Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Forests are another piece of the global warming puzzle

Forests are another piece of the global warming puzzle

By David Suzuki with Faisal Moola

We know that global warming is a reality and that we humans are its primary cause. And we know that carbon dioxide emissions, in large part from burning fossil fuels, are one of the biggest contributors to global warming. But we still have much to learn about the Earth’s mechanisms when it comes to regulating emissions and warming.

Forests – along with grasslands, soils, and other ecosystems – are an important part of the equation, and a new report published in the journal Nature sheds a bit more light on their role. We’ve known for a long time that forests are important carbon sinks. That is, they absorb carbon from the atmosphere thus preventing it from contributing to global warming.

But the Nature study shows that tropical forests absorb more carbon than we realized. Researchers from a number of institutions, including the University of Toronto, analyzed data from 79 intact forests in Africa from 1968 to 2007, along with similar data from 156 intact forests from 20 non-African countries. They concluded that tropical forests absorb about 4.8 billion tonnes of carbon a year, equivalent to about 18 per cent of the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere each year by burning fossil fuels. The world’s oceans are the other major carbon sink, absorbing about half the human-produced carbon that doesn’t end up in the atmosphere.

That doesn’t mean we can count on the forests or the oceans to save us from our folly. To start, about 15 billion of the 32 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide that humans produce is not reabsorbed on land or sea and ends up in the atmosphere. And the carbon stored in forests can be released back into the atmosphere with natural disturbances, such as fire or insect outbreaks, or if the forest is logged. This is because when trees are cut down, die, and decay naturally, or burn, some of the stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Even if carbon remains stored in the form of wood products taken from a logged forest, some is still released when soils in the forest floor are disturbed by logging. And many wood and pulp and paper products are discarded and destroyed in a much shorter time period than the life of an old-growth forest. This means that the carbon is released earlier than it would have been if the forests were left intact.

We humans have upset the balance of nature in more ways than we understand. The scientists haven’t figured out why the tropical trees are growing big enough to absorb more carbon than they release. One theory is that global warming and the extra carbon in the atmosphere are actually fertilizing the trees.

One thing we do know is that we cannot rely on tropical forests to prevent dangerous levels of climate change. But the amount of carbon they store gives us another compelling argument for protecting forests, as they may at least provide a buffer while we work on other solutions, such as reducing our energy consumption and switching to renewable sources of energy.

Clearly, it’s not the only reason to protect forests. Looking at the ability of forests to absorb carbon allows us to see that they have economic value beyond resources such as lumber that we have traditionally considered. Forests are a source of medicine, food, and clean drinking water and are habitat for over half of all land-based plants and animals on the planet. Forests also provide spiritual, aesthetic, and recreational opportunities for millions of people.

Forest degradation is also contributing to another ecological crisis, a biodiversity crisis on par with earlier mass extinctions. Scientists estimate that 16,000 species are now threatened with extinction, including 12 per cent of birds, 23 per cent of mammals, and 32 per cent of amphibians. Habitat destruction is partly responsible for this crisis, and climate change is exacerbating it. And although most of our carbon emissions are from burning fossil fuels, one quarter is from deforestation.

What all this shows is how everything in nature is interconnected and how our planet works to find equilibrium. We can’t confront the problems we have created on a piecemeal basis. We must look at them together. Conserving the world’s forests – which can include sustainable forestry practices – is one obvious place to start dealing with some of the most imminent crises.

Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at Davidsuzuki.org.

Free Book on Tar Sands!

Free Book on Tar Sands!

For the past few months we have been hearing more and more about Canada’s tar sand in the media. While the world goes green, Canada has elected to go black into the tar. The frenzied development ($100 billion and counting) of the oil sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the last six years has made Canada the world’s fifth greatest global exporter of oil and turned the country into “an emerging energy superpower.”

But this is not good news. Like many people, I know little about the consequences of this tar sands exploitation. I would really like to know the bottom-line of this story. This is why I was happy to learn this morning that on March 16 – 20, 2009 Andrew Nikiforuk’s book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent (Co-published with the David Suzuki Foundation) will be offered for FREE via downloadable PDF on the publisher’s website.

You will have the chance to read the book online before it even hits book store shelves. This is a truly wonderful opportunity to learn about the devastating environmental impacts of Canada’s tar sands, a unique oil extraction technique that devastates the Boreal Forest.

In the book readers will learn that oil sands:
• burn more carbon than conventional oil,
• destroy forests and displace woodland caribou,
• poison the water supply and communities downstream,
• drain the Athabasca, the river that feeds Canada’s largest watershed, and
• contribute to climate change.

Write it down in your agenda, you’ll have from March 16th to March 20th only to download the book for FREE.

Share the link with your friends and colleagues; they’ll be grateful you did http://www.dmpibooks.com/pdf/tar-sands.

Some reviews

"Investigative journalist and national treasure Andrew Nikiforuk documents the exorbitant economic, social and environmental costs of building Alberta’s Tar Sands."
-Maisonneuve

"It’s an important book, one that every Canadian should read to find out how the world’s largest energy project will affect us."
-David Suzuki Foundation

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Forbes and TV’s Fox Business News Launching CRO’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens List® Friday March 6

Tune in to TV's Fox Business News 12:15pm-1pm EST Friday March 6th and online at Forbes.com to see CRO's 10th Annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List® debut live. CRO magazine publisher Jay Whitehead will appear with representatives from 100 Best List companies to announce the 2009 list, the best-known ranking of corporate citizens and the only such list based 100 percent on publicly available data.

Or you can experience the CRO magazine 100 Best Corporate Citizens List® press conference live at 10:30am EST Friday by joining our live blog at www.corporateandresponsible.com . Blogger Lucia Candu will be posting live from the CRO press conference at the Penn Club in New York City where over 25 corporate responsibility executives from 100 Best Corporate Citizens List® firms will be gathering.

The 10th Annual 2009 100 Best Corporate Citizens List® will be published in its entirety along with the complete methodology, interviews and background in the upcoming issue of CRO magazine, due in 20,000 subscriber mailboxes starting March 20, 2009. Go to www.TheCRO.com and click on "Subscribe" to buy your copy, or select "Join CROA" to become part of the CRO Association and get a free subscription as a CROA member benefit.

To have a look at last year's list visit www.thecro.com/node/615

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Ecofont… why didn’t we think about it before?

The prints we make for our 'daily use' not only use paper, but also ink. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges (or ink toner) could last longer. SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont !

"After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well."

Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink.

Free to download and free to use = No excuse not to use it!

In the picture you can see how the Ecofont is created by omitting parts of the letter. At the shown size, this obviously is not very nice, but at a regular font size it is actually very usable. Naturally, the results vary depending on your software and the quality of your screen. The Ecofonts works best for OpenOffice, AppleWorks and MS Office 2007. Printing with a laser printer will give the best printing results.





The Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

With the Ecofont SPRANQ hopes to increase environmental awareness. Some ideas are:

• End-users: print only when necessary, use a modern, efficient printer and use unbleached paper.
• Graphic designers: use modern color separation techniques to avoid unnecessary wastage in ink. In paper choice, take the environment into account.
• (Offset) printers: avoid modern laser techniques that make ink indivisible from the paper. Keep an eye on innovations, such as plant-based ink.
• Printer manufacturers: invest in environment-conscious innovation.

For more info visit Ecofont.eu.

Are we digging ourselves into a hole with carbon capture?

By David Suzuki with Faisal Moola

The Alberta and federal governments are pumping billions of dollars into carbon capture and storage (CCS) as part of their climate change plans. U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minster Stephen Harper also discussed this largely untested technology during the president’s recent visit to Ottawa. But is it a good strategy? Think of what that money could do if it were invested in energy conservation and renewable energy instead of prolonging our addiction to dirty and finite fossil fuels, especially from the tar sands.

What is CCS? People in the oil industry found that as they drained oil from wells, they could pump CO2 back in to increase the yield. And the CO2 appeared to stay in the ground. But we have no idea what happens to this gas. Does it form a bubble under a big rock? Is it chemically bonded to its surrounding matrix? How long will it stay down there? We don’t know. We air-breathing terrestrial beings seem to have the attitude of “out of sight, out of mind,” and so we dump our garbage into the oceans or the ground or the atmosphere, as if that were a solution.

I can’t overemphasize the degree of our ignorance. Until a few years ago, scientists assumed no life existed below bedrock, but miners kept reporting that bits drilled far deeper into the ground came back contaminated. Researchers later discovered bizarre forms of life almost three kilometres below the surface. The organisms are bacteria, which in some cases are embedded in rock, eking out an existence scrounging for water, energy, and nutrition. Some are thought to divide only once in a thousand years! When these organisms are brought to the surface, their DNA is unlike anything we know about bacteria aboveground. Biologists have had to invent whole new phyla to describe them.

The layer of life on Earth’s surface is very thin, but these single-celled organisms go down kilometres. Now, scientists believe that protoplasm living underground are more abundant than all of the elephants, trees, whales, fish, and other life above! We have no idea how important these organisms are to the subsurface web of life. Do they play a role in movement of water and nutrients, of energy from the magma? We have no idea.

I met Princeton University’s Tullis Onstott, a geologist and expert on these organisms, at a lecture I gave at Princeton last year. I told him of the plans to pump millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the ground for CCS. “What effect will that have?” I asked. “I have no idea, but the methanogens should love it,” he replied. “What are they?” I asked. “They absorb carbon dioxide and make methane,” he responded.

Methane is 22 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide! So, we could be pumping a greenhouse gas into the ground and ending up with a super-greenhouse gas instead. Has anyone even considered this possibility?

Remember that Paul Mueller won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for his discovery in 1939 that DDT kills insects. Years after we started using it on a massive scale around the world, we learned that DDT is “biomagnified” up the food chain, harming birds, fish, and human beings. When we began to use chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, in spray cans, most people didn’t even know there was an ozone layer, let alone that chlorine-free radicals from CFCs destroy ozone. And mark my words, we have no idea what genetically engineered organisms or nanotechnology will do. But if we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.

CCS is a simple-minded idea based on a first impression. You’d think we would have learned from the past that we shouldn’t rush to apply new technologies before we know what the long-term effects will be. Carbon capture and storage may be worth studying, but the technology’s potential should not be used as an excuse for the oil and coal industries to avoid reducing their emissions and investing in renewable energy. After all, we know that energy conservation and renewable energy will yield immediate effects of a cleaner environment. We don’t know what carbon capture and storage will cost, when it will be commercially viable, or what it will do, other than perhaps to give us a way to keep relying on finite and polluting sources of energy.

Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at Davidsuzuki.org .

Sacking the environment

By Simplegreenaction.ca Staff

When I was visiting family in South Africa five years ago, I noticed that stores did not freely give out plastic bags with purchases. As an environmentalist, I was secretly delighted but as a North American, I thought that this idea would never fly back home.

Fast forward to 2009 and a major Canadian grocery chain has announced that they will charge customers 5 cents for every plastic bag used. Their research indicated that approximately 55 percent fewer bags are distributed when people have to pay for them. What a novel idea! At last!

It’s slightly disappointing that this step was implemented by the private sector and not by the government. Every week in Canada, 55 million bags are taken from grocery stores, plus millions more from other stores.* On average, Canadians dispose of 16 - 18 kgs (35 - 40 lbs) of plastic each year.

Read the entire article on Simplegreenaction.ca