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« Responding to Climate Change
Excerpt from In Search of Environmental Excellence:
Moving Beyond Blame
by Bruce Piasecki and Peter Asmus
CHAPTER 3
A Global Greenhouse: Framing the Debate
Page 9 of 14
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U.S. AID forester Michael Benge has been trying to prove the value of another particular tree — the wild tamarind — in order to save rain forests. A fast-growing member of the legume family, this tree is nitrogen-fixing, so it enriches soil as it also serves as fence, firewood, and food for livestock. This tree can help replenish the soil while serving other commercial uses because of its fast rate of growth. The world could invest in these safer alternatives. It is the international banks, dictating development policies for most of the world, that should prove the most critical player in halting this maddening pace of deforestation.17
How much are environmental benefits, such as those provided by trees, actually worth? Throughout the world, experts are now scrambling to quantify the real environmental economic costs associated with energy production and greater efficiency in order to move the nation beyond the "time discount" preoccupation of modern economic thinking. This concept postulates that present consumption reaps greater value than preservation of resources for future use. This assumption, which has guided thinkers from Adam Smith and John Locke to most modern-day supply-side economists, is one cause of today's environmental crisis.
Businesspeople such as Roger Sant of Applied Energy Services, Inc., have taken it upon themselves to prove the economic value of forests. Because Sant — an independent power generator — is now constructing a coal-fired plant in Uncasville, Connecticut, he is paying to help plant 52 million trees in Guatemala. These trees are expected to absorb 15 million tons of carbon dioxide over forty years, the same amount expected to be emitted by his power plant.
Sant, who is also chair of the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental and Energy Institute, claims that he will include reforestation projects for every new coal plant his firm constructs. "Energy policy ought to be seen through a greenhouse lens. That ought to be a principal focus," says Sant, adding that utilities and independent power producers should take a leadership role on global warming by stressing energy efficiency and conservation in every move they make.
Reforestation efforts are also building on several fronts. A plan by the World Resources Institute, also backed by the World Bank and the United Nations, promises to invest $8 billion over five years to plant trees. In Thailand and India, Buddhists are recognizing ecological values in their beliefs, and promoting sizable tree planting campaigns. In the United States, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory have discovered a way to utilize trees, along with white paint, to help mitigate the magnification of temperatures in urban centers, known as "the heat-island effect." (For example, since 1940, Los Angeles temperatures have increased by 5° F.)
Long before homes were cooled by air conditioners, trees were planted and outside walls painted white to achieve the same effect. Computer models verify that a return to this approach is a most economical way to combat global warming. What is so satisfying about urban trees is that their aesthetic value is matched by their practical value. They improve the local climate and, by serving as shade and windbreak, reduce the loss of moisture from soil. Trees are remarkably effective in cooling buildings in summer, at around one one-hundredth of what it would cost to get an equivalent amount of cooling from power plants and air-conditioning equipment. On hot summer days, a tree can act as a natural "evaporative cooler" using up to one hundred gallons of water a day, thus lowering the ambient temperature of otherwise scorching city streets. Anyone who has sweated out an August in Manhattan or a summer in Phoenix may now ask: Would we not be economic fools if we keep our cities treeless?
In addition to saving energy, urban trees and light-colored surfaces are probably the least expensive way to decrease carbon dioxide emissions. By reducing the need to burn fossil fuels for power, these old-fashioned tools carry many indirect benefits that the last several generations seem to have forgotten.
Here is the global warming reduction recipe the Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) now suggests for each citizen: Pay $15 to $50 to plant and water three trees around a house, wait ten years for the trees to grow, and then save about 1 or 2 kilowatts of peak power and about 750 to 2000 kilowatt-hours per year in air-conditioning energy per house — a value of $50 to $150 each year. Similarly, when asphalt streets or parking lots need resurfacing, they should be finished off with a thin surface of white sand, and any reroofing jobs should be done in white.
Trees can also reduce heating bills by thirty percent. And LBL's supply-curve models have shown that trees could help eliminate much of Los Angeles's smog problem.
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Footnotes
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The banking policies of the World Bank affect two-thirds of the world's ecological wonders. Typical of the misguided sort of project that the bank has funded in the past is a recent proposal to loan Brazil over $1 billion for huge hydroelectric projects that would flood hundreds of miles of dense tropical rain forests and displace another population of indigenous people. The bank has been urged by environmentalists to turn to smaller-scale projects that allow the existing human, animal and plant natives some dignity. Instead of monster dams to produce electricity that may never be needed, the banks should promote a range of environmentally benign energy alternatives such as simple solar heat pumps.
Progress was beginning to show in Brazil in 1988. Ironically, economic difficulties, which have hampered environmental protection, are reducing damaging public-works projects as well. Utilities in Brazil are now trying to factor in environmental costs in their decisions, at least temporarily stalling previously planned dams. On top of that, a broad policy initiative entitled Nossa Natureza ("Our Nature") has obtained the support of the country's military and is coordinating the activities of Brazil's four environmental-protection bodies.
Perhaps the most promising tool to save rain forests is debt-for-nature swaps. Such swaps involve the purchase of a developing country's debt at a discounted value in the secondary market, and cancellation of that debt in return for environment-related action on the part of the debtor nation. Such swaps have already occurred, or are being contemplated, in Brazil, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, and the Philippines. [« back]
