The Case of the Missing Carbon

(Photo above)Alone in a sealed jar, a mouse would die from exhaled CO2. But as scientist Joseph Priestley observed in 1771, adding a mint plant allows the mouse to thrive. In this proof of photosynthesis, the mint absorbed CO2, retained carbon for growth, and released oxygen. Two centuries later humans tried—and failed—to survive in a sealed environment in Arizona's Biosphere 2.

The Case of the Missing Carbon

By Tim Appenzeller
Republished from the pages of National Geographic magazine

It's there on a monitor: the forest is breathing. Late summer sunlight filters through a canopy of green as Steven Wofsy unlocks a shed in a Massachusetts woodland and enters a room stuffed with equipment and tangled with wires and hoses.

The machinery monitors the vital functions of a small section of Harvard Forest in the center of the state. Bright red numbers dance on a gauge, flickering up and down several times a second. The reading reveals the carbon dioxide concentration just above the treetops near the shed, where instruments on a hundred-foot (30-meter) tower of steel lattice sniff the air. The numbers are running surprisingly low for the beginning of the 21st century: around 360 parts per million, ten less than the global average. That's the trees' doing. Basking in the sunshine, they inhale carbon dioxide and turn it into leaves and wood.

In nourishing itself, this patch of pine, oak, and maple is also undoing a tiny bit of a great global change driven by humanity. Start the car, turn on a light, adjust the thermostat, or do just about anything, and you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If you're an average resident of the United States, your contribution adds up to more than 5.5 tons (5 metric tons) of carbon a year.

The coal, oil, and natural gas that drive the industrial world's economy all contain carbon inhaled by plants hundreds of millions of years ago—carbon that now is returning to the atmosphere through smokestacks and exhaust pipes, joining emissions from forest burned to clear land in poorer countries. Carbon dioxide is foremost in an array of gases from human activity that increase the atmosphere's ability to trap heat. (Methane from cattle, rice fields, and landfills, and the chlorofluorocarbons in some refrigerators and air conditioners are others.) Few scientists doubt that this greenhouse warming of the atmosphere is already taking hold. Melting glaciers, earlier springs, and a steady rise in global average temperature are just some of its harbingers.

By rights it should be worse. Each year humanity dumps roughly 8.8 billion tons (8 metric tons) of carbon into the atmosphere, 6.5 billion tons (5.9 metric tons) from fossil fuels and 1.5 billion (1.4 metric) from deforestation. But less than half that total, 3.2 billion tons (2.9 metric tons), remains in the atmosphere to warm the planet. Where is the missing carbon? "It's a really major mystery, if you think about it," says Wofsy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University. His research site in the Harvard Forest is apparently not the only place where nature is breathing deep and helping save us from ourselves. Forests, grasslands, and the waters of the oceans must be acting as carbon sinks. They steal back roughly half of the carbon dioxide we emit, slowing its buildup in the atmosphere and delaying the effects on climate.

Who can complain? No one, for now. But the problem is that scientists can't be sure that this blessing will last, or whether, as the globe continues to warm, it might even change to a curse if forests and other ecosystems change from carbon sinks to sources, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb. The doubts have sent researchers into forests and rangelands, out to the tundra and to sea, to track down and understand the missing carbon.

This is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. Scorching summers, fiercer storms, altered rainfall patterns, and shifting species—the disappearance of sugar maples from New England, for example—are some of the milder changes that global warming might bring. And humanity is on course to add another 200 to 600 parts per million to atmospheric carbon dioxide by late in the century. At that level, says Princeton University ecologist Steve Pacala, "all kinds of terrible things could happen, and the universe of terrible possibilities is so large that probably some of them will." Coral reefs could vanish; deserts could spread; currents that ferry heat from the tropics to northern regions could change course, perhaps chilling the British Isles and Scandinavia while the rest of the globe keeps warming.

If nature withdraws its helping hand—if the carbon sinks stop absorbing some of our excess carbon dioxide—we could be facing drastic changes even before 2050, a disaster too swift to avoid. But if the carbon sinks hold out or even grow, we might have extra decades in which to wean the global economy from carbon-emitting energy sources. Some scientists and engineers believe that by understanding natural carbon sinks, we may be able to enhance them or even create our own places to safely jail this threat to global climate.

The backdrop for these hopes and fears is a natural cycle as real as your own breathing and as abstract as the numbers on Wofsy's instruments. In 1771, about the time of the first stirrings of the industrial revolution and its appetite for fossil fuel, an English minister grasped key processes of the natural carbon cycle. In a series of ingenious experiments, Joseph Priestley found that flames and animals' breath "injure" the air in a sealed jar, making it unwholesome to breathe. But a green sprig of mint, he found, could restore its goodness. Priestley could not name the gases responsible, but we know now that the fire and respiration used up oxygen and gave off carbon dioxide. The mint reversed both processes. Photosynthesis took up the carbon dioxide, converted it into plant tissue, and gave off oxygen as a by-product.

The world is just a bigger jar. Tens of billions of tons of carbon a year pass between land and the atmosphere: given off by living things as they breathe and decay and taken up by green plants, which produce oxygen. A similar traffic in carbon, between marine plants and animals, takes place within the waters of the ocean. And nearly a hundred billion tons of carbon diffuse back and forth between ocean and atmosphere.

Compared with these vast natural exchanges, the few billion tons of carbon that humans contribute to the atmosphere each year seem paltry. Yet like a finger on a balance, our steady contributions are throwing the natural cycle out of whack. The atmosphere's carbon backup is growing: Its carbon dioxide level has risen by some 30 percent since Priestley's time. It may now be higher than it has been in at least 20 million years.

Pieter Tans is one of the scientists trying to figure out why those numbers aren't even worse. At a long, low National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) laboratory set against pine-clad foothills in Boulder, Colorado, Tans and his colleagues draw conclusions from the subtlest of clues. They measure minute differences in the concentration of carbon dioxide in air samples collected at dozens of points around the globe by weather stations, airplanes, and ships.

These whiffs of air are stacked against a wall in Tans's lab in 2.6-quart (2.5-liter) glass flasks. Because the churning of the atmosphere spreads carbon dioxide just about evenly around the planet, concentrations in the bottles don't differ by more than a fraction of a percent. But the differences hold clues to the global pattern of carbon dioxide sources and sinks. Scientists calculate, for example, that carbon dioxide should pile up in the Northern Hemisphere, which has most of the world's cars and industry. But the air samples show a smaller than expected difference from south to north. That means, Tans says, that "there has to be a very large sink of carbon in the Northern Hemisphere."

Other clues in the air samples hint at what that sink is. Both the waters of the ocean and the plants on land steal carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But they leave different fingerprints behind. Because plants give off oxygen when they absorb carbon dioxide, a plant sink would lead to a corresponding oxygen increase. But when carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean, no oxygen is added to the atmosphere.

Plants taking in carbon dioxide also change what they leave behind. That's because plants prefer gas that contains carbon 12, a lighter form of the carbon atom. The rejected gas, containing carbon 13, builds up in the atmosphere. The ocean, though, does not discriminate, leaving the carbon ratio unchanged. From these clues, Tans and others have found that while the ocean is soaking up almost half the globe's missing carbon—2 billion tons (1.8 billion metric tons) of it—the sink in the Northern Hemisphere appears to be the work of land plants. Their appetite for carbon dioxide surges and ebbs, but they remove, on average, more than 2 billion tons (1.8 billion metric tons) of carbon a year.

Forests like Wofsy's are one place where it's happening. For more than a decade his group has monitored the carbon dioxide traffic between the trees and the air. Instruments on his tower track air above the treetops as wind and solar heating stir it. As each waft of air passes the tower, sensors measure its carbon dioxide content. The theory is simple, says Wofsy: "If an air parcel going up has less carbon dioxide than an air parcel going down, you have carbon dioxide being deposited onto the forest."

The amount changes fast. "Sunshine, perhaps the temperature, rainfall over the past week—all those factors affect what the forest does on an hour-to-hour basis," he says. Even a passing cloud can dampen photosynthesis, spoiling the trees' appetite for carbon. In winter, when leaves fall and decay, more carbon dioxide—a by-product of plant respiration and decomposition—seeps back out of the forest and into the atmosphere. Still, over more than ten years, the bottom line of billions of measurements has been positive. On balance, Harvard Forest is sieving carbon from the atmosphere.

It shows in the trees and on the forest floor. To check that their high-tech air measurements weren't somehow being fooled, Wofsy's group strapped calibrated steel bands around trees to measure their growth, gathered and weighed deadfall, and set up bins to collect fallen leaves. The idea was to measure just how much carbon-containing wood and other organic matter was building up in the forest, and to see if it matched the gas measurements. It did. Each acre of the forest has been taking roughly 0.8 ton (0.75 metric ton) of carbon out of the atmosphere annually, doing its humble part to counteract greenhouse warming.

Other forests at research sites in the eastern U.S. are putting on weight as well. That's no surprise, Wofsy says. "In the eastern U.S., the most common age for a forest is 40 to 60 years. That's the kind of forest that's going to be growing."

The current Harvard Forest, in fact, has a precise birth date: 1938, when a hurricane barreled in from the Atlantic and leveled earlier stands of trees. Elsewhere in the U.S. humans were the hurricane, clearing vast stands of forest for farming. Abandoned in the early 20th century as agriculture shifted westward to the plains, the land is yielding to forest again. The trees, still young, are getting taller and stouter and putting on denser wood. Year by year this slow alchemy locks up carbon in thousands of square miles of eastern forest.

More missing carbon could be hiding in the West. Fire once regularly swept the grasslands, rejuvenating them while killing off woody shrubs like mesquite, juniper, and scrub oak. Decades of firefighting policies called for dousing the smallest blaze and allowed the brush to thrive. The practice disrupted the grasslands' natural cycle and led to bulkier, woodier brush that fueled larger, more destructive fires. But it may also have created a major storehouse for carbon. All told, forest and scrub across the 48 states could be taking in half a billion tons of carbon, balancing out more than a third of the emissions from U.S. cars and factories. It's a huge gift, says Wofsy: "That's at least four times what they were trying with Kyoto"—the climate treaty that the U.S. refused to ratify—"and it hasn't hurt anyone."

That leaves more than 1.5 billion tons (1.4 billion metric tons) of missing carbon to account for in the Northern Hemisphere. Mature forests, such as tropical rain forest and the great belt of coniferous forest across Alaska and Canada, probably can't help because they're in a steady state, taking in no more carbon dioxide for growth than they give off (plants breathe too). But Europe's managed woodlands, new forests planted in China, and forests regrowing in Siberia after decades of logging could account for another half billion tons (.45 billion metric tons), researchers say.

Then there is a change in the far north, where satellite measurements over the past 20 years have shown that vegetation is getting lusher and enjoying a longer growing season. Natives of the North American Arctic report a new luxuriance on the tundra, where once stunted plants, such as dwarf birch, willow, and alder, are growing taller. The reason is simple, says Princeton's Pacala: "You go to the far north, and it's just palpable how much warming there is."

Indeed it is. While the world as a whole has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.56 degree Celsius) since 1900, parts of Alaska have warmed by 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees Celsius). Brad Griffith studies caribou at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he has noticed a change in the winters. He remembers clear, cold days and powder snow. "It was never slick, never cloudy; you never had to clean your windshield." Now the winters arc warmer, wetter, and slushier. The shrubs on the North Slope seem to love the change, and Griffith has found that the lusher forage gives newborn caribou a better shot at survival.

That's the good news from the north: Right now global warming, ironically, may be helping forestall even more warming, by speeding the growth of carbon-absorbing trees. But balanced against that are warning signs—hints that northern ecosystems could soon turn against us. Eventually, warming in the far north may have what scientists call a positive feedback effect, in which warming triggers new floods of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, driving temperatures higher.

Worrisome signs begin on the aircraft approach to Anchorage. As the route skirts the hundred-mile-wide (161-kilometer-wide) Kenai Peninsula, ugly gray gaps appear in the dark green canopy of spruce below. Since the early 1990s bark beetles have been on the rampage in the Kenai, killing spruce on more than 2-million acres (809,000 hectares) there. Farther south in the Kenai, says Glenn Juday, a forest ecologist at the University of Alaska, skeletal trees stretch from horizon to horizon. "It's the largest single area of trees killed by insects in North America," says Juday. "No outbreak this size has happened in the past 250 years."

The vast tracts of dead trees will ultimately send their carbon back to the atmosphere when decay or fire consumes them. A warming climate is likely to blame, Juday and others believe. Warmth favors the beetle by speeding up its life cycle and improving its chance of surviving the winter. And as Juday has found in his study area, warming also stresses the hardy northern trees, making them less able to fight off infestation.

Two hundred seventy miles (434 kilometers) north of the Kenai, on a hillside just west of Fairbanks, the Parks Loop Stand appears to the unschooled eye to be thriving. But Juday, who has worked in this grove of hundred-foot-tall (30-meter-tall) white spruce for 15 years, knows practically every tree's biography—and he is concerned. Heavier, wetter snowfalls have broken off branches and crowns. The trees have also been assaulted by a pest new to northern Alaska, the spruce budworm.

The first outbreak of spruce budworm in this region was recorded in 1989, and Juday thinks the warmer climate is again to blame. Sickly orange branches high in the trees and ragged spruce seedlings festooned with black pupae show that the budworm is still at work. "This was a healthy, beautiful white spruce stand," says Juday. But so many trees have died that the formerly dense canopy has opened up, and the moss that carpeted the shadowy floor has given way to sun-loving grasses.

It's not just the snow and the pests. On the jagged stump of a recently fallen tree Juday points to another fingerprint of warming. The 200-year-old tree's growth rings are thick at the core of the stump, but the outermost rings, representing the tree's last few decades of life, are as thin as puff pastry layers. Juday believes the tree's growth has been slowing because of hotter summers. Thin rings are a sign that the trees are undergoing stress, running short of water in the heat.

Since that finding, Juday's group has examined cores from black spruce, another major tree type in interior Alaska. It too grows more slowly in warmer years because of moisture stress. The future of the northern forest could be bleak. Assuming that Alaska continues to warm at the rate some climate models predict, Juday's analysis points to "zero white-spruce growth" by 2090. If that happened, the boreal forest as we know it would be no more. A smaller carbon storehouse could take its place—perhaps a grassy parkland dotted with aspen groves, Juday suggests. Substantial amounts of carbon dioxide could be released into the atmosphere from the corpse of the old forest.

Across the far north a still bigger pulse of greenhouse gas could come from the soil. In a somber grove of black spruce on the broad floodplain of the Tanana River south of Fairbanks, Jamie Hollingsworth, who manages an ecological research site at the University of Alaska, sinks a 4-foot (1.2-meter) steel probe into a damp carpet of moss. It slips in easily at first, then stops abruptly about three feet (one meter) in. Hollingsworth digs through a foot-thick (0.3-meter-thick) layer of moss, roots, and decaying needles, then scoops aside the silty soil below until his shovel grates on the hard permafrost that defeated the probe. Chipping off a clod or two, he reveals silvery veins of ice.

That eternal ice is in jeopardy across much of the far north. Near Fairbanks, at the heart of Alaska, the soil has warmed as much as 3 degrees Fahrenheit (5.4 degrees Celsius) over the past 40 years, putting large tracts of permafrost in danger of thawing. Here and there—even at spots on the university campus—it has already crossed the threshold, and melting has left the ground unstable and boggy. Farther north there's a larger margin of safety.

Fires can speed up the melting. In the summer of 2001 a fire raced through a hundred thousand acres (40,000 hectares) of floodplain forest along the Tanana. The charred snags now stand on bare sand and silt, in many places burned clean of the usual thick moss carpet. The moss is critical to the permafrost: It insulates the soil, keeping it at subfreezing temperatures and helping preserve the ice through the summer. Any permafrost in the fire zone is now in danger of thawing—and hotter summers have made fires more common in many parts of the north, including Siberia and western Canada.

Climate experts keep a worried eye on the permafrost because vast reserves of peat and other carbon-rich organic material are frozen into it—a global trove of carbon estimated at 200 billion tons (181.4 metric tons). For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years low temperatures entombed it. Now, says Terry Chapin of the University of Alaska, "it's potentially a very large time bomb."

The permafrost's full megatonnage isn't certain. Some of the subterranean ice would create bogs when it melted, and the oxygen-poor waters of bogs can inhibit decay and keep the carbon locked up. But northern warming could well bring a drier climate, and that could open the way to a worst-case scenario, says NOAA's Tans. "If, due to warming in the Arctic, the permafrost warmed up and dried out, most of that carbon could be released." The atmospheric level of carbon dioxide could jump by a hundred parts per million as a result, he says—more than 25 percent above current levels.

So where in nature can we look for salvation? Until recently climate scientists hoped it would come from farther south. In temperate and tropical vegetation, they thought, a negative feedback effect called carbon fertilization might rein in the carbon dioxide rise. Plants need carbon dioxide to grow, and scientists have found that in laboratory chambers well-nourished plants bathed in high-carbon dioxide air show a surge of growth. So out in the real world, it seemed, plants would grow faster and faster as carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, stashing more carbon in their stems, trunks, and roots and helping to slow the atmospheric buildup. Such a growth boost could, for example, turn mature tropical forests—which normally don't soak up any more carbon than they give off—into carbon dioxide sponges.

Alas, it appears not to work. At Duke University's forest in North Carolina, William Schlesinger and his colleagues have been giving hundred-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) plots of pines a sniff of the future. Over each plot a ring of towers emits carbon dioxide at just the right rate to keep the concentration in the trees at 565 parts per million, the level the real atmosphere might reach by midcentury. When the experiment started seven years ago, the trees showed an initial pulse of growth.

"These trees woke up to high carbon dioxide and were able to make good with it for a couple of years," says Schlesinger. But then the growth spurt petered out, and the trees' growth has slipped most of the way back to normal. That's not to say that high carbon dioxide didn't have some long-term effects. Poison ivy, for some reason, "is one of the winners," says Schlesinger, with a sustained growth rate 70 percent faster than normal. And allergy sufferers will not be pleased to learn that the carbon dioxide-fertilized pines produced extravagant amounts of pollen.

To take advantage of a carbon dioxide bonanza, it seems, most plants also need extra nitrogen and other nutrients. Schlesinger's experiment is one of many to show lately that in the real world, more carbon just means plants will probably run short of something else essential. Resurgent forests are soaking up plenty of carbon now, but we owe that mainly to our ax-wielding forebears, who cleared the land in centuries past. That land sink is not likely to increase by much, say scientists. And it will eventually saturate as today's young forests mature. "We can expect this sink to disappear on the order of a hundred years," says Princeton's Pacala. "You can't count on it to keep getting larger, like manna from heaven, the way a carbon-fertilization sink would."

The outlook for an increased ocean sink is no brighter. Taro Takahashi of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has spent decades on oceanographic research ships, making thousands of carbon dioxide measurements just above and just below the water surface to track the exchange of gas between the ocean and the atmosphere.

The North Atlantic and the southern oceans have cold, nutrient-rich waters that welcome carbon dioxide, Takahashi has found. Carbon dioxide dissolves easily in cold water, and the nutrients foster marine-plant growth that quickly uses up the dissolved carbon dioxide. When the plants and the animals that feed on them die and sink into the abyss, their remains carry away the carbon and make room for more.

The traffic mostly goes the other way in warmer, less biologically rich seas. But the global balance is favorable, for now at least. More carbon dioxide dissolves in the oceans than is given off. Takahashi's measurements confirm that the oceans take up nearly as much carbon as the regrowing forests and thickening brush on land: an average of 2 billion tons (1.8 billion metric tons) a year. "One-half of the missing carbon is ending up in the ocean," Takahashi says.

That may be as good as it gets," he adds. "My major question is whether this ratio is going to change" as global warming raises the temperature of surface waters and carbon dioxide continues to build up in the atmosphere. "The prognosis is not particularly bright," Takahashi says. A warm soda fizzing over the rim of a glass illustrates one effect: carbon dioxide is less soluble in warmer water. What's more, dissolved carbon dioxide can easily slip back into the atmosphere unless it is taken up by a marine plant or combines with a "buffer" molecule of carbonate.

But the ocean's supply of carbonate is limited and is replenished only slowly as it is washed into the ocean by rivers that erode carbonate-containing rocks such as limestone. In absorbing those two billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere year after year, the ocean is gradually using up its buffer supply. Jorge Sarmiento, an oceanographer at Princeton University, has been trying to predict the impact of such changes on the ocean's ability to act as a carbon dioxide sponge. He expects that over the next century, its carbon appetite will drop by 10 percent—and it may ebb much further in the long run.

With no new help from nature in sight, perhaps it is time for us to think about creating our own carbon sinks. Scientists have dreamed up plenty of possibilities: planting new forests, for example, which the Kyoto climate treaty would encourage. The approach has already taken root on a grand scale in China, where the government has planted tens of millions of acres since the 1970s. The bureaucrats set out to control floods and erosion, not stem global change, but the effect has been to soak up nearly half a billion tons (.45 billion metric tons) of carbon.

Steve Wofsy sees another possibility in his forest studies. Young forests like his study plot are hungry for carbon right now because they are growing vigorously. So why not try to keep a forest young indefinitely, by regular thinning? "You manage it so that every year or every ten years you take out a certain amount of wood" to be used in, say, paper, housing, and furniture, Wofsy says. "You might have a situation where you could make the landscape continue to take up carbon for a long time—indefinitely."

Then there's the siren call of the sea. Although as Sarmiento points out the ocean's natural uptake is dwindling, scientists have tried to find a way to give a boost to its carbon appetite. In the 1980s oceanographer John Martin suggested that across large tracts of ocean, the tiny green plants that are the marine equivalent of forests and grasslands are, in effect, anemic. What keeps them from flourishing—and perhaps sucking up vast quantities of carbon dioxide—is a lack of iron. Martin and others began to talk of a "Geritol solution" to global warming: Send out a fleet of converted oil tankers to sprinkle the oceans with an iron compound, and the surge of plant growth would cleanse the air of industrial emissions. As the plants and the animals that grazed on them died and sank, the carbon in their tissues would be safely locked away in the deep ocean.

Reality has not been quite so elegant. Experiments have shown that Martin was partly right: A dash of iron sulfate does cause the ocean's surface waters to bloom with patches of algae tens of miles long, so vivid they can be seen by satellites. But oceanographers monitoring what happens in the water have been disappointed to find that when the extra plants and the animals they nourish die, their remains mostly decay before they have a chance to sink and be buried. The carbon dioxide from the decay nourishes new generations of plants, reducing the need for extra carbon from the atmosphere. Nature is just too thrifty for iron fertilization to work.

Perhaps carbon can be deep-sixed without nature's help: filtered from power plant emissions, compressed into a liquid, and pumped into ocean depths. Ten thousand feet (3,000 thousand meters) down, water pressure would squeeze liquid carbon dioxide to a density great enough to pool on the seafloor, like vinegar in a bottle of salad dressing, before dissolving. At shallower depths it would simply disperse. Either way environmentalists and many scientists are wary of the scheme because injecting vast quantities of carbon dioxide would slightly acidify the deep ocean and might harm some marine life. Last year protesters forced scientists to cancel experiments meant to test the idea, first near Hawaii and then off Norway.

But Peter Brewer, who is studying the scheme at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, says it's too early to write it off. Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will acidify the ocean's surface waters in any case, he points out, and pumping some of the carbon into the ocean depths could slow that process. "Why would you want to take this off the table before you know what it does?" he asks.

The most fitting end for the carbon that human beings have tapped from the Earth, in coal, oil, and gas, would be to send it back where it came from—into coal seams, old oil and gas fields, or deep, porous rock formations. Not only would that keep the carbon out of the atmosphere, but the high-pressure injection could also be used to chase the last drops of oil or gas out of a depleted field.

In fact geologic sequestration, as it's called, is already under way. One field in the North Sea, for example, yields gas that is heavily contaminated with natural carbon dioxide. So before shipping the gas, the Norwegian oil company Statoil filters out the carbon dioxide and injects it into a sandstone formation half a mile (0.8 kilometer) below the seafloor. The U.S. Department of Energy plans to start its own test project, which would drill a 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) well in West Virginia and pump carbon dioxide into the deep rock.

No one knows yet how well such schemes might work in the long run. Tapped-out oil and gas fields are, by nature, full of man-made holes that might leak the carbon dioxide. Even if the stored gas didn't leak straight to the surface, it might seep into groundwater supplies. But the North Sea project seems to be working well eight years after it began. Seismic images that offer views beneath the ocean floor show that the thick layer of clay capping the sandstone is effectively sealing in the 6 million tons (5.4 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide injected so far.

That's encouraging news for researchers who are working on schemes that would allow humanity to keep burning fossil fuels without dire consequences for climate. Researchers at Princeton, for example, are exploring a technology that would take the carbon out of coal.

In a multistep process coal would react with oxygen and steam to make pure hydrogen, plus a stream of waste gases. The hydrogen could be burned to produce electricity or distributed to gas stations where hydrogen-powered cars—emitting nothing but water vapor—could fuel up. The waste, mostly carbon dioxide but also contaminants that coal-burning plants now emit, such as sulfur and mercury, would be buried. The scheme, says Princeton energy analyst Robert Williams, "could make coal as clean as renewable energy, and you can exploit the low cost of coal."

Or maybe the future lies in fields of solar panels, armies of giant wind turbines, or a new generation of safe nuclear reactors. No one knows, but that gauge in Wofsy's shack tells us that we don't have long to dither. The trees are doing their best, but year by year the flickering red number is climbing.

Are Plastic Grocery Bags Sacking the Environment?

The "paper or plastic" conundrum that vexed earnest shoppers throughout the 1980s and 90s is largely moot today. Most grocery store baggers don't bother to ask anymore. They drop the bananas in one plastic bag as they reach for another to hold the six-pack of soda. The pasta sauce and noodles will get one too, as will the dish soap.

Plastic bags are so cheap to produce, sturdy, plentiful, easy to carry and store that they have captured at least 80 percent of the grocery and convenience store market since they were introduced a quarter century ago, according to the Arlington, Virginia-based American Plastics Council.

As a result, the totes are everywhere. They sit balled up and stuffed into the one that hangs from the pantry door. They line bathroom trash bins. They carry clothes to the gym. They clutter landfills. They flap from trees. They float in the breeze. They clog roadside drains. They drift on the high seas. They fill sea turtle bellies.

"The numbers are absolutely staggering," said Vincent Cobb, an entrepreneur in Chicago, Illinois, who recently launched the Web site http://Reusablebags.com to educate the public about what he terms the "true costs" associated with the spread of "free" bags. He sells reusable bags as a viable solution.

According to Cobb's calculations extrapolated from data released by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 2001 on U.S. plastic bag, sack, and wrap consumption, somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. Of those, millions end up in the litter stream outside of landfills—estimates range from less than one to three percent of the bags.

Laurie Kusek, a spokeswoman for the American Plastics Council, said the industry works with its U.S. retail customers to encourage recycling of plastic bags, which are in high demand from companies such as Trex in Winchester, Virginia, for use in building materials.

"We also feel it is important to understand that plastic grocery bags are some of the most reused items around the house," she said. "Many, many bags are reused as book and lunch bags as kids head off to school, as trash can liners, and to pickup Fido's droppings off the lawn."

But like candy wrappers, chewing gum, cigarette butts, and thousands of other pieces of junk, millions of the plastic bags end up as litter. Once in the environment, it takes months to hundreds of years for plastic bags to breakdown. As they decompose, tiny toxic bits seep into soils, lakes, rivers, and the oceans, said Cobb.

Plastic Fantastic

The Film and Bag Federation, a trade group within the Society of the Plastics Industry based in Washington, D.C., said the right choice between paper or plastic bags is clearly plastic.

Compared to paper grocery bags, plastic grocery bags consume 40 percent less energy, generate 80 percent less solid waste, produce 70 percent fewer atmospheric emissions, and release up to 94 percent fewer waterborne wastes, according to the federation.

Robert Bateman, president of Roplast Industries, a manufacturer of plastic bags—including reusable ones—in Oroville, California, said the economic advantage of plastic bags over paper bags has become too significant for store owners to ignore. It costs one cent for a standard plastic grocery sack, whereas a paper bag costs four cents, he said.

"The plastic bags are so inexpensive that in the stores no one treats them as worth anything … they use two, three, or four when one would do just as well," he said.

First introduced in the 1970s, plastic bags now account for four out of every five bags handed out at the grocery store. "When you look at it as a product, it is an unbelievable success story," said Cobb.

The success of the plastic bag has meant a dramatic increase in the amount of sacks found floating in the oceans where they choke, strangle, and starve wildlife and raft alien species around the world, according to David Barnes, a marine scientist with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, who studies the impact of marine debris.

Barnes said that plastic bags have gone "from being rare in the late 80s and early 90s to being almost everywhere from Spitsbergen 78° North [latitude] to Falklands 51° South [latitude], but I'll bet they'll be washing up in Antarctica within the decade."

Bateman said that plastic bags are becoming a victim of their success. "The industry is at the stage where its success has caused concerns and these concerns need to be addressed responsibly," he said. Among other initiatives, Bateman supports the development of biodegradable plastic bags, a technology that has made strides in recent years.

Plastax to the Rescue?

Plastic bag litter has become such an environmental nuisance and eyesore that Ireland, Taiwan, South Africa, Australia, and Bangladesh have heavily taxed the totes or banned their use outright. Several other regions, including England and some U.S. cities, are considering similar actions.

Tony Lowes, director of Friends of the Irish Environment in County Cork, said the 15 cent (about 20 cents U.S.) tax on plastic bags introduced there in March 2002 has resulted in a 95 percent reduction in their use. "It's been an extraordinary success," he said.

According to Lowes, just about everyone in Ireland carries around a reusable bag and the plastic bags that once blighted the verdant Irish countryside are now merely an occasional eyesore. Cobb believes a similar tax in the U.S. would have a similar effect on reducing consumption.

The American Plastics Council is wary of such a tax in the U.S. They say it would cost tens of thousands of jobs and result in an increase in energy consumption, pollution, landfill space, and grocery prices as store owners increase reliance on more expensive paper bags as an alternative.

Bateman said the Irish tax of about U.S. 20 cents per bag is too high, but that a tax of 3 to 5 cents could have a positive impact on reducing plastic bag consumption by changing people's behavior.

"Having bags charged has some merits because it gets them used more responsibly," he said. For example, instead of a bagger using six bags to package a person's dinner, the bagger might use just two.

As for Cobb, he hopes people will begin to realize that paper and plastic bags both come at great cost to the environment and instead of scratching their head when asked which type they prefer, they'll pull a tightly packed reusable bag from their pocket.

"We want to make it cool to carry reusable shopping bags," he said.

Melting Glaciers Are Evidence of Global Warming

Global climate change is one of the most hotly contested issues in the world. However, there is sufficient data to suggest that the observed melting of glaciers and ice caps around the world is caused by global warming.
Melting Glaciers and Ice Caps: The Evidence

According to Gary Braasch of World View of Global Warming, hundreds of glaciers worldwide are in retreat. The phenomenon has been occurring throughout the twentieth century and continues today. Mountain glaciers are especially sensitive to temperature changes, and most mountain glaciers around the world are shrinking, with some disappearing altogether, as described by A’ndrea Elyse Messer in the February 2005 NASA Earth Observatory news release “Melting Ice Indicator of Global Warming.”

Individual accounts of the melting are staggering. The National Park Service estimates that all but a few of Glacier National Park’s thirty mountain glaciers will be gone by 2050. In the Alps, the Rhone glacier in Switzerland has receded 2.5 km in 142 years, and the Pasterze glacier in Austria shrinks by 15 m each year. In the Northwestern US, scientists have observed rising snow lines, decreased mountain snowpack, and earlier spring runoffs.

Braasch points out that the loss of tropical glaciers has been particularly rapid. In the Andes, the Broggi glacier near Huascaran, Peru has receded 1 km in the past 67 years. The Ururashraju glacier, also in Peru, receded 500 m between 1986 and 1999, just 13 years.

In the October 5, 2009, CNN.com article “The High Stakes of Melting Himalayan Glaciers,” Reenita Molhotra points out that glaciers in the Himalayas are receding more quickly than glaciers in other parts of the world. Between 1962 and 2004, over 1000 glaciers shrank by at least 16%. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that all Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035.

Mountain glaciers are not the only forms of ice melting. Polar ice caps have also been severely affected. In 2002, the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica lost a 1200-square-mile section. More recently, a 54-square-mile iceberg that originally broke off of the Ross Sea Ice Shelf has been drifting towards Australia.

In the Arctic, satellite data shows that Greenland’s outflow glaciers appear to be thinning and flowing more rapidly. 2000 saw the warmest ocean temperatures at the North Pole in 400 years, according to Steven Marshak in Earth: Portrait of a Planet (W. W. Norton and Company, 2001), and a 15 km by 5 km open patch in the polar ice was discovered. Messer also points out that the Arctic is experiencing a shift in the snowy season and smaller and thinner sea ice.
Is It Really Global Warming?

According to Penn State glaciologist Dr. Richard B. Alley, the melting is a sign of global warming. This is because the melting is observed worldwide in a variety of environments and locales. Dr. Alley has been using satellite data to monitor the movement of glaciers and states that “the ice changes are best explained by warming.”

In the May 2001 NASA Earth Observatory news release “Melting Glaciers Signal Global Warming,” James Hathaway describes Rick Wessels, an Arizona State University geologist who has been using satellite data to track glaciers in a long-term, worldwide study. While Hathaway points out that the cause of global warming may still be up for debate, Wessels feels “there is definitely a global climate change.”
Effects of Global Warming, Melting of Glaciers

What does all this melting mean for the Earth’s future? The predictions are grim. Braasch reports an estimated three foot rise in global sea level by the end of the century if melting continues at its current rate, and Marshak cites studies that show that global sea level could rise by as much as 230 feet if all the polar ice caps melted. This would lead to extensive flooding of coastal plains and cities.

There is also fear that severe environmental changes could lead to civil unrest. As Braasch points out, seasonal melt water from glaciers provides water to scores of people, especially those in Asia and South America. According to Molhotra, runoff from Himalayan glaciers is an important source of freshwater in the region and supplies almost all major rivers in Southeast Asia, including the Indus, the Mekong, and the Yangtze. Glacial runoff accounts for almost 70% of flow in these rivers, with the other 30% coming from seasonal monsoons. If the Himalayan glaciers disappear, the region could face severe water shortages, potentially leading to civil, political, and even religious conflict.

At this time, there are still many questions to be answered about global climate change. Is it natural or a product of human industrialization? Is the planet facing a long-term change, or is this just a brief climate cycle? However, in the face of these questions, the melting of the world’s glaciers are a significant sign that warming is indeed occurring.

Demise of coral, salamander show impact of Web

DOHA, Qatar – The Internet has emerged as one of the greatest threats to rare species, fueling the illegal wildlife trade and making it easier to buy everything from live baby lions to wine made from tiger bones, conservationists and law enforcement officers said Sunday.

The Web's impact was made clear at the meeting of the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. Delegates voted overwhelmingly Sunday to ban the trade of the Kaiser's spotted newt, which the World Wildlife Fund says has been devastated by the Internet trade.

A proposal from the United States and Sweden to regulate the trade in red and pink coral — which is crafted into expensive jewelry and sold extensively on the Web — was defeated. Delegates voted the idea down mostly over concerns the increased regulations might impact poor fishing communities.

Trade on the Web poses "one of the biggest challenges facing CITES," said Paul Todd, a campaign manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

"The Internet is becoming the dominant factor overall in the global trade in protected species," he said. "There will come a time when country to country trade of large shipments between big buyers and big sellers in different countries is a thing of the past."

The IFAW has done several surveys of illegal trade on the Web and a three-month survey in 2008 found more than 7,000 species worth $3.8 million sold on auction sites, classified ads and chat rooms, mostly in the United States but also Europe, China, Russia and Australia. Most of what is traded is illegal African ivory but the group has also found exotic birds along with rare products such as tiger-bone wine and pelts from protected species like polar bears and leopards.

A separate 2009 survey by the group Campaign Against the Cruelty to Animals targeted the Internet trade in Ecuador, finding offers to sell live capuchin monkeys, lion cubs and ocelots.

"As the Internet knows no borders, it causes several new problems regarding the enforcement of the protection of endangered species," the group said in its report.

John Sellar, CITES' chief law enforcement officer, argued the impact of the Web was overblown and that many species that appear illegal may in fact may be legal. He also said many big traders were reluctant to use the Internet, since payments can be traced and they can be ensnared in undercover operations.

"There seems to be little evidence that there are commercial operations using the Internet," Sellar said. "Although the risks may be small depending on which country you are living in, you can be identified when using the Internet. So there are clearly risks there."

Still, a CITES committee endorsed an e-commerce proposal Sunday that calls on governments to draft measures to address the Internet trade and law enforcement agencies to dedicate a unit to focus on it.

The private sector has also moved to limit the illegal trade.

EBay, which was singled out in the IFAW survey as being a main source of much of the ivory sales, said in a statement that it instituted a complete ban on the ivory trade in 2008, which activists said has helped slow the trade in tusks on the Web.

The newt is a textbook example of what can happen to one species through trade on the Web. According to a study by the WWF, the black and brown salamander with white spots is coveted in the pet trade. They number only around 1,000 and live in Iran's Zagros Mountains. About 200 have been traded annually over the years, mostly through a Web site operated out of Ukraine. Their population has fallen 80 percent.

"The Internet itself isn't the threat, but it's another way to market the product," said Ernie Cooper, who spearhead the investigation into the newt for TRAFFIC Canada. "Most people are not willing to pay $300 for a salamander. But through the power of the Internet, tapping into the global market, you can find buyers."

The red and pink coral, which consist of 32 species, are harvested in deep Mediterranean waters and turned into expensive jewelry either in Italy or cheaper place like Taiwan and China, according to the marine conservation group SeaWeb.

It is the most widely traded and valuable of all precious corals but has no international protection, resulting in a brisk international trade in the species, the group said.

Opposition to the coral proposal was led by Japan, which also successfully spearheaded efforts last week to defeat a proposed ban on the international export of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a key ingredient in sushi. They were joined by several coastal states including Indonesia, Malaysia and Iceland, all of whom argued the corals are crucial to the survival of local communities and are not overharvested.

Meanwhile, delegates approved a voluntary conservation plan for endangered tigers that calls for tougher legislation in countries home to the big cats to tackle widespread smuggling and boost money spent on law enforcement.

The British plan also calls for countries to better control tiger farms and to phase out traditional medicine markets which fuel demand for tiger parts. The proposal includes no funding for the 13 tiger range countries, only a request for donor assistance.

The Tiger population has plummeted because of human encroachment, the loss of nine-tenths of their habitat and poaching to supply the illegal trade. Their numbers have fallen from 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century to around 3,600 today.

AN AUTO INSIDER TAKES ON CLIMATE CHANGE

TIME MAGAZINE
06-11-07

Thursday, May. 31, 2007 By DAVID VON DREHLE
Congressman John Dingell (D-MI).
ANDREW ECCLES FOR TIME

There are millions of reasons to think Congress won't do much about global warming, all stockpiled in the lobbying budgets of the U.S.'s mightiest interest groups--automakers and other manufacturers, environmentalists, labor unions, farmers, oil companies, coal companies, utilities, the military, antitaxers and so on. A Washington axiom holds that it's always easier to do nothing than to do something. By that standard, tackling climate change, which would affect every industry and every private life, looks almost impossible.

On the other hand, there's John Dingell. Michigan's eternal Congressman, defender of Detroit's carbon-spewing gas hogs, would seem an unlikely cause for optimism. After all, his wife Deborah is a General Motors Foundation trustee, leading his critics to assert that Dingell is literally in bed with the auto industry.

But just as it took anticommunist Richard Nixon to open the door to China, and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons to denounce misogyny in rap, so Dingell, Democrat from Dearborn and friend of factories, may be the insider able to drive change. At 80, restored to his wide-ranging dominion over the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, "John Dingell is one of the few people with the capacity to manage complex pieces of legislation where there are high stakes," says former House colleague Philip Sharp.

He's smart enough, strong enough, mean enough. Sharp saw Dingell up close the last time Big John reluctantly tackled air pollution--the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act that successfully dealt with acid rain. Now Dingell has awakened to global warming, holding more than two dozen hearings on the issue since February and extracting on-the-record promises of cooperation from heads of industry more accustomed to obstruction.

He's not the most famous member of Congress, but he's among the most feared. "A trade-association leader recently told me that his group was going to shift from being against mandatory caps on carbon emissions to being for them," Sharp recounts. "When I asked why, he said, 'There's no way we can go meet with Dingell and just say no.' He didn't mention any other leader of the House or Senate, just Dingell."

He is the last link to a vanished era. Seeing Dingell hobbling along the halls of Congress on his cane or cupping his half-good ear to hear a colleague is like spotting an elderly mammoth alive in the natural-history museum. As long as he's not extinct, he's formidable. Dingell comes from a time when Congress did big things, like Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, as a matter of course. Key Congressmen were known as "bulls," and they didn't look to the White House for permission slips or marching orders. Dingell's first oath of office, in 1956, was administered by Sam Rayburn, whose power is memorialized in the congressional office building bearing his name.

"I am a legislator," said the last woolly mammoth in a recent interview with TIME. By which Dingell means he is in Congress to pass laws, not to wage ideological warfare or get his mug on television. He has never wanted anything beyond life in the House.

The art of moving a major bill is an elusive mix of endurance, persuasion, negotiation, intimidation--and timing. The field is sown with favors large and small over many years and watered with occasional menace. (Ask Dingell how he feels about being called "the meanest s.o.b. in Congress," and he quietly answers, "It's very useful.") With luck, the seeds bear fruit when the votes are finally counted. The process is so slow and cumulative that few people ever become masters. "I've been doing it for years, and I learned from the best," Dingell said, "Rayburn, John McCormack [Rayburn's successor as Speaker], my dad."

John Dingell Sr. (born Dzieglewicz) first won the Dearborn seat in 1932 and held it for more than two decades before his son took over. Together, the Dingell dynasty covers nearly a third of the nation's history. "He was a skinny little shrimp," Dingell said of his dad. "Never drew a decent breath of air. Supposed to have died of tuberculosis in 1914. When the doctor told him that he had six months to live, Pop looked at him and said, 'Doc, I'll piss on your grave.' And Dr. Conway, whom Dad loved, died in '35. Pop died in 1955."

His son practically grew up in the House. Dingell recalls hunting rats "as big as cats" with an air rifle in the Capitol basement, and Franklin D. Roosevelt inscribed a photograph to him--"my friend"--around the time that Dingell was a 12-year-old congressional page. He insists that he never planned to occupy his father's seat, but the senior Dingell's death in office left a humming political machine leaderless and important goals unmet.

Dingell's victory in a special election was the first of 27 consecutive blowouts (some, he insists, harder than others). Unlike his father, Big John was physically imposing, and he filled his office walls with hunting trophies; visitors plead their cases under the cold gaze of Dingell kills. He honored his father by pushing for national health insurance and was chosen in 1965 to wield the gavel when the House passed Medicare.

Then, as now, many members of Congress coveted seats on Ways and Means or Armed Services, but Dingell preferred to master the process outside the spotlight. "No one paid any attention" to his subcommittee on fisheries, "so we were able to get a lot done," he explained. Between 1964 and 1974, Dingell was a driving force behind the National Wilderness Act, the Water Quality Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, wetlands preservation and bans on ocean dumping and the hunting of sea mammals.

In fact, Dingell would merit a bust on a pedestal at the Sierra Club, except that environmentalists cannot forget that his love for the outdoors is matched only by his love for heavy manufacturing. It was he who amended the Clean Air Act to guarantee that the U.S. auto industry must never be harmed by pollution regulations. And he has stoutly resisted increases in the gas-mileage requirements for sport-utility vehicles and minivans. "I've been looking after American manufacturing and American industry for years--it isn't just autos," Dingell acknowledged proudly. Besides, he added, neither he nor Detroit is to blame for the fact that overall mileage of the U.S. auto fleet hasn't improved. Americans simply prefer high-performance, four-wheel-drive towing machines, even for the preschool car pool. And in this free country, "if the people want something," he said, "they get it." And now the people want to fight global warming. According to Dingell, his shift from skeptic to activist has two explanations. "The scientific evidence is now generally accepted as being clear," he said. "The other thing that has transpired is that there's a public acceptance that something has to be done. And you'll remember that we work for the people."

Those aren't the motives that have Capitol Hill buzzing, however. Insiders wonder if Dingell has been riled up by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, with whom he has a long-running feud. Over the years, Dingell has opposed her rise to party leadership. She, in turn, backed another member of Congress, Lynn Rivers, when Rivers was forced by redistricting to run for Dingell's seat. That was in 2002, but Dingell still savors the drubbing he gave Pelosi's friend. So bad blood was pulsing when the Democrats took the reins of Congress this year and Pelosi appointed a select committee to remove global warming from Dingell's grasp.

No protégé of Rayburn's would ever willingly give up jurisdiction over a lunch menu--let alone the biggest bill in decades. Dingell flexed the muscle of a half-century and rallied his fellow committee chairs against this infringement of prerogatives. The select committee was promptly neutered. "John is the quintessential congressional chairman, protecting his jurisdiction while often reaching to grab someone else's," according to Leon Panetta, who chaired the Budget Committee before serving as White House chief of staff. "The last thing he wants is to lose jurisdiction."

Dingell scoffs at the idea that intramural combat is the root of his new attitude. "I think the select committee is going to be as useless as feathers on a fish, and they're either going to be in my hair or at my feet," he grumbled. But he insisted that he isn't motivated by mere annoyances. In fact, he was moving even before Pelosi acted, he said. Within days of the Democratic victory in November, he had summoned a former member of his committee to return and testify on global warming. "Albert!" he barked sternly when former Vice President Al Gore came on the line. "I'd like you to come in." The Gore hearing was quickly followed by sessions with leading scientists, auto manufacturers, power-company executives, economists and others. Energy and Commerce Committee chief of staff Dennis Fitzgibbons--lured back to Dingell's side after a lucrative stint as an auto-industry lobbyist--describes the "steep learning curve" for members of Congress, who have arrived, one by one, at "their holy [expletive] moment, when they say, 'Wow! This is bigger than I thought.'"

Behind the scenes, Dingell has delivered offer-you-can't-refuse messages to industry. "I've said, 'Fellas, the factual issue appears to be resolving itself. Work with me. I will do everything I can to get you a bill that you probably won't like--but with which you can live. And if you don't, you will have a bill that you won't like and can't live with." When the CEO’s of General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler testified in March, Big John demanded yes or no answers to a series of questions that boiled down to just one: Are you working with us or against us? With varying degrees of pain on their faces, each one promised to cooperate.

But the devil's in the details. And any serious climate-change legislation will be a forest of details. The key feature of any Dingell bill will be a mandatory cap-and-trade system modeled on Dingell's 1990 acid-rain legislation. Industries would be allowed to emit fixed amounts of greenhouse gases according to their share of the overall problem. If a power plant or factory reduces its emissions, the saving can be sold to plants that fail to adhere to the cap. In this way, reductions become valuable and pollution costly. Easy to say but fiendishly difficult to execute in a world where carbon emitters range from coal-fired power plants to the backyard grill. "How many sources of carbon dioxide are we talking about?" mused Fitzgibbons. "How do you allocate the amounts? It's a geometrically complex arrangement."

Europe's carbon cap-and-trade system is off to a poor start because too many permits were issued by governments trying to protect their own industries. On the other hand, too few permits could cripple the American economy. Many economists and environmentalists prefer a straightforward tax on carbon emissions, with proceeds going to fund research and development of alternative energy. It's much simpler--but economists don't run for re-election. House Democrats with long memories recall the whipping they took for backing a similar tax in the Clinton era. The so-called BTU tax was one reason the party lost control of Congress in 1994, and they don't intend to repeat the experience. As Dingell dryly noted in a recent speech, "Many members of Congress remember only too clearly the letters B, T and U."

Even tougher is the one perplexing area in which the fight against global warming conflicts with the U.S.'s goal of greater energy independence: coal. "The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal," Dingell recently declared. We have seemingly endless tons of the stuff, which can be converted into liquid fuel for cars. Coal boosters are pushing legislation through Congress to subsidize the use of coal instead of oil. The only problem: coal is the dirtiest source of greenhouse gases. Representative Rick Boucher, from Virginia's mining country, chairs the subcommittee on energy, but coal's influence goes further than that. Twenty-seven House Democrats hail from coal regions--a deeply meaningful number when Democrats control the chamber by just 16 votes.

The problem is so big, tangled and fraught that some House members prefer to let the Senate take the lead. After all, if Senate Republicans could be lured into a filibuster against a climate-change bill, they might hand the Democrats a strong issue for the upcoming presidential campaign. Dingell, who calls the Senate "a constitutional mistake," wants nothing to do with that strategy. Nor does he have any sympathy for environmentalists who believe the best thing to do is delay action until a Democrat wins the White House.

When both right and left, big business and the ultragreens are worried about what he's up to, call it a Dingell moment. He doesn't like ideologues. Extreme purity annoys him. "I write legislation from the middle," he explained. "I want to build a bill that will have broad bipartisan support that will have the public's confidence." And finally, "a bill that can be signed by the President."

His bipartisanship wears none of the lacy finery of a civics-class lecture. It is a strategy perfected in the bygone era of Democratic dominance of Congress. Dingell knows a purist in his own party can slow him down more than a pragmatist across the aisle. So he likes to get started on a big initiative by cutting a deal with a ranking Republican. Only then does he turn to battle his fellow Democrats. When this works, it can be impressive. The Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 were 13 years in the making (eight of them fairly quiet years as a result of the Reagan Administration's opposition to the bill). When Dingell at last brought the legislation to a vote, however, the amendments passed almost unanimously. But can the strategy work in today's more evenly--and bitterly--divided House?

One advantage Dingell will have in crossing party lines is his record in defending the U.S.'s industrial interests. He stands squarely on the only common ground Congress has found concerning global warming. In 1997 the Senate voted unanimously to condemn Kyoto-treaty provisions that would exempt China and other developing nations from mandatory carbon reductions. Dingell is bulletproof in this area. "I do not propose that my country be the only country that pays the costs of addressing [global warming]," he said. "China is only an example. You've got India, you've got the former Soviet countries, you've got the Europeans. Everybody is trying to give fine speeches, get a lot of credit--and then stick somebody else with the bill."

Where Dingell's influence is most vulnerable, by contrast--his Achilles' heel--is Detroit. He risks losing credibility if he becomes the last man standing between the auto industry and increased-mileage requirements. Momentum is building in the Senate--encouraged by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech early this year--for a 4%-per-year increase in corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards.

Dingell would prefer to do away with the existing CAFE system for measuring fuel efficiency and replace it with a system that measures tailpipe emissions. After all, a car that runs 25 miles on a gallon of clean biodiesel might be preferable environmentally to a car that runs 35 miles on gasoline or liquid coal.

Maintaining his influence on global warming may mean swallowing the 4% pill--washed down, knowing Dingell, by a fountain of federal subsidies for the retooling of American auto plants. Some friends of the chairman believe that Dingell has chosen the toughest bill of his career to cap his historic tenure. If he survives this Congress and wins one more election, he will pass Mississippi's Jamie Whitten as the nation's longest-serving Congressman.

But Dingell is superstitious about the luck-changing power of grandiose statements, according to a longtime associate. So instead of a grand finale, he quietly but insistently drummed his cane on the floor of his Capitol hideaway office as punctuation for the long list of his legislative achievements. "Look," he closed understatedly, "this is going to be one of the hardest tasks I've ever addressed." That said, "I intend to try and move this. If the problem is as big as everyone says--and it's an enormous problem--then we have a duty to move it. "Don't we?"

US Senators lay out new global warming plan

Thu Aug 2, 4:06 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP)

Two veteran US Senators on Thursday rolled out a market-based proposal which they said would reverse the catastrophic worst-case impact of climate change, but still safeguard the US economy.

Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Warner said their plan would focus on 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, to cut these by 70 percent below current levels by 2050, and could be used as a blueprint in the fight against global warming.

"We hope it will be a turning point," said Lieberman, who sits as an independent Democrat in the Senate, adding that the plan could reverse US foot dragging on tackling the global threat from climate change.
"We have been slow, we are already late, but not too late," he said.

The proposal, one of several expected to come up in the Senate later this year, lays out a mandatory, market-based cap-and-trade program that would cover 80 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions.
It is designed to cut those emissions back to current levels by 2012, pare them by 10 percent of current levels by 2020, and to reduce them to 70 percent below current levels by 2050.

At the same time, the senators said, their plan, to be the basis of legislation introduced into the Senate later this year, contains "robust" measures to protect American jobs and sustain US economic growth.
It will include the establishment of a Climate Change Credit Corporation to permit industry sectors to buy emissions allowances to regulate the amount of harmful gases they spew into the atmosphere.
Warner, a Republican, said he came late to the issue, after mulling over the potential security implications of global warming.

"In my 28 years in the Senate, I have focused above all on issues of national security, and I see the problem of global climate change as fitting squarely within that focus," he said.
Environmentalists have alleged that since President George W. Bush came to office in 2001 his administration has ignored and even tried to hide looming evidence of global warming and taken little or no action to combat climate change, or the US title as the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter.

They are also critical of Bush's refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol on global warming, which he has criticized as excessively flawed and a threat to the US economy.

"Myths and Facts on Global Warming"

Is global warming happening?

MYTH #1:Winters have been getting colder; for example, the winter of 2003–2004 in the northeastern U.S. was the coldest on record. Therefore global warming can’t be happening.

FACT: Winters have been getting warmer. Independent analyses of measurements by different scientists show that the Earth’s climate has warmed overall over the past century, in all seasons, and in most regions. (The studies are summarized in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001.)

The skeptics are doubly misleading when they bill the winter of 2003-2004 as record cold in the northeastern U.S. and imply that it disproves global warming predictions. While that winter was colder than average in the Northeast, it ranked as only the 33rd coldest in that region since records began in 1896 (NCDC, Climate of 2004, 2004). January 2004, when the most severe cold of the season occurred, was the 11th coldest January in the Northeast. No all-time low temperature records were broken in the Northeast that winter (NCDC, Climate of 2004, 2004). Only records for a given day of the year, such as January 16th, were broken, which is nothing unusual; the temperatures were not the coldest that had ever been experienced on any day. This contrasts with the 2003 heat waves in Europe, during which many all-time record high temperatures occurred (see Myth #5). In addition, a single spell of cold weather in one small region is no indication that the Earth’s climate is not warming. “Weather” refers to the atmospheric conditions at a particular time and location, while “climate” refers to the long-term average weather for a location. Scientists say that the Earth’s climate has been warming, since, on average, temperatures have been increasing over a long period of time in most regions. The global average temperature for January 2004 ranked as the fourth warmest on record (NCDC, Climate of 2004, 2004), showing that colder-than-usual weather was limited to a small area. Even with global warming, we will occasionally experience an unusually cold winter somewhere on Earth, since weather varies naturally from year to year and from place to place. But record-breaking cold is expected to become less common as the climate continues to warm, shifting the bounds within which weather fluctuates.

MYTH #2: Satellite measurements of temperature over the past two decades show a much smaller warming a few miles above Earth’s surface than is measured by thermometers at the surface. These observations show that computer climate models are wrong, since they predict that increasing amounts of greenhouse gases should cause slightly greater warming above the surface.

FACT: Recent research has corrected problems that led to underestimates of the warming trend in earlier analyses of satellite data. The early work of Spencer and Christy (1990), as well as subsequent revisions (Christy et al. 2003, and references therein), found little or no warming in the troposphere based on satellite data. Skeptics continue to cite these results. But two recent studies made different corrections to those analyses which, when added together, completely eliminate the discrepancy between climate models and observations. Mears et al. (2003), in a reanalysis of the satellite data, took into account various difficulties in determining a temperature trend from weather satellites. First, since no single satellite has been monitoring temperatures for a long period of time, researchers have had to rely on combining data from different satellites. However, different satellites have different instruments that need to be calibrated precisely against one another. Second, even one satellite may not produce consistent measurements over time, since satellite orbits can drift. After accounting for these factors, Mears et al. found a satellite temperature trend closer in size to the surface trend than in previous studies.

Fu et al. (2004) found another major problem with previous analyses. Satellite data that actually blend temperature readings in the stratosphere (the layer of atmosphere above the troposphere) with those in the troposphere were previously misinterpreted as representing only tropospheric temperatures. A strong cooling of the stratosphere over the same time period partly cancels out the tropospheric warming in the satellite measurements (the averaging of a warming trend and a cooling trend results in little trend).3 Fu et al. isolated the portion of the data that represented just the troposphere, and, accounting also for the corrections by Mears et al., found that the troposphere warmed slightly more than the surface, exactly as models predict. This finding dispels the notion that satellite data disprove the role of greenhouse gases in global warming. Weather balloon measurements may also show a smaller tropospheric warming trend than that observed at the surface. But here again, the interpretation of these measurements suffers from difficulties, such as sparse spatial coverage and inconsistencies among instruments (Fu et al. 2004). So trends derived from balloon data are not reliable.

MYTH #3: Even if Earth has been warming over the past century, it is nothing unusual. For example, temperature reconstructions show that there was a period known as the Medieval Warm Period, roughly from A.D. 1000 to 1400, that was warmer than the 20th century. This means that the global warming we are experiencing now is part of a natural cycle.

FACT: Ten independent scientific studies have all found a large 20th-century warming trend compared to other temperature changes over the past millennium or two. (See Figure 1a.) Some of the studies carefully reconstructed a history of temperatures across the globe over the past 1,000 years or more based on different kinds of records (ice cores, tree rings, historical documents, etc.) The rest of the studies calculated past temperature changes using climate models and an estimate of how climatic factors such as sunlight, volcanic eruptions and greenhouse gases changed over time. Uncertainty exists as to exactly how warm the present is compared to the Medieval Warm Period. Recently, von Storch et al. (2004) argued validly that the method used in some temperature reconstruction studies may underestimate the magnitude of past climate changes; however, the study does not answer the question of how warm the Medieval Warm Period actually was. Further support for the idea of an unusual 20th century warming is provided by a recent temperature reconstruction by Moberg et al. (2005), who consciously avoided the method criticized by von Storch et al. Although they find that the Medieval Warm Period may have been warmer than previously estimated, they “find no evidence for any earlier periods in the last two millennia with warmer conditions than the post-1990 period—in agreement with previous similar studies.” In contrast to these two studies, a number of papers arguing for a very warm Medieval Warm Period contain serious flaws. These include articles by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, and Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. See the box on “The ‘hockey stick’ controversy.” But what if future research were to produce results drastically different from the scientific studies to date, indicating with a high degree of certainty that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the present? That would have very little impact on the scientific case for a human cause of the current warming; whether or not the Medieval Warm Period was warmer provides only one piece of evidence in determining what is causing the current warming. That there were warmer periods in the past caused by natural factors (such as millions of years ago when tropical species flourished in polar regions) is insufficient reason to assume that the current warming also is natural. In fact, a whole body of studies separate from the ones discussed above have focused on the physical factors potentially responsible for changing the climate over the past 150 years, and they indicate with a high degree of confidence that most of the warming over the past 50 years was caused by human-produced greenhouse gases. The current warming is unlikely to be entirely natural and inevitable. Humanity largely controls how much climate change will unfold over the coming centuries.

MYTH #4: The Earth’s climate is self-regulating—natural control mechanisms prevent very large swings. For example, Richard Lindzen claims that the Earth has a planetary “iris,” consisting of tropical cloud cover that expands or contracts to control the amount of heat that escapes from the surface out to space (Lindzen et al. 2001).

FACT: The Earth’s climate actually has been very unstable in the distant past. There have been times, hundreds of millions of years ago, when much of the planet was covered in ice.Tens of millions of years ago, tropical species flourished in polar regions (such as during the era of the dinosaurs). A wealth of scientific evidence indicates that the climate has changed significantly and abruptly (within one or a few decades) numerous times in the past. (For a comprehensive review of the literature on this subject, see the 2002 report by the National Academy of Sciences.) While the climate has been relatively stable since human civilization started around 10,000 years ago, the warming projected to occur over the next century with unrestrained emissions of greenhouse gases is likely to exceed anything seen in the last 10,000 years (IPCC 2001). This warming could cross certain thresholds for abrupt climate change, triggering such dangerous events as a shutdown of the ocean currents that supply nutrients to important fisheries and moderate the climate in Europe and other regions (Sarmiento et al. 2004).

MYTH #5: Recent extreme events such as record heat waves, intense precipitation, massive forest fires and worldwide coral bleaching have no link to climate change.

FACT: These recent events are all consistent with a warming world and can be expected to occur more frequently with global warming. Heat waves and extreme precipitation: Weather fluctuates naturally, resulting at times in extreme events, even in the absence of climate change. However, the increase many critiques by global warming skeptics have focused on the work of one particular group of climate scientists, Dr. Michael Mann and colleagues. Their graph of temperature variations over the past 1,000 years (Mann et al. 1999) is featured prominently in the 2001 Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). in global average temperature over the past century, which constitutes a change in climate, shifts the bounds within which weather fluctuates. This climate change increases the likelihood that high temperature records will be broken and intense precipitation events will occur. (Precipitation becomes more intense because higher temperatures promote increased evaporation and thus higher moisture content in the atmosphere.) In fact, some scientists estimate that human-produced greenhouse gases have already at least doubled the chance of an extreme heat wave like the one that scorched Europe in 2003 (Stott et al. 2004). According to measurements, precipitation appears to have increased in intensity over recent decades, at least in certain regions (IPCC 2001).

During the 2003 heat waves in Europe, many all-time high temperature records were broken. The temperature surpassed 100°F in the United Kingdom for the first time since records began (NCDC, Climate of 2003, 2004). Furthermore, the European heat waves were part of an unusually warm summer overall, which appears to have been the hottest in Europe in at least the last 500 years (Luterbacher et al. 2004).

Forest fires: Global warming is expected to cause, and may already have caused, more severe droughts in many regions. The ongoing drought in the western U.S., possibly the worst in 500 years, may be caused by unusually warm waters in the western Pacific and other effects of global warming (Cook et al. 2004; Hoerling and Kumar 2003). Parched conditions and high temperatures associated with drought create ideal conditions for wildfires to spread. Global warming also lengthens the fire season and promotes outbreaks of tree-killing insects, which create a large amount of dry fuel to stoke forest fires (ACIA 2004). The amount of forest burned annually has been increasing over recent decades in some regions, such as the Arctic (ACIA 2004). Alaska experienced its worst fire year ever in 2004, a year with the warmest and third driest summer on record (NIFC 2004).

Coral bleaching: The incidence of large-scale coral “bleaching” events has increased around the world since 1979, and most evidence indicates that these mass bleachings, which can lead to coral death, are caused by global warming (Hoegh-Guldberg 1999). An increase in water temperature causes coral bleaching, and the average surface ocean temperature in many tropical regions rose by almost one degree C (1.8°F) over the last century. In 1997–98, the largest bleaching event on record damaged 16% of the reefs in the world and killed 1,000-year-old corals (Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network 2004; Hoegh-Guldberg 1999).

The Hockey Stick Controversy

The temperature trend is often known as the “hockey stick” because of its shape: nearly flat for most of the millennium and then a sharp upward turn in the 20th century (see Figure 1b). In their critiques of Mann’s findings, the skeptics claim that they have weakened a primary pillar on which the IPCC’s conclusions about human-produced warming rest. That claim is incorrect. The truth is that other independent studies have found similar temperature trends; the differences that do arise do not affect the overall conclusion that 20th century warming is relatively large and longlasting. Furthermore, how warm the Medieval Warm Period was compared to the present, which is the focal point of the skeptics’ critiques, is only a secondary piece of evidence for what is causing the present warming. The IPCC actually assessed an entirely different body of studies to come to the conclusion that humans caused most of the recent climatic change. Some of the analyses critiquing the work of Mann et al. have serious flaws. For example, a pair of similar papers by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas use subjective and unscientific methods to paint a picture of a Medieval Warm Period that was much warmer than the present. A rebuttal was published by thirteen climate scientists (Mann et al. 2003a, b). Soon and Baliunas use incorrect criteria for defining past warm periods. They actually consider a period to be warm even if it was simply unusually wet or dry, rather than basing their judgment strictly on direct indicators of temperature. The authors also consider the entire interval, A.D. 800–1300, to be warm, even though their data indicate that the warmth occurred only in scattered regions at any given time. True global warming occurs when temperatures over large areas increase simultaneously. Also, many scientists have found that the results of their studies were misinterpreted by Soon and Baliunas in a way that bolstered the authors’ thesis (Monastersky 2003).

A paper published in 2003 by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, claiming to be an audit of a study by Mann et al. (1998), used data from a corrupted electronic file, arbitrarily omitted 80% of the data before 1600, and replaced certain data with incompatible data, artificially resulting in temperatures during the 1400s that were warmer than during the late 1900s (Rutherford et al., in press, 2005). A paper published in 2005 by McIntyre and McKitrick claims that the hockey stick pattern is an artificial result of the method used by Mann et al. rather than an unbiased compilation of the data. Mann et al. used a version of a method known as principal components analysis, which basically boils a large amount of data down to its main features, or “principal components.” One main problem with McIntyre and McKitrick’s critique is that they misunderstand why Mann et al. used principal components analysis — Mann et al. used it to summarize all the important features of the data, not to extract only the one chief feature. The reason McIntyre and McKitrick’s version of the data doesn’t have a hockey stick pattern is that they display only the first principal component, omitting other critical principal components. In addition, scientists have shown that the hockey stick pattern emerges regardless of what version of principal components analysis is used or even whether principal components analysis is used (Rutherford et al., in press, 2005). Recently, von Storch et al. (2004) argued validly that the method used in Mann et al. and some other temperature reconstruction studies may underestimate the magnitude of past climate changes, particularly the longer-lasting, centuryscale changes such as during the Medieval Warm Period. But this paper provides no definitive answer as to how large the underestimates are (Osborn and Briffa 2004). Also, the temperature reconstruction of Moberg et al. (2005), which avoids the method criticized by von Storch et al., still provides no indication that there were any periods in the past 2,000 years that were warmer than the 1990s.

60 Earth Hour 2010

This year, Earth Hour takes place on Saturday, March 27 from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. (local time). Families are encouraged to join millions of people around the world and turn off their lights for one hour in support of action on climate change. Small acts can make a big difference.

Here are some activities to help you and your family make an evening out of Earth Hour:

1. Make a plan: Engage your family in a conversation about conservation and come up with ideas on how to save energy, limit waste, and make a positive impact on the environment at home. Then discuss other ways your family can take action for the planet year-round, like switching to CFL light bulbs, using cold water to wash your clothes, and buying energy efficient appliances.

2. Community involvement: Find Earth Hour events happening in your community and get involved. Being part of a community with purpose will prompt your kids to start seeking out other opportunities to get involved on their own and inspire more action.

3. Candle-lit games night: Dust off the board games or play a game of flashlight tag. Gather the family for some old-fashioned quality time to remind your children that games can be played without a computer or TV screen and that fun can be had with mom or dad.

4. Take a tour: Explore your neighborhood in a whole new light and take a flashlight walk, or tour around your city using “green” modes of transportation. Walk, bike, skateboard, scooter, or take the bus and show your kids that travel can be fun, and sometimes faster, when you leave the car at home.

5. Scavenge and save: Set up a scavenger hunt in and around your house to mark off areas where energy can be saved. Encourage the kids to place flags or stickers in spots where appliances or computers can be unplugged and lights turned off – highlighting the spots where they can make a difference.

WWF’s Earth Hour Returns for 2010 in Largest Call for Action on Climate Change in History

WASHINGTON, DC, January 19, 2010 – World Wildlife Fund announced today that Earth Hour 2010 will take place on Saturday, March 27 from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm, with many of the nation’s most iconic landmarks dimming their lights for one hour in what is expected to be the largest call for action on climate change in history.

The initial list of US landmarks taking part in this global climate event includes Mount Rushmore, Empire State Building, the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas,” Harrah’s Caesar Palace and the MGM Mirage on the Las Vegas Strip and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. New Earth Hour participants in 2010 will include Montezuma Castle National Monument in Arizona and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis. Other local landmarks taking part include Atlanta’s Bank of America building and the Pike Place Market sign in Seattle, with many more expected to sign on in the days ahead.

WWF officials said they are hopeful of Earth Hour participation in all 50 US states, as Americans from every walk of life, in communities large and small, symbolically dim their lights in solidarity for climate action with hundreds of millions of people around the world. The event will have special significance to Americans in the wake of a US government report from June 2009 which found that every region of the nation is experiencing significant, adverse impacts from climate change including droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires. A study released in November 2009 by WWF and the insurance company Allianz SE warned that by mid-century, rising global sea levels caused by climate change could increase risks to more than $7 trillion in buildings, transportation infrastructure, and other assets in major U.S. coastal cities, including Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.

“Climate change is real and it’s happening right now in the US, impacting our water resources, energy supplies, transportation, agriculture and health, putting our livelihoods and economic future at risk in every part of the country,” said WWF Climate Director Keya Chatterjee. “Earth Hour is a way for people across the US to join together with people from throughout the world to signal their concern about climate change and send a message about the urgent need for action.”

"Earth Hour directly links with Department of Interior and National Park Service priorities,” said Mount Rushmore National Memorial Superintendent Gerard Baker. “Our stewardship mission is to manage this country's most treasured landscapes unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. This mission is being challenged particularly by climate change. As stewards of our national parks, especially considering the challenges of climate change, we must be visible leaders to demonstrate commitment to energy and water conservation... and to use our parks to teach the public about climate change and the ways citizens can reduce their carbon footprints."

A number of organizations have also pledged their support for Earth Hour and will encourage their supporters and the public to take part including Goddard Systems, Inc., HandsOn Network, American Federation of Teachers, NAACP, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. National Park Service’s WebRangers, American Bird Conservancy, Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots, Focus the Nation, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Association of Student Councils, National Honor Society, National Junior Honor Society, National Science Teachers Association, National Association of Neighborhoods, Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington and Reverb, a non-profit organization that greens concert tours.

“We want children to think about how we all impact the environment in our daily lives and how each one of us can make a difference. Earth Hour provides a great opportunity to accomplish that.” said Joseph Schumacher, CEO of Goddard Systems, Inc., a national childcare franchise and national supporter of Earth Hour 2010. “As educators and as parents, we want to help children understand that how they care for and protect the earth will affect future generations”

“Climate change is the most urgent issue facing our planet today, and we need to unite the world around meaningful action,” Chatterjee said. “With a simple flick of the switch, Americans will not only be sending a signal that they want solutions to the climate crisis, but they’ll be helping to turn the lights out on our nation’s dangerous dependency on foreign oil, and an unsustainable economic future. That’s a powerful message that everyone around the world will be able to see bright and clear on March 27th.”


ABOUT EARTH HOUR:
Since its inception three years ago, Earth Hour has captured the world’s imagination becoming a global phenomenon. Last year, for Earth Hour 2009 nearly one billion people in 4,100 cities in 87 countries on seven continents turned out. In the U.S. alone, 80 million Americans and 318 cities officially voted for action with their light switch. These people and municipalities were joined by iconic landmarks including: the Las Vegas Strip, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings in New York City, the Space Needle in Seattle, Church of Latter-Day Saints Temple in Salt Lake City, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the National Cathedral in Washington DC. International landmarks that turned off their lights included the Great Pyramids of Giza, Parthenon in Athens, St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, Big Ben and Houses of Parliament in London, Paris’ Elysee Palace and Eiffel Tower, Beijing’s Birds Nest and Water Cube, Symphony of Lights in Hong Kong, Sydney’s Opera House and Christ de Redeemer status in Rio de Janeiro.

Collaborating to Conserve the World's Forests

Illegal logging and unsustainable management of forests - driven by the demand for cheap timber and paper products - lead to the loss of nearly 36 million acres of natural forests each year, an area roughly the size of New York state. The world's poorest people often bear the brunt of forest loss, as forest resources sustain most of the world's people living in extreme poverty.

WWF's work with the U.S. government
Our work with the U.S. government includes supporting the reauthorization of the Tropical Forest Conservation Act (HR 2185 in the House of Representatives and S 2020 in the Senate ) that authorizes debt-for-nature swaps and other financial incentives to conserve tropical rainforests, such as the forests of the Amazon. The bill would further expand the program to include coral reefs and associated coastal marine ecosystems, such as those of the Coral Triangle. We are also working to support the Legal Timber Protection Act (HR 1497) which would prohibit imports of illegally harvested plants and timber products into the United States.

* Learn more about our forestry efforts

Lacey Act
The nation’s oldest wildlife protection statute, the Lacey Act was first enacted in 1900 to combat the impact of hunting to supply commercial markets, interstate shipment of unlawfully killed game, introduction of harmful exotic species, and killing of birds for feather trade. Significantly amended in 1981 and 1988, the Lacey Act has been a tool to combat trafficking in illegal wildlife, fish or plants. Passed on May 22nd 2008, the Act was expanded to protect a broader range of plants, extending the statute’s reach to encompass products, including timber, that derive from illegally harvested plants.

This will help the U.S. to support the efforts of other countries, and its own States, to combat illegal logging making it unlawful to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce any plant, with some limited exceptions, taken or traded in violation of the laws of a U.S. State, or most foreign laws. The Lacey Act also makes it unlawful to make or submit any false record, account or label for, or any false identification of, any plant. It will be unlawful as of December 15, 2008 to import any covered plant or plant product without a declaration.

The U.S. Lacey Act - Frequently Asked Questions About the World's First Ban on Trade in Illegal Wood