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Climate Laws Encourage Deforestation, Scientists Say11-11-09 | News

Climate Laws Encourage Deforestation, Scientists Say




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Kyoto, the European cap-and-trade plan, and the House climate bill all treat bioenergy as carbon-neutral; nobody counts the effect of disappearing forests. Photo Courtesy of EarthFinds: A Green Solution


The law of unintended consequences strikes yet again. This can be seen as backwards thinking and adversely harms the landscape industry.

Global plans to tackle climate change, from the Kyoto Protocol to the recently-passed Waxman-Markey bill, have a fatal flaw. They essentially encourage large-scale deforestation. This pretty much undermines the whole idea of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions in the first place.

That's the argument from a new paper published in Science, written by Princeton University's Tim Searchinger and others. What's the upshot? Clearing out forests to use the wood for bioenergy clearly has an environmental cost. That's simply not accounted for in any of the prevailing climate-change programs. - Courtesy of Wall Street Journal
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