Arguing the Green

“Sometime in the 2020s, New Zealand will become responsible for a massive surge in emissions from its forests,” writes Fred Pearce in his Guardian series ‘Greenwash’. “The central problem seems to be that when it comes to carbon, Middle Earth is a scientific minefield,” Pearce continues. “And the Kyoto rules give the government considerable potential to pick and choose which carbon emissions and which carbon sinks from forests it declares for the purposes of meeting its targets. In a nutshell, the Kyoto protocol allows New Zealand to ignore what is happening across the wider landscape and simply report the growth of its 600,000 hectares of new forests, planted mostly during the 1990s. That sounds dodgy, though within the Kyoto rules. Even so, if these ‘Kyoto forests’ had been specifically planted as part of a genuine policy to cut the country’s long-term contribution to global warming – we might still applaud. Unfortunately it is not quite like that.”