Tropical deforestation emits at least 20 percent of total greenhouse gases that cause climate change — more than all the world’s cars, SUVs, trucks, trains and airplanes combined. The calculator determines personal or family carbon emissions from home energy, vehicle, travel and diet behaviors, or from an individual event or travel.

“Most people don’t realize that the meat and food items they eat, the soaps and shampoos they use, even some of the biodiesel and ethanol biofuels powering their cars come from cleared tropical forests,” said Michael Totten, CI’s Chief Adviser for Climate, Water and Ecosystem Services.

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A new Greenpeace report Cooking The Climate highlights the huge amount of carbon dioxide getting released into the atmosphere as a result of rainforest destruction. Destruction of rain forests for palm oil plantation production is a major cause of carbon dioxide emissions.

Greenpeace investigations centred on the tiny Indonesian
province of Riau on the island of Sumatra which contains 25 per cent of
Indonesia’s palm oil plantations. Its peat swamps and forests are among
the world’s most concentrated carbon stores.

They contain an estimated 14.6bn tonnes of carbon and their
destruction would release the equivalent of total global greenhouse gas
emissions for a year.

Greenpeace claims the burning of Indonesia’s peatlands and forests
releases 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gases annually – equal to four per
cent of the global total – even though it occupies 0.1 per cent of the
land on Earth.

Note that the push for biomass energy from Brazil and other
equatorial countries is leading to huge CO2 emissions as forests get
ripped down and burned. A lot of this is happening to feed a growing
population of humans. Also, Asian industrialization is increasing the
amount of spending money people have for food and so Chinese, Indians,
and others are spending more on types of foods (e.g. meats) that
require more land usage to produce. This increases food imports by
these countries and forest destruction by food exporters.

Making a bad trend even worse, some Westerners who pose as environmentalists are promoting biomass energy usage. Well, because of the CO2 released by rainforest clearing equatorial region biomass production expansion causes a net boost in CO2 emissions.
So people who worry about global warming and therefore advocate biodiesel are not just wiping out species (and I’m not trying to belittle the importance of this problem). They are increasing atmospheric concentrations of a gas whose rise they view as a big problem.

Fossil fuels burning attracts a lot of attention for its effect on global temperatures. But Greenpeace says that forest destruction is also very important for global climate warming.

About three million hectares (7.5 million acres) of
these peatland forests are earmarked for conversion to palm oil
plantations over the next decade, Greenpeace said.
This “climate bomb” is ticking loudly in the run-up to December’s
United Nations’ climate change meeting in Bali, which is expected to
debate forests’ role in accelerating — and slowing — climate change,
said Sue Connor, Greenpeace International Forests Campaigner.

“(If the Riau peatlands are cleared) it would wipe out any chance we
have of keeping the temperature increase below two degrees Celsius,”
she said, referring to a threshold given by the UN’s climate panel.
Palm oil is used in anything from body lotions and toothpaste to
chocolate bars, crisps and as a component of biofuels, such as
biodiesel.

I am more concerned about the destruction of habitats and species.
My guess is that CO2 emissions will peak some time in the next 20 years
and then decline as fossil fuels reserves depletion causes fossil fuels
extraction to decline. This will happen first for oil, then natural
gas, and eventually even coal.

U.S. Government Sued for Allowing Imports of Peruvian Mahogany.

Doubly illegal, mahogany from the Peruvian Amazon is being imported into the United States for deluxe furniture under the noses of three federal agencies, according to a lawsuit filed today by two Peruvian indigenous groups and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a U.S. conservation organization. The suit was filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York City.

Nearly all of Peru’s mahogany exports are logged illegally, the groups say. Importing it into the United States is illegal because it violates the U.S. Endangered Species Act and a major international treaty, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the lawsuit charges.

More than 80 percent of illegally logged Peruvian mahogany ends up in the United States.

Dominican Today.

Sao Paulo.– Greenpeace volunteers unfurled a 300 square metre banner in a massive area of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest this morning with the words ‘KFC – Amazon Criminal’ – in advance of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s (KFC) Annual General Meeting in Louisville, Kentucky tomorrow.

Activists in 2 inflatable boats also protested against US commodities giant Cargill, at its illegal soya export facility in the heart of the Amazon, which supplies KFC with animal feed in Europe. They held up a banner saying ‘Cargill Out’, as rainforest soya was being prepared for export. Both protests highlight the fact that KFC is fuelling the destruction of the Amazon by selling cheap chicken fed on soya grown on deforested land.

Recent Greenpeace investigations have traced the chain of rainforest destruction directly from the heart of the Amazon, via Cargill’s facility, to KFC’s European restaurants, which sell bucket-loads of cheap soya-fed chicken to millions of people every day.

"Deforestation, slavery, use of toxic chemicals, land theft, illegal farming and the extinction of rare species are a recipe for disaster in the Amazon rainforest, but they are ingredients in KFC’s quest for cheap animal feed," said Greenpeace International Forest Campaign Coordinator Gavin Edwards. "Fast food companies like KFC must take Amazon deforestation off their menu before it is too late for the world’s greatest rainforest."