Source: Tonic
The Wi-Fi is iffy in the colorful city of Santarém, where the Tapajós, a river the size of the Mississippi, meets the mighty Amazon in Brazil’s remote northern state of Pará (at right). The veteran climate journalists traveling the country with me say I should wait until we meet with Brazil’s Minister of Environment and chief negotiator at the UN biodiversity and climate meetings, before I report back on Brazil’s climate policy. I won’t have anything “new” to say until then, they tell me.But even old news on the topic is news to me. Unless you were in Copenhagen last December (several journalists here were), then you probably don’t know where your own country, much less Brazil, stands on climate change.
At the moment, the country that’s paying my airfare, lodging and meals of fried fish appears to be one of the “good guys.” Brazil not only pledged to cut emissions (138 countries representing 87 percent of global emissions assented to the nonbinding Copenhagen Accord), it signed its reductions into law. Brazil’s National Climate Change Policy (PNMC), enacted just days after COP15 disbanded amid overwhelming uncertainty, mandates certainty — a reduction of more than 36 percent projected greenhouse emissions by 2020.
Like Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President Obama okayed the Accord. He pledged, or rather “took note of” (in COP speak) the commitment to cut emissions, but didn’t deliver a set value, leaving it up instead to Congress. In the US, however, it has been a much rougher path to get anything into law that limits emissions in a meaningful way. In the US, the second biggest emitter behind China, emissions mean commerce. Industry and transportation are the biggest slices of our CO2 pie chart. Cutting emissions significantly enough to potentially avert global climate change means taking a bite out of business, or at least, that’s how it appears to US lawmakers.
It’s different in Brazil, the fifth or sixth (depending upon who you ask) biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Here, emissions from deforestation and land use account for 75 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas contributions. Amazon deforestation by itself, according to the country’s 2004 National Inventory of Greenhouse Gases, accounts for 44 percent of the country’s total emissions. In Brazil, if you can slow deforestation (which releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere through burning, natural decomposition and manufacturing), you can take a big bite out of your contribution of greenhouse gases.
That’s just what Brazil has been doing. Thanks to new government policies, improved satellite monitoring, new jobs in other sectors of a booming Brazilian economy and a decrease in global demand for wood, 2009 marked a record low in deforestation rates in the Amazon. According to the National Institute for Space Research, just 7,464 square-km were cut down in the Brazilian Amazon in 2009, down almost 400 percent from a peak of 27,772 square-km in 2004.
The PNMC sets to cut deforestation even further, aiming for 80 percent of 2008 levels by 2020. That’s a big commitment and a promising one for the most biologically diverse and effective carbon sink in the world.
But in 2020, the Brazil I’m getting to know today could be a totally different country. That’s when vast oil and natural gas reserves recently discovered off Rio de Janeiro’s coast’s will begin producing full steam, expanding the country’s greenhouse gas pie chart and slicing it in new and unforeseen ways. Perhaps forebodingly, before signing PNMC into law, President Lula (at left, with Obama) bowed to pressure from the Ministry of Mines and Energy and vetoed a clause calling for the “gradual abandonment” of the use of fossil fuels. The oil and gas buried beneath miles of water, salt and seafloor will be burned, if not in Brazil, somewhere.The question becomes whether Brazil will continue to commit to “greener” energy such as that derived from bio-fuel and hydroelectic power when it becomes an oil superpower. Will the country still focus on pushing ethanol-producing sugar cane out of its soil, and will it continue to fund the massive hydroelectric projects that power the bulk of Brazil’s homes. The Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, which is set to break ground just a ferry ride away my hotel, could displace more than 40,000 people and inundate hundreds of square miles of rainforest. The Brazilian government has some tough choices to make in the coming years. The country is perhaps lucky to have them.