Saving rainforests needs both property rights and payments

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Forests lock up a lot of carbon. Cutting them down accounts for around 20% of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases. On paper, halting deforestation should be the simplest way to cut emissions. Achieving a similar reduction by building wind turbines or nuclear-power stations, or by mandating more fuel-efficient cars and buildings, would take years and cost billions. In practice, however, halting deforestation is hard: much of the world’s rainforest has already succumbed to loggers and farmers. That is because it is difficult to align the interests of people who live in forests (now 20m in the Brazilian Amazon) with those of the rest of humanity.

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Gordon Brown’s New Deal will do little to advance renewable energy

One of the most impressive monuments to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal is the network of dams that stud the Tennessee River valley, built to provide work and to modernise a backward corner of America during the Great Depression. Seventy-five years later and on the other side of the Atlantic, work is once again growing scarce and an economy is in need of modernisation, this time to secure energy supplies and slash the release of planet-heating greenhouse gases. The British government has been playing up the parallels, with much ministerial talk of a “Green New Deal”. In March Gordon Brown promised the creation of a “low-carbon economy” for Britain that would provide jobs and clean up industry. Lord Mandelson, his business secretary, talked of a new industrial revolution and said that there was “no high-carbon future”.

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London - Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate the same amount of harmful carbon dioxide as boiling an electric kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

A typical search generates about seven grammes of CO2 whereas an electric kettle generates about 15 gm, a newspaper quoted a Harvard University physicist as saying.

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Below are notes from one of CO2 traders to members of its staff. The message is clear, even with little energy but with the right attitude - a small company can have a huge impact.

As a company we are promoting energy efficiency as a way to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. In last year’s Christmas present we also gave our best customer tips and tricks how to reduce energy consumption at home (see below). However, I notice that we don’t observe these tips and tricks at our offices. As it is customary to have always good intentions in a new year, here are our ‘voluntary’ energy efficiency measures:

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