And The World's Third-Largest Carbon Polluter Is...

It's well-known that the United States and China are the two biggest greenhouse-gas polluters in the world. But relatively few people can name number three on that list. It's Indonesia, thanks to heavy deforestation:

It is that frenzied rate of deforestation that has propelled Indonesia, home to 237 million people, into its top-three spot in the global league table of climate change villains. According to a government report released last month, the destruction of forests and carbon-rich peatlands accounts for 80 per cent of the 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted in the country annually.

And, for similar reasons, Brazil now ranks as the fourth-largest CO2 emitter in the world. So, while getting the United States and China to agree to binding emission targets is on top of the to-do list at Copenhagen this December, hammering out some sort of agreement on deforestation isn't far behind. The most promising contender, at the moment, is a program to pay developing countries not to chop down their trees or burn their peatlands. Incidentally, this is one of the cheapest ways to reduce CO2 emissions, but, as Michael McCarthy points out, some of the current options being considered make environmentalists queasy. Read more....