Green hope & green hype

While we’re on the delicate subject of green spin, let’s look at some of the uplifting stories, the “good news” in the Gospel of Denial:

Convalescing forests: A story circulated recently that the “world’s forests are recovering.” Several industrial countries in Europe and North America, having destroyed most of their forests, now show an increase in forest acreage, not the more important number of standing timber volume. Meanwhile, global forestry and agriculture companies do their slash and burn logging in developing countries such as Brazil, Burma, and Indonesia. The planet loses about 32 million acres (12 million hectares) of forest each year. Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University in New York, a credible scientist, originally reported the forest recovery data as a few isolated cases that included monoculture tree farms. Corporate forestry interests ran with the story, proclaiming the planet’s forest recovery. This is classic “cherry picking” of data, topped off with pure salesmanship in headline writing.

Plenty of Oil! This good news landed on editors’ desks in 2007. Business sections reported that according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates in the U.S., there could be 3.7 trillion barrels of oil reserves left, over three-times the reserves reported by Petroleum Institute data. The report extrapolates current reserves, counting on technology improvements to discover and retrieve hard-to-reach oil. This they call “exploration potential,” a fancy phrase for pie in the sky. They counted all the Canadian tar sands, including deep sources that cannot likely be retrieved at a net gain of energy. They counted the Colorado oil shale, which would require taking out major sections of the Rocky Mountains and superheating the rock with nuclear reactors, not likely able to produce any net energy. The report’s numbers for authentic known reserves came to 1.2 trillion barrels, slightly higher than the Petroleum Institute. The industry knows it cannot profitably recover much more than 80% of this oil, so we’re back to one trillion barrels, as everyone in the industry knows. The industry also knows that oil production has peaked and will almost certainly fall in the coming decades. But the hype about plenty of oil made great headlines and a long lunch for harried editors.

Aral Sea returns: More good news flashed on the wire services: “the Aral sea is recovering.” The truth: The sea has been shrinking for decades as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan divert water flow for cotton farming. Over three million people have suffered economic devastation, a health crisis, and ecological disaster. Once-active fish boats sit on dry land 100 km from the water. But recently, Kazakhstan built a dam to keep water from flowing from the “North Aral Sea,” a fragment of the original Aral Sea, into the “South Sea.” The dam preserves the little lake in the north, which is actually rising. Presto: The renaissance of the Aral Sea, neatly packaged for the world media.

Forestry hype II: Another loony forestry study claimed that some Canadian forests were actually losing carbon. Forestry hacks fired up the headline machine across the land, reporting “Forests not necessarily a carbon sink,” a completely spurious idea. Mature forests don’t capture more carbon and can even lose carbon, but growing forests always capture carbon and shrinking forests always emit carbon. Perhaps that’s too complicated for the public, and besides, we need some uplifting ecology news.

Yes, signs of authentic good news exist. More on that later.

This was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 8:44 am and is filed under Ecology . Feel free to respond, or trackback.