I have seen the future for American efforts to rejoin the world community on climate change – efforts that will follow whoever wins the presidential election in November.

And it is happening on the other side of the world – here in Australia.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain say the US must cap its emissions of greenhouse gases, by issuing a limited number of permits to pollute and allowing corporations to trade in those permits. It's called cap-and-trade.

That's great in theory, but watch out for when large industrial and utility emitters discover that the rules will cost them. That's when corporations, even those that currently back efforts to halt climate change, will find reasons why the scheme is unfair and discriminatory and – this is where they will ratchet up the rhetoric – self-defeating.

That is what we are seeing right now on the other side of the world.

Australia pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol right after the US. Then-prime minister John Howard was a soul mate of George W Bush. But last year they opted back in when the new prime minister Kevin Rudd took over.

Some here down under say that Rudd – young, clean-cut, intelligent, understated and a bit professorial – is not unlike Obama. Be that as it may, it looks like Australia is just over a year ahead of the US in rejoining the world on climate. So for Rudd's problems today, read Obama's next year, if he wins.

Like the US, Australia has very high per-capita emissions because of its high living standards, coal-fired energy systems and addiction to the automobile. And last week its industrial attack dogs sunk their teeth into Rudd's plans to cap and trade carbon emissions. A big report from the Business Council of Australia published in the last few days claims a "real world" analysis of its implications show that many big emitters will either go bankrupt or relocate offshore.

That last bit is the killer punch, they hope. Sure, they imply, there will be winners and losers as the national economies moves out of fossil fuels and into renewable. But if the losers – those it dubs the "emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries" simply ship out, the emissions will continue under another national flag, and the only loser will be the Australian economy.

The headline-grabbing report says this group of companies – aluminium smelters, cement manufacturers, coal burners and many more – make up half Australia's exports.

So, this matters. If these heavy industries do move to the Gulf or China or India or wherever there are no current emissions limits, then global emissions will keep growing.

Sitting in on a blue-chip conference of Australia's government and business leaders (Rudd was there) last weekend on Queensland's Hayman Island, it was clear that environmentalists and policymakers do not yet have a convincing response to this argument.

They will need one. And not just in Australia. For I predict with absolute certainty that, whoever gets the White House, the same arguments will be heard in the US. And America's attack dogs are a good deal sharper-toothed than the Aussies'.

Call it a threat, or call it real-world pragmatism, but environmentalists have to find an answer to what is coming.

Depending on your politics, you may think off-shoring some industries from the rich to the poor world is no bad thing. But if it stops us fixing climate change, then we will all be the losers.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent, Sydney

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint, US

What's the best way to fix climate change, to stamp out the emissions that are warming our planet? I don't mean what technology. That's actually coming along quite nicely. I mean what are the international legal and financial levers that can pulled to get the technology, on the scale needed, from the test rigs to the national grids?

Later this month, in Accra, Ghana, the UN's lumbering Kyoto negotiations will have another stab at what to do after 2012. They will come up against the familiar stand-off. On the one hand, is the rich world's reluctance to accept emissions limits that will add to the cost of doing business unless developing countries subscribe to emissions controls. On the other, developing countries utter their familiar (and not unreasonable) cry: "You caused the problem; you fix it."

The answer has been staring us in the face for a while now. And more and more people - from business to politics to the greens - are catching on. It has an inelegant name: contraction and convergence (C&C).

It works like this. The world needs to contract emissions by more than half by the middle of the century. It's do-able and it won't wreck the world economy. (Bankers on a spree are far better at doing that.)

But there will be some pain. The only way of sharing out that pain fairly is for everyone to take on emissions targets, but targets that are fair because they are based on a basic parameter of need. That is: population size.

So every country should head towards annual emissions proportionate to its population. Most would have to reduce their emissions; but some of the poorest countries could raise them. That's the convergence part of the formula.

Of course, to ease the pain and make investment more efficiently, there would be massive carbon trading in the same way as is already allowed for under the Kyoto Protocol.

It's simple and it's obvious. Tony Blair's shuttling climate diplomats get it. Nicholas Stern, author of the groundbreaking report on the economic perils of climate change back in 2006, gets it. In Washington and Paris and New Delhi, some influential figures get it. "It's where we will need to end up, of course, even if we can't quite work out how to get there," one UN leading negotiator told me recently.

Why doesn't the world admit it and get on with it? Surprisingly, one reason is the long-term opposition of most environmental groups to the plan. I find this baffling and dispiriting.

Why the hostility? One reason seems to be that it is the brainchild of a maverick and sometimes truculent campaigner living in London called Aubrey Meyer.

So the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth can't claim ownership. And even the more radical climate campaigners - like the Guardian syndicated op-ed writer and blogger George Monbiot - have got cold feet.

Monbiot, a former supporter of C&C, has recently started publicly backing a proposal from his old mate Oliver Tickell, called Kyoto2, which would set up an international agency to control not emissions of greenhouse gases but the production of fossil fuels themselves.

Well, I can see why politically he wants to take on the fossil-fuel leviathans. But the beauty of contraction and convergence is that it doesn't require a global fossil-fuel autocracy; it is transparent, self-evidently fair and tackles the problem, not a surrogate.

If climate change is the central challenge for the world in the 21st century, then C&C is the most, perhaps the only, viable long-term solution on which there can ever be international agreement.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint

The collapse of world trade talks in Geneva this week, after seven years of deadlock, should send a shiver through the climate change community.

Why so?

After all, many see free trade as a major cause of the escalating global environmental problem. Anything that gums up the wheels of capitalism, some might argue, ought to be good for the climate.

Maybe so. But the evidence from Geneva is that, even on the biggest and politically most pressing issues, governments are willing to walk away from agreement if it might give an advantage to others.

And that is very bad news for climate negotiators. Especially because all the big disputes over who should do what to halt climate change boil down to concerns about competitive advantage in trade.

The trade talks foundered because of an impasse between the US on one side and China and India on the other - exactly the big-power confrontation shaping up over a successor to the Kyoto protocol. China and India demanded freer access to western markets for their goods.

The Bush administration feared that this would undercut US jobs. Neither side gave way and the talks collapsed.

Climate talks, which are set to be concluded in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, could founder in a similar fashion, even without George W Bush.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama say that, if elected, they will be willing to sign up to limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

But their priorities do not differ so much from those of Bush. Neither has any intention of signing a climate deal that imposes costs on US manufacturers that would disadvantage them in the battle for markets with China and India.

McCain says he won't accept emissions caps at all unless China and India accept them, too. Obama says he would be willing to make commitments in advance of the Asian giants.

But he warns that if they don't agree to rein in their emissions, then he will impose import tariffs on energy-intensive products equivalent to the extra costs that the carbon cap may impose on US manufacturers.

China and India, as they indicated at the recent G8 summit in Japan, have no intention of accepting carbon caps while their per-capita national emissions remain far lower than those of developed countries. Which seems fair enough, unless you are a US manufacturer or worker.

There are ways through this mire. One would be the "contraction and convergence" formula, under which nations agree both to contract global emissions and to converge national emissions towards some common per-capita entitlement.

That would be fair. But fairness does not seem to cut it in international diplomacy these days.

After all there are fair ways of organising global trade, but after seven years of talks the world has for now given up trying to agree on them. So what chance does the world have of agreeing how to fix climate change in the coming 16 months?

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint, US

The rest of the world is looking forward to the US returning to the international fold, in particular to its reengagement, post-George W Bush, in treaties like the Kyoto protocol. Both Barack Obama and John McCain are committed, but I see trouble ahead.

This could be a marriage in which the US and the rest of the world have very different nuptial expectations, regardless of who makes it to the White House.

Talks began in Bali last December on the next phase of the Kyoto protocol, to come into force in 2013. And the world is desperate to have the US back. Negotiators on the holiday island would done anything for just a kiss from the Bush team. They got a kiss-off instead.

The talks have a deadline for final agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009. So come next year, Washington looks like being able to name its own terms for reentry.

Most obviously, they won't expect to be held to the emissions reductions agreed in Kyoto 11 years ago by the Clinton/Gore administration. Those targets required a 6% cut in US emissions by now, instead of the 15% increase seen so far.

Whether it is the emissaries of McCain or Obama who head for Denmark, they will expect a free ride back into the process, with today's elevated emissions the new base point for any future cuts.

That will make quite a few countries upset. The Australians, who rejoined Kyoto last year after departing with Bush, will expect the same. So may the Canadians, who stuck by the treaty in name but have so far taken no steps to reduce their emissions. In fact, despite promising an Uncle-Sam-size 6% cut, they have out-emitted their neighbours.

The Kyoto rules require any country that doesn't meet its target to buy spare permits from under-emitters like the Russians and Ukrainians. But so far Canada has taken no steps to do that. And if they use the US as a precedent, then why not the Japanese, or the Italians or the Spaniards, or anyone else still nowhere near their targets.

At that point, the entire edifice of carbon trading - the one success of Kyoto so far - could come tumbling down.

Even if all the above can be patched together, then another hurdle awaits. If McCain wins, he says he won't agree to any US emissions targets unless China and other major developing countries agree to targets too.

He has not said what kind of targets, but as China made clear after the recent G8 summit in Japan, they will have nothing to do with such a proposal. Which is hardly surprising, when Chinese emissions are, per head of population, only a quarter those of the US and a third those of Europe.

Obama's team agree they will have to make the first pledge. But even they say that, if there is no quid pro quo, than they will ultimately impose tariffs on carbon-intensive products. It is going to get nasty.

We may begin to see how things will pan out pretty soon. The next big climate pow-pow is in Poznan in December. By then there will be a President-elect in the US. He will have his entourage in Poland. They won't officially be negotiating, but every word they utter will be pored over.

Some thought that, when Bush pressed the ejector button and took the US out of Kyoto in 2001, he would doom the treaty. He didn't. But ironically, the return of the US could have precisely that effect.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint, kyoto protocol, US

If biofuels are so bad, why aren't we campaigning against cotton?

Biofuels are currently being accused of starving the world of food, by taking over badly needed land and water. But the fact is, cotton deprives food growers of much more water and good farming land than biofuels.

If we weren't already doing it, and somebody today came up with the idea of taking over the world's fields to grow clothes, there'd be a huge stink. So is it time for a reassessment of cotton and other non-food crops?

The charge list against cotton is long. Cotton drained the Aral Sea in central Asia. I have stood on the former shoreline at Muynak in Uzbekistan and looked out across the 100 kilometres of desert you'd have to cross to find the sea. No water gets down the rivers that once topped up the inland sea, because it is also taken to irrigate fields of cotton to make clothes for sale in our high streets and shopping malls.

It takes 25 bathtubs of water to grow enough cotton for one T-shirt. Cotton also helps empty the River Indus in Pakistan and the Nile in Egypt. Its cultivation uses up 35 million hectares of farmland, an area the size of Germany, and soaks up a tenth of all the world's pesticides.

We know that the corn needed to fill an SUV tank with bioethanol could feed an African for a year. But how many mouths could be fed with the land and water taken to grow my T-shirt?

And the geopolitics of cotton sounds not unlike the emerging geopolitics of biofuels. The globalisation of cotton production started with the British Empire, when vast areas in India, Egypt and elsewhere were turned over to cotton growing in order to feed Lancashire cotton mills. People starved in their millions as a result.

That is worth bearing in mind if you think the warnings being made today about the potential impact of biofuels on feeding the planet are far-fetched.

So my point is not that we can excuse biofuels because we have always been using precious resources to grow non-food crops. Rather, it is to wonder why those other crops still get a free ride.

Should we sacrifice our cotton T-shirts in order to allow people to eat? What about other fibres like flax and hemp? Or narcotics? Or timber? We all like natural forests, of course, but what about all those monoculture plantations growing wood for pulp?

Now, economists will argue that the world is simple: that rising prices for commodities, including food, stimulate production. We can have our cake and eat it, too. And to some extent they are right.

But in a world of empty granaries and rising food prices, this is a debate worth having. And, while biofuels need to be in the environmental dock, it is time we cottoned on to the fact that some of these other non-food crops should also be under interrogation.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: cotton, energy, freds-footprint

Britain to starve. You read it here first.

I've been delving into the history of green ideas. Especially ideas about the number of people that the planet can sustain - what ecologists call its "carrying capacity".

This idea has always struck me as nuts. Sure, there are practical limits, but they depend so much on the technology and economic systems of the day as to be meaningless.

The most famous public exposition of this nonsense notion came 40 years ago in Paul Ehrlich's famous book, The Population Bomb - still a seminal text for many greens. It forecast that billions would die in the 1970s and 1980s as food ran out - a calamity cancelled (or postponed, if you prefer) by a scientific revolution in agricultural productivity.

But it turns out Ehrlich got his ideas from a book (equally famous when published in 1948) called Road to Survival by William Vogt, an American ecologist who went on to head both the US's top birth control group, the Planned Parenthood Federation, and the Conservation Foundation.

It's a real page-turner. First up, Vogt predicts that "we may well see famine once more stalking the streets of London". Japan "cannot possibly feed itself".

Even US standards of living were certain to decline. "We had better enjoy our steaks now, since there will be many less of them within the lifetime of most Americans."

His big concern was how a combination of soil erosion and population growth was making it impossible for the world to feed itself. He had a cute turn of phrase. The cultivation of corn, he said, "has contributed more to human misery than that other great gift of the Americas, syphilis."

More perniciously, he took the view that efforts to cut death rates and improve health in the developing world were misguided.

The modern medical profession... continues to believe it has a duty to keep alive as many people as possible. The greatest tragedy China could suffer at the present time would be a reduction in her death rate.

He hated food aid, too. The UN "should not ship food to keep alive ten million Indians and Chinese this year, so that 50 million may die five years hence."

And you can hear the rumble of eugenic thinking in his observation that "the world's shiftless" should be offered bribes to be sterilised, a policy which "would probably have a favourable selective influence".

Many readers got angry about my observations a few weeks ago here on "green fascism", but here its black heart is on display. And Vogt was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Vogt's predictions about population numbers were undershoots of what actually happened, but his estimates of our ability to feed ourselves were hugely wide of the mark.

China reached a billion people 20 years earlier than he predicted, and still managed to feed itself without outside help, which he said "would certainly be impossible".

"Mother India," he wrote, "is the victim of her own fecundity. In all the world there is probably no region of greater misery, and almost certainly none with less hope." Sixty years on, India's population has more than doubled but so, almost, has life expectancy.

I don't doubt for a moment that the world faces truly troubling times, with food shortages and climate change rising up the agenda. But the lesson of Vogt and Ehrlich is that catastrophes, however imminent and intractable they appear, are rarely inevitable.

And hysterical calls to penalise the poor for their fecundity are - how can I put this most kindly? - misplaced.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

Let me introduce you to the idea of virtual water: the water supplies that make possible the world trade in commodities, especially food.

The term was the invention of water scientist Tony Allan from King's College London and, I think, it goes a long way to explaining why the world is currently in the grips of a food crisis.

Most crops take extraordinary amounts of water to grow: a thousand tonnes for a tonne of wheat, for instance. In fact, two-thirds of all the water abstracted from the world's rivers and underground reserves goes for crop irrigation. Unsurprisingly, dry countries, like most of the Middle East, don't have enough water to feed their growing populations.

So they import water. They import virtual water. This trade is huge, the equivalent of 20 times the flow of the world's longest river, the Nile. Without it, hundreds of millions would starve. But the trade is in trouble.

The world's biggest supplier of virtual water is, or was until a couple of years ago, Australia. It exported 70 cubic kilometres of virtual water, in the form of fruit and crops, a year. That's 70 billion tonnes, if you can imagine that better.

Then came drought, which has more than halved that figure. Australia's wheat exports are down 60%, its rice exports down 90%. The US, the second biggest virtual water exporter, has been diverting much of its water to growing corn for biofuels and hence has been reducing its own exports.

Meanwhile global demand for virtual water is soaring, especially from China, where water is the main constraint on food production. China has effectively run out of water in its traditional breadbasket region in the north of the country, where the Yellow River now rarely reaches the sea in any volume. China can't feed itself any more.

And other countries will follow. India has been one of the great success stories of the revolution in agricultural production in the past 40 years. Once a byword for famine, it feeds itself today. But at great cost.

Its farmers are estimated to pump, from below ground, 250 cubic kilometres of water a year, of which only 150 cubic kilometres is replaced by the monsoon rains. Water tables are plunging as a result.

This over-pumping cannot go on. Farmland is already falling out of production. Water is very heavy stuff, too expensive to move great distances. So there is no global trade in water itself, in the way there is in oil. But virtual water is traded. And as water shortages emerge round the world – the US, for example, has its own problems – the virtual water trade is turning those local crises into a global crisis.

In Europe, we often consider ourselves immune from water shortages in other parts of the world. But we rely on others' water more than we know. Spain is currently importing water ("real" water, in transport ships) from France.

Britain imports 40 cubic kilometres of virtual water a year, mostly in the form of food. Right now, we are feeling other peoples' water shortages in higher food prices. One day, if countries decide to hang onto their water, the supplies themselves may dry up.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint, water

My last blog brought a big response. A lot of you didn't like my suggestion that the rhetoric behind calls for population control to protect the environment often sounds like green fascism.

I was struck by how similar the tone of many responses was to the 40-year old classic of the genre: Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, which sold about three million copies. But a lot has happened since which seems to undermine the more rabid calls for action.

Ehrlich said that world food production would not be able to keep pace with the soaring population. Wrong. Since then, world population has more than doubled – but food production has kept ahead. As a result his prediction that "billions would die" from famine in the 1980s didn't happen either.

He was wrong too about trends in family size. Little more than a generation ago the average woman had 5-6 children. He predicted people would continue to want large families, and that "family planning does not control populations".

Wrong. That figure has now halved to 2.8 children per woman. Fifty countries round the world have rates of fertility that are at or below replacement levels. So Ehrlich’s demands for coercive population control were based on a false premise. Surely we should learn from this. A little humility, at least.

Most worrying for me, many of the people responding to my blog today are unaware of the rapid decline in fertility across most of the world. Nor the fact that, outside China, this is being achieved largely without coercion.

The fact is that, for all the fears of a demographic doomsday, women are voting with their wombs. They want smaller families and a life outside full-time motherhood.

Of course population is still going up. The developing-world baby boomers born in the 1960s and 1970s are still of childbearing age. But soon that will pass. United Nations demographers are now talking of the world population peaking by mid-century, perhaps at below 9 billion, and then starting to subside. Some say we may not reach 8 billion.

You see, as national fertility rates fall, they do not stop at the nuclear family ideal of mom, dad and two kids. They keep on down. To an average 1.8 children or even lower. In some countries it looks like women are on something close to a childbirth strike as their menfolk work out how to make motherhood easier.

This is the context in which I am amazed to find a resurgence of concern about rising populations. It makes no sense. How much faster exactly do we expect fertility rates to fall?

And there is a more insidious context, which was the prime concern of my original piece. Every time greens stress "over-population" among the poor as an environmental threat, they are denying the much greater threat to global resources from over-consumption among the rich.

I do not really believe in the idea that the planet has some fixed "carrying capacity". How many it can sustain depends on how we live on this planet rather than absolute numbers. Mahatma Gandhi wasn't far wrong when he said there is enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed.

Fred Pearce, New Scientist senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

Here is something all right-thinking liberals can agree on. Saving the planet is good; manipulating humanity through eugenics is bad. The trouble is that these two ethical opposites come together when we talk about population control as a means of protecting the environment.

Most of us breed. And those of us who do have one ecological footprint in common: our offspring. Me included. So all greens have to ask: is having babies bad for the planet?

Fair enough. But there is another question that I find increasingly being asked. Should we be trying to stop others having babies, especially people in poor countries with fast-growing populations?

I must say I thought this kind of illiberal thinking had been banished from the environmental movement. But it keeps seeping back. When I give public talks on climate change, I am often asked if all the efforts in the rich world won't be wiped out by rising populations in the poor world.

Isn't overpopulation more dangerous than overconsumption? I say no. But the unpalatable truth is that a lot of environmental thinking over the past half century has been underpinned by an unhealthy preoccupation with the breeding propensity of Asians and Africans.

They were, it was often held, polluting the human gene pool as well as the planet. Such thinking was not fringe: it involved some of the great names of the environment movement.

So the American academic Garrett Hardin said in his classic and still-revered environment text Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, "Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all." It must be "relinquished to preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms." Lest we have any doubt who should do the relinquishing, he wrote elsewhere about how college students should have more children than those with low IQs.

Or take Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb from the same era. That book said the world could no longer feed itself and called for population control "by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."

Meanwhile the British book Blueprint for Survival, published by The Ecologist magazine, sided with the demagogue-of-the-day Enoch Powell in calling for "an end to immigration". Far from being ostracised as a right-wing tract, its recipe was supported by Friends of the Earth and Peter Scott, the TV wildlife king and founder of the World Wildlife Fund.

And this is not ancient history. Only recently, US groups opposed to all migration tried to get their policies adopted by the blue-chip environment group, the Sierra Club. To many they sounded like a fringe group. Actually they were an echo of the earlier mainstream.

And the echo is becoming louder. We hear it in the climate change debate. No matter that the average European or North American has carbon emissions 10 times greater than the average Indian or African, somehow it is those pesky breeding foreigners who are really to blame.

And now food shortages are growing and we will get more. Ehrlich, we are bound to be told, was right after all. You have been warned: green fascism could soon be on the march.

Fred Pearce, New Scientist senior environment consultant

Labels: freds-footprint

Sometimes a media story is just too good not to be true. And right now we are in open season for attacks on China.

Yes, I know, China is a pretty unforgiving state with a nasty human rights record. But let's get some facts straight. When a leading international news agency says "to keep taps flowing for the Olympics, Beijing is draining surrounding regions, depriving poor farmers of water", it is hyping a non-story. When a leading British paper runs the headline "Thirsty land sucked dry to irrigate Olympics", it is talking nonsense.

I have been to China. I have investigated its water supplies. I spent two weeks with the Yellow River Conservancy Commission, which is managing a major water shortage in the north of the country. China does have a water problem. It is long-term and of global importance, but the Olympics are completely irrelevant.

On World Water Day last month, UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon said: "China is diverting hundreds of millions of cubic metres of water to drought-prone Beijing ahead of the Olympics." But of course that water would be diverted regardless of the Olympics.

Even after filling the swimming pools and boating lakes and the rest, watering the tens of thousands of Olympic athletes, officials and journalists will not require a fraction of the water used daily to keep Beijing's 10 million people going.My guess is that water use in Beijing will go down during the Olympics, because they will shut lots of water-guzzling factories to reduce air pollution.

And even this megacity is a small water user compared to Chinese farmers, who take more than three-quarters of China's water supplies.

The myth that the Olympics is drying up China is partly the fault of its politicians. The country has a major water crisis in the drier north of the country, the traditional breadbasket. For some years now virtually no water has flowed into the sea from the once-mighty Yellow River.

So China is currently spending a cool $60 billion on a series of canals to move water from the wetter south. And, with an eye to the symbolism, its leaders decided to complete one phase of the south-to-north scheme "in time for the Olympics". Like much of the rest of China’s PR connected to the Olympics, this piece of bravura has blown up in its face.

Those Chinese farmers that Western journalists have uncovered complaining about losing their water to the Olympics are actually suffering from continued drought, recently described by Chinese meteorologists as the worst in 50 years.

The crisis is real enough without inventing an Olympic ogre. We are all feeling it in rising prices of bread and pasta as world grain prices soar. One reason for that (along with biofuels planting in the US and the Australian drought) is China’s inability to feed itself any more. It simply does not have enough water, and so is starting to become a major importer.

And no, feeding a few thousand Olympians is not a big deal when you already have 1.3 billion mouths to feed.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

Can capitalism do sustainable development? OK, let's ask that question again without the jargon. Can I really help save the planet by buying products from all these big companies "going green" and selling Fairtrade products?

I have been thinking about this a lot while researching my newly published book, Confessions of an Eco Sinner. You will have seen some of my travel notes here at Fred's Footprint over the past year. Here is where I have got to.

Many companies are making a real effort to cut their carbon emissions and fight climate change. Whether it is Richard Branson's biofuels plane or Rupert Murdoch's carbon-neutral media empire, they mean business.

Some of this is down to emissions caps imposed by the Kyoto protocol, some to consumer and shareholder pressure, and some is real executive interest in long-term sustainability of both their companies and the planet.

The bottom line is they believe they can make money out of cutting carbon emissions. Hardly surprising, when trading in carbon emissions permits and voluntary offsets is now a business worth more than a hundred billion dollars a year. And no wonder major US corporations are leaning on this year's Presidential candidates to sign the Kyoto protocol, so they can join in the new brand of carbon capitalism.

And in my own small way, I am part of this, whether it is offsetting my flights, turning down the thermostat, taking the train or buying an energy-efficient fridge. The potential is so great that capitalism really could save the planet. But will it make a fairer world?

Here my optimism gives out. I don't yet see a way in which companies can make bigger profits by making the world's poorest people wealthier. Rather, we of the rich world seem increasingly to demonise the poor for daring to want a better life.

Sure, some of us buy Fairtrade tea, coffee, socks and bananas. But what I discovered during my book researches was that, though genuinely worth supporting, Fairtrade is a misnomer. Call it: slightly less unfair.

The premium price I pay for my coffee does not reflect what the farmer on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro or wherever should receive. Rather it reflects how much Western consumers like me can be encouraged to pay for feeling a virtuous glow as we stand in the checkout queue on a Saturday morning. And that's a different matter.

Some clothes companies would like to treat workers in sweatshops on the other side of the planet rather better. They have corporate social responsibility (CSR) departments devoted to the task.

But in the factories of sub-contractors in Bangladesh, India and China, I heard endless stories of what really happens. The day after the CSR inspectors come to read the riot act over workers' conditions, the buyers from the same companies show up and threaten to cancel contracts unless they get cheaper prices. Guess who wins.

And we are partly to blame. We may weep crocodile tears over the sweatshops, but we still buy the $10 jeans that create them.

I fear that, in coming decades, a combination of Western consumerism and corporate muscle will conspire to save the planet and starve the poor. Unless we are careful, we will unleash a new green and global fascism.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: climate change, freds-footprint

I bought a new PC last week. Like much of the rest of the world, I bought a Dell. Last year I visited one of its biggest factories, at Xiamen in China. It was an eye-opener.

Dell famously claims to shift completed computers, made to order, within 24 hours. And it seems to be true. You might imagine that means holding lots of stock. But you'd be wrong. Dell buys $16-billion worth of components from Chinese companies every year - only Wal-Mart spends more in the "workshop of the world". Yet at Xiamen, it holds no stock at all. Nothing.

Instead, Dell instructs its suppliers to bring what it needs to the city. Every 2 hours, Dell emails new orders for parts, which it expects to arrive at the factory within 30 minutes. "Just in time," as they say.

I watched assembly. It begins like a cafeteria, with a large pile of pink plastic trays. Each receives a piece of paper detailing the individual order - even a Dell production line is not paperless.

The tray is loaded and delivered to a small production "cell" in which a single worker performs most of the assembly in less than 10 minutes. It's surprisingly intimate. Your Dell computer is assembled by one human being, by hand.

A few hours later - software installed and tests completed - the consumer-ready computer is packed into a box at the other end of the assembly room, addressed and shunted straight into a container for shipping.

This is the bit that Dell does. But actually, I discovered, the real business is done 700 kilometres away in Suzhou, a computer city near Shanghai. Here a series of companies you have never heard of make most of the components and do much of the assembly for most of the world's branded computers. They deliver "bare bones" computers to Dell.

Suzhou is stunning. I went to the Logitech factory that makes two-thirds of the world's computer mice, including Dell's. And to another, operated by a Taiwanese company called Asustek, which makes half of all the world's computer motherboards. More than 60 million a year: Dells, Acers, IBMs, Hewlett-Packards.

Back home in England, there are no factories even one tenth the size of this place. Asustek employs 85,000 people - mostly bored, methodical, nimble-fingered 18-year-old girls fresh out of school and recruited from all across China.

Do they like the work? Yes, if they can get overtime, said David Chen, the cheery vice-president for procurement as we watched them work. How long do they stay? "We have a turnover 10%," David told me, before adding sheepishly, "not a year, a month."

Truth is, huge numbers come to work in the big city each year, get homesick, go back to mum for the Chinese New Year - and never go back. Thinking about that again, I understand the fervour of those vast crowds we saw on our TV screens a couple of weeks ago, queuing for days in the blizzards to catch a train home for the New Year holiday.

But they will be replaced. To keep the lines running, Asustek trains a staggering 7000 new operators every month. Right now a new influx of young girls is heading for Suzhou and the other computer cities, part of China's rapid urbanisation - a process demographers are calling the biggest human mass migration ever seen.

I don't quite know whether it is the dynamism or the heartlessness of the Chinese economy that I find most stunning. But in my small way, with my purchase, I am part of it.

So is the Dell style of delivery, avoiding retailers, a smart environmental move? I've often wondered this. Nobody seems to have done a study for consumer electronics. But I came across a study of Amazon-style e-commerce in books, which suggested that that in urban areas, it may use more energy, but in suburban and rural areas, the efficiency of courier services compared to the long car drive to the store won out.

And despite the 24-hour claim, my computer briefly went missing last week. It turned out, Dell didn't have an up-to-date address for my local dealer. It took an extra day to track down my new machine. Not quite just in time. And having clocked some more carbon emissions, I imagine.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

Nuclear power is making a comeback round the world - rebranded as the new clean, green, low-carbon energy source for the 21st century.

It's in George Bush's latest state of the union address. After two decades, the Brits are all fired up to resume building. Canada, China, South Africa, Egypt, India, Italy, the Gulf states, and the Philippines all have plans.

Living in the UK, I don't have much choice but to get a fifth of my electricity from nukes – thanks to an old generation of nuclear plants nearing the ends of their working lives. Should that continue?

You wouldn't have caught me saying this even 5 years ago, but I am now so concerned about climate change that I suspect even nuclear energy has to be dragged out of the attic to help combat it.

But I have one big concern. What to do with nuclear waste, and especially the hot, highly radioactive stuff like spent fuel, which will stay dangerous for thousands of years?

Here the proponents of nuclear power are their own worst enemies. Scared, no doubt, by the greens, they have been putting off coming up with burial grounds.

In the US, the planned giant repository for spent reactor fuel at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was supposed to open for business in 1998. But it is still at least 13 years from completion.

The situation in the UK is if anything even worse.

Many years ago, one of my big, early exclusives for New Scientist – 24 February 1983, since you asked – was a report on secret British plans to build a giant nuclear dump reached by a railway tunnel, probably beneath the sea close to Sellafield in Cumbria. An industry spokesman told me a planning application was only months away.

It made top story on the national evening news. But the plan was dropped soon after. And nothing has replaced it. The waste is still accumulating around the nuclear facilities of Britain.

Back in 1976, a Royal Commission said no new British nuclear power stations should be built until there was somewhere to put the waste. Last May, the chief scientist at the environment department, Howard Dalton, told me that rule still held. And with the government planning a nuclear revival, he said there would be announcement on waste before the end of 2007.

This was shortly before he retired – and before his sad death in recent days.

Yet January's government announcement about building new power stations came and went with no firm statement on waste. Frankly, it is pathetic. And dishonest.

If there are no plans, then it is nigh on criminal to starting pushing nukes. If there are secret plans, then it is dishonest not to reveal them and to try and win over a sceptical public.

And no, ministers cannot pretend that planning for waste disposal is a job for private industry. Not when thousands of years of safe keeping will be needed.

Not even George W Bush has tried to pull that one.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

I would never want to shoot a polar bear with anything more deadly than a tranquiliser dart. (The picture shows me cuddling up to a bear made comatose in just that way during research on the Canadian tundra near Churchill.) And yet I find myself on the side of Canadian Inuit in a stand-off with US greens on precisely that issue.

US environmentalists have been lobbying the Bush administration to declare the polar bear an endangered species. This is part of their campaign to shame Bush on climate change. But this week Inuit groups in Canada denounced the tactic. They said declaring the polar bear endangered will stop American hunters going north to bag a bear and then bringing the pelt home.

Now I have no brief for American hunters. But the fact is that they pay well to shed animal blood on the ice. And the isolated Inuit communities of the Canadian Arctic charge them $30,000 per bear for the privilege.

Is this a threat to the species? Not right now. The hunting is tightly controlled, and last year trophy hunters shot just 120 of the animals. The world bear population is about 25,000.

What it does do is help the Inuit to maintain their cultural traditions of tracking animals out on the tundra. A culture that, at other times, greens claim they want to defend.

The best way of protecting both the bears and Inuit culture is to enable the Inuit to profit from the (otherwise rather inconvenient) man-eating animals roaming their lands. In conservation jargon: "use it or lose it".

Tourism is one way to do this. Around Churchill, where I got to cuddle my comatose bears a few years back, tourism is the main economic activity these days. But, especially further north, hunting is another. Even those of us with no desire to go round the world killing things should recognise that it may be a sound conservation strategy.

It has always struck me that greens come in two kinds. Those motivated by animal rights and those determined that humans make sustainable use of natural resources. It's less romantic, but my instincts are with the latter group.

Big environment groups like Greenpeace and WWF are very good at creating a coalition between the two groups. And there is no shame in that. But we should not pretend that there are not occasions where the two motivations diverge. And hunting is one.

There may come a time when it is necessary to stop all hunting of the polar bear in order to save the species. But to do so would be to sacrifice part of the way of life of the Inuit. Human rights matter, too. So let us not do it lightly. Let us, at the least, not do it as part of a private war with George W Bush.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

Greenhouse gas emissions may be going up but most of us, most of the time, are breathing cleaner air than we did 20 years ago. Why? Because cars are now fitted with catalytic converters to strip out a range of noxious nasties that once created acid smogs in our cities.

But up in the Arctic, they are feeling a nasty blowback from cleaning up our urban air.

Catalytic converters filter our pollutants from exhausts using two metals: palladium and platinum. World demand for both has soared as a result, with catalytic converters taking almost half of current product from mines.

Most of the palladium comes from Siberian mines and is refined at the world’s biggest, and most notoriously polluting, metals smelters at a godforsaken spot called Norilsk, a closed Russian city on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

The Norilsk smelters are the biggest concentrated source of sulphur dioxide pollution on the planet.

Sulphur dioxide makes acid rain. And for hundreds of kilometres round Norilsk, the trees of the tundra are dead because of the acid fallout. In effect we are destroying huge areas of Arctic tundra with acid rain, so the rest of the world can keep its city air clean.

The smelters are so spectacularly inefficient that they also release large amounts of palladium up the stacks. One recent study suggests the metals fallout onto the tundra is so great it may soon be worth mining the soils!

And what about the other metal essential for catalytic converters, platinum? Winning this from the Earth is not so environmentally damaging, but it takes a big toll in human lives.

Three-quarters of the world's platinum is mined in South Africa, where it is now a bigger business than gold mining. South Africa's mines have always been dangerous places. That is partly a result of their often great depth, as I discovered in a trip down a gold mine there last year.

But the death toll is now turning into a major scandal, as people wake up to the fact that the end of apartheid did little to make the mines safer places to work.

Miners went on strike in December in protest at a death toll that rose to over 200 last year. And the conglomerate Anglo Platinum recently shut down its biggest platinum mine, the world’s largest, and fired its CEO in an effort to address the problem.

My lungs, and yours, are cleaner and healthier as a result of all this. But I can’t say that it helps me breathe more easily.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

The famed US climate scientist Jim Hansen of NASA has been circulating to friends and contacts a draft of a letter he plans to send to UK prime minister Gordon Brown. The main thrust of the letter is to criticise plans for a new coal-fired power station in the country that invented the practice of making energy from burning fossilised carbon.

But along the way, Hansen points out something I didn't know. Per head of its current population, the UK is responsible for more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than any other nation.

How come? After all, our current per-capita emissions are only half those in the US, Canada and some of the more profligate Gulf states – and about level with Germany, Japan and Russia.

The trouble is that us Brits – whose dogged desire to mine coal and burn it to power dark satanic mills kick-started the Industrial Revolution over 200 years ago – have been at the business of filling the atmosphere with CO₂ longer than anyone else. And, as we have all been told countless times, once the dreaded greenhouse gas gets into the air, it sticks around – often for centuries.

The fumes from those satanic mills are still up there, warming the world. Hansen says that if you share out those accumulated emissions among the current British population of about 60 million, it works out at almost 1200 tonnes per head.

So me and my dad, and his dad and his dad, and so on back through the generations, have been responsible for more CO₂ emissions than a similar family tree of Americans (just under 1100 tonnes per head), Germans (950 tonnes), Canadians (740 tonnes), Japanese (370 tonnes), and so on.

Ministers here in the UK are fond of pointing out that Brits are only responsible for 2% of current global CO₂ emissions. Maybe so. But Brits are, says Hansen, responsible for 6% of the accumulated CO₂ released into the air by human activity. Not exactly a shining example from a country with less than 1% of the world's population.

If there were a fair system of atmospheric justice, time would long since have been called on our emissions. The cry would be "leave some room for the Chinese". But there isn't. So we assuage our guilt by blaming the Chinese for emissions they haven't even made yet.

Since you asked, Chinese per-capita emissions today are about half those of Brits. And from Hansen's historical perspective, the accumulated emissions from each inhabitant of the new workshop of the world are something like one-sixteenth of those from the old workshop of the world.

None of this says developing countries won't have to start controlling the rapid growth in their emissions – for the good of us all. And last week at the climate conference in Bali we saw clear signs that they are waking up to that responsibility.

But it does underline where the real responsibility for climate change thus far lies. Step forward me and my collier ancestors from the Black Country of the English Midlands.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

The silk road to China has a dirty secret. Not of silk, but of cotton. The fabled cities on its route, Samarkand and Bukhara and the rest, are home to the world's largest state-run system of child labour. A system from which you and I benefit, almost every time we go shopping for clothes.

Back in April, I wrote here about my visit to the sweatshops of Bangladesh, where my jeans were made. While there, I asked the factory owners and traders where the cotton came from. Nobody would say. Back home, I asked retailers in the UK; they claimed not to know.

Then I got hold of a Bangladeshi rag-trade newsletter, and all became clear. Bangladesh – the biggest supplier of clothes to high-street retailers across Europe – gets half of its cotton from Uzbekistan.

I have been to Uzbekistan twice. It is an unpleasant place, an authoritarian former Soviet regime on the silk road, from where the British ambassador was messily removed a few years back for exposing human-rights abuses. And cotton is at the root of its many evils.

Uzbekistan empties its rivers to irrigate its cotton fields. That is why the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth largest inland sea, is drying up. Three years ago, I stood on the former shoreline and looked out across 100 kilometres of new, unexplored desert between me and the small saline sump that is all that remains of the sea.

All round the shore, towns and villages that once caught fish and grew crops are emptying. People with some of the highest rates of cancer in the world were fleeing a waterless land infested with salt and chemicals from the dried up sea bed.

And there is more. Across the country, the regime of Islam Karimov, the country's president, conscripts tens of thousands of children from state schools to pick the cotton harvest every year. In defiance of all international norms, as a new report out this week from the London-based Environmental Justice Foundation makes clear.

This exploitation is not new. The cotton used to be used to make Red Army uniforms; now it makes glad rags for the west. And while fashion houses and chain stores are very keen to tell us every detail about the source of their fair-trade and organic cotton, they operate a "don't ask, don't tell" policy as regards the cotton for their rest of their clothing.

Thomas Reinhart, who runs the giant cotton trading company Paul Reinhart, told one British newspaper a couple of years ago that he had never heard of the use of child labour in the region. "We buy our cotton from government agencies and don't know what happens out in the fields". Well, in my view, he should.

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent

Labels: freds-footprint

It's the big question that every wannabe green asks: do I need to downsize my lifestyle, or can I buy my way to environmental friendliness?

It has been gratifying to discover, while here in Vienna, that the most cerebral boffins are consumed by the same question, although they put it only slightly differently: does society need a "paradigm shift", or can we get by with a bunch of technological and policy fixes?

I have been attending the 35th anniversary celebrations of the blue-chip international think tank, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. No cake-and-candles event this; they have instead been getting their rocks off by deliberating on Global Development: Science and Policies for the Future.

On one side were the paradigm-shifters, who figure the world has to get off the growth bandwagon before we fry. My favourite was Manfred Max-Neef, a radical Chilean economist and global guru, who thought the world went wrong when it followed Machiavelli rather than Francis of Assisi, and compounded the error by adopting neo-liberal economics in the 1980s.

Then there was Jan Pronk, former Dutch environment minister and international climate negotiator, who is now the UN's special representative in Darfur. He had an understandable bleak take on things. "In the past the rich believed they needed the poor; now they are no longer needed," he said. "There is no sustainable development if there is poverty. We have to talk about over-consumption and inequality."

But the counter-attack was led by that smooth favourite of the intellectual salons and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs. "It's not a zero-sum game; there are many technological options on the table; the cost of implementing them will turn out to be shockingly small."

The dreamers and hair-shirt intellectuals are getting in the way, he said. "These problems won't be solved by talking about cuts in consumption. We don't need heroism; we need science-based strategies... problem solving."

To fix climate change, for instance, he reasons that we don't need to cut energy use, but rather to switch away from burning fossil fuels. Our problem isn't too many rich people; it is too many poor people.

So, who is right? Yes, there are technological fixes for most environmental problems. But are there policy fixes to make them happen? There is enough conspicuous wealth in the world to eliminate poverty many times over; but somehow it doesn't happen.

Perhaps the fixers gained the advantage with their claim that "we don't have the luxury of pessimism". But they didn't quite persuade me that the rich aren't also part of the problem.

The most striking new statistic from the event came from Stephen Pacala, director of Princeton University's Environment Institute. He showed that half of all the world's emissions of carbon dioxide came from just 500 million people, just over 7% of the world's population.

Bring the environmental footprint of these jet-setting super-emitters down to Earth and the climate problem would be all but solved – without inconveniencing the rest of us at all.

But when governments sit down in Bali next month to decide on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, the one certainty is that they will stick by the idea of national emissions targets. They will target every American and every European, rather than the super-emitting elite wherever they may be.

Some say the poor cannot be helped because the atmosphere cannot afford it. Piffle, I say. As Pacala put it, if you want to know the problem just "follow the money".

Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondent, Vienna

Labels: freds-footprint

I am in Kerinci, a town of 50,000 people carved out of the Sumatran jungle in the past 15 years. My assignment is to find out for New Scientist whether and why this tropical backwater holds an "Armageddon card" in the high-stakes game of climate change.

You will have to wait a few weeks to find the answer to that, but meanwhile I have discovered my own ecological footprint here.

The first sign of what Kerinci is about came within a few hundred metres of the town's airstrip. Bouncing down the road I was confronted by a road train, a huge truck and trailer unit with 44 wheels and weighing, I was told later, 32 tonnes unladen. Laden it was over 130 tonnes.

These beasts are so heavy and dangerous – especially in the clouds of dust that they churn up and make them invisible – that they are not allowed on public roads. But that's no problem because this is a company town, with company roads and company land all around. And the road trains lined up on the highway are carrying timber out of the forests to a lumber yard.

The lumber yard, which is itself the size of a small town, receives 22,000 tonnes of timber a day cut from the forests of central Sumatra. It feeds what locals claim is the world's largest pulp mill. Output: 2 million tonnes of pulp a year, for making into bleached white paper.

The logs on the trucks are all identical sticks of acacia. This is because the natural forest here is largely gone now. So the company that owns the mill – Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings or APRIL – grows its own forests, endless monocultures of acacia that are 25 metres tall when they are harvested every 5 years.

Yes, you read that right. Timber here grows that tall in just five years.

No wonder that the APRIL mill and its rival down the road, the equally large Asia Pulp and Paper, are bankrupting established paper and pulp industries from Vermont to Finland. The cold world can't compete. As one environmental campaigner here put it to me: "We are trashing the world's last rainforests so you can protect your forests back home." (See Friends of the Earth's page on the company)

Remember talk about how computers would lead to the paperless office? Big joke, huh? We all know that offices are awash with paper spewing out from printers and copiers and fax machines. Mine is. And it is the pulp behemoths of Kerinci that are feeding this soaring demand for that paper.

They mostly sell in Asia, where APRIL's PaperOne is a leading brand. But Kerinci pulp also turns up in own-brand copier paper in Europe and North America.

When I came here, I thought Sumatra was still largely forested. But I hadn't read the small print. The "forests" are now mostly monoculture plantations. The real forest is largely inside a handful of national parks, as the companies complete the government's plan to "convert" the rest of the land to "productive use". (See the area in Google Earth)

This is an unspoken tragedy. Central Sumatra is home to some of the last of the world's rarest subspecies of our most loved animals. Sumatran elephants and tigers and rhinos, and even some orang-utans, huddle in the last real forests, often within earshot of the chainsaws that feed the monster mills of Kerinci. The monsters that feed your printer and mine.

The American author Bill McKibben a few years ago wrote a book called The End of Nature. Here, I think I have seen it.

Fred Pearce, senior environment reporter, Kerinci, central Sumatra

Labels: freds-footprint

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised to discover that carbon offsets are now being traded like any other financial commodity. But it makes me uneasy.

I have been investigating what has happened to the cash I gave to the Climate Care company in August to offset the carbon emissions from flights I took in the previous year. I have discovered that, as the carbon offsetting business expands, companies are trading in the tonnes of carbon they have prevented from reaching the atmosphere in a manner that seems – I hate to say this, but this is the comparison that comes to mind – a bit like the sub-prime mortgage bringing down financial markets; a similar failure in carbon offsetting could bring down the climate.

I gave my offsetting cash – £168.75 – to Climate Care based in Oxford, UK. Recently I visited their offices to find out which projects my money is now being invested in.

Virtually all my money, it turns out, has gone into three projects. Rainforest restoration in Uganda's Kibale National Park has received 20%. A project to supply more efficient cooking stoves in Cambodia has received 44%; and wind turbines in China have received 35%.

The Kibale project is a long-standing scheme that Climate Care has been funding for some years. My money will go to plant trees that will absorb CO₂ from the air. So far as I can see, the scheme has local community support and has been delivering the goods.

The Cambodian cooking stoves scheme is similarly a Climate Care project, in which – provided the stoves remain in use – my money will have cut emissions by the promised amount within seven years. But the Chinese wind turbines are a bit different.

Climate Care is using my money to buy a share of the carbon credits generated by a turbines project started and run by others. The deal is being done through a carbon broker. This makes me a bit more jumpy. I trust Climate Care, but how can I be sure of whether this deal is watertight?

Climate Care's Michael Buick says these brokered projects actually give greater certainty, because the carbon has already been saved. So offsetters like me are not taking a gamble on future emissions reductions.

And these projects also bring more cash into the offsetting business, because they encourage entrepreneurs to set up forestry or renewable energy schemes in the hope of securing an eventual profit from selling the carbon credits.

I can see the logic of this new carbon capitalism. But I am uneasy about money-makers getting between me and the schemes intended to cut CO₂ emissions.

Buick says Climate Care intends to carry on with its own projects, and has set up a company specifically to do this. But suddenly Climate Care sounds more like carbon bank than a carbon offsetting company.

Fred Pearce, senior environment reporter

Labels: freds-footprint

Not much of what we eat comes from the wild any more. One exception, I have been delighted to discover, is my favourite herb - oregano.

Oregano's slightly bitter, minty flavour is the signature of Italian pizzas and pasta dishes around the world. There are lots of local varieties growing wild round the Mediterranean but most of what turns up in shops is from Turkey, which exports about 7000 tonnes of dried oregano leaves a year - a figure that has doubled in less than a decade.

That is apparently enough for seven billion slices of pizza, enough for everyone on the planet to have a piece.

Like French wine, almost every Turkish hillside claims to produces wild oregano with a different taste. But the best, say traders, is hand-cut by peasants with serrated knives in the spectacular limestone hills of the Sütçüler district in the west of the country.

Each summer, whole villages leave their homes to scour the gorges and hilltops, taking branches of the dwarf shrub back to their villages, where they dry the leaves and pack them for sale to international buyers. Then, for a few weeks, the world comes to Sütçüler.

In theory, oregano should be easy enough to cultivate. But it is not done much because the resulting plants often don't taste or smell nearly as good as wild varieties.

There are different opinions about whether all the harvesting is endangering the wild plants. But interestingly, in Sütçüler, local villages have responded to the soaring popularity of their ancient herb by established their own cooperatives, with strict conservation rules.

Of course, the Mediterranean harbours other wild culinary delights. In Spain, some 80 million thyme plants are uprooted every year for their leaves and oils. Wild chicory is picked in the Lebanon, and wild capers in Syria.

The sage in my kitchen may also come from the wild. The jar says it is a product of Turkey. But herb trader Al Goetze, who buys for the US company McCormick, says "Turkish" sage is usually picked from the wild in the mountains around Albanian towns like Tepelenë, Berat and Shkodër, and exported via Montenegro and Turkey.

In the cold war, when Albania was as isolated as North Korea is today, sage was about its only export to the West. The country continues to export roughly half of all the world's dried sage and medicinal sage oils. But now the 2500-tonne business is in private hands. People like Mehmet Guga from Tepelenë, who spent half a lifetime running the business for the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha, now grow rich in their old age.

And, just like oregano, almost all the sage is hand-cut from the wild using a sickle, and then dried in the sun. When I stuff a free-range chicken with sage and onion, the stuffing is, in fact, much wilder than the chicken.

Fred Pearce, senior environment reporter

Labels: freds-footprint

Green books are the latest publishing craze. I have my own coming out in February, telling some of the stories behind this blog. It's called Confessions of an Eco Sinner, since you asked. But how "green" is the publication of all those green books?

In my last blog post, I came clean about the carbon footprint involved in researching the book. This week I went to see my British publisher, Random House, which publishes Eden Project Books, to firm up details about the environmental impact of the book's publication.

The good news is the book will have the logo of the Forest Stewardship Council on the back. The FSC is the leading certifier of sustainable timber. Some greens grumble about how rigorous it is. But I think this alliance of the timber trade and mainstream environment groups like WWF has a generally good track record in outlawing forest destruction and promoting replanting.

My book will also be printed on paper made from Russian FSC-certified wood at the Anajala mill in Finland, owned by local paper giant Stora Enso. And, far from being printed in the Far East, as many books are these days, it will hit the presses about 140 kilometres from London in Bungay in Suffolk, courtesy of the printing company Clays.

But what's the carbon footprint? No product seems to be complete without one, these days. I bought a packet of crisps the other day that had a label declaring that the carbon emissions from when the farmer planted the potato to when the packet was delivered to the supermarket were 75 grammes.

But books - even green books - haven't got that far yet. Random House in the UK told me it had a carbon footprint of slightly under 7000 tonnes a year.

More than half of that is down to gas and electricity in its offices. As regards the nitty-gritty of making and moving books, it only covers emissions from the time the company receives books from the printer to the time it delivers them to the warehouses of Amazon or Waterstones or whoever.

So Random House's corporate footprint is far less than the footprint of its books. Some might wonder about the legitimacy of that. But, in reality it is hard to know where corporate responsibility should begin and end.

And what about the role of the readers?

I have always assumed that buying a book via the Internet - from Amazon, say - would use less energy than going to a local bookstore. After all, you cut out all the energy used in lighting and heating the shop, not to mention fuel to travel to the bookstore and back.

But, in Japan at least, it seems that the opposite may be true. I recently spotted a paper by Eric Williams of the United Nations University in Tokyo on the green credentials of on-line book buying.

"E-commerce uses considerably more energy per book than conventional retail in dense urban areas," Williams concluded. Typically it used 5.6 megajoules per book, compared to 5.2 megajoules. Depending on your fuel, that might amount to a bit over 400 grams of CO₂.

The main reason for e-commerce's poor performance, says Williams, is the packaging. That and the fact that most people who buy books at bookstores do so as part of a bigger shopping expedition. So even driving to the bookshop may be responsible for fewer emissions than the courier van. Only in rural areas does e-commerce work out best.

Fred Pearce, senior environment reporter

Labels: earth, environment, freds-footprint, pollution, recycling

I have been thinking for a while about offsetting my carbon emissions. There are lots of schemes out there advertising for our money. But what do we get in return?

The promise is a painless panacea for our pollution. Send some money and the offsetter will plant trees that soak up your CO2, or invest in some renewable energy to cut out coal burning somewhere. Hey presto, you have negated your emissions and expunged your environmental guilt.

Or maybe not. Some say it is all a con.

It seems to me there are three ways things could go wrong. There is out and out fraud - the people take your money and disappear. There are well-intentioned schemes that just don’t achieve the offsetting they promise - maybe the trees die or the wind turbines break down. And, hardest to unravel, there are schemes that subsidise forestry or renewable energy projects that were going to happen anyway.

One notorious case tracked down by my New Scientist colleague Rob Edwards involved people paying to plant trees on a Scottish island that were already in the ground and paid for.

But I suspect the backlash against offsetting has gone too far. And my guilt is getting serious.

Over the last year, I have been travelling the world to find out where my food and clothes and other stuff comes from. The findings have been appearing here as Fred’s Footprint and will be published next February in my book, Confessions of an Eco Sinner.

Please be assured that I am well aware of the irony of expanding my carbon footprint by going round the world to research my footprint. I can only leave it up to you to decide whether it was worth it.

Anyhow, it's confession time. How much did I fly? Gulp. Over 12 months it worked out at 180,000 kilometres. I decided I had to try and offset this. So I took some advice and made my own enquiries - see, for instance, my feature in New Scientist six months ago - and decided to place my offset money with Climate Care.

This is a non-profit company based in Oxford in the UK, which recently announced that its offsets had passed 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. I have met its boss Mike Mason several times at climate conferences and know he is serious. But being serious is one thing; being effective is another.

Climate Care’s online calculator reckons that my 180,000 kilometres of air travel made me responsible for 22.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions. On 29 August, my credit card gave them £168.75, their price for offsetting those emissions. And later that day I sent their press office an email notifying them that I intend to try and track how my money is spent, and asking if they were willing to cooperate. I said I planned to report my findings regularly here.

The first signs are good. I shall be in Oxford in a couple of weeks, finding out how they operate. But that will be just the start. I shall report back on what I find. Warts and all. If they waste my money you’ll know about it.

Fred Pearce, senior environment reporter

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My ecological footprint is large. So probably is yours. But can we measure it objectively? Not just our carbon footprint, which is all the rage just now, but our entire impact on the planet.

Some scientists are trying to do just that. They are the people who from time to time warn that we are using the resources of 1.2 planets and will need two planets by 2050. Obviously we are only actually using the resources of one planet right now. So what exactly do they mean?

I asked Mathis Wackernagel, director of the Global Footprint Network and one of the gurus of the business. He calculates the average citizen on the planet needs 2.2 hectares of productive croplands, pastures, wetlands, forests and coastal fishing grounds to get by, compared with the 1.8 hectares per head that the planet has available.

So, he says:

We are harvesting trees faster than they can regrow; taking nutrients from soils faster than they can be replenished; depleting fish stocks faster than they can restock; and emitting carbon dioxide into the air faster than nature can reabsorb it. Overshoot will ultimately liquidate the planet's ecological assets.

Of course, the rich world is largely to blame. Europe's global footprint is currently 4.7 hectares per person, roughly twice its productive land area. Worse still, says Gorn Dige, a footprint analyst at the European Environment Agency: "Europe's share of the world's resources is rising even as our share of the world's population is falling."

But the footprint of Europeans looks small compared with Australians and Canadians, who require between 7 and 8 hectares each, and Americans at 9.7 hectares. At the lower end, the Chinese require around 2 hectares, and Indians 0.7 hectares.

So far, so scary. And the footprint gurus have a good line in amazing stats. My favourite is that the average North American home has so many devices that, to produce the same lifestyle in Roman times, they would have required 6000 slaves – cooks, minstrels, ice-house keepers, woodcutters, nubile women with fans, and many more.

But the numbers are shaky as well as scary. Delve into the data and you discover that about half of humanity's calculated global footprint is for carbon-dioxide emissions. This is measured as the amount of land you would have to plant with trees to soak up the carbon from those emissions. But, of course, we are not doing that, so the gas is actually accumulating in the atmosphere, warming us up. The calculation is only a crude surrogate for real ecological impacts.

A second – and I think bigger – problem is that the calculations assume it takes as much land to grow a tonne of grain or some other crop, wherever you are in the world. So their measure of your footprint says nothing about your eco-efficiency. It gives your loaf of bread the same footprint whether the wheat is grown on farms yielding 2 tonnes a hectare or 20 tonnes. Applied strictly, footprint analysis could be an incentive not to become more eco-efficient.

Some people say that countries with land areas big enough to sustain their footprints, like the Australians and Canadians, should be seen as good guys – even if they are major consumers. I don't buy that. We are all global citizens now.

Fred Pearce, senior environment reporter

Labels: freds-footprint

Here’s a tip for reducing your carbon footprint: throw away the tumble drier and invest in a washing line.

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