It was time to get creative. In 2006, a head of government had signed a law requiring that greenhouse gases be cut 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. The cuts will be carried out through a cap-and-trade system, like the one passed by the House of Representatives and introduced in the Senate, due to start in 2012. In an effort to reduce the cost of those greenhouse cuts, the executive reached out to his counterparts in Brazil and Indonesia, which have more than half of the world's remaining tropical forests. Because reducing deforestation is the cheapest way to mitigate climate change in the short term, he wanted utilities and other greenhouse emitters to be able to pay state governments in Brazil and Indonesia to preserve their forests, which ranchers and loggers keep whacking, yielding the same net gain for the atmosphere as reducing their own emissions of carbon dioxide. The details—how to measure the CO2 cuts, how much to pay for preserving forests—will be worked out in the next few months, in time to set the rules for cap-and-trade. (Article continued below…)
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