Forests and Carbon Credits

If true, this is fairly good news:

The European Union should not allow industry to meet climate goals by funding tree planting or cutting deforestation in developing countries before 2020, said a leaked EU Commission paper due for release on Friday.

Many companies and their advocates want to avoid reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by paying developing countries for forest carbon credits, either through planting forests or plantations or through stopping deforestation. We do need to stop deforestation, but this scheme is basically setting up a kind of sub-prime market for carbon credits: trading real, permanent, current reductions of emissions in one place for uncertain and reversible (forests protected now are not guaranteed forever) 'assets.'

As we look forward to a post-Kyoto world, we need to work on both: companies must reduce emissions and become more efficient AND we need to protect and rejuvenate forests in tropical , temperate and boreal regions of the world to get these forests back to storing carbon and getting it out of the atmosphere where it is causing climate change.