The 81st Race for the Rain Forest Thread

I don't think so, Mags.

Thanks Stradee!

The babies are little dolls but Winter the almost one year old is my favourite at this moment. I know.... I know.... Grandparents are not supposed to say things like that but the one yr old is such a mischievous little tyke it's impossible not to favor her at the moment. She's trying to talk, walk & climb all at once.

Yesterday she took four steps all by her lonesome, then sat down with a big plop and a huge grin on her face. She is going to be hell on wheels in a matter of days! She is a little mimic too.....tries to copy whatever she sees us doing.

I'm doing my best to spoil the babies rotten. When they turn into kids I am going to move across country to visit you!!! Grandma calls this "getting even" time!

Hi all,

ehBeth, way to go - -
So, you found your earring in your bra.....

No new artwork - we did a lot and then quit.

Mags, by the look of the adorable photos of Winter, I'll bet there will be two visitors here, and you're more than welcome. Winter isn't about to let her grammie out of town without her.

My only grandson celebrated his 15th birhtday last October, and visits for a few weeks during the summer. When he lived in CA, we spoiled him daily. Now we only see his face a few weeks each year. That doesn't stop the family from spoiling him though. A neat kid too.

Hi Dan!

Hope you and Pattie continue painting ~ the works really good, imo.

ehBeth, had the earing been pierced, the cabbies would have learned the meaning of 'war'!

sue, interesting article.

Ocean diversity consideration is crucial. A natioanl-level, comprehensive strategy for protecting ocean ecosystems and wildlife, and improving resilience to the impacts of climate change vital when Congress begins deliberating enviornmental policies. Congress is debating several Oceanic bills now - however, the newest committee enactment, doesn't address marine systems thoroughly.

Not the best source for his motivation, but we will take all the help that comes along.


In Twilight of His Career, Warner Now an Environmental Maverick

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 7, 2007; B01



There are easier ways to retire than this. John W. Warner was flat on his back -- his coat was buttoned, his pocket square was perfect, but he was totally horizontal on a leather recliner wedged among his office's antique chairs.

Warner had a leg infection that prevented him from sitting down. He was looking at the ceiling and talking about climate change.

"We've got to have a law," he said in an interview last month. "And let's get on with it."

This is how Warner (R-Va.) is ending three decades in the Senate: with a potentially historic, but possibly fruitless, drive to pass a national law on greenhouse gases. A recent convert on the issue, he is trying to sell colleagues on a bill that would reduce emissions over 40-plus years.

The bill has enemies among both environmentalists and business interests. But so far, allies say, Warner's conservative credentials and willingness to make deals have helped give the bill momentum. On Wednesday, it passed a Senate committee, the first greenhouse-gas bill to make it that far.

"He's taking on an issue that's going to be very costly and hard," said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. Thurber contrasted Warner's exit with the retirement of Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who said last month that he would leave for the private sector.

"You compare it to Lott, who seems to be searching for a job," Thurber said. Warner "is a totally different kind of person."

Warner, first elected to the Senate in 1978, has said he will not seek a sixth term next year. On Capitol Hill, he has been known for a focus on the military, for a pervasive courtliness -- his formal bearing and memento-bedecked office define the high senatorial style -- and for an occasional maverick streak. In 1994, for instance, he was the target of Republican anger after he refused to back Oliver North for Virginia's other Senate seat.

On climate change, though, Warner had not been a maverick.

In 2003, he voted against limits on greenhouse gases that had been proposed by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, then a Democrat, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). In 2005, when the idea resurfaced, Warner voted "nay" again. Both measures ultimately failed.

But Warner said his thinking changed earlier this year. He decided that the U.S. military might face new and dangerous threats if the world were disordered by the weather.

"I began to think, 'This thing really does impact on national security,' " Warner said. And once he decided that, he said, "you've got to get off the bench and get in the ballgame."

So this fall, Warner and Lieberman, now an independent, introduced a bill that would create the country's first national mandate to reduce greenhouse gases. It calls for cutting the emissions from major polluters to 2005 levels by 2012, and then cutting them to 70 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

The plan calls for a "cap and trade" scheme, in which the government allocates most major polluters a share of a shrinking national emissions limit. Those that seek to pollute more could buy unused emissions credits from others, or from a government auction.

The bill was not written to be radical; it was written to be passed. And already, Warner and Lieberman have made compromises to keep the proposal going.

In subcommittee, for instance, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) won a concession that would help electric utilities in his state, many of which burn coal. Warner and Lieberman got his vote, and the measure passed. A similar perk went to utilities in Virginia, Warner's home state.

Some environmental groups think that Warner and Lieberman have conceded too much. They want tougher goals for 2050, and fewer concessions to industry.

"The bill's a good political compromise right now, but it fails on the science and the economics," said Erich Pica of the group Friends of the Earth. In particular, he blamed Lieberman and Warner for allowing a provision that would allocate polluting businesses a share of free emissions credits. The very valuable credits would effectively be a reward for years of bad environmental behavior, he said.

"This bill gets us part of the way there," Pica said. "And it's not enough."

On the other side of the debate, fossil-fuel groups have predicted that the bill could raise energy prices perilously high. One particular problem: The legislation envisions that coal plants will eventually be able to capture harmful emissions and store them underground. But if that technology does not become available, it could be difficult -- and expensive -- for them to meet emissions caps.

"We're putting ourselves in a position where, if we bet wrong, we don't have an economy," said William Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

On Wednesday, the bill was passed by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee after a full day of debate. In the process, it was amended to be more stringent: A larger number of pollution sources were made subject to the emissions cap, pleasing environmentalists who believed too many were left out.

A political cynic might have watched the debate and wondered whether Warner's support really mattered at all. In the end, he was the only one of the committee's Republicans to vote for the bill. Even if he hadn't, the measure would still have passed 10 to 9.

But its supporters say that Warner's dealmaking was crucial to getting the bill this far -- and that his conservative credentials could now give it a chance in the full Senate.

Lexi Shultz of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that the bill will need 60 votes to be filibuster-proof in the Senate. Because Democrats control only 51 seats, that means it will need Republicans. It has a few Republican co-sponsors, including Norm Coleman (Minn.) and Elizabeth Dole (N.C.), she said, and Warner could bring more GOP votes.

"Senator Warner is the key to actually getting this bill to a place where it could pass," Shultz said.

The bill's long-term chances still seem murky. Even if it is approved by Congress, President Bush seems unlikely to approve large-scale emissions limits.

But Warner said yesterday that he is optimistic. When the full Senate takes up the bill, he will push for provisions that help nuclear power -- a move demanded by several senators.

Now almost recovered from his leg infection, Warner was already thinking of the bill as a part of his legacy on Capitol Hill.

"I'd like to have, tucked away in my public record . . . a chapter that had a bit of greenery in it," he said.

December 7, 2007
Senate Blocks Far-Reaching Energy Bill
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 ?- Brushing aside a veto threat from the White House, the House passed a package of energy measures on Thursday that includes a 40 percent increase in fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks sold in the United States. But the measure stalled today in the Senate, as expected.

The bill's supporters say it will reduce the nation's dependence on imported oil, jump-start development of clean-energy technologies and sharply reduce the nation's production of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide.

But the complex and costly bill faces the prospect of a radical rewrite in the Senate because of opposition there to two provisions: $21 billion in new taxes, mostly on the oil industry, and a mandate that electric utilities must generate 15 percent of their power from alternative sources, like wind or solar. The White House threatened to veto the bill if the final version contains those or several other provisions passed by the House.

The House vote was 235 to 181, with 14 Republicans voting for it and 7 Democrats voting against. But the measure was blocked in the Senate this morning, as it attracted 53 "yes" votes ?- 7 short of the number needed to advance it. Forty-two senators voted against it.

Environmental groups, consumer advocates and alternative-energy companies have hailed the bill, but a broad array of opponents, including cattlemen, coal producers and multinational oil companies, are lining up to block it.

The centerpiece of the bill is a requirement that passenger vehicles sold in the United States achieve a fleet average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, the first significant increase in mileage standards since 1975. The provision was a result of a deal brokered by Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who has long protected the domestic automakers' interests in Washington.

Mr. Dingell gave his reluctant support for the package in a floor statement before the vote, criticizing the process by which the compromise was reached and suggesting he would not be unhappy to see the Senate remove major parts of the overall bill.

"This bill is not the ultimate answer to our dependence on imported oil, to high energy prices or to climate change," said Mr. Dingell. "But it is a major and important step toward those goals, and, for that reason, I will be voting for it."

The White House issued a statement immediately after the vote expressing its objections.

"Unfortunately, Democratic leaders in the House today pushed a partisan bill, that members had very little opportunity to study before the vote, which they knew was unacceptable to the president and had no chance being signed into law," the statement said. "Their proposal would raise taxes and increase energy prices for Americans. That is a misguided approach and if it made it to the president's desk, he would veto it."

The bill envisions a sevenfold increase in production of ethanol and other biofuels, from about 5 billion gallons a year today to 36 billion gallons by 2022. It provides incentives for production of diesel fuel mixed with renewable liquids including soy oil and animal fat; cellulosic ethanol made from sugar cane and switch grass and advanced fuels formulated from municipal garbage, wood chips and agricultural waste.

The largest source of these alternative fuels remains corn, and food producers argue that diversion of corn to fuel production is driving up feed prices for cattle, pigs and poultry. They oppose the bill because it raises their production costs and, ultimately, the price of food on the table.

"The ethanol number is definitely too high. It burns more feed and food than we would like," said Jesse Sevcik, vice president for legislative affairs at the American Meat Institute. "The hog diet is 80 percent corn, and when corn prices double, those producers' input costs go up pretty substantially."

The oil industry hopes to eliminate a provision that rescinds more than $13 billion in tax breaks granted in 2004 and 2005, when Congress was in Republican hands. Democratic supporters of the bill said the oil companies could easily afford the new taxes because they were earning record profits on oil selling for more than $90 a barrel. But the oil companies said the money would come from revenue needed to develop new sources of oil and would lead to higher prices at the gasoline pump.

The bill contains hefty incentives for a variety of new energy sources and efficiency measures, like wind turbines, solar arrays, plug-in hybrid cars and more fuel-efficient buildings and appliances.

In the Seante, the prospects for the renewable electricity standard and the oil industry tax package are highly uncertain. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said the Senate could pass an energy bill without those two "millstones."

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, declined to predict passage, with or without the renewable energy or tax provisions.

"We're going to try very hard," he had said Thursday afternoon.

i.e., money (profits) as usual.

yep - the status quo

You and your 300 friends have supported 2,833,914.0 square feet!

~~~

1 Aktbird57 .. 2010 65.053 acres

The science of climate change includes a study earlier this year that found Antarctic Peninsula glaciers like this one are melting faster into the sea.

updated... 9:12 a.m. PT, Wed., Dec. 5, 2007
WASHINGTON - For the first time, more than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists, losing their patience, urged government leaders to take radical action to slow global warming because "there is no time to lose."

A petition from at least 215 climate scientists calls for the world to cut in half greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Unveiled Wednesday night, it is directed at a conference of diplomats meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate the next global warming treaty.

"The amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere now far exceeds the natural range of the past 650,000 years, and it is rising very quickly due to human activity," the scientists stated. "If this trend is not halted soon, many millions of people will be at risk from extreme events such as heat waves, drought, floods and storms, our coasts and cities will be threatened by rising sea levels, and many ecosystems, plants and animal species will be in serious danger of extinction."



The appeal from scientists follows a petition last week from more than 150 global business leaders also demanding the 50 percent cut in greenhouse gases. That is the estimate that scientists calculate would hold future global warming to a little more than a 3-degree Fahrenheit increase and is in line with what the European Union has adopted.

"Greenhouse gas concentrations need to be stabilized at a level well below 450 ppm (parts per million; measured in CO2-equivalent concentration)," the scientists added. "In order to stay below 2º C (3 degrees F), global emissions must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, so there is no time to lose."

In the past, many of these scientists have avoided calls for action, leaving that to environmental advocacy groups. That dispassionate stance was taken during the release this year of four separate reports by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But no more.

"It's a grave crisis, and we need to do something real fast," said petition signer Jeff Severinghaus, a geosciences professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. "I think the stakes are way way too high to be playing around."

Expert: We're 'fed up'
The unprecedented petition includes scientists from more than 25 countries and shows that "the climate science community is essentially fed up," said signer Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in Canada. It includes many co-authors of the intergovernmental climate change panel reports, directors of major American and European climate science research institutions, a Nobel winner for atmospheric chemistry and a winner of a MacArthur "genius" award.

"A lot of us scientists think the problem needs a lot more serious attention than it's getting and the remedies have to be a lot more radical," said Richard Seager, a scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The organizers of the petition ?- two Australians, two Germans and an American ?- would not comment about their efforts before their 11 p.m. ET press conference. But several scientists who signed on talked of losing patience.

"Action needs to be taken and needs to be taken now," said Marika Holland, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who signed on. "The longer we wait, the worse it's going to become."

Negotiators in Bali are working on the initial groundwork for a treaty that would take effect after 2012, the expiration date of the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty the United States did not sign. However, no one expects concrete results at the closed-door sessions.

NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, who signed the petition, said "the time for half-measures and the time for voluntary agreements and the time for arguing about 1 percent here and 1 percent there ?- those things are no longer relevant."

Schmidt noted while scientists have been dismissed by some as unrealistic, the call for a 50 percent emissions cut by business leaders "helps give credence to the idea that it's achievable."

From complaints to policy?
Policy analysts, who were not part of either petition, split on how meaningful the two petitions are.

What is happening is people are agreeing "that the cost of inaction is on the high side and the cost of action is affordable," said Joseph Romm, a policy analyst at the liberal think-tank Center for American Progress, energy business consultant and trained physicist.

But Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute said "scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change." Scientists can lay out scenarios, but it is up to economists to weigh the costs and benefits and many of them say the costs of cutting emissions are higher than the benefits, he said.

Granger Morgan, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said he sees "a growing realization among a wide variety of players that we've got to stop talking about this and start some action." But, he added, "I'm not going to hold my breath that we're going to get anything."

The full declaration, and list of who has signed, is online at www.climate.unsw.edu.au/bali/

I wish they had all been fed up a long time ago.

It's still not too late.

We can begin to clean up the earth.

All we have to do is get rid of the richest 1 & 1/2 percent of the population around the world.

And all the corporations and poor values that they have, or control.

Exploitation = dividends

My question is what the heck good will money do them when there's no enviornment? Are they building space ships for Mars relocation?

Congress had better get off their duffs and get serious!

December 8, 2007

Trucks Power China's Economy, at a Suffocating Cost

By KEITH BRADSHER
GUANGZHOU, China ?- Every night, columns of hulking blue and red freight trucks invade China's major cities with a reverberating roar of engines and dark clouds of diesel exhaust so thick it dims headlights.

By daybreak in this sprawling metropolis in southeastern China, residents near thoroughfares who leave their windows open overnight find their faces stiff with a dark layer of diesel soot.

After Mary Leung opens her tiny open-air shop along a major road soon after dawn, she must wipe the soot off her countertops and tables; the tiny yellow-and-olive bird that has kept her company is harder to clean.

Trucks are the mules of this country's spectacularly expanding economy ?- ubiquitous and essential, yet highly noxious.

Trucks here burn diesel fuel contaminated with more than 130 times the pollution-causing sulfur that the United States allows in most diesel. While car sales in China are now growing even faster than truck sales, trucks are by far the largest source of street-level pollution.

Tiny particles of sulfur-laden soot penetrate deep into residents' lungs, interfering with the absorption of oxygen. Nitrogen oxides from truck exhaust, which build all night because cities limit truck traffic by day, bind each morning with gasoline fumes from China's growing car fleet to form dense smog that inflames lungs and can cause severe coughing and asthma.

The 10 million trucks on Chinese roads, more than a quarter of all vehicles in this country, are a major reason that China accounts for half the world's annual increase in oil consumption. Sating their thirst helped push the price of oil to nearly $100 a barrel this year, before a recent decline, and has propelled China past the United States as the world's largest emitter of global-warming gases.

More of the article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/world/asia/08trucks.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Good Sunday all,

China isn't going to stop either. They are, however, beginning to talk about their environment.

Neither, apparently, is the U.S.

December 9, 2007

U.S. ?'Not Ready' to Commit at Bali

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:58 a.m. ET

BALI, Indonesia (AP) -- The United States will come up with its own plan to cut global-warming gases by mid-2008, and won't commit to mandatory caps at the U.N. climate conference here, the chief U.S. negotiator said Saturday.

''We're not ready to do that here,'' said Harlan Watson, the State Department's senior climate negotiator and special representative. ''We're working on that, what our domestic contribution would be, and again we expect that sometime before the end of the Major Economies process.''

That process of U.S.-led talks was inaugurated last September by President Bush, who invited 16 other ''major economies'' such as the Europeans, Japan, China and India, to Washington to discuss a future international program of cutbacks in carbon dioxide and other emissions blamed for global warming.

Environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of using those parallel talks to subvert the long-running U.N. negotiations and the spirit of the binding Kyoto Protocol, which requires 36 industrial nations to make relatively modest cuts in ''greenhouse'' gases.

The United States is the only major industrial country to have rejected Kyoto and its obligatory targets. The U.S. leadership instead favors a more voluntary approach, in which individual nations determine what they can contribute to a global effort, without taking on obligations under the U.N. climate treaty.

Watson's comments reaffirmed that the Bush administration views its own talks as the main event in discussions over climate change.

The European Union, on the other hand, has committed to binding emissions reductions of 20 percent by 2020. Midway through the two-week Bali conference, many of the more than 180 assembled nations were demanding such firm commitments from Washington as well, as the world talks about a framework to follow Kyoto when it expires in 2012.

''It would be useful for Annex I, non-Kyoto countries'' -- code for the U.S. -- ''to indicate what level of effort'' they'll make, said M.J. Mace, a delegate from the Pacific nation of Micronesia, whose islands are threatened by seas rising from global warming.

The conference's main negotiating text, tabled for debate on Saturday and obtained by The Associated Press, mentions targets, but in a nonbinding way.

Its preamble notes the widely accepted view that industrial nations' emissions should be cut by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to help head off climate change's worst impacts -- expanding oceans, spreading droughts, dying species, extreme weather and other effects.

Even mentioning such numbers in the conference's key document may set off renewed debate next week, when environment ministers and other ranking leaders join the talks, which are meant to launch a two-year negotiation for a post-Kyoto deal.

Delegates here made progress in the first week on such secondary matters as establishing a system for compensating tropical forest nations for reducing deforestation, a major source of carbon emissions. They're expected to approve work on measuring forest cover, emissions and related factors.

''I've observed a strong willingness on the part of countries to get a successful outcome in Bali,'' the U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer, told reporters in assessing the first week.

American negotiator Watson said the Bush administration is planning probably four more meetings in the Major Economies series before a ''leaders' meeting'' in mid-2008 presents a final outcome.

Asked how the U.S.-organized process would complement the U.N. treaty talks, he said, ''We think if we could get agreement among these 17 economies, or a good portion of them anyway, that would certainly contribute to that discussion in terms of any sort of interim goals or targets that might be discussed.''

But he acknowledged it remained unclear how the two ''tracks'' would merge.

For one thing, there's no guarantee the Europeans, for example, would fully join in what is likely to be a voluntary emissions regime. And as Bush's White House term nears its end, the rest of the world may be looking instead for a fresh start under a new president less resistant to binding international cooperation. Democratic and some Republican presidential hopefuls favor mandatory reductions.

The U.N.'s De Boer, in fact, implied that the world ought to wait before debating binding targets.

''I really hope that that is a discussion that will be taken up toward the end of that two years rather than here,'' he told reporters.

The talks to follow Bali would also attempt to draw China, Brazil and other fast-developing economies -- all exempted from binding reductions under Kyoto -- into some arrangement whereby they would slow growth in their emissions.

------

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Bali-Climate-Conference.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=world&pagewanted=print

Very worthwhile article.

Preserving Tropical Forests Is Key Issue at Talks on Global Warming

By Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 9, 2007; A25



As 12,000 people gathered in Bali this week to begin framing a global response to Earth's warming climate, efforts to close a deal that would slow destruction of tropical forests appear to be the best prospect for a concrete achievement from the historic assemblage.

But the deforestation issue is also Exhibit A for the disputes that have made climate negotiations lengthy and divisive despite widening agreement that global warming is real and largely man-made. While scientific dispute over what causes global warming has ended, the debate over how to address it has just begun.

Deforestation is one of the biggest drivers of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Each year, tropical forests covering an area at least equal to the size of New York state are destroyed; the carbon dioxide that those trees would have absorbed amounts to 20 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, about the same as total U.S. emissions.

The bargain is being championed by a dozen of the world's developing countries at the conference, whose ultimate goal is to map out a two-year path aimed at forging a global system for imposing and enforcing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

But the hoped-for compromise -- which would give financial rewards to poor nations that slow or halt the destruction of their forests -- could still founder amid divisions over who bears how much responsibility for slowing climate change -- and who should pay for it.

Developing countries that profit from logging or expanded farming and construction are seeking incentives and assistance for preserving their forests or slowing the rate of destruction. But many developed countries do not want to pay other nations for actions that are not taken, and they worry that it would be hard to measure the amount of avoided deforestation.

"The problems tend to start when you get down to the small print," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty organization that oversees international climate negotiations.

Deforestation aside, much of the focus on the Indonesian island will be on the large print. "If things go wrong in Bali, I think we are in deep trouble," said de Boer.

The goal is to come up with climate accords that would take effect after the expiration in 2012 of the Kyoto Protocol, which was negotiated a decade ago. Under that treaty, a cap-and-trade system for limiting and creating a market for emissions is in effect in Europe and has become a multibillion-dollar-a-year business.

"It will be a process to get to a mandate to get a protocol," said Dirk Forrister, a managing director of Natsource LLC, a firm that invests in projects that produce marketable credits for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But government officials are also trying to leave Bali with some concrete achievements, and preserving the world's forests ranks as one of the most likely prospects.

"It's the area of climate-change negotiations that offers the most promise of cooperation between developing and developed countries, which is why it's so attractive to people on both sides," said Duncan Marsh, director of international climate policy for the Nature Conservancy, an advocacy group.

There is ample scientific evidence that tropical forests are particularly valuable in curbing climate change. Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology, has done studies showing that these forests not only store carbon in their trees but also help produce white clouds that reflect sunlight back to space, which has a cooling effect.

In 1997, deforestation was left out of the final Kyoto accord. Industrialized countries balked at paying countries for avoiding action, and Brazil did not want interference in what it considered a matter of national sovereignty. Later, when Europe implemented its cap-and-trade system, it did not give offset credits for avoided deforestation, which it feared would flood its system with cheap credits. (It did allow credits for planting trees in areas that were deforested before 1990 or where there had been no forest vegetation for at least 50 years.)

Without financial assistance, persuading poor countries to preserve their forests is not easy. Last week, Everton Vieira Vargas, one of Brazil's senior delegates to the Bali talks, told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper that his country should not be held to the same standards as developed countries when it comes to greenhouse gases.

"It's a myopic vision to want to compare the responsibilities of India and China in emissions with the United States and Europe," Vargas said, adding that it's "very different" to compare the carbon generated by bringing electricity to Chinese villagers with the carbon emitted by sport-utility vehicles in rich countries.

But Daniel M. Price, Bush's deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, said in an interview that one of the key tests of any climate agreement will be whether developing countries do their part.

"It can't just be the developed countries. It's got to be the developing countries as well," Price said. When it comes to the next round of climate commitments, he added, "A post-2012 framework will simply not be effective if developing countries adopt the view that they need to do nothing."

Even the traditional allies of developing nations say those countries must tackle climate change. "It's a perfectly understandable point, but to not do anything to improve the greenhouse gas situation is semi-suicidal for everybody," said Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.

Providing financial incentives to "reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation" has emerged as the most likely way of enlisting poor countries in combating climate change. American nongovernmental organizations have helped write proposals for determining historical deforestation baselines that could be measured on a national level. That would avoid the problem of paying a country to stop deforesting one area and then have it do so elsewhere. Credits based on those "savings" could then be sold in cap-and-trade markets in industrialized nations.

Papua New Guinea is leading the group of tropical-forest nations backing a financial incentive plan. A session at the Bali talks will present 10 years of satellite and ground data to convince negotiators that accurate measurement is possible.

"Eighteen months ago, most people were really skeptical that this would ever be included in the next round," said Glenn T. Prickett, senior vice president for business and U.S. government relations at the advocacy group Conservation International. "Political opinion has really come around."

James L. Connaughton, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the Bush administration was still studying how to steer money to the protection of tropical rain forests. "The concept of paying for avoided deforestation is a good one," he said. "The proponents themselves recognize there are difficulties. It's a new area, and we want to make sure it is done right."

Robert G. Aisi, who is Papua New Guinea's U.N. ambassador, has been pushing for more than two years to address deforestation in the context of a climate accord. He said industrialized nations need to understand that if countries such as his hold off logging their forests, there has to be financial compensation.

"It's our resource, it's not yours," he said. "But we understand it's a resource that can be part of the global public goods."