Flawed cap and trade imperils state's forests!

Tell the Air Resources Board to clean up its forest act!

A major flaw in California's cap-and-trade program for reducing greenhouse gas emissions creates perverse incentives to clearcut forests. This defect must be remedied immediately!

Let your protest be heard by the responsible officials and Gov. Jerry Brown!

Created under the landmark 2006 law A.B. 32 and administered by the state's Air Resources Board (ARB), the cap-and-trade program includes a protocol, developed by the Climate Action Reserve (CAR), that effectively regards forest clearcutting and the logging of old-growth trees as a good thing. Under the protocol timber companies can earn carbon credits worth millions of dollars.

The statewide marketplace set up by the ARB allows industries to trade forest-based carbon offset credits as though they were stocks and bonds, enabling industrial emitters of CO2 to meet their targeted greenhouse-gas emissions levels without actually reducing anything — except for trees in 20-to-40-acre parcels of clearcut land!

The ARB in essence considers the state's forest sector to be a net carbon sink, always sequestering more CO2 than itreleases, regardless of what kind of forestry is going on.

But as Forests Forever and other environmental advocacy groups have long argued, clearcutting brings about harmful effects on water quality, wildlife habitat, soils, aesthetic and recreation values — as well as increased greenhouse gas emissions!

This January, the respected journal Nature published a study confirming that large, old trees fix large amounts of carbon, as compared to smaller trees. View the article here.

Given these facts, we have no choice but to confront ARB, CAR and Brown, holding them accountable for cap-and-tradeb