Carbon Shock Quotes

“At the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the United States, Britain, Norway, and other developed countries committed $4.5 billion to launch a global initiative that would begin to assess the value of the world’s tropical rain forests. Four years later, in 2013, at the Warsaw Climate Change Conference, further rules set criteria for tropical countries to meet in order to receive payments in return for reducing deforestation or launching sustainable forest management strategies. Now global efforts focus on what the forests are worth, and who will pay to keep them standing.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“The “they” in this case was “us”—meaning those who do not live in the Amazon, namely Americans and Europeans who have come to recognize the central role played by forests in the earth’s ecology. If the forest is so important for us—for the planet—then its time to pay for it. Braga suggested I visit an offset project he’d helped establish south of the city.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“(This of course would be laughable were it not for the fact that the country’s largest timber company, Sierra Pacific Industries, successfully demanded that the CO2 sequestered in its “wood products” be counted by the state of California as saved carbon when tallying up the company’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“In other words, turning a tree into a desk just slows down the release of carbon dioxide, it doesn’t prevent it.”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

“A “tax or emission trading scheme on livestock,” they argued, “could be an economically sound policy that would modify consumer prices and affect consumption patterns.” In the end, as climate impacts increase, the web of costs associated with cultivating plants and animals for food grows ever more complex—”
― Mark Schapiro, Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy