Yep fair cop - but also in The Age on diddly deals...

http://www.theage.com.au/news/tim-colebatch/the-greenhouse-challenge/2005/08/01/1122748574824.html

Is there nobody we can trust !

OK, remove politics from trade, same as remove religion from politics, let trade run free from the corrupting political influence.

Would you support that Phildo?

Free trade? No tariffs? No kickbacks?

Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of race, freedom of movement etc

Might mean the end of Europe, could you live with that?

via John Ray

1. Greenpeace have advised that "planned developments will lead to the damage or loss of between 33-42 percent of Brazil's remaining Amazon forest."

2. In 2000 alone, more than four million acres of rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon were lost to illegal and destructive logging, mining, industrial agricultural plantations and other human industries such as road building.

3. Despite alleged heavy clearing of "frontier forest" 772,200 square miles of forest remain in Brazil.

4. WWF confirm the area as being 4.1 million square kilometers.

This would mean that some according to Greenpeace between 1.35 and 1.72 million square kilometres are to be cleared.

WWF also advise that "each year 1.8 million hectares of forests are destroyed in the Amazon, more than any other forest on earth. Recent figures show that more than 23,000 square kilometres of the Amazon forest — about half the area of Switzerland — disappeared between August 2002 and 2003."

5. ex Greenpeace front man Patrick Moore advises that " "The Amazon is actually the least endangered forest in the world," and that, in the 20 years of warnings about deforestation, "only 10 percent of the Amazon has been converted to date from what was original forest to agriculture and settlement."

The scientific evidence paints a much brighter picture of deforestation in the Amazon. Looking at the NASA Landsat satellite images of the deforestation rates in the Amazon rainforest, about 12.5 percent has been cleared. Of the 12.5 percent, one half to one third of that is fallow, or in the process of regeneration, meaning that at any given moment up to 94 percent of the Amazon is left to nature. Even the Environmental Defense Fund and Sting’s Rainforest Foundation concede, among the fine print, that the forest is nearly 90 percent intact."

Philip Stott of the University of London and author of the new book, "Tropical Rainforests: Political and Hegemonic Myth-making," maintains that the environmental campaigns have lost perspective.

"One of the simple, but very important, facts is that the rainforests have only been around for between 12,000 and 16,000 years," he says. "That sounds like a very long time, but in terms of the history of the earth, it’s hardly a pinprick. The simple point is that there are now still — despite what humans have done — more rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago."

1. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/forests/amazon

2. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/the-amazon-rainforest

3. http://www.rainforestweb.org/Rainforest_Regions/South_America/Brazil/

4. http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/forests/our_solutions/about_programme/projects/brazil_amazon_forest.cfm

5. http://www.ncforestry.org/docs/Latest%20News/articles/shaky_science_behind_saving_rain.htm

Rog - well if there are more rainforests today than 12,000 years ago ... well there mustn't have been a lot 12,000 years ago - there's lots of dairy cows in eastern Australia grazing on ex-rainforest land. Brazil's lowland forest has been razed for agriculture. Do we think logging in Borneo is well managed ? Are you saying that we have as much rainforest today as we did in 1900 ?

Yes phil, I agree with all that you say, we can have 'our forest' and a productive timber industry.

http://www.greenspirit.com/printable.cfm?msid=30

So we haven't lost 30% of the world's tropical forests in the last 100 years - with most in the last 50 ?