Well, according to a decision taken yesterday by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the major industry-NGO body, this greatest of environmental crimes is now officially “green.”

Palm oil plantations have driven the destruction of more than 30,000 square miles of tropical forest in Indonesia and Malaysia alone, pushing species like orangutans and Sumatran rhinoceroses and elephants to the edge of extinction. It’s the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Southeast Asia, and has propelled Indonesia to be the world’s third largest climate polluter behind only China and the United States.

Nonetheless, at its Extraordinary General Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the RSPO formally rejected longstanding calls from member companies, scientists and nonprofit organizations to stop certifying as “sustainable” palm oil produced through deforestation and other environmentally damaging practices like destruction of ultra carbon rich peatland and use of highly poisonous chemicals like the notorious paraquat, which is linked to kidney failure, respiratory failure, skin cancer, and Parkinson’s disease.

On one level, of course, the RSPO’s action is an exercise in patently absurd Orwellian PR: If something produced through wholesale destruction of tropical rainforests is considered “sustainable,” the word has lost any meaning at all. But the decision is sadly symptomatic of broader challenges faced by sustainability certification efforts across a variety of different industries. These persistent challenges have led some to question the value or applicability of the fundamental model many companies have relied on to prove their environmental bona fides – and develop a new model based more on industry transformation than green niche production.

Indeed, the palm oil decision leaves dozens of major companies including Unilever, Kellogg’s, Dunkin Donuts, Colgate-Palmolive, Walmart, Carrefour, Cadbury, and others facing something of a supply chain and image crisis. These companies have all pledged to source RSPO-certified palm oil out of an understandable desire to ensure that their products weren’t driving destruction of the Earth’s tropical rainforests and other hyper-valuable ecosystems — and respond to demands from their customers and NGO campaigns that they take the very basic step of ending links to deforestation. Large banks Credit Suisse, Rabobank, Citibank, HSBC, and Standard Chartered also have policies aimed at channeling investment towards RSPO companies.

The RSPO’s action was such a blatant affront to basic environmental values that even the organization’s co-founder World Wildlife Fund, which has always defended RSPO even in the face of withering criticism, issued a formal statement saying that while it intends to continue engaging with the RSPO, it no longer considers RSPO certification sufficient for responsible companies.

Because the review failed to accept strong, tough and clear performance standards within the P&Cs [RSPO Principles & Criteria] on issues like GHGs and pesticides, it is, unfortunately, no longer possible for producers or users of palm oil to ensure that they are acting responsibly simply by producing or using Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO). Therefore WWF is now asking progressive companies to set and report on particular performance standards within the framework set by the new RSPO P&Cs.

Responsible growers are those that not only certify all of their palm oil production against the RSPO principles & criteria but who also take the following further actions: immediate public reporting of GHG emissions from existing and new plantations using Palm GHG;

‐ for new oil palm developments: full implementation of the RSPO New Plantings Procedure and zero‐net land use emissions over a single rotation, which will exclude cultivation on peat‐soils and clearance of high carbon stock areas;

‐ for existing plantations and mills: significant annual GHG emissions reduction targets

‐ essential measures should include the treatment of mill effluent to eliminate methane emissions and the restoration of any plantations on peat at the end of the current rotation;

‐ an end to the use of pesticides that are categorized as World Health Organization Class 1A or 1B, or that are listed by the Stockholm or Rotterdam Conventions, and paraquat;

‐ only buying Fresh Fruit Bunches (FFB) from known sources, in particular no FFB originating from land illegally occupied or that is within any sort of designated or protected areas such as national parks;

WWF’s statement surprised many long time palm oil watchers, but the organization deserves enormous credit for sticking to its principles and making clear that companies cannot claim sustainability just by sticking an RSPO label on their product while continuing to destroy the Earth’s forests.

So what are responsible companies to do? Dozens have dived into the RSPO’s sustainability vat, only to float up saturated in palm oil and stinking of deforestation.

The good news is that RSPO is far from the only game in town — there are many options for sourcing deforestation free vegetable oil – and it’s now time for companies to take advantage of them.

Of course, coconut, soybean, canola and other vegetable oils generally have far fewer issues with deforestation, though responsible companies should investigate the specific supply chain for any of the commodities they use.

And the Rainforest Alliance’s Sustainable Agriculture Network standards not only go well beyond RSPO, but also create incentives for ecosystem restoration – and have been adopted by the Colombian organic palm oil producer Daabon. The Brazilian company Agropalma and New Britain Palm Oil are also considered leaders on reducing deforestation.

But perhaps most exciting is the commitment by Golden Agri-Resources (GAR), the world’s largest private sector palm oil producer, to eliminate deforestation from its supply chain following efforts by Greenpeace, The Forest Trust and other groups (full disclosure: I do some consulting work for TFT, though this article is my own).

As the grower of approximately five percent of the world’s palm oil, GAR can be an immediate large-scale source for deforestation free palm oil, period. Companies that buy from GAR or other responsible producers and traders are sending a signal that there is a demand for truly deforestation free palm oil, which will encourage other palm oil companies to raise their own standards.

The important point here is that what GAR and its fellow vegetable oil industry leaders are doing doesn’t rely on an amorphous term like sustainability that can be easily corrupted by cynical PR agents looking to greenwash wholesale ecological destruction. They’re saying something very simple: We don’t destroy forests, we don’t destroy peatland, and we don’t abuse human rights or community rights.

It’s very easy for the public, forest communities, journalists, civil society organizations and others to scrutinize them by that standard, and when they fall short, hold them accountable. There’s really not much room for fudging it.

This commitment that is simple and affordable to implement: most of the additional cost of RSPO-style certification comes from segregating the “sustainable” product from the “mainstream” product in processing, shipping, and sales – not from changing production practices. Indeed, a recent study by Timothy Fairhurst and David McLaughlin found that planting on degraded lands actually costs several hundred dollars less than planting on cleared secondary forests.  With 6-10 million hectares of available degraded land in Indonesia and 60 million available in Brazil, there are massive opportunities for affordable, deforestation free production: companies just have to seize them.  Certification can be a tool to help ensure that they’re meeting their commitments, but it’s no substitute for action.

In short, companies should stop proclaiming their commitment to “sustainability” from the stump, and just stop buying the products of ecological destruction. That’s what their customers demand, and what the Earth needs.

The controversy: the European Union has finally ended  airlines’ exemption from European pollution rules, and has applied its law equally to domestic and international flights that take off or land in Europe.  The policy is a big deal: it cuts pollution by an amount equivalent to taking 30 million cars off the road by 2020 – and does it at a cost of about three dollars per trans-Atlantic flight, less than the cost of a bag of absurdly expensive potato chips peddled to passengers during the flight. And far less than the $16.70 fee that the United States levies for every international flight that takes off and lands here.

So what does President Obama or Congress have to do with this? United Airlines and other major carriers don’t want to set a precedent of regulating airplane pollution, and they especially don’t want Americans to see how affordable limiting emissions could be. As a result, they’ve poured tens of millions of dollars into lobbying Congress and the administration to get them to pass legislation sponsored by Senators John Thune and Claire McCaskill that permits the administration to require US airlines to violate Europe’s climate law.

If the President signs the Thune bill, US taxpayers could be on the hook for paying the up to $22 billion in fines airlines are expected to accrue for their law-breaking. It’s as if a American business tycoon went to Paris, stole the Mona Lisa, and then got US taxpayers to pay the Louvre billions of dollars in compensation.

The Thune bill is pretty unprecedented – and if President Obama signs it, the United States will suddenly be in the business of pretending to decide the legality of Europe’s regulations – which I’m pretty sure is not in the Constitution.

To try and make President Obama’s decision easier, the European Union on Monday agreed to delay implementation of its law for foreign airlines by six months to give the International Civil Aviation Organization time to work out a global deal to cut airline pollution. Though ICAO has languished unproductively for 15 years in pursuit of such an aim—stymied by the airlines’ lobby -Europe’s climate law has breathed new life into the negotiations, generating some very cautious optimism that a global agreement may be on the horizon.  The Obama administration says it backs such an agreement, but under pressure from United Airlines and others, refuses to support anything concrete that would actually reduce pollution.

In other words, President Obama would be giving New Yorkers hungry for climate action a big old extremely soggy blanket. It’s like when Gerald Ford refused to help New York City during its hour of greatest need, the 1970′s fiscal crisis – and New York produced one of the great headlines of all time, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” (Ford subsequently blamed the headline for his 1976 election defeat).  Now, New York is in an hour of perhaps even greater need, and President Obama is threatening to abandon New Yorkers and all Americans to their fates when it comes to the rising seas swamping our neighborhoods.

As a native New Yorker, it’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that the President would consider being so callous. My in-laws on Long Island have been picking dead fish out of their closets for the last two weeks, lost their cars to the storm surge, and have months of recovery ahead of them – all due to a storm that at a minimum was made worse by rising sea levels. For President Obama to come in and tell them and other Sandy victims that he cares more about the airline lobby than their well-being and the global climate would be an epic disappointment, and a sweeping failure for his administration and legacy.

You may not be able to tell from the sublime stillness of his hair, but United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek is foaming at his strong-jawed mouth. The European Union at long last has ended United and other airlines’ exemption from the continent’s climate law, including both domestic European flights as well as flights that take off and land in Europe.

That means that United and other U.S. airlines accustomed to polluting with impunity now will have to either improve their efficiency or purchase pollution permits.  All in all, that’s expected to add a whopping three dollars to the cost of a transatlantic flight, where coach tickets average $1000 round trip (US airlines are already imposing a surcharge to cover these additional expenses, before they’re even required to pay them!). Each way, the extra expense is equivalent to the price of the 2.6 ounce bag of potato chips that United charges its coach-class customers.

But that Pringles-size price tag hasn’t stopped Smisek and other airline CEO’s from calling up their favorite senators, John Thune and Claire McCaskill, and their House counterparts and ordering them to throw a climate-killing tantrum. The senators have managed to pass a bill through both Houses of Congress that actually prohibits U.S. airlines from obeying the European climate law. Worse, it puts taxpayers on the hook for bailing out the airlines for the $22 billion in fines they’re expected to accrue as a result of their willful law breaking (full disclosure: I’ve done consulting work with the coalition of environmental groups fighting aviation pollution).

Of course, the airlines could have just improved their efficiency by adding winglets, improving back-up power systems, and retrofitting their engines, or just sucked up the compliance fees as the cost of being a responsible, law-abiding corporate citizen. By the airlines’ calculus, however, it’s much easier to just get some pliant senators like Thune and McCaskill to get taxpayers to bail them out for violating laws they don’t want to obey.

The one potentially important silver lining is that in order to get their bill through the Senate, Thune and McCaskill were forced to accept language calling for climate action in the International Civil Aviation Organization (a sort of UNFCCC for the aviation industry, with all the attendant futility) or a U.S. domestic policy. We’ll have to wait and see on that front, but keep in mind that ICAO’s decades-long failure to act and near-complete control by industry is what spurred Europe to unilateral action in the first place.

As if polluting the skies and our political process wasn’t enough, Smisek also fouled the literary air of the usually anodyne United Hemispheres in-flight magazine with an unhinged rant attacking the idea that flights taking off and landing in Europe should have to obey the laws of Europe. Who wants to read that while stuffed into a coach seat munching on three dollar potato chips?

The irony of the entire legislative tragicomedy is that the airlines aren’t actually worried that the European climate law will be too expensive – they’re worried that it will be too cheap. You see, this is the first time a US industry has been subject to an international carbon cap. If it was expensive and onerous, a whole array of polluters could cite it as a reason not to institute a more comprehensive cap on carbon through the whole economy. But since it will produce significant pollution reductions (equivalent to taking 30 million cars off the road) and costs so little that no one will notice, it will actually be yet another illustration of a longstanding truth: reducing pollution just isn’t that expensive.

Europe’s carbon fee actually pales in comparison to the $16.70 fee imposed by the United States on flights that take off or land here – but in fairness, the airlines’ lobbyists wouldn’t be very good at their jobs if they let hypocrisy stand in the way of trashing the planet.

Indeed, as a recent MIT study shows, US airlines will actually garner “windfall profits”  from the European climate law, especially in the early years, because Europe is giving them free pollution permits to ease the pain of having to slightly reduce their planetary destruction.

In other words, melting Arctic, dying polar bears, and flight-disrupting extreme weather notwithstanding, Jeff Smisek and his colleagues oppose the idea of climate action so much that they’re willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to block it…even when climate action will boost their profits.

Perhaps this contempt for their customers and shareholders is the reason why all four of America’s major airlines have gone bankrupt. It’s the same self-defeating approach to sustainability that kept the auto companies funneling money into Washington to block higher fuel efficiency standards when they should have been investing that money in making modern cars that people actually wanted to drive. When companies can ignore the change happening to the planet, it probably means they’re ignoring a lot of other problems as well.

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise…is to help you and your family. – Willard Mitt Romney, August 30, 2012

The moment Mitt Romney mocked the climate crisis will be cursed, rued, and lamented by future generations. It might even be cursed, rued, and lamented by Mitt Romney, if he looks back on that line as the beginning of the end of his flirtation with young voters and their planet. After all, America’s best and brightest youth are pouring themselves into innovation to create clean energy, to solve the climate crisis, and win the future…and Mitt Romney tonight sent the message that his America has no place for them.

But while Romney mocked the Earth with his words, President Obama is mocking the planet with his actions.

On the same day that Romney unleashed his contempt on the natural systems that support all life, the Obama administration issued permission to allow Shell to drill for oil in America’s Arctic’s fragile Arctic seas. Obama’s actions take oil that’s been locked safely under the sea for eons, and turn it into carbon pollution that will lock us into a future of drought, wildfire, rising seas…and more intolerable heat. Along with Obama’s broader oil drilling and coal mining spree, it would undo the modest but important progress he’s made by raising vehicle fuel efficiency standards and temporarily blocking part of the tar sands pipeline. And that’s if Shell’s aging equipment doesn’t cause a massive oil spill.

That would be the greatest mockery of all.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. Obama’s political team looks at the Shell Oil decision – and every other major policy choice facing them in the next few months – purely as a risk: risk of giving the Tea Party material to whine about, risk of riling up Koch brothers, risk of giving Mitt Romney an issue. It’s why Obama has such a hard time telling us what he’ll do in the second term – or even the remainder of this one: any big announcement, any expression of his core values, will turn off someone, and the Obama team it’s much safer to try and keep the focus on Mitt Romney.

Unfortunately, Obama is unlikely to have the luxury to speak only about Romney’s failings.  Until he does something big, until he fights with actions and not just words, until he shows us – not just tells us – that there’s a substantive difference between Romney’s sneer and his “all of the above,” it will be hard to motivate activists to knock on doors, donors to close Obama’s enormous money gap, and journalists to write admiringly about Obama’s character and not just his verbal facility.

But imagine that instead of more bromides, Obama steps up to the podium in Charlotte and finally showed us some spine.

Unlike Mitt Romney, I will never mock the threat of climate change; I will never mock the thousands of young people pouring their best ideas and their hard work into innovating the clean energy economy we need; and I will never mock that quintessentially American drive to create a better world. That’s why today, I am standing up to the oil company CEO’s to protect America’s fragile Arctic and make sure that a major oil spill never again fouls America’s coasts, that we never have to see a picture of a turtle or a polar bear or a person coated in toxic oil, and that we can keep our coastal economy protected from disaster. Mitt, I’ve got a message for you: oil is important, but our children’s future is more important and that, my friend, is something I will always cherish and defend.

In the words of the great progressive champion and political powerhouse Paul Wellstone, “You’ve got to start a fight to win one.” Those aren’t words Obama has lived by, but he’s got to start doing so if we’re going to head off a Romney presidency that seems poised to make Obama’s mixed environmental record look like an eco dream.

The bright contrast showed that deforestation is no ways inevitable — in many cases, the same countries are winning great conservation victories in one area and proving their capacity for senseless destruction in another. In that spirit, here are some of the big trends and decisions to look out for in 2012:

Can Brazil tolerate success?

Brazil has been the world’s great success story when it comes to reducing deforestation, and 2011 was no different. Continuing a seven-year trend, Brazil cleared and burned the Amazon at the lowest level on record in 2011. While that’s still 6,238 square kilometers of forests (an area the size of Delaware) wiped away during the year, it represents a whopping three-quarters decline since 2004. To put that in American climate terms, it’s as if the United States cut its coal and oil consumption to one-quarter of the current level by 2020.

At the same time that Brazil is achieving this major conservation success, the country has continued to boost soy and cattle production every year — proving that it doesn’t need to cut down the forest to grow economically. Indeed, the restrictions on deforestation themselves seem to be helping generate growth in the agricultural sector. Historically, cattle ranching in Brazil has been negatively profitable — that is, a money-losing sector (somewhat like the American airline industry). But since Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, and others rallied consumers for deforestation-free soy and cattle, Brazilian producers responded: instead of investing in clear-cutting, cattle and soy operations have focused on improving yields and profitability on existing land — and restoring degraded land to forest or agricultural use. Now instead of just making cattle, Brazilians are also making money. Indeed, buoyed by the agricultural sector, the country’s overall economy is booming to such an extent that large numbers of newly rich are flooding Miami and Europe in search of luxury goods.

But that economic success — and Brazilians’ very strong pro-environment attitudes — haven’t stopped a backlash by well-financed cattle gangs and illegal logging cartels. These interests have pushed the Brazilian Congress to gut Brazil’s strong Forest Code, the primary legal instrument behind the success in reducing deforestation. To show they’re serious, thugs hired by some big agriculture and logging interests have launched an assassination campaign on the agricultural frontier, gunning down indigenous and peasant activists who dared to try to make them obey the law. This summer, for instance, thugs assassinated four rainforest activists in the Amazon, including the internationally known leader Joao da Silva and his wife. When their deaths were announced on the floor of the Brazilian congress, pro-deforestation delegates erupted into a chorus of boos — not because they were upset with the murder, but because they were offended that one of their fellow members would bring such a crime into the light of day.

So what would prompt parliamentarians to act so abominably? The Code currently requires landowners to keep 80 percent of their land in the Amazon forested, and a minimum of 20 percent in the biodiversity rich savannah known as the Cerrado. It also requires protection for forests bordering rivers and streams. But under the revisions passed on Dec. 6, people who’ve violated the Code in the past will get effective amnesty for their actions — not being required to reforest their land to come into compliance; owners of less than 998 acres will be exempted from the main provisions of the code; and the amount of forest required to be protected along waterways will be cut. Despite a provision giving more enforcement power to environmental agency Ibama, WWF estimates that these revisions will reduce forest cover in Brazil by 295,000 square miles, an area larger than Texas — and prevent Brazil from meeting its international commitments to cut carbon pollution.

Now, one woman stands between the gangs and ecological catastrophe: Brazil’s recently elected President Dilma Rouseff, who has the power to veto the legislation. Dilma promised to oppose amnesty during the 2010 presidential election, but is facing strong pressure from monied deforestation interests to break her promises. Were she to uphold her promises, however, she can count on the Brazilian people for support: 79 percent of Brazilians want Dilma to veto the legislation, according to a recent poll — and environmentalists proved their strength at the polls in 2010 when Green Party candidate Marina Silva landed 19 percent of the vote, forcing Dilma into a runoff.

This may be the biggest environmental decision of any kind in the world in 2011, with enormous consequences for the planet. In climate terms alone, passage of this bill would spew more carbon into the atmosphere than all the world generates in one year. It’s a real test for the Brazilian environmental movement, which can count on stronger popular support than almost any country in the world — but now needs to leverage that support into a substantive victory. With a well-run campaign targeting Dilma, the Forest Code could become what the Keystone XL pipeline has been to the American environmental movement. Indeed, a heavy emphasis on mobilizing the grassroots to take their demand for forests directly to Dilma and her campaign backers is likely to be the only thing that can prevail against the well-financed deforestation interests.

Carbon offshoring: forest edition

During the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong ordered the Chinese to clear the country’s once-expansive, and occasionally panda-filled forests for agriculture and fuel to run backyard steel furnaces. The furnaces, unfortunately, could not actually produce steel (perhaps the 20th century’s first big biomass failure) and the lack of trees, of course, produced huge problems: erosion, flooding, lack of rainfall, and desertification. China still loses 15,000 square kilometers every year to desert.

To stem the tide, the country is building a “Great Green Wall” reaching from Xinzhang in the West to Heilongjiang on the Pacific coast. Every Chinese child above the age of 11 is required to plant at least three trees a year, and the country has planted 56 billion since the program was launched in 1978. Although China has paid little attention to actually ensuring that the trees grow and thrive, and hasn’t always chosen the native species adapted to local water conditions and wildlife, there are a lot of new forests. Combined with a series of domestic logging bans, the reforestation effort does seem to be achieving some of its goals.

Domestic conservation notwithstanding, China is still hungry for wood and paper, as well as commodities like palm oil, beef, and soybeans that can come from deforestation. And so far, China hasn’t seemed to care that much about whether those appetites lead someone else to cut down their own forests (a similar process is playing out in India, where the government has set 2012 as the goal date for restoring one-third of the country to forest, but turns a blind eye as Indian companies import goods from deforestation).

So they’ve turned — en masse — to rainforest nations and other ecologically sensitive regions to supply their needs. China has become the “wood workshop of the world” and set up or financed illegal logging operations in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and Russia to feed its demand. More than half of timber shipped anywhere in the world is sent to China, as reported by William Laurance in an important article in Yale Environment 360.

In Southeast Asia, Chinese companies like Julong, Indian companies like KS Oils, and multinationals like Bunge have bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of “land banks” in Borneo and Sumatra for conversion to palm plantations. In Africa, Chinese companies are logging the Congo and an Indian company, Karuturi Global Limited is tearing up forest, wetlands and savannah to grow hundreds of thousands of acres of roses for global markets in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region that is the site of Africa’s second largest wildlife migration, according to another must-read Yale Environment 360 article, this one by Fred Pearce.

Of course, deforestation is messy and often illegal — and that has led to a global political push by shadowy front groups to undermine even developed countries’ international forest protections. Of course, there are examples in tropical countries like Indonesia where someone or something caused the man formerly known as “Indonesia’s green governor” Irwandi Yusuf to suddenly change his mind and approve converting a 4,000 hectare peatland rainforest in Aceh known for its orangutans, bears, and tigers into a palm oil plantation. It’s just one example of the palm and timber industries undermining Indonesia’s much trumpeted moratorium on forest conversion (though overall the moratorium may produce some progress).

In the United States, several Tea Party organizations have suddenly aligned their entire agendas with those of Asian companies who profit from illegal logging and palm oil. These groups have reframed the commercial agenda of Asian logging and palm oil companies in Tea Party rhetoric and launched attacks on policies such as the Lacey Act, which prohibits import of illegally logged wood and poached wildlife. Their efforts have helped persuade politicians like Reps. Jim Cooper and Marsha Blackburn to take on the agenda of the Asia logging companies and pursue a wholesale gutting of the Lacey Act’s forest protections (an effort I’m working to stop).

There have been halting efforts to tackle China and India’s deforestation-based supply chain, but it’s hard to measure the results so far. WWF won vague pledges from some Chinese palm oil companies in 2010 to support sustainability, but it’s unclear what the results have been on the ground. Companies like Tianjin-based Julong boast videos on their webpages showing their trucks clearing land in Borneo.

In other words, in the same way that U.S. companies take advantage of loose free trade policies to export polluting industries to low-wage, low-regulation countries, China and India are doing the same thing in their agriculture and forestry sectors — it’s the Asian edition of carbon offshoring. 

It’s clear that in a world weighted to the increasingly prosperous population centers in Asia, the question of whether they, as well as their Western counterparts, will take responsibility for the impact of their consumption on the world’s ecosystems is in many ways the big one for the fate of the world’s forests.

The carbon market is dead — long live the carbon market

In America, the sorry demise of climate legislation has made some casual and even not-so-casual observers think we’ve seen the last of carbon markets, cap-and-trade, and their ilk. While in theory, this thinking goes, these might be the most powerful mechanisms on Earth to solve the climate crisis and save forests, they’re somehow too complex or something to actually make a difference.

Under the radar, however, carbon markets are starting to flourish – though wonkish obstinacy is preventing them from achieving their full potential.

By far the biggest breakthrough for carbon markets broadly, and specifically for forests, was the passage of the Australian climate law, including both a carbon tax and cap-and-trade.

As part of the package, Australia launched a Carbon Farming Initiative, which gives credit for carbon sequestration to forest conservation, restoration, and shifts to carbon-sucking agriculture. Not only will the program conserve and restore hundreds of thousands of acres of land, it also ensures that farmers and other landowners benefit financially from action they take to limit climate change.

The program also includes the exciting possibility for emitters to receive credit for investing in affordable international tropical forest conservation measures (REDD+), lowering the cost of the overall program – and saving a lot of orangutans, rhinoceroses and other endangered rainforest creatures. Indeed, without the Carbon Farming Initiative, it’s unlikely Australia’s climate action would have been as ambitious as it is. Combined with California’s emerging program to finance a modest amount of forest conservation in Mexico’s Chiapas state and Brazil’s Acre Province, carbon markets will in the new year start to spur significant conservation in parts of the globe.

You might be asking why I’m not mentioning Europe, the granddaddy of carbon markets. I would like to mention the EU ETS, , but alas I cannot, for it still unfathomably and tragically excludes credit for international forest conservation, the most affordable way to reduce pollution. If Europeans included tropical forests, they could pay the same amount as they do now to reduce pollution, but significantly tighten their overall targets from 20 percent reductions to 30 percent or stronger by 2030 .

The European carbon market is enormous: more than seven billion tons traded annually. If emitters were allowed to use a relatively modest one billion tons of tropical forest conservation annually to meet their obligations, it would radically alter the financial prospects for forest conversion globally overnight. Suddenly, billions of dollars would flood into conservation and trees around the world would be worth more alive than dead. In addition, because tropical forest conservation is among the most affordable ways of reducing emissions, it would cut costs for complying.

The European wonks running the climate program say – and have said for many years now – that they do indeed want to accept tropical forest credits, and are just waiting for international agreement on the technical details of the forest-climate conversation. Why Europe has to wait for the countries of the world to ratify the technical details of the EU ETS is beyond me, but even accepting that argument on its own terms, the conditions should have been satisfied: the Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban climate summits all made the rules of the road for tropical forest investment clear. Nonetheless, European climate wonks continue to dither, and millions of acres of forest go up in smoke every year – saying they’re now waiting for a final deal in 2020. Australia and California have now passed Europe by, but if we’re going to achieve the financing levels we need to make a serious global blow against deforestation, the continent is going to have to finally take action. Will climate champion Europeans really allow forests to go tens of millions of acres of forests to go up in smoke for this wonkish fetish? We shall see.

In the meantime, if there’s anywhere in the world that’s in need of a forest campaign, it’s Europe.

The race between forests and the climate

If you’ve been to the Rockies recently, you’ve probably seen their famous mountains turned into a semi-Apocalyptic crazy quilt of climate disaster. Ancient aspen stands have retreated without sufficient water. Vast swathes of evergreens are now just big, dead, grey skeletons haunting the landscape where forests once stood. They’re victims of climate change as surely as a glacier or a polar bear: with warmer temperatures, bark beetles once killed by cold snaps are able to stay alive during even alpine winters and eat through millions of acres of trees. The arboreal bones they leave behind are tinder for the huge forest fires that have surged across the West in recent years.

These great forests are on the front line of climate change – and they’re not alone. As reported in one of the past year’s great pieces of environmental journalism, “Temperature Rising” by The New York Times Justin Gillis.

The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.

When those forests go up in smoke, we’re losing their wildlife, their clean water, and a little bit of the great outdoors that defines us a people. But as scientists are increasingly finding, we’re also losing a critical weapon in the fight against climate change.

In 2011, scientists seem to have solved one of the great Earth science mysteries: where exactly all the carbon being spewed into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and converting land to agriculture was going. The unsurprising answer, apparently, is forests.

Two studies in the past year found that living forests absorb approximately one third of the carbon dioxide spewed into the air from burning fossil fuels – that’s around 45 percent more than previously thought (oceans are also sucking up a lot of carbon, making them more acidic and less hospitable to sea life). More good news: natural regrowth of previously degraded tropical forests is sucking up a lot of carbon, though there still about 1.3 billion tons more CO2 going into the atmosphere every year from deforestation than is being sequestered by reforestation.

All in all, forests present something of a paradox: on the one hand, we cannot solve the climate crisis without solving the deforestation crisis. On the other, if we don’t save forests and otherwise cut our emissions, the climate-driven burning and decomposition of those forests could make the climate crisis far worse.

So what can be done in 2012 to ensure that forests are helping stop the climate crisis – and that their decay isn’t making it worse? Here are three big ones:

1. Maintain and expand North American protected forests (huge victory on this front in 2011 when the Roadless Rule protections for 50 million acres were upheld by the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals and a court ruled that Alaska’s Tongass National Forest should also be restored to protection).
2. Revisit recent changes to Russia’s Forest Code that, according to Pacific Environment and others, contributed to the (preventable) big fires that swept Russia in recent years.
3. Invest in simple steps to ensure forests are climate resilient.

The deforestation free revolution

For decades now, companies around the world have been falling over themselves to declare their products sustainable – and tap into the huge global green consumer market. Unfortunately, for many, sustainability is nothing more than PR pabulum (for instance, watch this movie in which a brutal Indonesian palm oil plantation manager responds to evidence that he had engaged in massive deforestation by denying that it was possible because of the sustainability blah-blah on his company’s website).

In the forest sector, this has been a particular problem: because of environmentalists’ attention to forests, most companies feel some pressure to express gooey affection for Mother Earth regardless of how they act towards her.

Probably the two biggest sinners in this regard are the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which distributes a “sustainable” label even to palm oil produced on deforested land – and Asia Pulp and Paper, a unit of the massive Indonesian-Malaysian-Chinese Sinar Mas conglomerate. APP once told World Wildlife Fund that it had to clear more than 400,000 acres of forest to “become sustainable.” In December, satellite data emerged showing that APP was logging in the exact tiger sanctuary that they’ve been promoting as evidence of their sustainability.

In the face of this attitude, forest advocates have started to ask that products be “deforestation free,” not just “sustainable” or “green.” The new approach appears to producing impressive dividends: the Consumer Goods Forum has committed to working to make its members’ products deforestation free by 2020 (the forum included giants Walmart, Sara Lee, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, General Mills, and others).

And individual companies are taking action in ways that could resonate through the entire food chain: in response to Greenpeace’s campaign targeting Nestle, the global food giant committed to finding palm oil from a deforestation-free source, and not just slapping an RSPO label on their foods. In partnership with the Tropical Forest Trust, they’ve been working with Sinar Mas’ palm oil division, Golden Agri-Resources, to ensure that they’re only buying palm oil from plantations not associated with recent deforestation. Given Sinar Mas’ long record of broken promises and rampant deforestation, we’ll have to wait for independent analysis to confirm that the company has indeed improved its performance, but it’s representative of significant progress.

And sitting at a key point in the global supply chain, Cargill in June responded to pressure from Rainforest Action Network activists (and Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen) by promising to take some steps toward reducing deforestation. The company, which trades 25 percent of the world’s palm oil, agreed to supply on RSPO-certified palm oil to Europe and North America by 2015 and Asia by 2020. Given the problems with RSPO and the long timelines, it’s not a solution to deforestation, but it does represent improvement. Even APP may be facing some pressure: U.S. supermarket giant Kroger, thought to be one of the biggest seller of APP’s Paseo brand of tissue paper, recently responded to a request from Greenpeace by ending its contracts with the company.

The great hope is that under assault from its customers and legal pressure, 2012 will see APP and the many other bad actors in the Southeast Asian pulp, paper, timber, and palm oil sectors move from greenwash to green.

Photo: Tar Sands Action

As amazing as this progress is, however, let’s not delude ourselves: President Obama is just kicking the climate can down the road to a point when he may not even be in a position to decide its fate. In the not-unlikely scenario that he loses reelection, approving the tar-sands pipeline will be an easy way for President Romney to give Big Oil a huge thank-you gift for all the help they provide him during the 2012 election. This decision just postpones a green light for the pipeline by a year. And it’s unclear to what extent the administration is really reconsidering the pipeline, or just reconsidering the poorly chosen pipeline route.

That’s why I’m a little dismayed at suggestions that this kick-the-can decision means environmentalists will enthusiastically back President Obama in 2012. Is the price of an environmentalist’s vote a year’s delay on environmental catastrophe? Excuse me, no.

Let’s remember what was different about this tar-sands campaign from too many failed efforts to get President Obama to defy the fossil-fuel industry: direct targeting of President Obama and no shyness about charging the administration with corruption where it existed.

We cannot abandon that tough approach, even as the administration throws us a bone. Shifting the pipeline route is helpful, but it doesn’t get at the bigger problem that exploiting the tar sands is a climate catastrophe and deadly to millions of acres of boreal forests and their songbirds. The fuse on the tar-sands carbon bomb was just made a year longer, but let’s not forget that it’s still burning.

And let’s not forget that despite quite positive moves on fuel efficiency, the Obama administration weekly announces what RL Miller has called mini-Keystones: under-the-radar greenlighting of major fossil-fuel projects, like a coal mine on public land outside Bryce Canyon, Utah; massive expansion of offshore drilling; failing to regulate coal ash sufficiently; letting coal plants off the hook on water use.

In other words, the climate crisis is still spinning out of control, and Obama is seeking to split the difference. Unfortunately, splitting the difference doesn’t work when you’re dealing with planetary physics. It’s getting a lot hotter out there, more species are dying, more states are bursting into flames, and more countries are drowning in floods. Obama’s instinctual conflict avoidance just isn’t going to cut it when it comes to the existential task of saving the planet. We can’t let him forget that.

So what’s in these trade agreements that so arouses the ire of progressives?

First, more bailouts! If you like corporate bailouts, you’ll love Obama’s FTA’s. They represent the globalization of disaster capitalism. Now, instead of just being on the hook to guarantee Wall Street firms if they make bad investments, the U.S. government will be responsible for bailing out foreign companies too if we decide to improve environmental or labor protections in ways that cost them money. 

Here’s how: “Investor protection provisions” in the agreements actually give foreign companies the right to challenge U.S. environmental and labor laws if they deem them to be somehow costing them money. The United States then has the delightful option of changing its law or paying millions or billions in compensation to foreign companies … just for obeying our laws like American companies do.  

Previous free trade agreements have included similar provisions, and governments have already shelled out $350 million, with billions more pending in cases affecting the United States. Critics, such as Public Citizen’s Todd Tucker, believe that the investor provisions in these free trade deals are even worse, and the bailouts for foreign companies could reach the billions.  In addition to the monetary cost, these provisions have a chilling effect on legislation: before changing our laws, we’ll now not only have to assess the effect not only on our own economy and environment, but also the cost to overseas operations of foreign companies as well.

We’ve had experience with this type of provision in previous trade deals, and it’s not pretty: just this past month, the World Trade Organization issued a ruling that says notorious Mexican fishing operations must be given “dolphin-safe” labels on their tuna fish — even though these operations routinely kill dolphins (Mexico’s fleet actually seeks out dolphins to cast their nets knowing that they frequently swim near tuna). Just so it’s clear, the United States isn’t banning import of dolphin-dangerous tuna — we just insist that tuna fish labeled “dolphin-safe” doesn’t actually involve killing dolphins.

Of cours, adorable marine mammals won’t be the only victims. Job-hungry Americans will bear the brunt of these deals as well. The Korea FTA alone will add a net $13.9 billion to our annual trade deficit with South Korea and cost 159,000 jobs, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s a giant anvil of unemployment around the neck of the economy: when we do start to dig out of the recession, it will take that much more growth just to get back to where we are today.

The Panama deal rounds out the greed train with its own investor provisions. The country is one of the most notorious offshore tax havens. Under the agreement, investors will be able to challenge U.S. efforts to crack down on this type of shenanigans — a huge sop to the very Wall Street financial institutions that are the direct target of the Occupy movement.

As bad as the trade deals are, they could have at least represented a strategic opportunity to pass the President’s jobs bill, which is supported by many of the same groups that bitterly oppose the free trade agreements. Obama could cut a deal with Republicans: he only submits the trade agreements on condition that Republicans pass the jobs package, thus compensating for at least some of the employment losses expected to occur under the trade deals.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. Obama’s not exactly the guy you want walking into a car dealership with you. As I wrote in a tragic-accurate 2007 article about his failure to bargain as a senator on the Peru trade agreement that forecast his inability to haggle his way out of a paper bag of debt ceiling, Obama is “the world’s worst negotiator.”

Obama also seems to have a highly evolved capacity to divide his own party in two: while a majority are expected to oppose the deals, the pro-trade New Democrat caucus is expected to back it, giving Republicans and the White House the votes they need to force the agreements through.

Let’s be clear what this is: President Obama’s substantive response to the Occupy Wall Street protests is to push Wall Street’s free trade agreements. Of course, he’s adopted anti-greed rhetoric (or at least anti-ATM fee rhetoric), but when it comes to what his administration pushes in the corridors of power, it’s the same old Wall Street agenda. Indeed, he may be trying to jam the trade agreements through Congress before the Occupy Wall Street movement grows to a size at which politicians get chary of defying their calls for economic and environmental justice.

This is a real test for Occupy Wall Street, the first direct challenge from the White House to a broad swathe of their constituencies. Whether or not they meet the challenge will send a signal whether these protests are really just a giant, exciting outlet for pent up rage, or a movement that understands power and can transform our country.

Faced with accusations that his company had illegally imported wood from Asia, Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz launched a media campaign bashing the federal government’s action and criticizing aspects of the law he had allegedly broken — the Lacey Act, which bans the import of illegally logged forest products.

“We’ve been severely harassed by the Department of Justice (DOJ), no charges have been filed, we’ve had two armed raids, a significant amount of wood confiscated,” Juskiewicz said on the Lou Dobbs Show. He told a conservative talk radio host that “The DOJ’s position is that we should just shut down and go away as a company.”

In a letter to President Obama, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) took up Juszkiewicz’s cause: ”Your agencies and this administration are actively pursuing regulatory and legal policies that discourage job growth in the United States and encourage shipping those very same jobs overseas.”

The reality is that the Lacey Act and other similar measures have enjoyed strong bipartisan support and enthusiastic backing from the American forest products industry. The amendments to the Lacey Act that prohibit the import of illegally logged or traded goods were passed with the strong support of the George W. Bush administration in 2008, with bipartisan Senate co-sponsors in Lamar Alexander (from Gibson’s home state of Tennessee) and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

The reason: American forest products growers, companies, and workers were being asked to compete with foreign operators who employ slave and child labor, and log in national parks and other areas without permission and without paying taxes — even companies that funded Taliban attacks on American soldiers. Competition from illegal imports costs the American forest products industry around $1 billion per year, representing thousands of lost jobs, according to a study by the American Forest & Paper Association.

Mark Barford, executive director of the Memphis-based National Hardwood Lumber Association put it succinctly: “We need the protection of the Lacey Act. We need a fair playing field. Our small, little companies cannot compete with artificially low prices from wood that comes in illegally … This is our Jobs Act.”

The economic benefit of the Lacey Act is why such an unusually wide array of groups support it: the Hardwood Federation (representing more than 13,000 companies across the U.S.), the American Forest & Paper Association, the United Steelworkers (who represent 100,000 pulp and paper workers), Lowe’s Home Improvement, Teamsters International, National Hardwood Lumber Association, International Paper, and hundreds of small and large companies alike, as well as a wide array of environmental groups.

“The [United Steelworkers] has seen true devastation among our members as multiple plants have closed or reduced production, in large part because of imports from nations where illegal logging is a large part of the timber supply,” said Holly Hart, the group’s Legislative Director, told the Chestertown (Ind.) Tribune.

Nonetheless, eager to jump on the latest Tea Party cause and bolstered by Boehner’s speech, some Republicans have been kicking around the idea of repealing or altering the Lacey Act to carve out exemptions for the guitar industry or other users of wood.

But Gibson is an outlier in its own industry. Other major guitar manufacturers have embraced Lacey Act compliance — and have found affordable, legal, sustainable, and super high quality hardwoods for their instruments. Here’s how Bob Taylor, CEO of Taylor Guitars, recently described his company’s approach to Lacey in a blog post for the Forest Legality Alliance:

It’s very simple. We now investigate the sources of our wood, and we ensure to the best of our ability that the wood was taken legally. We fill out the paper work required and we present our business as an open book. The cost isn’t so much for us. It’s not an unbearable added burden, and we’re happy to do the extra administrative work.

Taylor continued:

If I could take any user of wood, whether it be a guitar player or a purchaser of a dining room table, with me on a trip to the forest of 2011 in many, many parts of the world, and let them see with their own eyes the state of the forests and the people living in them, I’d stake my last dollar on the fact that they’d come home and preach with a loud voice how deforestation has got to be stopped. You have to see it to believe it, and if you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, you can’t argue against it. Period. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.

The comparisons from within its own industry, as well as perhaps some genuine environmental conscience (Gibson has historically provided financial support for conservation efforts) has moved Juszkiewicz to put some space between himself and some of the Tea Party’s extreme calls to repeal or roll back significant parts of the Lacey Act. ”I believe we need government in this area to ensure that wood is used responsibly,” he told Greenwire in an interview.

Nonetheless, Juszkiewicz is scheduled to participate in a Tea Party rally in Nashville next Saturday, Oct. 8, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity and other Tea Party groups. And Gibson recently hired a Washington lobbying firm to explore the possibility of pushing amendments to the law.

However, outside of foreign interests associated with illegal logging, it’s hard to find a major constituency that doesn’t embrace the Lacey Act. In fact, until Gibson’s Tea Party campaign, support for Lacey seemed to be growing along with evidence that it is producing results. The law and similar measures passed in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere have produced a 22 percent decline in illegal logging around the globe. Just this past week, at a ceremony in New York, the Lacey Act was recognized by the United Nations as one of the world’s three most effective forest policies.

Indeed, environmentalists and their allies hope the government increases its enforcement of the Lacey Act, especially by expanding it to sectors other than musical instruments. Most observers believe that just a few enforcement actions will likely cause the vast maj
ority of importers to ensure that their wood and paper comes from legal sources, reducing the need for actions like the one against Gibson.

The Lacey Act is a government program that works, providing jobs, protecting the environment, and promoting development — and doing it all with bipartisan and broad industry support. That very effectiveness may explain the Tea Party’s distaste for it: If you’re trying to drown government in the bathtub, the last thing you want is an example of a government program that’s popular, keeping Americans at work, and saving forests and wildlife along the way.

Full disclosure: Glenn Hurowitz is currently doing communications work for the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit advocacy organization that is campaigning to protect the Lacey Act from corporate, Tea Party, and Republican attacks. He wrote these articles as a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a nonprofit that also works to stop illegal logging.

When the Fish and Wildlife Service carried out a search warrant against Gibson Guitar last month, CEO Henry Juszkiewicz went on the offensive. His company was suspected of illegally importing precious wood from Madagascar and India. In response, he launched a PR campaign aimed at mobilizing right wing groups and media in defense of his company’s alleged illegal activities.

Juszkiewicz started by going to talk radio and using social media, creating the made-for-Tea Party slogan/hash tag #ThisWillNotStand. It was perfectly calibrated to draw the attention of conservative media. Juszkiewicz has appeared on the television talk shows of Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity, and conservative commentators joined in on the pro-Gibson chorus. The Wall Street Journal even ran a pointed opinion piece taking up the rallying cry.

What was Juszkiewicz’s secret to getting his company’s narrow message so quickly and widely amplified? In part, the groundwork had already been laid for him by a series of Tea Party groups that back an agenda closely aligned with that of large Asian timber companies eager to import wood and paper into the United States from legally and environmentally questionable sources.

At the nexus of these organizations is prominent Tea Party operative Andrew Langer, who played a critical role in organizing many of the original anti-Obama Tea Party rallies. In 2009, Langer started diverting members of his organizations (notably the Institute for Liberty and Frontiers of Freedom) away from the standard array of conservative issues and toward ones narrowly affecting the interests of Chinese, Indonesian, and Malaysian logging companies. He also established a new organization, the Orwellian-sounding “Consumer Alliance for Global Prosperity,” dedicated primarily to attacking a coalition of environmental groups, unions, and businesses that supports rainforest conservation policies. Chief targets included the Lacey Act, which prohibits imports of illegally logged wood and paper, and which Gibson Guitar is now accused of breaking.

These groups even set about attacking American companies (including Disney) that responded to consumer pressure to green their supply chains by eliminating Indonesian wood from their books and other products. The Consumers Alliance for Global Prosperity even produced a parody logo showing Mickey Mouse struggling to free himself from a paper straightjacket emblazoned with the logos of environmental groups and companies that support forest conservation.

Langer told The New York Times that he took up the Asian timber companies’ cause when he heard that tariffs on imported paper could increase the cost of textbooks. The Times suggested otherwise:

Mr. Langer would not say who financed his Indonesian paper initiative. But his sudden interest in the issue coincided with a public relations push by Asia Pulp & Paper. And the institute’s work is remarkably similar to that produced by one of the company’s consultants, a former Australian diplomat named Alan Oxley who works closely with a Washington public affairs firm known for creating corporate campaigns presented as grass-roots efforts.

Asia Pulp & Paper, a huge company that’s part of the Indonesian-Chinese-Malaysian palm oil, timber, and coal conglomerate Sinar Mas, wants to do more business in the U.S. However, environmental groups have long targeted the company and other Asian timber interests for clearing millions of acres of Indonesian rainforest — prime habitat for orangutans, Sumatran tigers, rhinoceroses, and other endangered animals.

To help scrub its public image and tarnish the conservation and trade laws that might stand in its way, Asia Pulp & Paper hired a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and launched a major advertising campaign in the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and other outlets. Meanwhile, the global anti-forest conservation group World Growth stepped up its Washington-based activities, emitting a flurry of press releases attacking conservation policies and environmental groups.

As all this was happening, Langer’s apparently unwitting Tea Party activists were suddenly being told that loyalty to conservative principles meant attacking the Lacey Act, as well as the United States’ extremely modest level of aid for conservation in foreign countries, and environmental trade policies — all programs that had traditionally had very strong bipartisan support.

When Gibson Guitar’s Juszkiewicz turned to the Tea Party, it was the moment Langer had been waiting for. Langer’s organizations quickly mobilized their social media networks to stump for Gibson. (The group has more than 10,000 Facebook fans on its “Pulp Wars” page, though not all accounts appear to be active.) Langer himself penned an op-ed for the BigGovernment website attacking the government and environmental groups for enforcing the law:

While Tea Partiers are portrayed by the mainstream media as radicals and potentially dangerous, no Tea Partier has ever advocated barging in to someone’s business and confiscating his property. It’s the far left environmental movement that is the real danger here, backed by the deep pockets of George Soros and others, and empowered by an Obama administration that will never solve the country’s jobs crisis if it continues harassing American companies this way. At the very least, it is time to examine this nation’s problem with overcriminalization — starting with the Lacey Act itself.

Primed by Langer’s “grassroots” network and more traditional Beltway lobbying by Asia Pulp & Paper and other companies, Juszkiewicz’s claims had an easy road to acceptance in the right wing media machine. Here, for instance, is Fox News commentator, guitarist, and NRA board member Ted Nugent on the Gibson case:

We have bent over so far as a citizenry in this country that we’ve allowed a communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-trained, a church-goer to the hate-America church — we’ve allowed him to become the president of the United States of America, because we bent over that far. We’ve allowed our federal agents to get away with this kind of jack-booted thuggery.

This type of hardcore rhetoric — and celebrity endorsement — combined with Tea Party rage, conservative media fury, and high-powered public relations seemed to make Gibson the perfect cause for those interested in bashing “big government,” and Republican leaders were quick to jump on it. After inviting Gibson CEO Juszkiewicz to join him in the gallery to watch President Obama’s jobs speech, Speaker of the House John Boehner took up Gibson’s cause a few days later in his own jobs speech: 

Those excessive regulations are making it harder for our economy to create jobs. Over the last couple of months we’ve seen two vivid illu
strations. Last month, federal agents raided the Gibson Guitar factories in Tennessee. Gibson is a well-respected American company that employs thousands of people. The company’s costs as a result of the raid? An estimated $2-3 million. Why? Because Gibson bought wood overseas to make guitars in America. Seriously.

With that, the cause shared by large Asian commercial interests and the Tea Party had won the official imprimatur of the highest levels of the GOP establishment.

The truly extraordinary thing about this is that, in their haste to take up a Tea Party rallying cry, Boehner and a handful of other Republicans seem not to have taken a close look at what Gibson was up to, what illegal logging is all about, and which side American businesses — and jobs — are on.

Next: Gibson’s crusade is off-key with U.S. workers.

Full disclosure: Glenn Hurowitz is currently doing communications work for the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit advocacy organization that is campaigning to protect the Lacey Act from corporate, Tea Party, and Republican attacks. He wrote these articles as a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a nonprofit that also works to stop illegal logging.

Gibson’s logging miles on a highway to hell.

On August 24, federal agents knocked on the doors of Gibson Guitar headquarters and factories in Nashville, Tenn., and seized large quantities of imported wood. The company, famous for its Les Paul guitars, had apparently aroused suspicion for importing guitar fingerboards from India under false pretences — claiming the wood was “veneer” when it was allegedly sawn lumber exported in violation of the Lacey Act, a federal law that prohibits trafficking in illegally harvested plants and animals. On further investigation, according to an affidavit in the case, agents found evidence that Gibson had allegedly committed similar offenses 11 previous times.

These were serious accusations, especially because Gibson was already facing a civil action brought by the federal government for allegedly importing illegally logged wood from Madagascar — and had already been raided in that case. Although not all facts in the case are known, a filing by the federal government suggests that Gibson officials knew that the wood they were importing was off limits. The filing quotes a Gibson employee who visited Madagascar in 2008 and reported back in an email:

The true Ebony species preferred by Gibson Musical Instruments is found only in Madagascar (Diospyros perrieri). This is a slow-growing tree species with very little conservation protection and supplies are considered to be highly threatened in its native environment due to over exploitation … All legal timber and wood exports are PROHIBITED because of wide spread corruption and theft of valuable woods like rosewood and ebony.

In other words, Gibson officials apparently knew that the wood came from what they called a “grey market,” but, according to the federal suit, they imported it anyway.

What’s worse, the company appears to have continued exporting the ebony even after Madagascar’s 2009 coup, which led to prolonged lawlessness and caused the United States to cut off aid to the country (including conservation aid). In the aftermath of the coup, Chinese logging gangs pillaged Madagascar’s national parks, focusing on high-value export species like ebony. The BBC and other news outlets documented severe abuses by logging operations, including slaughtering endangered wildlife. In one notorious incident, conservation researchers found dozens of dead lemurs that had been butchered for bush meat.

A report by the advocacy groups Environmental Investigation Agency and Global Witness documented new beds made out of Madagascar wood on sale in China for more than $1 million. That would be huge money for a developing country like Madagascar, but only a tiny fraction of it went to the locals: The investigation found that less than 1 percent of the value of logged wood went to benefit Malagasys, as citizens of Madagascar are known.

The situation in Madagascar is typical: Globally, illegal logging costs developing nations close to $10 billion annually in lost assets and revenues, according to the World Bank. For these reasons, forest nations have begged developed countries to enforce their own laws against trade in illegally logged goods.

Last October, Madagascar’s forest director, Julien Noel Rakotoarisoa, appealed to China to bring its laws into line with the United States, Europe, and other countries. “If they could … forbid importation, that would be a big step towards improving the situation,” he told the BBC.

As a result of the deteriorating conditions in Madagascar, many companies pulled back from the country and sought other sources of wood that they felt certain were harvested sustainably and complied with the Lacey Act’s import rules. Here’s what Christian Martin, chairman and CEO of Martin & Co., maker of Martin guitars, told NPR about the case:

There was a coup. What we heard was the international community has come to the conclusion that the coup created an illegitimate government. That’s when we said, “Okay, we cannot buy any more of this wood” … I think [the Lacey Act] is a wonderful thing. I think illegal logging is appalling. It should stop. And if this is what it takes unfortunately to stop unscrupulous operators, I’m all for it. It’s tedious, but we’re getting through it.

Gibson, for its part, insists that its purchases from Madagascar have complied with U.S. and Malagasy law. A company attorney told NPR that the recent raid seized wood imported legally from India, and that the company stopped importing wood from Madagascar in 2009. Meanwhile, Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO, has launched a PR campaign aimed at mobilizing right wing groups and media in defense of his company’s alleged illegal activities.

This effort to paint illegal wood smuggling as a patriotic act may seem improbable, but it quickly resonated beyond all expectations with the Tea Party and conservative media, ultimately reaching House Speaker John Boehner and the top ranks of the Republican Party.

Next: How Congress fell for Gibson’s bunk crusade.

Editors’ Note — full disclosure: Glenn Hurowitz is currently doing communications work for the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nonprofit advocacy organization that is campaigning to protect the Lacey Act from corporate, Tea Party, and Republican attacks. He wrote these articles as a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a nonprofit that also works to stop illegal logging.

We didn’t post this information when this article was first published, and we should have. We’ve appended it as of Sept. 28, 2011.