Money does grow on trees.

Along with other big environmental groups and such businesses as Duke Energy and El Paso Corp., they are part of a coalition that wants to use markets to protect the world’s forests and curb climate change.

Jeff Horowitz

The coalition—called Avoided Deforestation Partners, a name that will never win a branding contest—is the brainchild of Jeff Horowitz, a 58-year-old architect and newcomer to the environmental movement who has quietly become an influential player as climate change legislation inches its way through a divided Congress.

Protecting forests “is our single most important strategy, with respect to solving the climate crisis,” Horowitz says. “If we don’t tackle forestry immediately, we can’t buy enough time to get at the technological advances we need and scale them.”

I met Jeff in December at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, and visited him last week at his office in a lovely, hilly neighborhood of Berkeley. A mechanism to protect forests by steering millions of dollars from the developed world to poor countries, known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), was endorsed by governments in Copenhagen, so Horowitz felt good about the climate talks. “As far as we’re concerned, Copenhagen was a tremendous victory,” he told me.

Now he wants to make sure that forestry offsets are part of a U.S. climate bill. That will enable regulated polluters in the U.S. to offset their carbon emissions by paying to protect forests elsewhere. Protecting forests is a cheaper and quicker way to curb emissions than by switching from coal or natural gas to low-carbon energy sources like nuclear, wind or solar power.

While offsets are controversial, no one doubts is that protecting forests matters: Scientists estimate that nearly 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation, as trees are slashed and burned to make way for agriculture. Standing forests also act as carbon sinks by absorbing CO2. Environmentalists and governments from Norway to Brazil have for decades tried to stop deforestation, but they  have made limited headway.

Neither afforestation (planting trees) nor avoided deforestation (stopping trees from getting cut down) were part of the Kyoto climate agreement, largely because of opposition from enviros. They argued that forest protection could not be reliably monitored and verified and that offsets would allow polluters to avoid mending their ways.

Critics of forestry offsets worry about arcane concepts known as “leakage” (paying to save one forest only to have another one nearby cut down) and “additionality” (how do you know the forests would not have been saved anyway?). They’re right that if mismanaged, offsets could do more harm than good.

Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, which released a 28-page report attacking offsets last fall, said: “Offsetting does not lead to promised additional emissions cuts in developing countries while it delays essential structural change in the U.S. economy.”

But the politics of offsets have shifted in the last year or two, in part because of Horowitz’s persistent behind the scenes efforts. Early on, he enlisted the support of Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Matthai, the founder of the Green Belt Movement, which planted trees across Africa. Her fellow Nobel laureates Al Gore and Oscar Arias came around as well. A key turning point, in retrospect, came when Carter Roberts, the president and CEO of  the World Wildlife Fund U.S., spoke in favor of market mechanisms at an ADP event. The WWF had previously opposed offsets.

Last year, Horowitz and ADP — other members include Conservation International, Environmental Defense, NRDC, The Nature Conservancy among green groups, and PG&E, Marriott, Starbucks and Walt Disney among companies–developed “consensus principles” on forest offsets. They call for both public and private money to be steered to forestry protection.

Horowitz argues that the best way to overcome objections to offsets is to regulate forestry projects to insure that they are real, verifiable and long-lasting. Besides lobbying in Washington, ADP is developing a protocol to help poor communities seek financing to protect and monitor forests. “This allows indigenous groups to team up with NGOs, without hiring expensive lawyers they can’t afford,” he says.

Meanwhile, he explains, there are three categories of companies that can profit from forestry offsets.

If climate legislation passes, regulated utilities and their customers will save money by using offsets rather than shutting down coal or natural gas plants.

Branded consumer companies like Marriott, Disney and Dell, whose emissions are not regulated, use offsets to establish their green cred and burnish their reputations. (See my blogpost about Marriott and this press release from Disney, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and The Conservation Fund.)

Finally, a entire industry of project developers, carbon traders, verifiers and regulators has emerged to create and manage offsets. “There is profit all along that food chain,” Horowitz says, “and in my view that’s good.”

A native New Yorker, Horowitz designed large-scale projects around the world as an architect and became concerned about deforestation. He previously founded a nonprofit called Urbanists International, which provides design  and land planning services to developing countries, and was vice chair of Equator International, a forest carbon firm. He and his wife, Lynn,  own Rio Lago Ranch and Vineyard, which produces cabernet sauvignon grapes for the Clos du Bois Winery of Sonoma.

But his energies now are focused on forestry, with the goal of making it more profitable to preserve forests than it is to cut them down.

Thereby proving that your parents were wrong.

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Disclosure: I was paid in Copenhagen by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations to host a celebration of REDD.

In return, the Amazon dwellers simply agree not to cut down trees.

This deal—in which companies and governments pay people who pledge not to destroy rainforests—is the essence of a concept known as REDD, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.

REDD is an important element of the UN climate negotiations unfolding this week here in Copenhagen, as well as a vital – and potentially controversial – plank of the climate bills pending in Congress.

“We will only win this deforestation battle if we can find ways to make the forest worth more standing that they are when cut down,” says Virgilio Viana, direct of Fundacao Amazonas Sustentavel, which oversees the project in the Juma Preserve of the Amazon. Juma is a 1.8 million acre region—about the size of Delaware—which is 98% forested.

Today, I went to a briefing by Marriott about the Juma project and REDD. If REDD projects can be made to work, in a verifiable and lasting way, they can be potent weapons against climate change. [Disclosure: I am hosting an event this week sponsored by the Coalition of Rainforest Nations, which paid my way to Copenhagen and strongly backs REDD.]

The arguments for REDD are environmental and economic. Between 15% and 20% of the world’s carbon emissions come from cutting down forests, burning wood or peat. These forests are destroyed for timber or to make way for farming and ranching. Because of deforestation, Indonesia and Brazil are the No. 3 and 4 ranked all countries in carbon emissions. Deforestation causes more carbon emissions that the world’s transportation sector—a stunning fact, when you think of all the attention paid to (and money invested in) electric cars or fuels.

What Amazon deforestation looks like

The other appeal of REDD is that it’s cheap. REDD projects cost an estimated $5 t0 $15 to eliminate each ton of carbon emissions, far less than it costs to, say, substitute solar panels for coal plants. They can also be done quickly, compared to, say, the time it takes to permit and build a nuclear plant.

The Juma Project being touted by Marriott is a voluntary offset. No one requires hotel chains to reduce their carbon emissions. but Marriott has committed $2 million to the effort as part of its sustainability program. It also asks hotel guests to contribute $1 per night to offset their own carbon emissions when they stay in a Marriott  hotel.

Marriott’s contributions have, among other things, built the first school in one community. The Amazon foundation has also helped finance such alternative livelihoods as the harvesting of Brazil nuts, the development of fish farms and sustainable logging, where tress are planted as quickly as they are cut down. “It is quite moving to see lives being changed, while the rainforest is being preserved,” says Mari Snyder, who oversees Marriott’s sustainability work. (You can watch a Marriott video here about Juma and REDD.)  Even critics of offsets regard voluntary ones like this as benign.

But REDD will only have a major impact if offsets are incorporated into legally binding cap-and trade regulations like those being debated here in Copenhagen and in Congress.

This is where things can get sticky. Some critics—most prominently, Friends of the Earth—say offsets are dangerous gimmicks and  trading schemes are subject to abuse. REDD projects in particular are hard to measure and verify. One problem is described as “leakage”–the notion that if forests are protected in one place, rangers or farmers who want land will simply tear down trees elsewhere.

The other argument against REDD is that cheap overseas offsets will allow coal and oil companies in the U.S. to buy their way out of carbon controls, rather than reform their own practices.

I asked Glenn Hurowitz, who works for a coalition called Avoided Deforestation Partners, to respond to the criticisms. He said verification of forest projects had become easier with the democratization of satellite technology, like Google Earth. As for leakage, rules can  be written to prevent it by only allowing credits to go to  countries or large regions that agree to limit deforestation on a broad basis.

As a practical matter, Hurowitz said, without offsets like  REDD, passing a strong U.S. climate regulation bill will be  difficult if not impossible becausethe costs of reducing emissions without them would be much higher. (As much as 89% higher, an EPA analysis says.) “IF you didn’t have the inclusion of offsets, particularly forests, you would see weaker emissions caps,” he said.

The Avoided Deforestation Partners coalition includes carbon emitters like American Electric Power and Duke Energy and such big NGOs as Environmental Defense, The Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club. The coal burners like REDD because they’d rather pay for offsets that shut down their plants; the enviros like it because, done right, it works.

Two other interesting things to know about REDD:

First, REDD advocates say that protecting the  Amazon will help U.S. timber and agriculture interests who now compete with loggers and farmers who use deforested Brazilian land. Backers of REDD will use that argument to try to persuade senators from farm or timber states to support climate legislation—as a way to protect jobs in their home states.

Second, REDD is a form of what activists call climate justice. They argue that rich countries are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so they should  finance the solutions to the climate crisis. Under the REDD provisions, an estimated $12 to $14 billion in government and corporate money will be dedicated to forest protection.

This is part of what the Park City calls its “Environmental Commitment.” Right on every trail map, the resort says it “recognizes that the environment is one of our most valuable assets.” Now there’s a bold statement. It might be more attention-grabbing to say that  if we don’t do something about global warming soon, Park City will have the climate of, say, Phoenix, before too many decades go by.

But what does it mean for the ski industry to make an environmental commitment? Skiing requires chopping down big trees on beautiful mountains to make way for ski runs and slope-side second homes. It’s an utterly unnecessary pursuit that usually takes place far from population centers, requiring air travel or long car trips. It’s energy-intensive, too. Think of artificial snow-making, and all those steaming hot tubs.

Still, I love to ski. Just being in the mountains makes me happy. And skiing has been a great way for me to spend time over the years with my brothers and my daughters (that’s my older daughter, Sarah, who came with me this time.)

As a tree-hugging (not literally) skier hoping for insight into this conundrum, I have been reading an advance copy of Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, by Auden Schendler. Schendler is executive director of community and environmental responsibility at Aspen Skiing Company, a business known for its sustainability efforts.

I’m halfway through the book, and I’m enjoying it a great deal. Right up front, Schendler takes on those who tell him that the best thing that the Aspen ski resort and, for the matter, the entire town of Aspen could do for sustainability would be to shut down:

Certainly Aspen’s lifestyle is lavish. But then, so is the entire U.S. lifestyle. You’ve heard the stations before: we’re 5 percent of the world’s population, and we use 25 percent of the planet’s resources. Americans burn more fossil fuel per capita than any nation on earth…

So what do we do? Close down Aspen, then close down the United States? The U.S. is hugely wasteful compared to Europe…and actually, Europe is pretty bad compared to India…Do we shut down Paris?

In short there’s no way to draw the moral energy line in the sand showing which activities are OK and which are not.

Fair enough. So the more reasonable question for Aspen, Park City and every other business is: Are you doing as much as you can to be environmentally responsible?

Park City’s record is mixed in that regard. The resort says that it offsets 100% of its power consumption from renewable energy sources—a claim that is hard to verify, without knowing more detail, but let’s assume that it’s true. The resort’s fleet of snowcats is “powered entirely by biodiesel fuel.” One of the best things about staying in Park City area is the free, well-run public bus system which shuttles people around resorts, lodging and restaurants. Then there are those waterless urinals. You can read more at www.saveoursnow.net.

But much of this appears to be for show. On the mountain, you can eat chili in a paper bowl that is 100% compostable, but the bowls get thrown in with other trash, making the claim worthless. There’s lots of self-congratulation on the website, but no mention (that I could find) of the resort’s overall carbon footprint, or its goals.

And, as Schendler argues in his book, the most important measures of a company’s environmental commitment may be well its actions in the policy arena, because that’s where the climate change problem will be solved, or not. He writes:

Before businesses can effectively lobby for government action on climate, they need to have done something themselves or they lose their credibility and appear to be hypocrites. This may be the single most important reason businesses and individuals should implement policy reductions: so that their political case-making has more power and credibility.

This is a great point. Aspen measures up well in this regard—it filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in a lawsuit requiring EPA to regulate GHG emissions. It also joined a Greenpeace campaign against Kimberly Clark, the forest products firm. I’ve never heard of Park City doing anything like that.

More to the point, why don’t we hear more from the entire ski industry on the climate-change issue? They have databases of skiers—why not enlist their customers to support federal action? The same could be said for the travel industry. It’s not just ski areas, but beaches that are threatened by climate disruptions. Where are Marriott, Hilton, Starwood and the airlines when it comes to global warming policy? Actually, I know where the airlines are—they don’t want their emissions to be regulated. Marriott, by contrast, is taking steps to help preserve rainforests.

Unfortunately, only a handful of progressive companies, including Nike and Starbucks, have taken bold positions on the climate change issue. They’re part of a coalition called Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy, or BICEP.) Only when a lot more companies join them will the odds get better than we can truly save our snow.