Ultimately, until the standing forest is worth more than what
it's cleared for, large-scale conservation is probably a losing
fight. This is potentially where the international carbon market
comes in. The Bush administration has done a good job of
convincing Americans that the Kyoto Protocol has failed (even
though its effects cannot be measured yet). The little secret
they hope no one will notice is that the global carbon market,
non-existent two years ago, has already generated $30 billion in
trades. The value of the carbon stored on an acre of Amazon
forest is already more than most of the things people clear
forest for. All of a sudden lots of companies with real money to
invest are figuring out how to buy forest carbon, despite the
fact that there are officially no rules for trading it in the
European or Kyoto Protocol markets. Until only a few years ago,
Brazil was solidly against even talking about forests in climate
negotiations. Now it has one of the proposals on the table for
how forests can get int