If action is not taken soon to reforest large parts of the Earth, global warming could get out of control and further discussions about reducing carbon emissions will be irrelevant. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change's focus on carbon emissions had led politicians and green organisations to dismiss the vital role of global reforestation in reducing global warming. The ecological priority for combating global warming is not, as suggested by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the reduction in greenhouse emissions, but reforestation.
Poor and industrialising countries will never agree to global policies to combat global warming unless these policies are formulated on a just and equitable basis - ie in which the different contribution each country has made to global warming since the start of the industrial revolution is taken into account. The basis of global ecological equity is that each country must balance its historical carbon budget so that carbon emissions equal the amount of carbon absorbed through photosynthesis. This means that most of the over-industrialised nations, which are carbon debtors, will have to carry out wholesale reforestation, whilst the poor-industrialising countries, which are carbon creditors, will be able to go on releasing carbon emissions whilst they develop and eradicate poverty.
The proposal for global, national and local carbon cycle budgets may seem somewhat bizarre but, in a number of respects, it is merely a substitution for monetary-based budgets. The advantage of a carbon budget is that whilst money is capable of astronomic growth which will eventually lead to the destruction of the Earth's ecology, carbon is rooted in, and thus limited by, the Earth's natural processes. Whilst money is infinite, carbon is finite. Whilst money knows no standards (whether gold, dollar, or yen), carbon can be fixed by the concentration of atmospheric carbon and the scale of the Earth's forest cover needed to maintain climatic stability.
In a sustainable green world, carbon budgets would replace monetary budgets; a living economy (based primarily on trees) would replace a dead economy (based on fossil fuels); and sustainable wood economies would replace an unsustainable global economy. Carbon would be a green currency in comparison to ecocidal currencies such as petro-dollars, the yen or gold. There is no such thing as a steady state economy, only a steady state climate. A steady state climate can be built only on carbon not cash. Just as economists meticulously measure the demand and supply sides of a monetary economy to promote economic growth, so greens will have to do the same for the Earth's carbon cycle if they are to protect the Earth's life support system.
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