But there is a sharp line between the mass of trees inside the scheme, home to hundreds of elephants, giraffes, buffalo and other wildlife, and the expanse of scrub beyond it, where charcoal burners and subsistence agriculture have devoured the forest.
It’s usually not billionaire capitalists devouring the world’s forests. It’s poor people with poor people lifestyles doing so.
Which gives us an interesting plan. We here in Europe are so rich that we’re using less land each year. The wilds out there are depopulating. So, we need economic growth in all those poor places so that the same happens there.
Grow the economy to save nature….
All these countries are depopulating anyway. They have all moved to Europe.
Just two years ago, the survival of these trees – a crucial elephant habitat – was the basis of a multibillion dollar carbon boom that touched almost every large-scale forest on Earth,
Fuck the elephants, where’s our money?
As we have a wildfires issue in bits of rural Europe, clearly the solution is move the subsistence farming there.
Thus Migrants should be allocated an acre or 2 of remote scrubland, not set up in luxury city hotels.
The Guardian claims to have proved that the market for carbon offsets was bullshit.
Now it’s whining that companies aren’t wasting money on it any more!!!
Netflix and Shell were among the companies that bought millions of credits from Kasigau. The market reached more than $2bn (£1.5bn), propelled by a wave of enthusiasm for offsets as a solution to global heating and biodiversity loss. Each credit represented a tonne of CO2 that was not released into the atmosphere from deforestation, theoretically cancelling out emissions from flying, fashion, food and fossil fuels.
So the theory is, if you get on a plane you should also pay African tribesmen to plant trees (it’s ok, you can trust people you don’t know in some village in Africa to do only the right thing). Strangely, this ritual offering turned out not to appease Gaia
more than 90% of offsets did not represent genuine carbon reductions, according to independent research published by journals including Science, PNAS and Conservation Biology. Another paper, published in Science last month, reinforced the finding that there were deep flaws in the Verra system, and another is expected in the coming months. The Washington-based NGO says two of the previous studies have been “discredited” and declined to comment on the latest Science study.
But remember, The Science is settled! There’s a version of Gell-Mann amnesia effect where Gorbal Worming adherents completely forget all the discredited scams and humiliatingly failed predictions of Global Warmasses past. Btw Prince Charles says we only have 96 months to save the planet (starting 2009).
But they can’t be wrong because they’re Good People™!
“if you get on a plane you should also pay African tribesmen to plant trees (it’s ok, you can trust people you don’t know in some village in Africa to do only the right thing)”
Most of the people who bought the carbon offsets along with their ‘plane tickets don’t really care, they just feel social pressure to look like they care.
So as long as carbon offsets were assumed to work, everything was fine; millennials could still fly to Marrakesh to get their Instagram photos; they just had to pay a bit extra on their airline tickets for the carbon offset (and because it was just social pressure rather than government compulsion, us sensible blokes didn’t have to pay it; great).
But this sort of thing being reported in the Guardian blows it apart, because if their crowd can no longer believe in the carbon offset, so it no longer protects you from the social disapproval.
The big questions is whether enough people will shift their views and just stop caring, so that the social disapproval of flying collapses (the shift in views is happening, but will it include the muppets who currently buy carbon offsets?), or will they have to come up with another form of protection?
They’ll come up with another form. That tailor who makes the Emperor’s clothes isn’t idle.
Actually the tailor already has: it’s called Gaza. Exhibit A: the cabbage patch doll. Note that it’s not called Sudan.
I must admit I find the call for ‘the world’ to intervene in Sudan entertaining.
Of course if you sent good old Kitchener and his maxim guns back there to sort it out, the do-gooders would be shrieking even louder.
Prince Charles says we only have 96 months to save the planet
Sadly his son is spouting the same bollocks at COP whatever it is in the Brazilian boondocks.
Imperialism fails because the underlying requirements don’t exist.
E.g., you aren’t going to electrify sub-Saharan Africa until the people get property rights and rule of law. Which happened under colonialism. It’s not under thugocracies.
They had it in South Africa. Which is devolving under the thugs-in-charge. So South Africa is LOSING their electrification.
Charcoal burners and subsistence farmers can’t afford European decadence.
Funny you should say that. I was reading of a plan to put a fibre optic cable across the middle of Africa, approximately along the Equator. They have this idea that they can use undersea cable type tech which means they don’t need intermediate power sources. I do hope potential investors don’t mind losing their shirts…
What’s the fucking point in that? The whole place goes cloudy at the same time. It’s what the Equator is famous for.