Dr. Richard North of the EU Referendum sends word of this new revelation. North and Christopher Booker were the first to point out the money trail with Pachauri. Now the have followed the money on IPCC’s “Amazongate” all the way to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Here’s an excerpt from both.
Appearing in the Booker column is an account of how the “conservation” group WWF hopes to turn Amazonian trees into billions of dollars, all in the name of saving the planet. The background briefing on which Booker relied is posted below, detailing how the rainforests are to become a monstrous cash-making machine.
The Amazon – a “green gold-rush”
The WWF and other green campaign groups talking up the destruction of the Amazon rainforests are among those who stand to make billions of dollars from the scare. This “green gold-rush” involves taking control of huge tracts of rainforest supposedly to stop them being chopped down, and selling carbon credits gained from carbon dioxide emissions they claim will be “saved”.
Backed by a $30 million grant from the World Bank, the WWF has already partnered in a pilot scheme to manage 20 million acres in Brazil. If their plans get the go-ahead in Mexico at the end of the year, the forests will be worth over $60 billion in “carbon credits”, paid for by consumers in “rich” countries through their electricity bills and in increased prices for goods and services.
The prospect of a billion-dollar windfall explains the sharp reaction to the “Amazongate” scandal, in which the IPCC falsely claimed that up to 40 percent of the rainforest could be at risk from even a slight drop in rainfall.
Here, the IPCC was caught out again making unsubstantiated claims based on a WWF report. But unlike the “Glaciergate” affair where its claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was conceded to be an “error”, the IPCC stood firm on its Amazon claim, stating that the assertion was “correct”. What makes the difference is that there is no serious money locked into melting glaciers. Amazonian trees, however, are potentially worth billions.
In standing its ground, the IPCC was strongly supported by the WWF, and by Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist from the US Woods Hole Research Centre. Relying on an assiduously fostered reputation as a leading expert on the effects of climate change in the Amazon rainforests, Nepstad – who works closely with the WWF – posted on the Centre’s website a personal statement endorsing “the correctness of the IPCC’s statement”. Bizarrely, his own research failed in any way to substantiate the claim.
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Read the rest of this entry at the EU Referendum here
Also see the Booker column in the Telegraph
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Bones (10:39:07) :
ScientistForTruth (14:52:16) :
‘WWF is an extremely evil organization.’
“The founding Chairman Sir Peter Scott, was neither a Nazi or a big game hunter. In fact he was an accomplished naturalist, author, painter and sailor.”
You know exactly who I meant, so don’t be disingenuous. I never mentioned the founding ‘Chairman’. I’m talking about WWF’s ‘Founder-President’, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, who was most certainly a Nazi and a big game hunter: he was one of the founders of the WWF and its first president, from 1962-1976 in fact. He is known (officially by WWF) as WWF’s Founder-President. Check it out on WWF’s own website, which says ” WWF is deeply saddened following the announcement of the death of its Founder-President…Prince Bernhard was a driving force behind the creation of WWF in 1961, and served as the organisation’s first International President from 1961 to 1976.”
http://www.wwf.org.uk/article_search_results.cfm?uNewsID=752
Now if you check up on him, you will find he was a Nazi and big game hunter. You knew that all the time, of course: you just thought you could do a bit of whitewashing on WWF, I suppose, by dropping in a non-sequitur..
Thinking about it – the Japanese should be able to claim carbon credits.
They are well known for importing hardwoods from the Amazon and elsewhere. They use this wood in buildings and so sequester CO2 AND it means that the cleared forest can be used for crops to sequester MORE CO2.
They should be applauded for their efforts to reduce CO2!
This could be a good model for the WWF. If they chop down the forest but only sell the wood if used for construction, the cleared land can be used for cash crops or for biofuel production. An ideal solution to counter AGW as it actually removes more CO2 from the atmosphere than their current plans.
So we are putting carbon credits on the Amazon Rain forest.
Funny thing is the Amazon climate has absolutely no effect on climate to the northern hemisphere. So were is the net gain for companies to buy carbon credits in the northern hemisphere when it will not effect the climate where the carbon trading is produced?
Anticlimactic (18:00:05) :
Thinking about it – the Japanese should be able to claim carbon credits.
They are well known for importing hardwoods from the Amazon and elsewhere. They use this wood in buildings and so sequester CO2 AND it means that the cleared forest can be used for crops to sequester MORE CO2.
They should be applauded for their efforts to reduce CO2!
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It goes back a few years now but I seem to recall that one of the criticisms of the Japanese use of hardwood timber (which was a driving force for de-forestation at that time) was that they used the hardwood in the construction process rather than just in the construction. This wasted slow growing hardwood when faster growing softwood would have been fine since it was just trashed and burned once the building work was complete. Moving on with the development of the CO2 concern meme, if they still operate the same way it would seem that a large proportion of the timber (and therefore carbon) would not be sequestered at all.
However that probably would not stop claims for carbon credits.
I have a couple of trees and a bush or two I could protect. Wonder if someone will pay me to do it? Thinking about it I got a bin full of moss and thatch out of the grass today. That must be worth something surely if it gets buried?
Richard Telford (09:43:40) :
Wilson Flood (05:06:15) :
REDD is a mechanism to reduce carbon emissions from tropical deforestation, not to enhance carbon sinks. So it wouldn’t matter if tropical rainforest were not a carbon sink. And actually it is probably is a sink, see Simon Lewis’ recent paper in Nature.
GP (04:53:45) :
That’s a challange that will take more than a few minutes to type out. I was at the Klimaforum in Copenhagen in December (not the main event in the Bella Centre). Presentation on REDD at klimaforum were mainly from a left wing prospective and were almost uniformly hostile.
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Richard,
I think your point in the response to Wilson Flood is exactly one of the points that Dr. North was making. REDD, for good or otherwise, is meant to be deployed for the purpose of reducing deforestation. North makes the point that the way the funds seem to be deployed by the World Bank/WWF/et al appear to be avoiding that objective by seeking to ‘protect’ areas that are not currently the subject of any real risk and are unlikely to be at risk for some decades or indeed maybe never.
However, as a ‘source’ for an excuse to generate a very nice recurring revenue scheme (with virtually no costs or resource management liability and overhead) fully supported by BIG everything and primarily grounded on general taxation topped up by usage taxes in some way, any old bit of land that no one ever visits would do just fine.
In a way it is rather pleasing that some of the (presumably smaller) ‘concerned’ organisations have some inkling that things are not quite as clean as they might be. One wonders if this is mainly because they are not (yet?) in the rolling stock carrying the gravy. Perhaps they have spotted the ‘globalisation’ endemic in the policy and are still of the opinion that such a development is not such a good thing.
The thing that occurs to me is that foot soldiers in such organisations will always be left complaining that things are not right (they have their uses when doing so) whlst the more capable members will be recruited and subsumed into the larger players. After all most ‘leaders’ could not resist taking on more leadership.
I hope you can take on the challenge of a response about REDD. I’m sure that most here would welcome the opportunity to assess more than one angle of something that appears to be set to affect most of the world’s population one way or another – especially if the concept spreads globally.
This is not new, the WWF has a long record of trying to advance money making schemes in the UN. For instance, they tried to get the UN to declare all seamounts in international waters to be the sovereign territory of the WWF (basically making the WWF a government) and allowing it to collect taxes from fishing vessels fishing within 200 miles of each seamount (the Exclusive Economic Zone), and tolls from any cargo vessels travelling through their EEZ, taxes which the WWF would split with the UN, giving the UN sources of funding independent of donations from member countries.
Money is what the whole global warming thing is all about. The UN, ever since Reagan held US’s subscription money in order to force reform (repeated in 1994 under Gingrich’s congress and the Contract with America) at the UN, has sough ways to raise money to do what they want to do independently of the US.
When it is independent of US funds, and has sources of revenue independent of any nation, then the UN is in a position to militarily force its decisions on the US.
this is sadly to be expected – case of if there is money to be made someone will figure out how.
I am pleased to see it being exposed for what it is.
I have BLOGGED about it today:
Hailed as “the big new idea to save the planet from runaway climate change”, this set up a global fund to save vast areas of rainforest from the deforestation which accounts for nearly a fifth of all man-made CO2 emissions.
http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/03/measure-your-gullibility.html
Mike Lorrey (22:25:43)
WUWT 4/3/2003 Ad Hoc Group wants to run ad attacks
“Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to
organize researchers and use their donations to challenge
critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times”
However a non-profit group may not be needed :
Partnerships for Sustainable Development:
Partnerships database
http://webapps01.un.org/dsd/partnerships/public/search.do?dispatch=displayAdvanced
Search ‘Climate Institute’ for eg for the list of partnership projects.
This may also facilitate employment of the WWF volunteers globally for many years.
Climate Institute: Schneider on Board of Directors: Pachuri on Board of Advisors
I am not clear whether these are ‘microfinance’ or ‘capacity building’ projects, additional to the governance training projects funded by development Aid $. UN programs to alleviate poverty and attain Millenium Development Goals?
There are arguments for and against the preservation of trees. In the local farming context on the east coast of Australia, here ids a rather substantial contribution from one who knows the subject. A lot of material is in common with the Amazon, but one has to weight the pros and cons according to criteria devised over long periods of observation – not from knee jerk rections in a blip on the historical record.
From my friend Viv Forbes, who, like me, was in big mining (he was high up in finance) before going farming.
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/grass-trees-climate-food.pdf
Joe (18:07:28) :
So were is the net gain for companies to buy carbon credits in the northern hemisphere when it will not effect the climate where the carbon trading is produced?
The only gain is to Uncle Al’s net worth.
Carbon trading isn’t about reducing the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, it’s about wealth redistribution — from our pockets to theirs, with no change to anything else, and nothing to show for it except the transfer of funds.
Mike Lorrey (22:25:43) :
Can you document any of the your first paragraph?
If they were sincere, they would refuse to sell any carbon credits based on the rain forest. Sadly, the big environmentalist groups have become that which they once might have protested: money-grubbing organizations that say the right words, but whose real goal is only growing their little bureaucratic empires.
From the times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7069946.ece
An unkind person might point to the similarities with colonisation, except in this case the WWF would be doing the morally suspect stuff that western governments could not countenance from private corporations (tax free). I am not sure the natives would see the difference between being shot by the WWF for using their own resources, or the east india company shooting them for using their resources. The WWF is unlikely, however, to leave them any infrastructure.
I don’t see a lot of western interest in making sure the wrong people don’t get shot. There was not a single reference to human rights in the article. Will WWF start logging, as many people point out here a forest is only sinking carbon if somebody is logging it. Will they then prevent the forest from being logged by irresponsible loggers (i.e. those without a WWF accreditation)? They are surely walking into very dangerous territory here, especially with such close links to the UN.
pesadilla (15:37:16) :
You can see now, how and why the WWF had such a big imput into the IPCC 4th report. It doesen’t take a genius to add 2 and 2 together, it’s just a case of working out which is the dominant partner in this scam. I hope that this information finds its way to senator Inhofe because i am sure he will be able to use it against the EPA.
REPLY:
I think Senator Inhofe has someone busy reading WUWT. Many of the ideas I have seen here make it straight over to his web site. His staff would be crazy not to let Anthony and his crew here do their work for them…. The ideas are even subject to very rigorous “peer review”
Jimbo (18:16:20) :
…….
“As for Metals substitute, there is already tons of research out there on using hemp, rubber, bamboo,and host of other tree-based alternatives to minimize or eliminate the usage of metals/minerals.”
I can see it now, bamboo skyscrapers, rubber planes, hemp satellites and wooden surgical equipment. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Actually I think obsidian is sometimes used for scalpels
“Obsidian is still used today for its precision. It is carefully carved into the blade of a scalpel used in some cardiac surgeries. The uniqueness of this natural glass results in a cleaner cut that causes less tissue damage. The end result is less scar tissue and a faster healing process. “
http://www.beadage.net/glossary/index.php?term=obsidian
Perhaps we should use it for constructing our modern guillotines.