From Wikipedia:
One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Bến Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.”The quote was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
In a truly bizarre parallel, the New York Times writes:
“They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”
…
But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.
The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations.
The company involved, New Forests Company, grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad. Its investors include the World Bank, through its private investment arm, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.
In 2005, the Ugandan government granted New Forests a 50-year license to grow pine and eucalyptus forests in three districts, and the company has applied to the United Nations to trade under the mechanism. The company expects that it could earn up to $1.8 million a year.
But there was just one problem: people were living on the land where the company wanted to plant trees. Indeed, they had been there a while.
“He was a policeman for King George,” Mr. Bakeshisha said of his father, who served with British forces during World War II in Egypt.
All of this, for something not worth a nickel in America anymore…
Note the flatlined final price of 5 cents per ton of CO2…
…because the Chicago Carbon Exchange closed, as nobody wanted to buy carbon credits that had no tangible value.
And yet people are being burned out of their homes in Africa to plant trees for carbon credits. It is madness.
In the meantime, it appears the existing trees are responding to increased CO2, so planting new stands may not even be needed:
Forests in many regions are becoming larger carbon sinks thanks to higher density, U.S. and European researchers say in a new report.
In Europe and North America, increased density significantly raised carbon storage despite little or no expansion of forest area, according to the study, led by Aapo Rautiainen of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and published in the online, open-access journal PLoS One.
As the Eucalyptus isn’t a native tree to Africa I can predic that these plantations will grown like weeds and soak up all the ground water the invasive root systems can find. If people want to see how Eucalyptus trees grow as an intrduced species then go to Ethiopia. Eucalyptus is spreading like a rash and decimating ground water reserves. It does however produce nice long straight trunks which are used in building houses.
See this.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/armed-troops-burn-down-homes-kill-children-to-evict-ugandans-in-name-of-global-warming.html
As reported, this is a tragic story that also includes the death of an eight year old boy who was burned to death in one of the homes they destroyed while the villagers were in a church service.
The boy was ill and his mother had gone to another village to get medicine while he slept. She returned to find her home and son in ashes.
Madness doesn’t begin to describe this atrocity.
It make perfect sense if you just live in the UN’s opposite-world, where up is down, help is hurt, bad is good, etc.
At least they don’t have peace keeping troops raping children in Africa, oh wait….
I have sent this story to all of the Labor and Green politicians in Australia that I can get email addresses for to show them what is being done NOW in preparation for the carbon tax and subsequent ETS they are about to vote in favour of.
Look for the names behind REDD. The super rich using the environment to become even richer. Officials paid to look the other way. Fortunes built stealing traditional lands from the poorest of the poor.
All in the name of helping in planet. The came to do good, and they did very well indeed.
Episodes like this demonstrate why it is not unreasonable to use the term “Enviro-Nazis.” Sceptics can stop this by continuing to expose the man-made global warming fraud. This is why sceptical scientists will in the future be the recipients of the Noble Peace Prize and other praise and honours (it will be like the final scene in the original Star Wars). Sceptical scientists are like Sparticus. Roll on the shale gas revolution. Cheap power for the 3rd world and the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of industrialisation that the 1st world enjoys. The 3rd world should not be a place that is kept as a backwater so that latte sipping 1st world greenies can feel happy that that their lifestyles are ‘carbon-offset’ and that there are still “untouched wilderness areas” and offbeat places for them to go to for holidays.
All climate alarmist should hang their misguided heads in shame.
One can only shake one’s head in the madness that Global Warming campaign has become.
[snip] fraudsters the lot of ’em!
This typifies the warped thinking that comes with AGW. Burn a village, destroy a community release CO2 in the process and then plant trees which are not even native to the region to soak up the CO2.
There is no logic to this. Plus it demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the environment. Whenever a non-indigenous species is introduced to an established Eco system it is usually a disaster. Japanese knotweed, the grey squirrel, here, rabbits in Australia are three examples I can think of off the top of my head. I am certain there will be others
Any excuse to get the cash!
Eucalyptus burns like—well wildfire.
Stop carbon Credits Now.
Eucalyptus is spreading like a rash and decimating ground water reserves.
And all that water gets transpired into the atmosphere as water vapour. Affecting the local climate and even the regional climate, and because of the way surface temperatures are determined the most quoted measure of global climate,
On the same topic, Brazil plans to save the Amazon forest by feeding grain to cattle with the result,
The implications for global food prices could be profound.
China, Europe and the Middle East are Brazil’s main buyers and
a couple percentage points variation in its output of soy,
beef, sugar and coffee could send market prices reeling.
The world’s poor being the ones who suffer.
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFS1E78C1NO20110923
This is a rich field, I live in southern OZ and am in my seventh decade. The last twelve months saw a decade long drought break. Eucalypt’s are indeed a weed, this year Oz saw our gum trees flowering and seed continuously most trees doubled in size and weight. Oz turned green with all the other plants and native grasses going bonzo. I have seen nothing like this in my life and have a gut feeling that OZ sucked in more CO2 than we have ever produced in the last two hundred years.
That would agree with the finding that forests are responding well to the increase in CO2.
I live on forty acres of semi forested land and am spending an inordinate amount of time killing the weeds called gum trees that are popping up like mushrooms.
If my memory serves me correct a NASA program showed a 6% increase in bio-mass that is a huge intake of CO2 and shows beyond doubt that the flora have been starved of food until now.
As for the clever Dicks making money from the carbon credit scam let us not forget who they are and what they are up too. Some time in the near future we may have to remind them of their behaviour and even prosecute them for their crimes against humanity.
Truly terrible. It just goes to show what messianic certainty does for you.
Next time I’m called a ‘denier’ I shall accept it as a badge of honour.
I really do think we would be so much better off WITHOUT the UN. Then people like Pachauri can go back to laying sleepers and rails for which he is much better qualified. They could use Al Gore as ballast?
Having scrapped the UN it will be time to scrap bio fuels, wind farms, carbon credits, most politicians, all champagne socialists and the warmest scientists[?] who have done so much to drag this planet to its knees!
Across the planet, Al Gore and his minions in and out of government will hold out their hands to show that they are clean. “It’s not us who burned that poor child,” they’ll protest; “Blame the big bankers.” Yet it is their insane schemes that bring such events about.
In that preceding post about the resignation, I had the chance to read the Bishop Hill piece, which led me, in turn, to another piece about how the skeptics were winning in the science of global warming, which then led in turn to an article in Mother Jones, which found that it was WUWT who was responsible for coining the term “Climategate”. This, of course, got me to looking over some of the early writings and findings here on WUWT on the emails and other files. You could say (I know it’s a stretch) that an eight year old child was burned to death, all for the sake of the likes of M. Mann, P. Jones, K. Trenberth et al, who were more concerned about their image than about true science. And then there were the whitewash “investigations” that cleared everyone.
They like their image of a polar bear on a lone ice floe; how about hanging around their necks the image of a devastated mother and the story of a child burned to death all for the sanctimonious and self-righteous environmentalists.
More cuts to the left-liberal warmistas’ arts.
Of Nowhereisland and Erewhon.
…-
“Olympic Arctic art project deserves to sink”
“Spending £500,000 – and considerable energy – on Nowhereisland to drag six tonnes of Arctic rock to the UK for the Olympics is wrong”
“Just what was the Arts Council thinking when it agreed back in 2009 to hand over £500,000 to the artist Alex Hartley in order for him and 18 volunteers to create Nowhereisland?
The creative idea itself is actually rather captivating: find an Arctic island that has recently been exposed by melting ice and then break off some rocks to form a new “island nation” which can then be transported to the waters off the UK in time for the 2012 Olympics.
During its conception, Hartley billed it as a “travelling embassy” intended to highlight issues such as climate change and land ownership. Here’s how his website explains it:”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/sep/22/olympic-arctic-art
…-
“Erewhon by Samuel Butler (England, 1872)”
“Erewhon (an anagram of ‘nowhere’, the literal translation of ‘utopia’) is a remote kingdom, not on any map, which the narrator claims to have discovered in his travels. In many respects, life there is not dissimilar to contemporary Western civilization – there is a monarchy, lawyers, judges, prisons, money, rich and poor – and at first sight the inhabitants appear healthy and contented.
However, it soon becomes apparent that duplicity is rife, and there are in actual fact two conflicting religions, two banking systems, etc. Illness is treated as a crime and criminal behaviour treated with sympathy.
Their once sophisticated industrial know-how has been deliberately abandoned in favour of very basic machinery. As it becomes clear that their bizarre rule are just exaggerations of common Western practices, the book becomes a dystopia of biting satire against contemporary mores.”
http://www.utopianfiction.com/19th.html
I cannot wait for those astute environmental stewards in Berkeley to pass legislation mandating “Fair Trade Carbon Credits” for the city. I can see the wording of the bill now, “we will only buy carbon credits from suppliers that are certified to meet the highest environmental and labor standards.” Then the City Council of Berkeley will issue a press release stating “This is a victory for what’s known as the fair trade movement. The City of Berkeley will only consume legally obtained carbon credits that are certified to compensate the producers at a fair price.”
Not a surprise, not an unintended consequence.
Like all the other aspects of the evil Gramscian project, “global warming” is DESIGNED to enrich the rich and kill the poor.
I have been angry for a long time.
It is good to see this anger spreading here (a place I have also been for a long time).
“New Forests Pty Limited, a specialist investment management and advisory services firm, announces it has reached agreement on the sale of a minority equity position in the company to Generation Investment Management.
…
“Generation Investment Management, created in 2004, is a leading fund management firm focused on researching and investing in companies who create long term competitive advantage through their orientation to sustainable business. The firm was founded by Managing Partner David Blood and Al Gore who acts as Chairman of the company.
http://www.newforests-us.com/news/pdf/press/20080430_generation_investment.php
April 30, 2008
Leon, I couldn’t have put it any better. Somehow I don’t think that even with a child’s blood on their hands they will admit that they are lying through their teeth.
These people are indeed on a war of extermination of life itself. Where eucalyptus are grown, nothing else will ever grown again.
I read this the other day, and dropped it in Tips with the comment that it is very much like “Blood Diamonds”. Where there is money and power to be acquired at the expense of the penniless and powerless, be assured that some one will justify any means to do so. Add to that the “moral” imperative of “saving the planet” from the ravages of CO2, and you have a recipe for great evil. HSBC, and the others involved in this and similar (as yet undiscovered ) atrocities should be brought to justice in the same way Bin Laden was.
If they go unpunished, they will surely continue to perpetrate such horror, and it’s only a matter of time till it reaches your town and your house.