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.
But, but but… that’s against international law the UN says so (at least for illegal squatters on protected green belt land).
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/un-adviser-denounces-dale-farm-evictions-2354784.html
The United Nations is used more and more to give a veneer of legitimacy to criminal actions around the world (including what The New Forests is doing), and in the process, it has lost its purpose, if there ever was one (besides giving a veneer or legitimacy to criminal actions).
The UN needs to be dismantled.
A toast to the purveyors, and worshipers, of CAGW.
==========================================================
A Toast
Lola Ridge
Not your martyrs anointed of heaven—
The ages are red where they trod—
But the Hunted—the world’s bitter leaven—
Who smote at your imbecile God—
A being to pander and fawn to,
To propitiate, flatter and dread
As a thing that your souls are in pawn to,
A Dealer who traffics the dead;
A Trader with greed never sated,
Who barters the souls in his snares,
That were trapped in the lusts he created,
For incense and masses and prayers—
They are crushed in the coils of your halters;
’Twere well—by the creeds ye have nursed—
That ye send up a cry from your altars,
A mass for the Martyrs Accursed;
A passionate prayer from reprieval
For the Brotherhood not understood—
For the Heroes who died for the evil,
Believing the evil was good.
To the Breakers, the Bold, the Despoilers,
Who dreamed of a world over-thrown…
They who died for the millions of toilers—
Few—fronting the nations alone!
—To the Outlawed of men and the Branded,
Whether hated or hating they fell—
I pledge the devoted, red-handed,
Unfaltering Heroes of Hell!
This has clearly been going on for some time. The level of corruption in the local police/politicos must be horrendous if, when two police officers turn up to the village in this story to arrest someone in April last year, the rest of the village are motivated to beat them to death.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201004290548.html
I can not imagine the horrors the people of the area have suffered.
Do we know the name of the 8yo boy who was murdered? Lest they forget.
More here… http://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin/145/Uganda.html
“According to Mpamira, the population is suffering night attacks and as a result most residents have resorted to sleeping in the bushes. He also added that “we doubt whether the intention of the company is to plant trees and protect the environment,” because “since 2005, they have been cutting down trees which we had preserved for commercial timber.”
Eucalyptus planting is a very bad idea in africa:
1) It’s a non-native species
2) Nothing will growth underneath
3) They burn like torches when on fire due to the eucalyptus oil.
“As long as we continue planting these trees in watershed areas and in our forests, we will continue to experience water shortage and it will even become a bigger problem as climate change hits us,” said Maathai, who won the Nobel Prize for her tree planting campaign.
http://www.climatemediapartnership.org/reporting/stories/eucalyptus-trees-deadly-for-africa-nobel-laureate/
Anthony, you may be interested in a related story, published today, from GlobalResearch, titled “Bolivia and The Protection of the Amazon”,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FUE20110925&articleId=26764
where the same U.N. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) program is used as a tool for “Green Imperialism” in an effort to control the resources of Bolivia.
In my opinion this whole thing does not have anything to do with global warming except for the fact that the company which is doing business there is by chance doing business in industry branch related to global warming. Should it be an oil company, what happened would be probably the same, it would just be the “other group” crying about it.
Situation in human rights is notoriously bad in Africa, killing or stealing other’s property is much more common there than in Europe or US and it is often even supported by local govermnents.
Even in civilized countries it is considered normal to evict squatters should you find them to occupy your property.
I’m by no means saying what has happened there is right. I’m just saying I doubt it has anything to do with AGW. And that if we want to comment on what’s happening there we should first try to understand the situation in which the whole continent is and circumstances under which this particular accident happened.
Who is buying credits from these guys?
Must be some fools in Euroland . . Obama has dropped global warming from his regime’s agenda
Frosty says:
September 25, 2011 at 5:55 am
According to the NYTimes story, the boy’s name was Friday.
Can they claim extra carbon credits for the people they kill?
I thought it was the people who denied global warming who were killing people by the millions and needed to be tried for their crimes against humanity.
Mike79879 says:
September 25, 2011 at 6:14 am
And now Bolivia has granted the planet the same rights as the girl buned up in the village.
A weed is a species that grows, reproduces, and spreads in diverse conditions; e.g. homo sapiens. These traits are not a bad thing. It means you have a hardy species. Nature thrives on competition and cooperativity.
I read somewhere a long time ago, the two species of eucalyptus we have in California are the only two with no commercial use out of the many different kinds in Oz. Blue gum is one of the ones we have if I recall correctly. It turns out there is a lot more to the story. I just found this from Cal State Stanislaus, seemingly definitive:
http://library.csustan.edu/bsantos/section1.htm#FROM DOWN UNDER IT
The promise of eucalyptus in California was based on the old virgin forests of Australia. This was a mistake as the young trees being harvested in California could not compared in quality to the centuries-old eucalyptus timber of Australia. It reacted differently to harvest. The older trees didn’t split or warp as the infant California crop did. There was a vast difference between the two, and this would doom the California eucalyptus industry.
From Fall 1909 to Spring 1910, 23,000 acres in California were planted in eucalyptus, mostly red and blue gums…. It was found that eucalyptus wood could not be seasoned properly to do the things that had been anticipated. Tests of seasoning were performed and processes were structured for proper curing, but there was a great dissatisfaction with these. Eucalyptus wood warped, cracked, twisted, and became too tough once cured. The yields that were projected it was found would take too many years to be realized.
Lumber mills using exclusively eucalyptus timber closed. Furniture manufacturers moved back East. Plantation trees were sold for firewood. Pharmacologists dropped their support which meant that eucalyptus would not be used in most medicines.
There are between 70 to 100 species growing in California today.
The ‘two’ species I’d heard of are probably the red and blue gums so widely planted above. However, the point is made that many species were imported and none proved to be commercially viable except as ground cover and ornamental purposes.
And there is more regarding the fire hazard:
http://library.csustan.edu/bsantos/section3.htm#A Fire
H.H. Biswell, Professor of Forestry and Conservation at the University of California, Berkeley made a prophetic statement too on March 1973:
“When eucalyptus waste catches fire, an updraft is created and strong winds may blow flaming bark for a great distance. I think the eucalyptus is the worst tree anywhere as far as fire hazard is concerned. If some of that flaming bark should be flown on to shake roofs in the hills we might have a fire storm that would literally suck the roofs off the houses. People might be trapped.”
Conclusively the 1990 freeze led to the 1991 firestorm. The eucalyptus got the blame for spreading the fire as seen in this San Francisco Chronicle article with the headline “Eucalyptus trees getting blamed for East Bay fire.”
Eucalyptus globulus, the tall, aromatic trees dropped yet another notch in public esteem in the great East Bay hills fire of 1991. Like giant matchsticks and loaded with freeze-dried fuel, the East Bay’s eucalyptus trees acted like a torch that spread the conflagration by exploding into flames almost instantly — Experts who otherwise couldn’t agree on whether the fire began by arson, official foul-up or act of God declared that the Australian imports bore heavy blame. And while her press aide derided the trees as “weeds,” Berkeley Mayor Lori Hancock proposed chain-sawing thousands of them in hopes of forever preventing a repeat of the deadly events of Oct. 20, 1991.
And what do they say in Oz about the trees?
The native home of the eucalyptus, Australia, has eucalyptus forest fires generally every year. In January 1994 a large fire broke out near Sydney and was in the international news. This was said about the eucalyptus:
“The explosive nature of the eucalyptus and the abundance of fuel produces a very intense fire that ‘crowns’ — leaps from tree top to tree top . . . The fierce blazes have been stoked by the highly volatile oils of the eucalyptus tree, which vaporize under intense radiative heat as the fire approaches and explode, with flames sometimes towering as high as 230 feet.”
Another report:
One reason Australia is so fire prone is the eucalyptus have aromatic oils in their leaves that adds to flammability . . . Eucalyptus trees are one of the world’s most inflammable trees. It bursts into flames when fire reaches a certain temperature because there is rapid vaporization of the oils and that causes rapid ignition.366
In 1962, the Australian Forestry and Timber Bureau published “Control Burning in Eucalyptus Forests.” It said that controlled burning does not kill eucalyptus trees, but it burns off the litter that collects on the forest floor which is 10 tons per acre. It recommends controlled burning every five years.
These days, such a policy would be regarded as madness. Controlled burning? What would CARB (CA Air Resources Board) say about that? Fireplaces now illegal and all. We are barely allowed to do conduct controlled burns in the Sierra Nevada. CO2phobia is mass hysteria.
The trees may not survive in California for long. A beetle form Chile is now killing them, mainly in SoCal. If these beetles are able to lay eggs under the bark of other trees, they might be considered yet another weed. However, predators are naturally limited by reduced numbers of prey.
The Greens are not predatory, but parasitic. Most parasites try not to kill their host, but the Greens are coming close to crossing that line. Too many parasites trying to feed off of too few hosts. What will they do? The next few years will be interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMay_you_live_in_interesting_times).
Grrr. Wish I could edit my previous post to fix the simple formatting error.
The quoted text stops before “And what do they say in Oz…”, and resumes in the following paragraph. That quoted section ends before my final three paragraphs starting, “These days, such a policy would be regarded as madness.”
The stories with parallels to Khmer Rouge are only a matter of time. From Communism uber alles to Global Warming is a short jump, maybe a hop.
Fred from Canuckistan says:
September 25, 2011 at 7:05 am
Who is buying credits from these guys?
Must be some fools in Euroland . . Obama has dropped global warming from his regime’s agenda
The European Union is enforcing an ‘Emissions Trading Scheme’ as now is Australia. There is money to be made from it so get rid of these villages. What is human life when a multinational can make money?
It reminds me of ‘The Clearances’ in Scotland – rich people from distant lands want to make money and don’t care who they destroy to get it.
The case of the boy being burned to death in Uganda should be the FIRST question asked of every leading ‘warmist’ – they should be asked to provide a scientific explanation for what is being done in their name.
Kasuha says:
September 25, 2011 at 6:49 am
Even in civilized countries it is considered normal to evict squatters should you find them to occupy your property.
Sort of like what happened in America and Australia, where the native populations were found to be “squatting” and were forcibly removed by the governments of the day. Now we are seeing the same thing happening around the world as REDD is used as an excuse to remove native population from their homelands to make way for corporate takeovers of their traditional homelands.
Planting eucalyptus of course makes very good sense in this situation, as it prevents the native population from moving back to reclaim their land, because their food crops will no longer grow once eucalyptus as taken hold. The ultimate aim of the REDD program being to exterminate native populations through starvation as a means to gaining ownership of their lands and resources, while at the same time reducing human populations in the third world.
Carbon Credits and REDD are only steps in a long, very carefully planned and crafted campaign.
What they are doing in Africa is mere practice
for when they come for your home and car,
which will buried to protect the environment.
You will be relegated to a mud hut,
‘made from ecologically approved local materials’.
This is of course long after your guns have been taken.
8 year old Ugangan boy was burnt alive when thousands were disposed to make way for carbon credits.
Of course hunger and food riots due to ethanol production and political constraints on oil production have already killed many indirectly, but if true, this tragedy is the first that can be directly attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gas climate change.
Leon Brozyna says:
September 25, 2011 at 2:56 am
Well said. As soon as Gore and the eco-loons have power we will hear something that we heard from the Soviets: “There is nothing wrong with Marxism, the Soviet Union is just an imperfect realization of it.”
This is the logical conclusion of the 10:10 ‘No Pressure’ video and philosophy.
Never, ever, ever forget this day when children were killed in the name of ‘climate change’. And nver forgive a single ‘activist’ who does not immediately sincerely and completely condemn the atrocity carried out in their name and as a direct result of their advocacy.
This horrific reality, so reminiscent of human horrors of the past, was inevitable once the rich were given an easy cash-grab by the politicians. The AGW nonsense was just the method of justifying yet another perversion of human laws so that those with major resources and contacts could squeeze more wealth out of the have-nots.
This sort of stuff makes my blood boil. And I agree we need to make a fuss now, for it will indeed spread, and before you know it your house will be in the way of a new “Wildlife Corridor.”
The heartless always have some “improvement” which sounds right, in their Ivory Tower. I’m sure “Ethnic Cleansing” sounded as reasonable to some as “Carbon Credits” now sounds to Gore.
In the end this sort of behavior always comes back to haunt those who allow it. Unfortunately it often hurts “the second and third generation,” and the fatcats themselves seemingly get away with murder.
The Cherokee “Trail of Tears” may have seemed wise to some in Dixie at the time, but a whole nation of Cherokee friends would have been better, when Sherman came marching south burning Dixie, during the lifetimes of some who saw the Cherokee depart.
The Highlanders were Great Britain’s best troops, but all their homes were burned down to make way for sheep, during the “Clearances.” Along came the Crimean War, and no Highlanders enlisted. When asked why, a great old man replied, “You burned down our homes and scattered our families, as sheep were more profitable. Now let your damn sheep fight for you.”
Call it Karma, or call it reaping-what-you-sow, evil does come home to roost. However it isn’t worth waiting fifty years, if we can halt it right now. .
The first step in reducing population size in the third world was the EPA’s ban of DDT. That was in 1972 or 4, I think, and has killed 50 or 60 million people so far. The EPA spokesperson said the ban was for political reasons. He was right, there was no science to back it up. Now they are stepping it up by evicting, killing residents and destroying villages.