REDD Herring

Dying of Consumption

Just as the fossil fuel nations have already consumed the easiest oil and gas resources and are now scraping the bottom of the barrel, reaching into ever more difficult and dangerous areas, so also are we forcing our way into ever more remote places as we suck the life out of the biosphere. Concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Devising ever more cunning and devious ways of asset stripping the Earth and our fellow human beings. Destroying genuinely sustainable ways of life and replacing them with the here now, throw tomorrow uncertainty of modern Western consumer atomisation. Blaming the poor for our greed. Turning a private profit from destroying the common heritage of humanity.

Carbon Cowboys Draw Up New Plans to Eliminate Indians

REDD Monitor has produced a list of the top ten worst climate cons being perpetrated against defenceless communities in the name of "saving" the environment from the consequences of our Western fossil fuel addiction.

By way of example, a project in the Amazon region threatens the Guarani people by shutting them off from the forest that is their very means of subsistence, ignoring the fact that, as film-maker Paul Kell explains:

“These tribes are not the reason our ecosystem is being threatened, but they are now being made scapegoats and are actually going to prison for it. As is often the case, hastily (and insanely profitable) laws are put in place to appease the collective conscience, when in fact, the real criminals behind crimes against Nature are being rewarded with unheralded growth and prosperity. Such is progress.”

Not What it Says on the Tin: REDD Will Not 'Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation'

Here's a video view from the grass-roots.

Wanna Get Fracked?

Who is this “we” in Australia's new "We want CoalSeamGas" campaign?

Why, the Coal Seam Gas industry, of course!

Over 1000 Arrests Outside White House But Media Still Silent

More than a thousand people have so far been arrested protesting the construction of the Keystone-XL Tarsands pipeline through the Ogalalla Aquifer.

Still not heard anything about this on the radio or other media here.

Why not?

President Turns a Blind Eye as Masses Arrested at White House

"... Now, here’s the thing: while it’s great to see the press corps pushing the Administration to recognize our demonstration, the fact that Carney hasn’t yet briefed the President on the protest and the pipeline is a worrying sign about how out of touch this administration is on this issue."

“Just in the last two days everyone from the president’s chief climate scientist to an 84-year-old grandmother was arrested on his front doorstep,” said environmental author Bill McKibben, who is spearheading the White House protest. “This is the largest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement in a generation, and if they really aren’t even discussing it with the president, that signals a deep disrespect for their supporters ..."

More at Tarsands Action

AgroFuels: Pushing Prices of Vital Commodities Ever Higher

Priced out of the UK wood market by subsidies given to electricity generators

It seems there is a new casualty of the drive, or should that be forced march, toward biofuel; timber-based industries, and users of wood products (which is all of us). The Countryman has been hearing from the Wood Panel Industries Federation.

Alistair Kerr of WPIF says, “The government has failed to disclose to the public that generators like Drax, E.ON, RWE NPower and Scottish and Southern Energy will use the subsidy paid by taxpayers to source as much wood as they can from the UK before venturing further afield. If allowed to continue unchecked, not only are the UK’s wood processing industries at serious risk of being wiped out thereby putting at risk tens of thousands of jobs, but the forests that the British public care deeply about will be decimated – and it is the public that will have paid for it to happen.”

More here.

How high do corn prices have to be to get end-users to reduce consumption?

Scarcely credible - scarcely human - but this is the sort of question that economists, those nice men who never rape or commit foul crimes, are now amusing themselves with. Try replacing the phrase "end-users" with the word "people" and you get some idea of the (im)moral universe economists inhabit.

Southeast Farm Press reports that "This year's corn crop is not big enough to meet the entire consumption base that has been built ... [and] ... The largest competitor for corn in the coming year will be the ethanol industry where USDA analysts currently estimate 5.1 billion bushels of corn use."

After six months of peak already in 2011, the World Food Price Index looks set to continue inexorably upward from peak to peak ...

Wind Up?

Here are the turbines that Artists Against Windfarms say, perhaps a little melodramatically, "will destroy the beauty of North Devon":

See anything?

No, neither could I this May from Codden Hill as the first turbines are going up.

The windmills are certainly visible from Crow Point, but far less obtrusive than the noise that can blow across from large roads like the A39 and the main Barnstaple to Bideford road. Maybe the Artists could campaign to get rid of those eye and earsores instead?

Of Schemes and Schemers

Con + Insult = Consult

"There's funding available ..." Words to make any hungry consultant salivate, and as Private Eye reports in its latest issue in "REDD faces all round" the feeding frenzy is just beginning:

"There’s funding available from the World Bank to help countries draw up REDD plans, as well as assistance from some enthusiastic European nations. Most of this REDD-readiness money is ending up in the pockets of international consulting firms …"

Clever and complex schemes.

Kerching!

The new 'market', as many hipsters like to call it, in carbon credits is already creating fantastic global opportunities for business. Australian bureaucrats in charge of implementing climate change avoidance and mitigation have been warned of the "possibility of GST fraud on carbon credit trades under so-called "carousel fraud". The scam, which has operated overseas, involves the skimming of GST on the sale of carbon credits bought tax-free overseas." 

Sky Money

"The Netherlands' emissions trading authority has  [also] been the target of 'large-scale criminal activity, including fraud, money laundering and the financing of terrorism'. The Papua New Guinea "sky money" scam, involving the sale of worthless carbon credits, is also detailed in a spate of 2009 briefings."

And so it goes.

Geo-Engineering: Garbage in - Garbage out

If you already had a hunch that blowing huge volumes of gas down a hole in the ground and expecting it to stay there sounds like a stupid idea, or potentially dangerous perhaps, then you’re not the only one, and geophysicist Mark Zoback has some evidence …

International Diplomacy Failing Again

As long as the modern nation state has been conjured in the imagination of politicians there have been failures of diplomacy between these nations, with dire outcome. So what now that international negotiations on climate change and on biodiversity are crashing, if not yet burning?

Is global governance still-born?

These buggers couldn’t agree on what price to sell their grandmother for.