The United Arab Emirates' takeover of African forests
lemonde.fr
lemonde.fr
You buy some piece of land, or (as per TFA) lease it for 30 years. Then, you do nothing with it.
On the basis of you having the potential of doing something with it, you calculate a hypothetical difference in "potential scope of hypothetical activity" somehow denominated in the CO2 unit. The exact procedure for doing this is neither known, reproducible, nor audited?
This purely fictional "measure" (for lack of a better term) is then renamed to "credits" and converted to some monetary unit, like, say USD. The exchange rate is then what? And why?
Last, you sell - as in actually sell - this purely fictional nothingness to states and big corporations who all have multiple economists and/or scientists employed. Plus ample access to external specialists if their own capacities should somehow need a reality check...
Is it me, or does this seem a bit weird (to put it politely)?
Here’s a few politicians from various countries explaining, basically, ”Look we need to develop. If you need us not to cut down the jungle, you should pay. The economic activity needs to come from somewhere. We can’t live in poverty forever”
https://time.com/6233998/brazil-indonesia-rainforests-climat...
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/11/where-is-the-money-brazil-...
Think of it as money paid for conservation. Then it all makes sense.
It’s great that Liberia has an incentive to conserve its forest. It’s not so great that doing so gives the rest of the world a license to pollute.
...And this payment can be used by the buyers to justify destroying the climate elsewhere, in a more efficient way.
Climate change is one of those things where asking for perfection is the perfect way to ensure nothing happens. This is a common lobbying tactic aimed at preventing change. If that’s not your intention, I recommend a different approach – encouraging anything that might help.
Well, that's the point. I do not believe this is helpful, and I do believe this takes the space of other actions: in terms of not discussing the alternatives and in terms of taking time and effort to implement, both of which are in limited supply.
> Climate change is one of those things where asking for perfection is the perfect way to ensure nothing happens.
It's also one of those things where even the most watered down plans are not sufficiently acted upon, and where every target eventually ends up not being respected.
I'm all for compromise, but it takes two to compromise. And, as you mentioned, one side is not lobbying for compromise.
Usually I just get downvoted until my post is white but someone once replied with an interesting proposition: paying me not to do it. I just laughed it off because it seemed completely insane to me. Why would they pay off a developing country not to develop itself?
And now I come across this thread and it seems these people are doing exactly that. Why our president isn't jumping at that chance is beyond me.
Your country has a resource, it could monetize it, the rest of the world should incentivize you to NOT cut down the forest, in order to have a better Earth.
In our modern society, money is inherently tied to survival as it can be traded with resources that helps further the root loop.
We humans, and every other living thing are a competing distributed system because of a limited resource environment.
So if you light up Amazon, Congo and Daintree rainforests to get a massive economic boost. Go for it!
However the question is how much you care about your great great grandchildren? Because they’ll be getting a very shit deal.
If we had another backup planet, I’d be all down for setting shit on fire.
Earth is all we got in the entire 100B light year observable universe as far as we know.
If all of Amazon is lit on fire, that likely explains why we can’t find any intelligent anywhere.
I don't think the notion that humans are self-interested is particular surprising. It's more notable when we are not.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
Plus the UAE is ~10% citizens, 90% migrant foreigners. I'm not sure how per capita footprint of the UAE accounts for that (is a UAE citizen carbon footprint actually 250t CO2...?)
The US and EU have a lot of existing infrastructure, construction of which required enormous amounts of CO2 emissions. Countries that are still building out their infrastructure should be expected to expend more CO2 per capita to catch up. (Modern equipment is more effecient, but still).
Well, the UAE is not exactly a "country that is still building", so your comment is very misleading. Nevertheless, we can also compare the "share of global cumulative CO₂ emissions" for UAE and USA. It's 0.3% and 24% respectively, and when prorated to the population, we get (0.3 / 10) / (24 / 330) = 0.4, so the UAE is cumulatively about 40% of the USA already, even though their development only started 50 years ago.
And again, if you consider that out of the 10 millions living in the UAE, about 9 million are migrant workers, the vast majority living in dorms, the equation is clear and the UAE current lifestyle is totally unsustainable.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-cumulative-co2?t...
That being said, plastic is a problem in itself, not a "carbon" concern as it is being discussed in COP28 so it is off-topic.
Regarding the "externalize manufacture"/"carbon hit", again, this is a little outdated. It was very true from 2005-2010, but since then China has developed rapidly and is now importing almost as much carbon as it is exporting. See graphs below for "consumption-based CO2 emissions vs. territorial emissions". Except for the EU, it is a matter of ~10% difference.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption...
It's close. Electricity is practically free for citizens, which is why their large homes are key peretualy cool and thoroughly well-lit, like what you'd see in a real estate marketing brochure.
Your suspicions might be true: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=%22united+arab+emirates%22+m...
Migrants aren't citizens, last I checked.
Ignoring the source of the funds used for this conservation effort, actively incentivizing rainforest conservation so that real capital is used to that end is a fantastic thing.
That's a nice euphemism.
The Simple Economics of Saving the Amazon Rain Forest: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-simple-economics-of-sav...
But it's a bit complicated because if you just buy plots then cattle farming will buy different plots. So you need to setup an incentive structure to pay dividends for sitting on undeveloped rain forest
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-centraleurope-environment...
The studies I saw didn't agree with the climate change angle, but bark beetles of various species are absolutely brutal to trees.
What's more, depending on the species, the wood is useless for anything but biomass. The larvae can and will burrow tunnels deep into the trunk which makes the wood unappealing for most uses... So it's not like it is a convenient excuse for loggers to go in and clear cut.
It could well be that the other alternative for these forests was logging or slash and burn agriculture, in which case the program is working exactly as intended. Or if not, we can criticize it for being ineffective without woke moralizing. Someone needs to make a bid to preserve the forest, and this company made a bid that is apparently higher than alternatives. As carbon credit economy takes off, there will be competition and prices will rise, in turn exposing the limits of carbon offsets and forcing reductions in actual emissions.
" or currently wealthy countries succeeding above other countries"
This isn't about protecting forests. It's about a rich country offsetting its emissions by buying another countries industrial capacity in the form of carbon credits. It's taking a bribe from another country to stay poor. It's as if the United States started to pay China to turn factories off so they can turn more on. It's not just metaphorically colonial, it's literally the colonial economic model, capturing a resource, bringing the industry home (to Paris/London/Moscow in the olden days) and selling the produce back to the periphery. The only difference is the resource and land captured here is synthetic ("green credits"). There is nothing environmental about this, the emissions are constant. The planet does not care if you produce oil in Nigeria or Saudi Arabia.
It's way cheaper to go on vacation now. I care about the environment and stuff but not enough to have a bunch of people tell me I'm bribing someone. And tbh, this is better. No one actually lectures you for going on vacation now.
The net of not getting rid of the forest means it's starting at carbon neutral for the world as a whole.
Slash and burn would make it carbon positive for a bit, and regrowing it carbon negative for a bit, but all our base measurements include that forest already.
If you trade keeping the forest as it is against burning a bunch of oil, your still carbon positive by that amount of oil
They are just different values people might hold.
We call this ideology "ecofascism."
> The prioritization of a white supremacist conceptualization of a pristine and dichotomous “Nature” [note: ie "the earth"] over the wellbeing of people, particularly people of color, coupled with a failure to acknowledge the differential responsibility of predominately white corporate polluters.[0]
> For tens of thousands of years, people have lived in balance with our natural environment. Even early agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry was minimally destructive on a global scale... The burden of environmental destruction can’t be placed equally at the feet of all people. As a matter of fact, the wealthiest 10% of people contribute half of global greenhouse gas emissions! [1]
0. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2021.1982744 1. https://www.bard.edu/cep/blog/?p=11973
Are you saying that because someone was born in country X, which committed Y misdeeds ~100 years ago, then that person is not free to draw attention to current misdeeds that are like Y happening now by the hand of others?
That's absurd and ungrounded in any real system of ethics or morality--and also untenable, given that every country/religion/group/whatever has at some point done pretty fucked up shit.