Comment by cat_plus_plus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cat_plus_plus | Hacker News Reader

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That's how we tell the difference between rational environmentalists concerned about future human well being and zealots who just hate the idea of human succeeding above other animals or currently wealthy countries succeeding above other countries. Because if you are the former, you are absolutely in favor of carbon credits, sequestration, geoengineering, nuclear power plants, migrating from coal/oil to natural gas etc. Of course, you would want evidence of safety and effectiveness, but not "it's colonialism" knee jerk reactions.

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.

When I first saw reporting of these UAE ventures some days ago, it was about suspicion that the owners would eventually exploit the forest or the minerals underneath. It is a frequent phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar that land is first restricted and named a protected reserve, but after ribbon-cutting ceremonies are over and attention moves elsewhere, logging is done with wood being sold to e.g. China’s furniture industry, or the local population’s slash-and-burn practices encroach regardless.

This completely misses the point, intentionally I suppose given this sentence:

" 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.

Yeah, an environmentalist friend of mine told me this about my Terrapass offsets - which cost a fortune to take me to net zero. He said that I was just bribing someone so I could go on holiday. Most people agreed with him so I kinda went with it and stopped.

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.

If there is no way to build industry except through fossil fuels, we are doomed already. Otherwise poor countries can take money from carbon credits and build clean industry to start with, which is easier than rebuilding all the existing industry. Plus residents get many other important benefits from preserved forests and cleaner environment.

It's good that the forest is being protected, but it shouldnt be counted as a sequestration project.

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

If the forest would be otherwise cut down, you are offsetting from that alternative status quo. Or you could do sustainable logging and use wood for durable construction that keeps carbon locked in. I agree that preserving and regrowing forests will not offset current level of emissions, but it's a low hanging fruit to address first, please forests have other benefits for environment and humans.

I'm not sure what's "irrational" about thinking humans are a blight and scourge upon the earth. Being "concerned about future human well being" is not inherently more rational.

They are just different values people might hold.

> humans are a blight and scourge upon the earth

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

It’s always hilarious to see people say stuff like this, if you truly believed it you’d start with yourself. Or else you’d be planning mass extermination campaigns to destroy the scourge. Anything else is simply irrational or outright hypocrisy.

I bet you didn't heard about Norvegians cutting forrests in the Amazonas. /s

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