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)?
Yes this is weird and also may be exactly what we need to do.
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”
And it's unclear who is even responsible for making the final decision on whether the 'licensed' forests have been degraded in any way 30 years from now, and what authority they have to do anything.
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.
> 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.
I'm from Brazil, a developing country. Sometimes I express here on HN the fact I'd burn down the entire Amazon jungle if doing that would give us enough industrial strength to rival the USA and China. That jungle just doesn't matter to me. If you handed me a button that burned down the entire Amazon and told me Brazil would be the most prosperous nation on earth if I pushed it, I wouldn't even think twice.
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.
You shouldn't be downvoted, IMHO. In fact, you pose a really interesting question, and also challenge, to the rest of the world.
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.
And I'm sure somewhere else, there's a person in their 60s in the US who'd push a button that made all life on earth that uses sexual reproduction infertile and unable to continue past the current generation if it meant they got to live a rich western life for their remaining years.
I don't think the notion that humans are self-interested is particular surprising. It's more notable when we are not.
Im sorry but isn’t this actually good? As Africa, parts of Asia and South America become more populated and strive for better quality of life, the last of the big forests are already at risk. If these places are incentivized to protect them, it is a net good for everyone.
It's better than doing nothing, but the UAE has more than enough homework regarding carbon emissions reduction. Its per capita footprint is 25t CO2, 75% more than the USA, which itself is 2.5x that of the EU.
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...?)
These stats can be misleading for other reasons as well.
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).
> 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.
And they ship/externwlize much of their costs to other places. Just a few examples with China - US and EU send their plastic there for “recycling” and probably the majority of goods we use are manufactured in China so they can take the “carbon hit”
China doesn't take the world's plastic anymore, that comment is now 4 years outdated. Since then, some of it was shipped to south-east Asian countries but they started cutting back soon after.
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.
> 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...?)
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.
Absolutely nothing that happens anywhere, to anyone, is paid for without selling or burning fossil fuels. Even solar plants reduce the price of electricity, which gives people buying fossil fuel energy the ability to buy more of it.
I don't really think so. I think they're separate issues. If anything, increased warmth, carbon dioxide and water vapor will increase the density of rainforests, ignoring any other emgstive consequences elsewhere around the world. Rainforest conservation and climate change are separate issues, though they overlap in specific ways and circumstances.
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.
So if an acre of rainforest were slated to be "developed" but burning, say, 1 55-gal drum of your favorite hydrocarbon would prevent it, and instead preserve that acre for 5 years, you would be against doing so, because it involves burning fossil fuels? If no, then your statement is untrue.
Just to make sure it's clear to everyone who's commenting about how great this is - in return for UAE paying to protect Liberia's forests, it gets to burn more fossil fuels while claiming to be reducing its carbon output. Not sure whether this is bad news from a climate perspective, but it certainly isn't good news.
This is good. Eventually doing this will probably be too expensive and most players probably will have to find ways to lower emissions (I assume?) and forest remaining forest will become more valuable than the timer that can be extracted from them.
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
Next: Look at how much of Eastern European forests was clear-cut in the past 5 years due to "battling insects"... Satellite imagery is showing Brazil-like deforestation.
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.
NGO's hate it when a bigger player with more resources eats their cake. Their only recourse, it seems, is to complain about the semantics of how the new kid is punching wrong.
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.
> 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]
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.
It's a bit hypocritical from Le Monde to talk about African forests as if the French haven't colonized and looted Africa for the better part of a century.
True, but they're highlighting the NGOs calling colonialism on what the UAE is doing (admittedly a horrible regime) as if France never engaged (and probably still is) in such behavior.
Would you read a Russian newspaper article about bad treatment of Ukrainians in the west? I mean, sure but I hope you wouldn't actually give it any credibility. To me this is similar, considering how blatant France is about 'Franceafrique' and how unapologetic it is about wanting Africa to be its own little backyard.
They aren't acting "as if" French colonialism never happened.
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.
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)?