There was no such PC term as "Rainforest"? We called such areas JUNGLES... The PC crew has forced Tarzan and Jane to rename their habitat.
I guess that's par, because the Tarzan I grew up with wore a loincloth of endangered specie hide. Today ze wears a rainbow kilt... and has replaced his deadly dagger with an umbrella... and poor boy is now a young ze.
: From CGI member oldmaninthedesert:
: *****************************************************
: Wow, who would have guessed, the carbon credit 'tax' not
: serving it's intended purpose...gee I am shocked...
: snip
: The state of Acre, on the western edge of Brazil, is so
: remote, there’s a national joke that it doesn’t exist. But
: for geochemist Foster Brown, it’s the center of the
: universe, a place that could help save the world.
: “This is an example of hope,” he said, as we stood behind his
: office at the Federal University of Acre, a tropical campus
: carved into the Amazon rainforest. Brown placed his hand on
: a spindly trunk, ordering me to follow his lead. “There is
: a flow of water going up that stem, and there is a flow of
: sap coming down, and when it comes down it has carbon
: compounds,” he said. “Do you feel that?”
: I couldn’t feel a thing. But that invisible process holds the
: key to a massive flow of cash into Brazil and an equally
: pivotal opportunity for countries trying to head off
: climate change without throwing their economies into
: turmoil. If the carbon in these trees could be quantified,
: then Acre could sell credits to polluters emitting clouds
: of CO₂. Whatever they release theoretically would be
: offset, or canceled out, by the rainforest.
: Five thousand miles away in California, politicians,
: scientists, oil tycoons and tree huggers are bursting with
: excitement over the idea. The state is the second-largest
: carbon polluter in America, and its oil and gas industry
: emits about 50 million metric tons of CO₂ a year.
: What if Chevron or Shell or Phillips 66 could offset some
: of their damage by paying Brazil not to cut down trees?
: The appetite is global. For the airline industry and
: industrialized nations in the Paris climate accord, offsets
: could be a cheap alternative to actually reducing fossil
: fuel use.
: But the desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears
: to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting
: pile of evidence that they haven’t — and won’t — deliver
: the climate benefit they promise.
: I looked at projects going back two decades and spanning the
: globe and pulled together findings from academic
: researchers in far-flung forest villages, studies published
: in obscure journals, foreign government reports and dense
: technical documents. I enlisted a satellite imagery
: analysis firm to see how much of the forest remained in a
: preservation project that started selling credits in 2013.
: Four years later, only half the project areas were
: forested.
: In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset
: the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had
: brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t
: be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the
: polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂,
: but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance
: the ledger either never came or didn’t last.
: “Offsets themselves are doing damage,” said Larry Lohmann, who
: has spent 20 years studying carbon credits. While we’re
: sitting here counting carbon and moving it around, more
: CO₂ keeps accumulating in the atmosphere, he said.
: It’s “the worst possible idea — except for everything else,”
: said Timothy Searchinger, a Princeton researcher who
: studies land use and climate change. “If we had enough
: money, it could probably help a lot.”
:
: https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/05/an-even-more-inconvenient-truth_22.html