[HN Gopher] The United Arab Emirates' takeover of African forests
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The United Arab Emirates' takeover of African forests
Author : geox
Score : 63 points
Date : 2023-12-10 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lemonde.fr)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lemonde.fr)
| josh_fyi wrote:
| That's great! Liberia can't afford to protect its forest, and
| this deal allows that.
| __s wrote:
| Agreed. This is the kind of agreements that are needed for
| Brazilian rain forests
|
| 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
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Easiest would be for Brazil to become more stable and act in
| its own long term interest
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| 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.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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.
| mrpopo wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...?)
| fakedang wrote:
| > 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.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Somehow I doubt the migrant workers live in excessively
| AC'd mansions
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Somehow I doubt the migrant workers live in excessively
| AC'd mansions
|
| Your suspicions might be true: https://duckduckgo.com/?hp
| s=1&q=%22united+arab+emirates%22+m...
| uluyol wrote:
| 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).
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 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"
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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.
| hulitu wrote:
| I bet you didn't heard about Norvegians cutting forrests in the
| Amazonas. /s
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| catlover76 wrote:
| 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.
| nolongerthere wrote:
| 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.
| rexpop wrote:
| > 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
| 8note wrote:
| 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
| tru3_power wrote:
| 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.
| mahmoudhossam wrote:
| 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.
| micwag wrote:
| None of the countries in the article were ever colonized by
| France.
| mahmoudhossam wrote:
| 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.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Irrelevant to the subject at hand.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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.
| treprinum wrote:
| 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.
| zdragnar wrote:
| No need for the sarcastic scare quotes. The trees were dead or
| dying and a fire hazard.
|
| 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.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Isn't this just rainforest conservation done right? I fail to see
| the problem here.
| situationista wrote:
| Rainforest conservation can hardly be described as being "done
| right" when it is paid for by selling/burning more fossil fuels
| elsewhere.
| yetanother12345 wrote:
| Let me get this right...
|
| 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)?
| Swizec wrote:
| 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"_
|
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Except the Western nations/companies who buy the credits no
| longer have to reduce their emissions.
|
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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.
| pyrale wrote:
| > Think of it as money paid for conservation. Then it all
| makes sense.
|
| ...And this payment can be used by the buyers to justify
| destroying the climate elsewhere, in a more efficient way.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Vs destroying everything everywhere. But hey, gotta pump up
| more humans.
| Swizec wrote:
| I mean something is better than nothing?
|
| 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.
| ssss11 wrote:
| ...and people think crypto doesn't make sense lol!!
| smfjaw wrote:
| Cambridge did a great study on how 'real' these credits are
| https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/carbon-credits-hot-air
| situationista wrote:
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| Basically a perfect example of Goodhart's Law taken to
| capitalist extremes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| Loughla wrote:
| I mean, if the forest was going to be developed, and this stops
| that, it has to be worth something, correct?
| pyrale wrote:
| > if the forest was going to be developed
|
| That's a nice euphemism.
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