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The quote was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, ?We had to destroy the village in order to save it.? In a truly bizarre parallel, the New York Times writes: ?They said if we hesitated ...
One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, B?n Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: ??It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,? a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.?The quote was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, ?We had to destroy the village in order to save it.?
?They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,? said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. ?Smoke and fire.?
But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.
The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations.
The company involved, New Forests Company, grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad. Its investors include the World Bank, through its private investment arm, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.
In 2005, the Ugandan government granted New Forests a 50-year license to grow pine and eucalyptus forests in three districts, and the company has applied to the United Nations to trade under the mechanism. The company expects that it could earn up to $1.8 million a year.
But there was just one problem: people were living on the land where the company wanted to plant trees. Indeed, they had been there a while.
?He was a policeman for King George,? Mr. Bakeshisha said of his father, who served with British forces during World War II in Egypt.
Forests in many regions are becoming larger carbon sinks thanks to higher density, U.S. and European researchers say in a new report.
In Europe and North America, increased density significantly raised carbon storage despite little or no expansion of forest area, according to the study, led by Aapo Rautiainen of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and published in the online, open-access journal PLoS One.
As the Eucalyptus isn?t a native tree to Africa I can predic that these plantations will grown like weeds and soak up all the ground water the invasive root systems can find. If people want to see how Eucalyptus trees grow as an intrduced species then go to Ethiopia. Eucalyptus is spreading like a rash and decimating ground water reserves. It does however produce nice long straight trunks which are used in building houses.
As reported, this is a tragic story that also includes the death of an eight year old boy who was burned to death in one of the homes they destroyed while the villagers were in a church service.
The boy was ill and his mother had gone to another village to get medicine while he slept. She returned to find her home and son in ashes.
I have sent this story to all of the Labor and Green politicians in Australia that I can get email addresses for to show them what is being done NOW in preparation for the carbon tax and subsequent ETS they are about to vote in favour of.
Look for the names behind REDD. The super rich using the environment to become even richer. Officials paid to look the other way. Fortunes built stealing traditional lands from the poorest of the poor.
Episodes like this demonstrate why it is not unreasonable to use the term ?Enviro-Nazis.? Sceptics can stop this by continuing to expose the man-made global warming fraud. This is why sceptical scientists will in the future be the recipients of the Noble Peace Prize and other praise and honours (it will be like the final scene in the original Star Wars). Sceptical scientists are like Sparticus. Roll on the shale gas revolution. Cheap power for the 3rd world and the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of industrialisation that the 1st world enjoys. The 3rd world should not be a place that is kept as a backwater so that latte sipping 1st world greenies can feel happy that that their lifestyles are ?carbon-offset? and that there are still ?untouched wilderness areas? and offbeat places for them to go to for holidays.
This typifies the warped thinking that comes with AGW. Burn a village, destroy a community release CO2 in the process and then plant trees which are not even native to the region to soak up the CO2.
There is no logic to this. Plus it demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the environment. Whenever a non-indigenous species is introduced to an established Eco system it is usually a disaster. Japanese knotweed, the grey squirrel, here, rabbits in Australia are three examples I can think of off the top of my head.
This is a rich field, I live in southern OZ and am in my seventh decade. The last twelve months saw a decade long drought break. Eucalypt?s are indeed a weed, this year Oz saw our gum trees flowering and seed continuously most trees doubled in size and weight. Oz turned green with all the other plants and native grasses going bonzo. I have seen nothing like this in my life and have a gut feeling that OZ sucked in more CO2 than we have ever produced in the last two hundred years.
I live on forty acres of semi forested land and am spending an inordinate amount of time killing the weeds called gum trees that are popping up like mushrooms.
If my memory serves me correct a NASA program showed a 6% increase in bio-mass that is a huge intake of CO2 and shows beyond doubt that the flora have been starved of food until now.
As for the clever Dicks making money from the carbon credit scam let us not forget who they are and what they are up too. Some time in the near future we may have to remind them of their behaviour and even prosecute them for their crimes against humanity.
I really do think we would be so much better off WITHOUT the UN. Then people like Pachauri can go back to laying sleepers and rails for which he is much better qualified. They could use Al Gore as ballast?
Having scrapped the UN it will be time to scrap bio fuels, wind farms, carbon credits, most politicians, all champagne socialists and the warmest scientists[?] who have done so much to drag this planet to its knees!
Across the planet, Al Gore and his minions in and out of government will hold out their hands to show that they are clean. ?It?s not us who burned that poor child,? they?ll protest; ?Blame the big bankers.? Yet it is their insane schemes that bring such events about.
In that preceding post about the resignation, I had the chance to read the Bishop Hill piece, which led me, in turn, to another piece about how the skeptics were winning in the science of global warming, which then led in turn to an article in Mother Jones, which found that it was WUWT who was responsible for coining the term ?Climategate?. This, of course, got me to looking over some of the early writings and findings here on WUWT on the emails and other files. You could say (I know it?s a stretch) that an eight year old child was burned to death, all for the sake of the likes of M. Mann, P. Jones, K. Trenberth et al, who were more concerned about their image than about true science. And then there were the whitewash ?investigations? that cleared everyone.
They like their image of a polar bear on a lone ice floe; how about hanging around their necks the image of a devastated mother and the story of a child burned to death all for the sanctimonious and self-righteous environmentalists.
?Spending £500,000 ? and considerable energy ? on Nowhereisland to drag six tonnes of Arctic rock to the UK for the Olympics is wrong?
?Just what was the Arts Council thinking when it agreed back in 2009 to hand over £500,000 to the artist Alex Hartley in order for him and 18 volunteers to create Nowhereisland?
The creative idea itself is actually rather captivating: find an Arctic island that has recently been exposed by melting ice and then break off some rocks to form a new ?island nation? which can then be transported to the waters off the UK in time for the 2012 Olympics.
During its conception, Hartley billed it as a ?travelling embassy? intended to highlight issues such as climate change and land ownership. Here?s how his website explains it:?
?Erewhon (an anagram of ?nowhere?, the literal translation of ?utopia?) is a remote kingdom, not on any map, which the narrator claims to have discovered in his travels. In many respects, life there is not dissimilar to contemporary Western civilization ? there is a monarchy, lawyers, judges, prisons, money, rich and poor ? and at first sight the inhabitants appear healthy and contented.
However, it soon becomes apparent that duplicity is rife, and there are in actual fact two conflicting religions, two banking systems, etc. Illness is treated as a crime and criminal behaviour treated with sympathy.
Their once sophisticated industrial know-how has been deliberately abandoned in favour of very basic machinery. As it becomes clear that their bizarre rule are just exaggerations of common Western practices, the book becomes a dystopia of biting satire against contemporary mores.?
I cannot wait for those astute environmental stewards in Berkeley to pass legislation mandating ?Fair Trade Carbon Credits? for the city. I can see the wording of the bill now, ?we will only buy carbon credits from suppliers that are certified to meet the highest environmental and labor standards.? Then the City Council of Berkeley will issue a press release stating ?This is a victory for what?s known as the fair trade movement. The City of Berkeley will only consume legally obtained carbon credits that are certified to compensate the producers at a fair price.?
?New Forests Pty Limited, a specialist investment management and advisory services firm, announces it has reached agreement on the sale of a minority equity position in the company to Generation Investment Management.
?Generation Investment Management, created in 2004, is a leading fund management firm focused on researching and investing in companies who create long term competitive advantage through their orientation to sustainable business. The firm was founded by Managing Partner David Blood and Al Gore who acts as Chairman of the company.
Leon, I couldn?t have put it any better. Somehow I don?t think that even with a child?s blood on their hands they will admit that they are lying through their teeth.
I read this the other day, and dropped it in Tips with the comment that it is very much like ?Blood Diamonds?. Where there is money and power to be acquired at the expense of the penniless and powerless, be assured that some one will justify any means to do so. Add to that the ?moral? imperative of ?saving the planet? from the ravages of CO2, and you have a recipe for great evil. HSBC, and the others involved in this and similar (as yet undiscovered ) atrocities should be brought to justice in the same way Bin Laden was.
If they go unpunished, they will surely continue to perpetrate such horror, and it?s only a matter of time till it reaches your town and your house.
The United Nations is used more and more to give a veneer of legitimacy to criminal actions around the world (including what The New Forests is doing), and in the process, it has lost its purpose, if there ever was one (besides giving a veneer or legitimacy to criminal actions).
This has clearly been going on for some time. The level of corruption in the local police/politicos must be horrendous if, when two police officers turn up to the village in this story to arrest someone in April last year, the rest of the village are motivated to beat them to death.
?According to Mpamira, the population is suffering night attacks and as a result most residents have resorted to sleeping in the bushes. He also added that ?we doubt whether the intention of the company is to plant trees and protect the environment,? because ?since 2005, they have been cutting down trees which we had preserved for commercial timber.?
?As long as we continue planting these trees in watershed areas and in our forests, we will continue to experience water shortage and it will even become a bigger problem as climate change hits us,? said Maathai, who won the Nobel Prize for her tree planting campaign.
Anthony, you may be interested in a related story, published today, from GlobalResearch, titled ?Bolivia and The Protection of the Amazon?
where the same U.N. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) program is used as a tool for ?Green Imperialism? in an effort to control the resources of Bolivia.
In my opinion this whole thing does not have anything to do with global warming except for the fact that the company which is doing business there is by chance doing business in industry branch related to global warming. Should it be an oil company, what happened would be probably the same, it would just be the ?other group? crying about it.
Situation in human rights is notoriously bad in Africa, killing or stealing other?s property is much more common there than in Europe or US and it is often even supported by local govermnents.
I?m by no means saying what has happened there is right. I?m just saying I doubt it has anything to do with AGW. And that if we want to comment on what?s happening there we should first try to understand the situation in which the whole continent is and circumstances under which this particular accident happened.
I thought it was the people who denied global warming who were killing people by the millions and needed to be tried for their crimes against humanity.
A weed is a species that grows, reproduces, and spreads in diverse conditions; e.g. homo sapiens. These traits are not a bad thing. It means you have a hardy species. Nature thrives on competition and cooperativity.
I read somewhere a long time ago, the two species of eucalyptus we have in California are the only two with no commercial use out of the many different kinds in Oz. Blue gum is one of the ones we have if I recall correctly. It turns out there is a lot more to the story. I just found this from Cal State Stanislaus, seemingly definitive:
The promise of eucalyptus in California was based on the old virgin forests of Australia. This was a mistake as the young trees being harvested in California could not compared in quality to the centuries-old eucalyptus timber of Australia. It reacted differently to harvest. The older trees didn?t split or warp as the infant California crop did. There was a vast difference between the two, and this would doom the California eucalyptus industry.
From Fall 1909 to Spring 1910, 23,000 acres in California were planted in eucalyptus, mostly red and blue gums?. It was found that eucalyptus wood could not be seasoned properly to do the things that had been anticipated. Tests of seasoning were performed and processes were structured for proper curing, but there was a great dissatisfaction with these. Eucalyptus wood warped, cracked, twisted, and became too tough once cured. The yields that were projected it was found would take too many years to be realized.
Lumber mills using exclusively eucalyptus timber closed. Furniture manufacturers moved back East. Plantation trees were sold for firewood. Pharmacologists dropped their support which meant that eucalyptus would not be used in most medicines.
The ?two? species I?d heard of are probably the red and blue gums so widely planted above. However, the point is made that many species were imported and none proved to be commercially viable except as ground cover and ornamental purposes.
H.H. Biswell, Professor of Forestry and Conservation at the University of California, Berkeley made a prophetic statement too on March 1973:
?When eucalyptus waste catches fire, an updraft is created and strong winds may blow flaming bark for a great distance. I think the eucalyptus is the worst tree anywhere as far as fire hazard is concerned. If some of that flaming bark should be flown on to shake roofs in the hills we might have a fire storm that would literally suck the roofs off the houses. People might be trapped.?
Conclusively the 1990 freeze led to the 1991 firestorm. The eucalyptus got the blame for spreading the fire as seen in this San Francisco Chronicle article with the headline ?Eucalyptus trees getting blamed for East Bay fire.?
Eucalyptus globulus, the tall, aromatic trees dropped yet another notch in public esteem in the great East Bay hills fire of 1991. Like giant matchsticks and loaded with freeze-dried fuel, the East Bay?s eucalyptus trees acted like a torch that spread the conflagration by exploding into flames almost instantly ? Experts who otherwise couldn?t agree on whether the fire began by arson, official foul-up or act of God declared that the Australian imports bore heavy blame. And while her press aide derided the trees as ?weeds,? Berkeley Mayor Lori Hancock proposed chain-sawing thousands of them in hopes of forever preventing a repeat of the deadly events of Oct. 20, 1991.
The native home of the eucalyptus, Australia, has eucalyptus forest fires generally every year. In January 1994 a large fire broke out near Sydney and was in the international news. This was said about the eucalyptus:
?The explosive nature of the eucalyptus and the abundance of fuel produces a very intense fire that ?crowns? ? leaps from tree top to tree top . . . The fierce blazes have been stoked by the highly volatile oils of the eucalyptus tree, which vaporize under intense radiative heat as the fire approaches and explode, with flames sometimes towering as high as 230 feet.?
One reason Australia is so fire prone is the eucalyptus have aromatic oils in their leaves that adds to flammability . . . Eucalyptus trees are one of the world?s most inflammable trees. It bursts into flames when fire reaches a certain temperature because there is rapid vaporization of the oils and that causes rapid ignition.
In 1962, the Australian Forestry and Timber Bureau published ?Control Burning in Eucalyptus Forests.? It said that controlled burning does not kill eucalyptus trees, but it burns off the litter that collects on the forest floor which is 10 tons per acre. It recommends controlled burning every five years.
These days, such a policy would be regarded as madness. Controlled burning? What would CARB (CA Air Resources Board) say about that? Fireplaces now illegal and all. We are barely allowed to do conduct controlled burns in the Sierra Nevada. CO2phobia is mass hysteria.
The trees may not survive in California for long. A beetle form Chile is now killing them, mainly in SoCal. If these beetles are able to lay eggs under the bark of other trees, they might be considered yet another weed. However, predators are naturally limited by reduced numbers of prey.
The Greens are not predatory, but parasitic. Most parasites try not to kill their host, but the Greens are coming close to crossing that line. Too many parasites trying to feed off of too few hosts. What will they do? The next few years will be interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMay_you_live_in_interesting_times).
The quoted text stops before ?And what do they say in Oz??, and resumes in the following paragraph. That quoted section ends before my final three paragraphs starting, ?These days, such a policy would be regarded as madness.?
The stories with parallels to Khmer Rouge are only a matter of time. From Communism uber alles to Global Warming is a short jump, maybe a hop.
The European Union is enforcing an ?Emissions Trading Scheme? as now is Australia. There is money to be made from it so get rid of these villages. What is human life when a multinational can make money?
It reminds me of ?The Clearances? in Scotland ? rich people from distant lands want to make money and don?t care who they destroy to get it.
The case of the boy being burned to death in Uganda should be the FIRST question asked of every leading ?warmist? ? they should be asked to provide a scientific explanation for what is being done in their name.
Sort of like what happened in America and Australia, where the native populations were found to be ?squatting? and were forcibly removed by the governments of the day. Now we are seeing the same thing happening around the world as REDD is used as an excuse to remove native population from their homelands to make way for corporate takeovers of their traditional homelands.
Planting eucalyptus of course makes very good sense in this situation, as it prevents the native population from moving back to reclaim their land, because their food crops will no longer grow once eucalyptus as taken hold. The ultimate aim of the REDD program being to exterminate native populations through starvation as a means to gaining ownership of their lands and resources, while at the same time reducing human populations in the third world.
Of course hunger and food riots due to ethanol production and political constraints on oil production have already killed many indirectly, but if true, this tragedy is the first that can be directly attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gas climate change.
Well said. As soon as Gore and the eco-loons have power we will hear something that we heard from the Soviets: ?There is nothing wrong with Marxism, the Soviet Union is just an imperfect realization of it.?
Never, ever, ever forget this day when children were killed in the name of ?climate change?. And nver forgive a single ?activist? who does not immediately sincerely and completely condemn the atrocity carried out in their name and as a direct result of their advocacy.
This horrific reality, so reminiscent of human horrors of the past, was inevitable once the rich were given an easy cash-grab by the politicians. The AGW nonsense was just the method of justifying yet another perversion of human laws so that those with major resources and contacts could squeeze more wealth out of the have-nots.
This sort of stuff makes my blood boil. And I agree we need to make a fuss now, for it will indeed spread, and before you know it your house will be in the way of a new ?Wildlife Corridor.?
The heartless always have some ?improvement? which sounds right, in their Ivory Tower. I?m sure ?Ethnic Cleansing? sounded as reasonable to some as ?Carbon Credits? now sounds to Gore.
In the end this sort of behavior always comes back to haunt those who allow it. Unfortunately it often hurts ?the second and third generation,? and the fatcats themselves seemingly get away with murder.
The Cherokee ?Trail of Tears? may have seemed wise to some in Dixie at the time, but a whole nation of Cherokee friends would have been better, when Sherman came marching south burning Dixie, during the lifetimes of some who saw the Cherokee depart.
The Highlanders were Great Britain?s best troops, but all their homes were burned down to make way for sheep, during the ?Clearances.? Along came the Crimean War, and no Highlanders enlisted. When asked why, a great old man replied, ?You burned down our homes and scattered our families, as sheep were more profitable. Now let your damn sheep fight for you.?
Call it Karma, or call it reaping-what-you-sow, evil does come home to roost. However it isn?t worth waiting fifty years, if we can halt it right now. .
The first step in reducing population size in the third world was the EPA?s ban of DDT. That was in 1972 or 4, I think, and has killed 50 or 60 million people so far. The EPA spokesperson said the ban was for political reasons. He was right, there was no science to back it up. Now they are stepping it up by evicting, killing residents and destroying villages.
It is interesting that as the science behind the movement is more and more discredited, the movement itself, politically, progresses as if nothing happened ? presumably because the science isn?t the reason for the movement at all.
I know people are still flocking to their banner, but not only are they often wrong, but they can be wrong on Saturday, right on Sunday, and wrong again on Monday and the casual user has no way to tell which.
Much anger and frustration expressed here.. and rightly so! How do we apply that anger to effective means of confronting and ceasing this travesty?
Much anger and frustration expressed here.. and rightly so! How do we apply that anger to effective means of confronting and ceasing this travesty?
In times past ( and not so long ago), there would be retribution in kind. But we have become more civilized now. We wag our fingers and stomp our feet, write letters that no one reads or cares about, and if we get really upset we sue and trust the ?system? to mete out whatever ?justice? it sees fit to impose, or none at all.
So lets all plant trees on solar farms to get carbon credits! http://volumatrixgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/solar_farm_gujarat.
Flamethrowers are like gigantic aerosol cans you know. Those alarmists who commissioned the torching of villages could be fined for that!
There?s been more than a few sources over the years that I?ve seen that insist the quote at the beginning of the article, from the Vietnam war, was simply made up by Arnett. Nobody Arnett interviewed that day agreed they said anything close to what Arnett reported, and so even the Wiki page on Ben Tre admits Arnett ?distorted? something that may or may not have been said to him.
Solar activity on the upswing, big sunspot rotating into view is producing x-class solar flares. Large CME expected soon, may hit earth.
Solar activity on the upswing, big sunspot rotating into view is producing x-class solar flares. Large CME expected soon, may hit earth.
Al Gore Arctic Australia BBC california Carbon dioxide climate climate change Climate Reality Project Climatic Research Unit email controversy Current sea level rise earth El Niño-Southern Oscillation Emissions trading global warming Global Warming Policy Foundation Goddard Institute for Space Studies Goddard Space Flight Center greenhouse gas greenland Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Japan Kevin E.