In September 1993 at Whole Earth Foods we ran a retail promotion called “Eat Organic - Save the Planet.’ This highlighted our increasingly organic range - organic ingredients were becoming widely available. I recorded a rap. We sent the cassette out to all participating shops. One verse ran:
“The weather round the world is getting mighty strange,
As the Amazon rain forest turns into a cattle range
But still you keep on buyin’ all those products that they sell
Eatin’ burgers, drinking coffee, let the Indians go to hell.
Eat organic, save the planet.’
26 years later everyone’s got their knickers in an almighty twist about the same thing and blame Brazil’s President Bolsonaro for the fires in the Amazon. Bolsonaro snaps back that he blames the green NGOs. He’s deluded if he thinks that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF are secretly lighting fires. But if you asked me who was responsible for this tragedy I would blame the same culprits.
The idea of carbon offsets has been anathema to these NGOs. My inbox is full of their urgent requests for funding, promising to campaign against Amazon fires. None have a credible strategy. The only viable strategy is one they oppose: clean up the mess!
Back in 1854 Soho in London had a severe cholera outbreak. A doctor called John Snow cured it by removing the pump handle from the pump at the public well. People stopped dying. After that London invested heavily in sewers to separate the liquids (and solids) that come out of your body from the liquids that go into your body. It became a model for the world. Otherwise we’d all be dying of cholera. Nobody minded having to pay to remove the crap that was killing people. If it was today, you’d have NGOs screaming at people to reduce the number and volume of their bowel movements.
Excrement is visible and smellable. Our carbon dioxide excrement is invisible and odourless. But it is far more threatening to society than a cholera epidemic. So why do we baulk at the cost of cleaning it up? We have marvellous tools like trees, soils, pastures, the use of wood in buildings, biochar, peat bogs and salt marshes that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and very quickly and cheaply reduce greenhouse gas levels. So why do the NGOs oppose it? Here’s their policy, mostly set out around 2008.
Greenpeace: “allowing forests to become a get out of jail free card for polluters would be extremely bad news for the fight against climate change.’
Friends of the Earth: “Allowing rich countries to offset their carbon dioxide by buying up huge tracts of forest is riddled with problems and will do little to tackle climate change.”
WWF “We committed to only purchasing offsets from projects which have been certified by the Gold Standard. The Gold Standard excludes forestry. Buying forestry offsets does nothing to lessen society’s dependence on fossil fuels to generate its energy, something that is ultimately needed to address climate change”
We have wasted 10 years. The rain forests burn and we lose 30 football fields of farmland every minute.
We have to pay farmers and foresters to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If the global carbon price was $50 tonne CO2 the cost to society would be minimal, about $10 per barrel of oil. A hectare of rain forest would be worth $500 a year. That’s a heck of a lot more than anyone makes grazing cattle or growing soybeans. Brazil has been cleaning up our shit for several decades now and we’ve never paid them a penny for it. We make the CO2, they clean it up. We refuse to pay them because a few worthy NGOs play right into the hands of the climate change deniers by opposing the market for offsets. If we did pay for carbon removal we’d all be eating organic food and have more trees. We’d stop using peat. We could still make progress on wind and solar but meantime we would have more biodiversity, purer water, healthier soils and cleaner air. Would that be so terrible? If you don’t want to pay to clean it up then don’t complain about the mess.
