ECOLOGY POLICE COMING TO THE USA?

Der Spiegel is reporting on conference of "scientists" who are planing to make their "cult" a profitable business.At a global conference in Bonn, Germany, representatives of 191 nations are discussing their revolution in conservation.

They believe that by making a highly profitable business out of saving forests, whales and coral reefs, environmentalists they can put a stop to an apparent, they say, dramatic wave of extinctions. The currency in their new environmental age is called a "forest certificate," and a potential market for the green money already existsthanks to Al Gore and his ilk.

In the EU emissions trading system, for example, industrial corporations and energy utilities are allocated carbon dioxide pollution rights known as CO2 certificates. They define how much carbon dioxide a given company's factories are permitted to emit into the atmosphere. If a company's CO2 emissions exceed its allocated limit, it must buy additional certificates to offset the difference. Unused pollution rights can be sold. In other words, the certificates have a real monetary value, which is currently at €25 ($39) per ton of CO2, but could increase to €60 ($93) in the future.Smells like a ponzi sheme to me! But this sounds to me like World dictatorship for the United States if their quest for environmental power succedes.

Apparently the tropical rainforest countries are keenly interested in entering this growing market.Note: most are countries considered third world countries. At the next UN Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen in 2009, the course could be set for the development of a market in forest certificates. Large electric utilities, like Germany's RWE, are already waiting in the wings. "Forests as a part of a global emissions trading system would be of interest to us," says Michael Fübi, the company's climate protection manager. The company would benefit by satisfying climate protection requirements more quickly and at a lower cost than through the installation of costly new technologies.

In the medium term, however, this could not serve as a replacement for modernizing power plants, says Fübi. How much money this forest certificate system would ultimately generate is still written in the stars. Experts estimate that it would cost $10 billion (€6.45 billion) a year to truly benefit the world's forests.Authors note: how do you give monies to trees?

Otherwise it would be far more profitable for tropical countries to cut down their forests for lumber, as they presently do.Seems to me as though they want successful economic countries to agree to a scheme that has a great possiblility of failure. Never the less,experts estimate that at least twice as much as is spent today on ecoological efforts, will be required to protect nature in the long term. Professional environment police officers must monitor the reserves.

Education is critical in helping local populations find new ways to live in harmony with nature. Microloans are needed to help people implement new business models compatible with the natural environment. Police Ecologists!!!! Can such global financial transfers truly bring about change? "Once CO2 trading translates into large amounts of money, the question that inevitably arises is who actually owns the forest," says Tom Griffiths, who is with the human rights organization Forest Peoples Programme. "Is it the investors or the people who live in the forest?" A typical socialist/communism question!

The underlying problem in these eco schemes is that those who seek to effectively protect nature, make ocean zones off-limits and allow forests to remain untouched must ensure that the people who have depended on these facets of nature for their livelihoods are given new opportunities, and thus far their is an eerie silence about this problem from those promoting the eco-economics.And they have another problem in Germany. While they are meeting in Bonn the head of the current German government, German Chancellor Merkel did little to ease tensions when she recently signed an energy treaty with Brazilian President Lula da Silva. The Brazilians see German concern for the Amazon rainforest as an attempt to corner the biofuels market. To produce bio-ethanol, they plan to have planted sugarcane in an area almost as large as Great Britain by 2025.

The World Bank allegedly plans to incorporate the entire Congo basin into its Forest Carbon Partnership program. The Washington-based organization wants to enter the emissions trading market with the CO2 stored by the Congo rainforest. Because deforestation in tropical regions is responsible for about 20 percent of "climate change, protecting the forest is synonymous with protecting the climate" -- and the world community(?) is increasingly willing to pay a lot of money to make that happen.

Blogger's comment:who do they include in the World Community? China and India are exempt from Kyoto, and the USA has rejected the proposal as being draconian!

While the politicians plot their Ecology "war"there are private wealthy people involved in their own personal ecology shemes topersonally control the fate of nature. Patagonia, for example, appears to be firmly in the hands of billionaires. For years, Douglas and Kris Tompkins, the co-founders of the apparel companies North Face and Patagonia, have owned several thousand square kilometers (more...) of untouched wilderness in the region. Some of their neighbors are speculator George Soros, fashion magnates Luciano and Carlo Benetton, actors Sharon Stone and Christopher Lambert, and CNN founder Ted Turner. Do you believe they are involved for soley altruistic reasons?

If natural landscapes are increasingly assigned a value, they could lose their role as "the world's free garbage dump," as Gordon Shepherd of the WWF puts it. But Shepherd also warns that adding value to nature is "no panacea." Indeed, it raises many questions. For instance, developing countries would have to prove that their goal is not simply to rake in additional cash, but that they are serious about protecting diversity. Sounds to me as though this is just another scheme to redistribute the world's wealth to undeveloped countries, where dictators will grab it ,and the poor people will continue to get "the short end of the stick"!

Omar al-Bashir, president of Sudan, retains his position as the worst dictator in the congo!And lest we forget the infamous dictator Mobutu; According to Transparency International, Mobutu embezzled over $5 billion USD from his country, ranking him as the third-most corrupt leader in world history and the most corrupt African leader ever. He is a constantly recurring theme in African dictators to whom these "pi-heads plan to give hundreds of millions to stop producing the wood we need to buil homes and the grains needed to make the new panacea, bio-fuel!!