Conning the Climate and Palm Oil

History is replete with examples of scams and con schemes on a scale that makes dizzying reading: the Ponzi scheme, the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch tulip scandal of 1637, just to mention three.

Lately, investment bankers are moving on to an area of securities trading that is potentially even more lucrative, and what's more, even has a social value - saving the planet. Or supposedly so, anyway.

Says Jeremy Warner of the Daily Telegraph: "I've long had my suspicions about the great carbon trading bubble, and I've had them pretty much confirmed by a brilliant article which has been drawn to my attention by one Mark Schapiro in Harper's magazine."

"According to Mr Schapiro, carbon trading is now the fastest growing commodities market on earth. Since Kyoto signatories bought in to the cap and trade concept in 2005, there have been more than $300bn carbon transactions, prompting several investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and Barclays, to set up their own carbon trading desks. But that's just the start. If President Obama and his supporters can institute a cap-and-trade system in the United States - and that's a big if for this increasingly marooned presidency - demand could explode into a $2 to $3 trillion market."

Warner observes: "And here's the great thing about it. Unlike traditional commodities markets, which will eventually involve delivery to someone in physical form, the carbon market is based on lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no-one. Since the market revolves around creating carbon credits, or finding carbon reduction projects whose benefits can then be sold to those with a surplus of emissions, it is entirely intangible."

Warner pointed out: "Carbon developers", many of them employed by large multinationals, travel the world in search of carbon reduction projects to sell, while firms of carbon accountants have been established to verify on the United Nations' behalf that those reductions are real. The whole thing, though well intentioned, looks wide open to abuse and scams. Mr Schapiro's account of the carbon trading market is obviously a sceptical one, and no doubt there are others that take a less cynical view. But I wonder what all the wide eyed climate change campaigners are going to say when the first scandals begin to break, still more what they'll make of it when the whole thing turns out to be another giant asset bubble."

What they'll make of it indeed! As things stand, climate change campaigners have not shown themselves to be capable of objective analysis. The key question is how many of the people at Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth believe that they can get away with claiming that war is peace, slavery is freedom and that palm oil is causing massive deforestation and thus causing climate change and threatening the extinction of the orang utan?

Part of the stratagem to pull the wool over the world's eyes is for these climate change campaigners to take satellite imagery of a small part of a palm oil producing country like Indonesia showing large parts of logged over areas and then try to create the impression that the entire rainforest system of Indonesia has been decimated. This was a tactic used by Greenpeace and others of their ilk to stunning effect!

Sure enough, the mass media fell for it and they were soon drumming up reports on the massive deforestation caused by palm oil and the imminent demise of the orang utan.

The sheer volume of these baseless attacks against palm oil by supercilious and opaque "Environmental NGOs" such as Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth, appears to be moving the political process in the countries in which palm oil is proving to be a serious threat or making inroads against oil seed producers in those countries towards some type of policy restricting palm oil imports - but insidiously and cleverly disguised as policies to prevent deforestation and climate change.

However, the fact that palm oil cultivation occupies less than 1% of the world's agricultural area and yet the crop accounts for more than 30% of total world edible oil production proves that palm oil does not require quite as much land as its critics would want the world to believe. In fact, the crop is so productive that it has a typical yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare which is close to ten times that of its nearest competitor, such as soy, sunflower and rapeseed. That explains why Malaysia which is such a small country relatively speaking, could be the world's biggest producer of palm oil for more than a century.

Yet after cultivating the crop intensively for more than a hundred years, Malaysia still retains forest cover of 56%. That dwarfs the forest cover of 25% in Europe and 11% in the United Kingdom from where Greenpeace hails.

Malaysia had undertaken in the Rio Earth Summit to conserve 50% of its lands as forest cover whilst Indonesia has adopted the 25% forest cover of Europe as its target. If the 25% forest cover of Europe is acceptable to Greenpeace, the Palm Oil Truth Foundation is compelled to ask just what is so objectionable for Indonesia to adopt the same standard when it is a developing country with hundreds of millions of mouths to feed?

The Palm Oil Truth Foundation is compelled to ask: Why are the green groups so vocal on palm oil which occupies LESS than 1% of the world's agricultural land and yet remain silent on the other agricultural crops which occupy 99% of the world's agricultural land. How could it even be conceivable that the other agricultural crops which occupies so much of the world's land mass not have caused deforestation and stripped their forests bare?

The sheer incongruity of that should have alerted the mass media to the uncomfortable scenario that environmental organizations like Greenpeace and CSPI are really proxies used in a cleverly planned and well coordinated trade war against palm oil.

Worse, the specter is raised that all this palm oil bashing is just part of an elaborate Ponzi-like scheme by these green groups to raise funds from unsuspecting governments and corporate donors who are drawn to support their "noble" mission to "save the planet"! THE END
--
Palm Oil Truth Foundation is an international non-governmental and not-for-profit organisation, without strings to the world of commerce and power. We are a people organisation, organised for the people and founded upon the principles of integrity and responsibility as a global citizen with the sole purpose of representing TRUTH to the global community about health, environmental and economic benefits of palm oil.

The TRUTH Foundation is an international network of social conscience and cooperation among peoples in industry, government, academia and the ordinary global consuming public, strengthening the forces devoted to respect, justice and equality for a more just and sustainable world and for global peace.