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"The 2008 decision by EU countries to obtain 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020 has proved to be the catalyst for many evictions....To meet the EU target, the total land area required to grow industrial biofuels in developing countries has been estimated as...more than half the size of Italy."
7/5/12, "Guatemala farmers losing their land to Europe's demand for biofuels," UK Guardian, John Vidal
"Indigenous smallholder farmers are being violently evicted as companies move in to satisfy Europe's hunger for biofuels"
"Helicopters with armed men leaning out were flying overhead, private security guards and paramilitary forces were attacking people, and houses and crops were being burned. The farmers could not speak Spanish and needed help dealing with the police, as well as legal advice on how to stop giant biofuel companies taking their land.
When Macz and Pascual, human rights workers from the Guatemala Campesino Unity Committee (CUC), arrived after a six-hour drive from the capital, Guatemala City, two of the communities had been brutally evicted. Over the next four days, 10 more villages were cleared. By the end of March 2011, around 800 families – about 3,200 people from 14 communities – had been forced off land they believed they had a right to live and work on. Within months, hundreds of hectares of the lush valley in the province of Alta Verapaz were being planted with sugar cane that would be turned into ethanol for European cars, including British ones.
Today, displaced families live by the side of the road with no access to shelter or food. "The men fled to the mountains, the women had to find a way to live. People lost everything; they became nothing but cheap labour," says Macz....
But the unprecedented worldwide rush for land to grow food or fuel crops for the international market is now hitting some of the poorest communities hard, and leaving them at risk of violence and landlessness. Guatemala is now one of the world centres for growing biofuel crops.
In Guatemala, says Pascual, who is petitioning European governments and the UN over the atrocity, more than 300 requests for land have been made in the past few years by large companies to mine for gold, silver and nickel; prospect for oil; develop hydroelectric power; or grow biofuel crops. More than 150 other areas have been identified as places of potential conflict over resources. The Polochic valley has been earmarked by international companies as suitable for biofuel crops.The 2008 decision by EU countries to obtain 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020 has proved to be the catalyst for many evictions, says Oxfam. To meet the EU target, the total land area required to grow industrial biofuels in developing countries has been estimated as 17.5m hectares (43.2m acres), more than half the size of Italy.
What happened in the Polochic valley exemplifies what is now happening all over the world. The latest data suggests up to 203m hectares of land has been acquired by companies in land deals and two-thirds of that is for biofuels," says Hannah Stoddart, economic justice adviser at Oxfam. "The UK government should immediately freeze its biofuel targets and call on the EU to scrap the directive. There is a mass undermining of rights and livelihoods, and no improvement in food supplies. They are just diverting food for stomachs to gas tanks."
Guatemalan peasants evicted by climate militia, March 2011, Oxfam photo
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More for your children's eyes, Monbiot:
10/28/11, "UK firm's failed biofuel dream wrecks lives of Tanzania villagers," UK Guardian, Damian Carrington
"Many say biofuels actually increase pollution. The G20 meeting next week will discuss the issue, following a stark report it received in June from the
- as all UK petrol and diesel is mixed with biofuels.""...
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More deaths due to Europe 'caring' for the planet. No more looking in these peoples' eyes, eh Monbiot?
Honduran farmers alleged killed by private climate militias, EurActiv10/3/11, "Carbon credits tarnished by human rights 'disgrace'," EurActiv, Arthur Neslen
"The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations in Honduras is forcing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) executive board
- to reconsider its stakeholder consultation processes."...
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All for nothing, Monbiot:
4/4/12, "Arctic Shatters More Records," Real Science, Steve Goddard
"Arctic ice extent is the highest in nearly a decade, and has again set the record for both the latest peak and the longest winter. Normally it has been melting for almost a month already." (NORSEX, SSM/1)
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As of Feb. 2012, no Antarctic ice lost in past 30 years per AGU, American Geophysical Union:Feb. 21, 2012, "A new, high-resolution surface mass balance map of Antarctica (1979–2010) based on regional atmospheric climate modeling," J. T. M. Lenaerts,1 M. R. van den Broeke,1 W. J. van de Berg,1 E. van Meijgaard,2 and P. Kuipers Munneke1, American Geophysical Union, Geophysical Research Letters
Received 17 January 2012; accepted 21 January 2012; published 21 February 2012.
page 4. "3.4. Trend
[15] We found no significant trend in the 1979–2010 ice
sheet integrated SMB components, which confirms the
results from Monaghan et al. [2006]....
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2/8/12, "The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows," UK Guardian, Damian Harrington
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Monbiot, US CO2 emissions have dropped steadily since 2006 and are going lower. Europe's haven't gone down at all. Your best ideas have done one thing: made the rich richer and the poor poorer:6/26/12, "The Incredible Shrinking Carbon Pollution Forecast - Part 2," switchboard.nrdc.org, Dan Lashof
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6/29/12, "US Carbon Output Forecasts Shrink Again," American Interest, Walter Russell Mead
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6/4/12, "Climate change stunner: USA leads world in CO2 cuts since 2006," Vancouver Observer, Saxifrage
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6/22/12, "U.S. cuts greenhouse gases despite do-nothing Congress," CNN, Steve Hargreaves
"Even factoring in a stronger economy, forecasters see greenhouse gas emissions continuing to fall."...
=============================4/21/12, "Why [CO2] Emissions Are Declining in the U.S. But Not in Europe," by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, newgeography.com
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7/2/12, "CO2 Emissions Will Likely Fall This Year to 1991 Levels," Carpe Diem, Mark J. Perry
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11/23/11, "Europe's $287 billion carbon 'waste': UBS report," The Australian, by Sid Maher
"SWISS banking giant UBS says the European Union's emissions trading scheme has cost the continent's consumers $287 billion for "almost zero impact" on cutting carbon emissions."...EU CO2 trading provided "windfall profits" to participants paid for by "electricity customers.""
5/2/12, "Permit glut sparks talk of ‘carbon central bank’," Euractiv
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4/23/12, "'I made a mistake': Gaia theory scientist James Lovelock admits he was 'alarmist' about the impact of climate change," UK Daily Mail, L. Warren
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7/16/10, "Carbon Trading Used as Money-Laundering Front," Jakarta Globe
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10/8/10, "Murder on the Carbon Express: Interpol Takes On Emissions Fraud," Mother Jones, M. Schapiro
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5/6/12, "US Leads EU in CO2 Reductions," Walter Russell Mead, American Interest
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7/25/10: "European Climate Exchange website hacked," Indymedia Australia
======================
3/15/12, "U.K. ‘Wasted’ 4 Years on Failed $1.6 Billion Carbon-Capture Plan," Bloomberg, S. Bakewell
"The U.K. must learn from a failed 1 billion-pound ($1.6 billion) carbon-capture funding program that “wasted” four years."...
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12/16/09, "BLOW FOR CLEAN COAL AS UN SHUTS IT OUT OF EMISSIONS TRADING," UK Telegraph, by Rowena Mason
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1/6/09, "Siemens bribery judgment a "wake up call for the "global energy industry," stoel.com-----------------------------------------------
9/20/10, "Climate Deal May Need Company Lobbying, Figueres Says," Bloomberg,
"Success at climate-change talks in Mexico may depend on companies such as Siemens AG ...prodding governments into action,
- said Christiana Figueres, the United Nations climate chief.
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2/13/2009, "At Siemens, Bribery Was Just a Line Item," PBS.org, FrontlineWorld, Schubert and Miller, story also published in NY Times
Mr. Siekaczek (pronounced SEE-kah-chek) says that from 2002 to 2006 he oversaw an annual bribery budget of about $40 million to $50 million at Siemens. Company managers and sales staff used the slush fund to cozy up to corrupt government officials worldwide."...
- Note: The US Justice Dept. went easy on Siemens so it could keep the pipeline open to US taxpayer dollars.
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1/25/2009, "Global warming industry becomes too big to fail," Timothy Carney, Washington Examiner
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A 2011 report noted EIA results through 2009, US CO2 emissions dropped steadily since 1999. If, hypothetically, US temperatures have been on the increase, they couldn't possibly be related to US carbon dioxide emissions:4/14/11, "Biggest Drop in U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions," World Climate Report
"In 2009, greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. experienced their biggest drop since the U.S. Energy Information Administration began tracking them during the 1990-2009 timeframe.
The EIA’s latest numbers on greenhouse gas emissions can be found in their just released report “Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2009.”...
According to the EIA:
In Figure 1 we show the history of carbon dioxide emissions—primary among the greenhouse gases—in the U.S. from 1990-2009. We also include the emissions history from China, for comparative purposes.The decrease in U.S. CO2 emissions in 2009 resulted primarily from three factors: an economy in recession, a particularly hard-hit energy-intensive industries sector, and a large drop in the price of natural gas that caused fuel switching away from coal to natural gas in the electric power sector.
Figure 1. Annual carbon dioxide emissions from the United States (blue) and China (red), 1990-2009 (data source, EIA)....
The plans that are kicked around in Congress from time to time (although certainly less so this year), typically call for a reduction in U.S. CO2 emissions roughly on this schedule: 20% in 2020, 40% in 2030, and 80% by 2050.
Now, consider that currently China adds to its total CO2 emissions an equivalent of 10% of the U.S. baseline emissions each year. So, if everything went according to plan, as the U.S. worked to reduce its emissions by 20% by 2020, China meanwhile will have increased their total by about quadruple that amount. And the numbers get worse from there.
So you can see the inherent silliness in using “climate change” as a reason for pushing for reductions in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
In fact, U.S. politicians who are thinking that their first responsibility should be towards improving the situation for Americans here and now, ought to be seeking out ways to get the U.S. CO2 emissions
We say this because two the three reasons given by the EIA for the recent drop in U.S. CO2 emissions have to do with the poor economic times. Turn around the economy
- and you will turn around emissions.
Burning natural gas reduces CO2 emissions per unit energy produced, but, in terms keeping the trend of total U.S. CO2 emissions in the negative territory, this effect is probably trumped by the hard economy. Further, there is a hot-off-the-presses new study that suggests that the carbon dioxide savings from natural gas acquired through hydraulic fracturing (a fast-growing technique to recover loads of natural gas domestically) may actually be (more than) offset by the by-product release of methane during the extraction process (Howarth et al., 2011). So the climate benefits of switching to natural gas (from coal) to produce electricity are perhaps not as great as they are being touted. We’re sure we’ll be hearing more about this—in fact, stay tuned to these pages because we are working through the Howarth et al. article and will post our findings soon!
So, what’s in store for 2010? Probably more of the same—that is, a relatively low level of carbon dioxide emission from the U.S.—as the circumstances that led to the low value in 2009 were pretty much the same as the situation in 2010."...
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7/2/12, "We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all," UK Guardian, George Monbiot
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