Mark Keenan

In Sweden there exists an electrified road for Electric Vehicles (EVs) to charge while driving[1]. The 2 km stretch of road is the world’s first of its kind, and an expansion of a further 3,000 km of electric road by 2045 is planned. It all sounds rather cool and futuristic, and I am reminded of a song lyric from the 1980s, the singer Eddie Grant sang “we’re gonna rock onto Electric Avenue”.

However, let us consider whether these expensive EVs are actually environmentally friendly or are yet mega-corporate marketing scam?

This article demonstrates that the latter is the case. The reality is that the misled environmentalists buying these cars are suckers for mega-corporate advertising, ignorantly proud of their so-called low-carbon eco-cars.

Apparently, unaware that the manufacture of millions of electric car batteries, requires huge mining operations to acquire and refine large quantities of rare earth metals, such as lithium, rhodium and cobalt; that these metals have to be mined out of the ground using machinery which is powered by carbon-emitting vehicles powered by diesel or petrol; and importantly, that the mining and refining processes can cause significant and extensive pollution to land, air and water systems, for example in rural China and Mongolia[2]. Unlike the fake climate agenda, these are real environmental problems.

Below is a picture of a lithium leach field. This is what your EV batteries are made of. It is so neuro-toxic that a bird landing on this stuff dies in minutes. Take a guess what it does to your nervous system. Pat yourself on the back for saving the environment.

Furthermore, the push to end gasoline or diesel transport by 2035 in favor of e-vehicles is based on a lie as the lithium-ion battery-powered vehicles have a total “carbon footprint” when the effects of mining lithium and producing all parts are included, that is worse than diesel autos.

Furthermore, electric cars are still driven by electricity produced from fossil fuels and will most likely continue to be. Despite decades of government subsidies wind power provides less than 5% of the world’s energy, and solar just 1%. The use of electricity to charge vehicles and devices is also an extremely inefficient use of energy, according to a study by the European Association for Battery Electric Vehicles commissioned by the European Commission (EC):

“The ‘Well-to-Tank’ energy efficiency (from the primary energy source to the electrical plug), taking into account the energy consumed by the production and distribution of the electricity, is estimated at around 37%.“

Let us take a look at the deceptive marketing for electric vehicles. The first misleading marketing trick that millions of environmentalists fell for was the ‘hybrid’. Hybrid cars are actually gasoline powered cars with a little battery assistance and the little battery has to be charged from the gasoline engine.

If the EPA-certified mileage is 55 mpg, then it is no different from a non-hybrid that achieves 55 mpg. A world 100% full of ‘hybrid’ drivers is still 100% addicted to oil.

Now consider a cleverly designed marketing pitch for electric cars by Elon Musk, Co-Founder & CEO of Tesla Motors. In an article published on the Tesla Motors website[3], he states:

“the overarching purpose of Tesla Motors… is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy…  I’d like to address two repeated arguments against electric vehicles – battery disposal and power plant emissions… the Tesla Motors Lithium-Ion cells are not classified as hazardous and are landfill safe…  the battery pack can be sold to recycling companies (unsubsidized) at the end of its greater than 100,000-mile design life…

A common rebuttal to electric vehicles as a solution to carbon emissions is that they simply transfer the CO2 emissions to the power plant. The obvious counter is that one can develop grid electric power from a variety of means, many of which, like hydro, wind, geothermal, nuclear, solar, etc. involve no CO2 emissions. However, let’s assume for the moment that the electricity is generated from a hydrocarbon source like natural gas… the hands down winner is pure electric:

we will be offering a modestly sized and priced solar… This system can be… set up as a carport and will generate about 50 miles per day of electricity. If you travel less than 350 miles per week, you will therefore be “energy positive” with respect to your personal transportation… you will actually be putting more energy back into the system than you consume in transportation!”

However, Elon Musk does not mention the fact that:

• the move from mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy in itself requires a vast expenditure of fossil-fuel energy to re-purpose the entire worldwide industrial system, as well as build vast new energy grids for wind and solar energy, etc, simply to reduce CO2 emissions. A new industrial framework which in itself will still be very polluting to land, air, and water in virtually the same ways as the old framework as it creates more and more ‘product’ to be marketed and sold, such as electric cars, which we are now incorrectly told is okay because its ‘green product’;

• the Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) for solar and wind energy is too low to be viable, and therefore to repurpose and rebuild the world energy and industrial system to de-carbonise the economy is a waste of vast amounts of fossils fuels (no wonder the sector seeks subsidies);

• the manufacture of potentially hundreds of millions of new electric cars and electric car batteries involves a continuation of widespread mining and processing of rare earth metals, such as lithium, rhodium and cobalt, which are a limited resource. The mining and processing of rare earth metals has been shown to be polluting to land, air, and water systems, such as rivers.

• if you charge the car with solar energy, you may be putting slightly more energy back into the system than you consume in ‘driving the car’. However, driving the electric car is only one small part of the entire energy consuming process from mining to manufacture to distribution, not to mention the embedded energy in the manufactured materials of a new worldwide supply-chain industrial infrastructure, including cars, factories, energy grids, windmills, photovoltaics, etc.

• and, vitally, that CO2 emissions are not the cause of climate change. This is evidenced in my books: Transcending the Climate Change Deception Toward Real Sustainability and CO2 Climate Hoax – How Bankers Hijacked the Real Environment Movement

As an example of why electric cars are fake environmentalism let us consider a Tesla model Y battery in the picture below.

It takes up all of the space under the passenger compartment of the car. To manufacture it has been estimated that you need:

12 tons of rock for lithium; 5 tons of cobalt minerals (most cobalt is made as a byproduct of the processing of copper and nickel ores. It is a very difficult to obtain and is very expensive.);

3 tons of nickel ore; and 12 tons of copper ore. In addition, you must move 250 tons of soil to obtain: 26.5 pounds of lithium; 30 pounds of nickel;

48.5 pounds of manganese; and 15 pounds of cobalt. To manufacture the battery also requires 441 pounds of aluminum, steel and/or plastic and 112 pounds of graphite

A Caterpillar 994A vehicle is commonly used for the earthmoving to obtain the essential minerals. It has been estimated to consume between 250 and 775 gallons of diesel in 12 hours[4]. Finally, you get a “zero emissions” car. Presently, the bulk of the necessary minerals for manufacturing the batteries comes from China or Africa; and much of the hard labour for acquiring the minerals in Africa is done by children!

The cost of Tesla batteries for the Tesla car models ranges from $5,000 to $20,000.

It takes seven years for an electric car to reach net-zero CO2. The average life expectancy of the batteries is 10 years. Only in the last three years do you begin to reduce your carbon footprint. Then the batteries have to be replaced and you lose all the gains you made in those three years.

The reality should be distinguished from the lies we are all being told by the UN, the WEF and mega-corporate advertising. The word “sustainable” was hijacked decades ago, and it is now deceptively used to advance the agendas of mega-corporate-communist interests who couldn’t care less about the environment. The aim is to catapult humanity into the ‘fake-sustainable’ totalitarian arms of UN Agenda 2030 and other clever marketing plans entirely designed by the so-called elites of the corporate WEF Davos group.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/driving-electric-car-fake-environmentalism-elon-musk-debunked/5846311

Dr Eddy Betterman

We rarely hear about it due to the system-wide embargo on truthful information about the damage they cause, but vaccines have destroyed the world.

A Midwestern Doctor, a popular Substack account, conducted an extensive review into the science behind vaccines that never sees the light of day. The doctor found that the ugly truth about vaccines stays hidden in order to protect “the business,” meaning the vaccine arm of Big Pharma.

To tell the ugly truth about vaccines “would destroy the vaccine programme,” the doctor writes, which is why it is never told. One of them is the fact that vaccines do not prevent disease, and instead cause more of it.

Diseases that were once thought to be eradicated have returned, but not because the unvaccinated. The doctor found that vaccines are reintroducing these ancient illnesses, which are today being dubbed a “mystery.”

Take the smallpox vaccine, for instance. Introduced in 1798, the smallpox jab was frequently observed to cause smallpox outbreaks rather than prevent them, but this ugly truth was swept under the rug.

If modern medicine was an honest science, the smallpox jab would have been pulled from the market and relegated to the dustbin of the world’s worst scientific mistakes. Instead, the smallpox jab laid the groundwork for the thereafter release of a host of new vaccine injections, all of which do the same type of thing.

“Having looked at it extensively, I am of the opinion the smallpox vaccine reshaped the trajectory of humanity’s health and ushered in the era of chronic illness,” the doctor writes.

(Related: People who were vaccinated are much more likely than the unvaccinated to develop ear diseases, blood disorders and hair loss, research shows.)

Skip all jabs

The vaccines that would come after smallpox unleashed other new health problems, often due to quality control issues. Besides their inherent toxicity, new vaccines would get pumped out at an increasingly faster rate, and all the new companies trying to cash in on the jab rush to cut corners to save a buck.

“Because of this, a variety of new and severe medical conditions emerged, many of which were deemed to be due to brain inflammation (encephalitis) or brain damage (encephalopathy) and observed to occur in conjunction with cranial nerve damage,” the doctor explains.

“Most of these conditions in turn mirrored the myriad of injuries we now too see from modern vaccinations.”

Back in the 1980s, it was rare for children to show symptoms of autism or other neurological problems. Today, autism is common, as are many other chronic illnesses that prior to the advent of vaccines were rare, if not nonexistent.

Real science backs these claims, by the way, but most of it remains hidden while the fake kind promoting vaccines constantly gets pushed to the forefront of the news cycle.

“Numerous clinical trials of individual vaccines (e.g., the HPV vaccine) show that vaccines cause many of the same disorders (e.g., a myriad of autoimmune conditions) that have increased in parallel to the number of doses of the vaccine one receives (e.g., the second shot is almost always more likely to cause a severe reaction than the first),” the doctor further writes.

“This in turn suggests that taking a large number of vaccines (presently the ever increasing CDC schedule gives children 90 before they turn 18) puts them at risk for developing chronic disease.”

Though many such studies have been conducted over the years, research highlighting all of this does not typically get published in any of the medical journals that the modern medical profession looks to for guidance. As such, the vaccine racket continues, seemingly without end.

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2024/09/29/vaccines-destroyed-society-unleashing-damage-public-health/

Episode 11 Universities and Intellectual Discovery

The Middle Ages Around the World

Dr Joyce E Salisbury

Film Review

China

During the Sui dynasty (581-618), China implemented a civil service exam proposed by Confucius intended to limit the power of local nobility and weed out bureaucratic corruptions. The exam covered the Confucian moral code, the philosophy of yin/yang duality, the I Ching (Book of Changes – used to inform future decisions), medicine, science, astronomy,

Wealthy parents spent fortunes preparing their sons the exam – those who failed became teachers or not infrequently hung themselves. Approximately 130,000 students (25% of the age 19-24 population)  took the exam, which was closed to sons of merchants (viewed as being “too greedy”). Ironically the exam produced deeply conservative bureaucrats who viewed traditional ethics as far more important than innovation and knew virtually nothing about collecting taxes or hiring contractors to build roads.

The Muslim World

In Baghdad, the Abassid Empire established Wisdom Schools, which translated the science, medicine and mathematics texts of Greek and Roman scholars.

Fatima al Firi founded the University of Kareein in Fez Morocco, the largest continuously operational university in the world, and the Mali empire established the Sankoré university in Timbuktu.

Muslim physicians (who needed a license to practice) received training combining the teachings of 2nd century Roman physician Galen and clinical observations. They did surgery using opium and/or wine as anesthesia for cancer, circulation problems and cataracts (which were removed by being drained of fluid.

Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna) was the most famous physician in the Middle Ages. In the 6th century, his Cannon of Medicine was the second most read book after the Bible. He was one of the first to teach that good health relies on a balance of healthy food, lifestyle and medical treatment.

In the 7th century, Indian mathematicians invented the concept of 0 and base 10 numerals. In 825, the Persian mathematician A-Khwarizmi introduced these concepts to the Muslim world in his treatise “On Calculation with Numerals.” By the 10th century, Muslim mathematicians had invented fractions, decimals and algebra.

In the 11th century Lubna, the private secretary to the Cordova Caliph Al-Hakam used Arabic numerals to verify the scientific concepts proposed by Archimedes and other Greek scientists. Pope Sylvester II (999-1003) would introduceMuslim math principles to Europe.

The 12th century Muslim philosopher Averroes rediscovered Aristotle’s Advanced logic, which had been lost to Europeans. Around the same time Muslim Seljik Turks established the first Madrassas in the Near East and Africa. to assist Muslim children to memorize the Koran in Arabic.

Europe

In Europe the first universities were created by cathedrals in the 11th and 12th century, owing to their practice of drawing scholars together to debate theology. Copying the guilds, their advanced scholars referred to themselves as masters and organized themselves into “universitas” (Latin for guild).

As in Rome, advanced education for boys began at 14 (no girls were allowed) and consisted of the trivium: (Latin) grammar, rhetoric and logic. Next came the quadrivium music, arithmetic, geometry and astrology. After two years they took an exam for a bachelor’s degree. After two more years, they could be licensed to become a master. After successfully completing advanced training a student could become a doctor of medicine or philosophy.

All training, including religious training, was based on Aristotelian logic. This led to 13th century scholasticism, which attempted to join faith with reason.*

*This led to ridiculous debates over the number of angels on the head of a pin and whether a man’s body (in the final resurrection) belonged to him or the cannibal who ate him. The most famous scholastic Thomas Aquinas offers five proofs of God’s existence in his Summa Theologiae. William of Ockham at Oxford was the most prominent critic of scholasticism. He asserted that requiring God to be logical removed the possibility of miracles. Roger Bacon set the stage for the modern scientific revolution by arguing all old beliefs should be tested by experimental science.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/13172786/13172811

By Richard Poe (From How the British Invented Communism and Blamed it on the Jews)

On November 25, 1789—four months after the storming of the Bastille—King Louis XVI was still on his throne, showing every willingness to work with the new National Assembly to form a constitutional monarchy. Sadly for Louis—and for all of France—events took a fateful turn that day. The catalyst was a letter from the London Revolution Society to the French National Assembly, which was read aloud to the members. It directly inspired the formation of the so-called Jacobin clubs, from which Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and the Reign of Terror would emerge.

Paid Agents

Jefferson expressed the same view in a letter of January 31, 1815 to William Plumer, a New Hampshire lawyer and politician.63

“[W]hen England took alarm lest France, become republican, should recover energies dangerous to her,” wrote Jefferson, “she employed emissaries with means to engage incendiaries and anarchists in the disorganisation of all government there…”

According to Jefferson, these hired “incendiaries and anarchists” infiltrated the Revolution by “assuming exaggerated zeal for republican government,” then gained control of the legislature, “overwhelming by their majorities the honest & enlightened patriots…”

Their pockets filled with British gold, these paid agents “intrigued themselves into the municipality of Paris,” said Jefferson, “controlled by terrorism the proceedings of the legislature…” and finally “murdered the king,” thus “demolishing liberty and government with it.”

In the same letter, Jefferson accused Danton and Marat by name of being on the British payroll.

The London Revolution Society

Jefferson’s views find unexpected support from U.S. historian Micah Alpaugh, who has revealed the extensive influence British reformers exerted over the French revolutionaries. Unlike Jefferson, Alpaugh sees nothing nefarious in this influence, but nonetheless remarks on its surprising extent.

In his 2014 paper, “The British Origins of the French Jacobins,” Alpaugh notes that France’s radical Jacobin clubs were consciously modeled after an existing British organization, the London Revolution Society.64

This was a group of English intellectuals who began meeting at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate in 1788, ostensibly to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of William III’s Glorious Revolution. It soon became clear, however, that their true goal was to agitate for revolution in the present day.

On November 25, 1789—four months after the storming of the Bastille—King Louis XVI was still on his throne, showing every willingness to work with the new National Assembly to form a constitutional monarchy.

Sadly for Louis—and for all of France—events took a fateful turn that day which would end all possibility of cooperation. The catalyst for this catastrophe was a letter from the London Revolution Society to the French National Assembly.

The so-called “English Jacobins” offered their French disciples a poisoned chalice of “cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and universalism” (Alpaugh’s words), urging the French idealists to put aside the narrow interests of their own country, in favor of the broader interests of mankind. But the broader interests of mankind pushed by the “English Jacobins” turned out to be little more than a smokescreen for British imperial interests.

British Radicals Intervene

That day, November 25, 1789, the president of the French National Assembly read aloud to the legislators a letter from the London radicals.

The letter directly inspired the formation of the so-called Jacobin clubs, from which Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and the Reign of Terror would later emerge.

The letter called on the French to disdain “National partialities” and join with their English brethren in a revolution that would make “the World free and happy.”

Alpaugh writes that the letter “produced a ‘great sensation’ and loud applause in the Assembly, which wrote back to London declaring how it had seen ‘the aurora of the beautiful day’ when the two nations could put aside their differences and ‘contract an intimate liaison by the similarity of their opinions, and by their common enthusiasm for liberty’.”

This letter fueled a “growing Anglophilia” (Alpaugh’s words), inspiring the French revolutionaries to found a Societé de la Révolution, directly modeled after the London Revolution Society.

The Societé de la Révolution was later renamed, but always kept its English-style nickname Club des Jacobins—pointedly retaining the English word “club” as a tribute to the group’s British origin, Alpaugh explains.65

The Poisoned Chalice

As Jacobin “clubs” sprang up all over France, they typically retained close ties to their English mentors.

Alpaugh writes, “Early French Jacobins created their network in consultation with British models,” such as the London Revolution Society and the London Corresponding Society. “Direct correspondence between British and French radical organizations between 1787 and 1793 would develop reciprocal and mutually inspiring relationships…helping inspire the rise of Jacobin Clubs throughout France,” writes Alpaugh.66

Deliberately or not, the so-called “English Jacobins” (as they came to be known) offered their French disciples a poisoned chalice of “cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and universalism” (Alpaugh’s words), urging the French idealists to put aside the narrow interests of their own country, in favor of the broader interests of mankind.67

This was, in fact, a deception.

Alpaugh may not see it this way, but the broader interests of mankind pushed by the “English Jacobins” turned out to be little more than a smokescreen for British imperial interests.

The Jacobin Clubs gave rise to Marat, Danton, and Robespierre, ultimately leading to the Reign of Terror and the murder of King Louis XVI.

They also gave rise to a new ideology which has come to be known as communism.

“The term ‘communism’ in the France of the 1840s denoted… an offshoot of the Jacobin tradition of the first French revolution,” wrote Marxist historian David Fernbach in 1973. “This communism went back to Gracchus Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals” which was already shaking up Paris more than 20 years before Marx was born. Babeuf derived many of his ideas from British mentors, at least some of whom were British intelligence operatives.

The Invention of Communism

Communism was born on the streets of revolutionary Paris.

More than fifty years before Marx and Engels penned The Communist Manifesto, a faction of French radicals calling itself the Conspiracy of Equals was already preaching classless society, abolition of private property, and the need for revolutionary action.

Led by “Gracchus” Babeuf —whose real name was François-Noël Babeuf—the Conspiracy of Equals tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the so-called Directory, France’s last revolutionary government, in 1796.68

Their conspiracy failed, and Babeuf was put to death. But his ideas live on.

Marx and Engels called Babeuf the first modern communist.69

No record exists of Babeuf using the word communiste, though he sometimes called his followers “communautistes” (usually translated “communitarian”).70

However, a contemporary of Babeuf, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, often used the word “communist” in his writings, beginning as early as 1785.71

Babeuf’s prosecutors apparently believed that Restif was secretly in league with the Conspiracy of Equals, and some evidence suggests he may have been, according to James Billington, in his 1980 book Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith.72

Jacobin Communism

For all these reasons, it is not surprising that the self-styled “communistes” who emerged in Paris during the 1830s and 1840s saw themselves, at least partly, as following in the footsteps of Babeuf.73

“The term ‘communism’ in the France of the 1840s denoted… an offshoot of the Jacobin tradition of the first French revolution,” wrote Marxist historian David Fernbach in 1973. “This communism went back to Gracchus Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals… This egalitarian or ‘crude’ communism, as Marx called it originated before the great development of machine industry. It appealed to the Paris sans-culottes—artisans, journeymen and unemployed—and potentially to the poor peasantry in the countryside.”74

Thus, Babeuf’s “crude” communism was already shaking up Paris more than 20 years before Marx was born.

By March, 1840, the Communist movement in Paris was deemed sufficiently threatening that a German newspaper denounced it, saying, “The Communists have in view nothing less than a levelling of society— substituting for the presently-existing order of things the absurd, immoral and impossible utopia of a community of goods.”75

When these words were written, the 21-year-old Karl Marx was studying classics and philosophy in Berlin. He had not yet shown a strong interest in radical or revolutionary politics.

[…]

Via https://richardpoe.substack.com/p/how-the-british-invented-communism

Episode 11 Cathedrals to Pagodas: Sacred Architecture

The Middle Ages Around the World

Dr Joyce E Salisbury

Film Review

The first medieval cathedrals (10th-13th century) were Romanesque churches relying on columns to support their massive roofs. Early cathedrals were built by monasteries. In the later Middle Ages, they were built by the community with funds generated from trade revenue.

The 12th century Vezelay (east central France) Abbey basilica is an excellent example of the Romanesque style. Fixed buttresses and a series of rounded arches forming barrel vaults (see The Engineering Marvels of Rome’s Public Baths) support the roof.

Flying buttresse

Gothic arches filled with stained glass windows, replaced Roman arches in the late 12th century. Introduced by Abbott Sager to introduce more light into the cathedral interior, this design shifts the roof support away from walls and columns to exterior flying buttresses.

The first Gothic church was the St Denis basilica, where most French kings were consecrated.

Built by the 6th century Emperor Justinian I, the Hagia Sophia basilica became a mosque following the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. I became a  model for 17th century mosques.

11

14 century El Transito synagogue

During the Middle Ages, Jews embarked on heavy synagogue building, using the same builders as the Christian churches. Muslim-controlled Toledo (in modern-day Spain) built 11 synagogues in a city with 4,000 Jews (out of a total population of 35,000).

In 1192, Turks established the Delhi Sultanate in modern day India and ordered Hindu temples destroyed and replaced with mosques. The mosques were built under the direction of Islamic architects. Most retained their ornate Hindu carvings, with specific image of Hindu gods and goddesses.

The medieval temples where Buddhists worshiped were topped by stupas, which contained relic or manuscript. Only monks could enter the temple’s stupa for meditation.  A Buddhist temple in Java from the 8th or 9th century is known as the Borobruder. The largest stone temple in the world, the stones were laid without mortar and a carved to detail the journey to enlightenment. It was abandoned in the 15h century when Islam replaced Buddhism in Indonesia.

As Buddhism moved into China, Buddhist stupas became pagodas. There were 91 monasteries. The Tang capitol of Chang’an had 91 Buddhist monasteries. Liaodi is the largest pagoda in the world.

As Hindu spread to Southeast Asia in the early 12th century, the Ankar Watt temple (dedicated to Vishnu) was built in the Khmer Empire (9th-15h century) in modern day Cambodia.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/13172786/13172809

In a recent interview with the New York Times, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates was asked if there were types of projects that he would not invest in to offset his greenhouse gas emissions. “I don’t plant trees,” he replied, adding that planting trees to deal with the climate crisis was complete nonsense. “I mean, are we the science people, or are we the idiots? Which one do we want to be?”[1]

Microsoft, the company he built his fortune on and, according to insiders, still actively advises, sees it differently.

In June 2024, the tech giant bought 8 million carbon credits from the Timberland Investment Group (TIG), a fund owned by the Brazilian agribusiness lender BTG Pactual.[2] TIG is raising US$1 billion to buy and convert pasture lands to large-scale eucalyptus plantations across the Southern Cone of Latin America.[3] As these trees grow, they draw carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their roots, trunks and branches. TIG will estimate the amount of carbon removed and then sell it as carbon credits to Microsoft and other corporations.

Each carbon credit that Microsoft buys from TIG is supposed to offset one tonne of the emissions Microsoft generates burning fossil fuels. This is one of the main ways that Microsoft and many other companies are planning on getting to “net zero” emissions, while still burning fossil fuels.

Microsoft’s deal with TIG, reportedly the largest “carbon dioxide removal credit transaction” in history, is just one of many investments Microsoft is making in tree plantations as a way to offset its emissions.[4]

The Dutch agribusiness lender Rabobank is another source of carbon credits for the tech company. It too is acquiring land in Brazil for tree plantations, in this instance with a local agribusiness family with a track record of illegal deforestation and fraud.[5] But most of the carbon credits Rabobank sells to Microsoft are from its programme to plant trees on the lands of small coffee and cacao growers in Latin America, Africa and Asia. This programme, called Acorn, uses satellites and a Microsoft digital platform to measure the number and size of shade trees that small farmers plant on their farms and then calculate the carbon they’ve removed from the atmosphere. It then sells the carbon to Microsoft as “carbon credits” for about US$38 a piece, taking a 20% cut for itself and its local partner, and paying farmers what’s left of the proceeds.[6]

A big problem with Rabobank’s scheme, identified in an investigation of its project with cacao farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, is that it is vastly overestimating the carbon removed — in this case by 600%![7] What’s more, the Côte d’Ivoire government says Rabobank is likely double dipping as its project overlaps with a World Bank-funded scheme that has already generated and sold carbon credits from trees planted on small cacao farms in the same area.

All of this “nonsense”, as Gates calls it, has not stopped an increasing number of corporations, governments and billionaires — not to mention a new industry of climate consultants and carbon brokers — from promoting the idea that emissions from fossil fuels can and should be offset by planting trees or other crops that sequester carbon.

Such projects have a chequered history that goes back to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but they really only took off after the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, when governments endorsed the notion of offsets and carbon markets as an effective means to get corporations to cut their emissions.[8] Today, most offset projects are in the so-called “voluntary market”, where private companies from the global North manage the certification and sale of carbon credits to corporations that want to show they are taking action to deal with climate change. The projects, largely in the global South, can be for anything from the distribution of clean cook stoves in Malawi to the preservation of rainforests in Indonesia. The premise is that the project either prevents emissions that would have occurred without it, or that it leads to the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. Cook stoves and rainforest preservation are examples of emissions avoidance. Planting trees, on the other hand, is the most popular form of removal.

In a 2024 study, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) says that the number of tree planting projects for carbon credits has tripled over the past three years.[9] WRM says the surge is partly driven by the large number of high-profile scandals in emissions avoidance schemes, known as “REDD+”.[10] Numerous projects to preserve forests have been withdrawn or suspended from carbon markets after investigations showed they were based on implausible stories about the threat of deforestation or that they caused human rights violations and other harms to local communities. As a result, WRM says corporations are turning their attention to tree planting as a source of “high-integrity” carbon credits. This is now spawning a mad rush to secure lands where trees can be planted.

The Carbon Farmland Grab

Activists and scientists have been warning for years that schemes to offset carbon emissions by planting trees or other crops would lead to a surge in land grabbing, especially in the global South.[11] These warnings are now proving true.

GRAIN combed through the various registries of carbon offset projects to try and get a better sense of this new land grab and how it is unfolding. We identified 279 large-scale tree and crop planting projects for carbon credits that corporations have initiated since 2016 in the global South. They cover over 9.1 million hectares of land — an area roughly the size of Portugal. (See Box 1: What’s included and what’s not included in the land deal dataset)

The deals (view the dataset here) add up to a massive new form of land grabbing that will only increase conflicts and pressures over land that are still simmering from the last global land grab spree that erupted in 2007-8 in the wake of global food and financial crises. They also signify that new sources of money are now flowing into the coffers of companies specialised in taking lands from communities in the South to enrich and serve corporations, mainly in the North.

Box 1: What’s included and what’s not included in the land deal dataset

What’s in?

Our data covers projects from all the major voluntary offset project registries. These are: American Carbon Registry (ACR), Climate Action Reserve (CAR), Gold Standard (GS), Verra (VCS), BioCarbono (BC), Cercarbono (CV) and Plan Vivo (PV). It also includes cases on the website farmlandgrab.org that are not yet found in the registries.

The projects in our dataset are limited to projects that:

– involve the large-scale planting of crops and/or tree species on a combined area of land over 100 ha for the purpose of producing carbon credits;

– are driven by companies from outside the communities;

– were initiated since 2016 and up to 31 March 2024 (roughly post-Paris Agreement); and

– are located in the global South.

The projects involve either 1) the creation of large-scale plantations or 2) contract production with small farmers. But all the projects bind the use of the land to the terms of the project for 20 years or more.

What’s not in?

REDD+ projects, which aim to avoid deforestation, are not included. Some types of projects that produce carbon credits through tree planting or agriculture on large areas of land are not included either. These are:

– projects to manage pasture lands, which affect the access to lands and traditional practices of pastoralists;

– projects to restore or create mangroves, where large areas of coastline are taken over for the planting of mangrove trees; and,

– projects which generate carbon credits by enrolling farmers to implement agricultural practices that are said to build up carbon in the soils, often called “carbon farming”.

These projects are extremely important and can have equally severe impacts on communities, including land grabbing, but they are not covered here to keep the dataset manageable.[12] Our data also does not cover projects located in the global North, such as in New Zealand, Scotland and Australia, where national schemes that endorse tree planting for carbon offsets have led to a displacement in food production and undermined farmers’ access to land.[13]

To date, 52 countries in the global South have been targeted by these projects. Half the projects are in just four countries: China, India, Brazil and Colombia, which are developing their own industries of carbon project developers. But projects in these countries account for less than a third of the total land area involved. The most affected region, in terms of land area, is Africa, with projects covering over 5.2 million hectares.[14]

Many of the projects involve land deals to set up giant eucalyptus, acacia or bamboo plantations. Typically, these are pasture lands or savannahs that were used until now by local communities for grazing livestock or growing food.

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The money that investors plan to capture from these deals is immense. The projects we pulled from the Verra and Gold Standard registries alone will generate 2.5 billion carbon credits (1 credit = 1 tonne of CO2 removed) over their lifetime. With an average price of about US$10 per credit, that adds up to a potential bounty of US$25 billion.[15]

Here Come the “Idiots”

While these projects are exclusively set up in rural areas with extremely low emissions per capita, it is quite the opposite when it comes to the companies orchestrating the projects. With the exception of what’s happening in India and China, most carbon projects are led by foreign companies in rich countries with atrocious emissions records — such as the Netherlands, the US, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK, France, Germany and the UAE.[16] There is a clear colonial dynamic at work, with companies and big NGOs from the North once again using the lands of communities in the global South for their own agendas and their own benefit.

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GRAIN and UChicago Data Science Institute (click here for better resolution)

.A good number of actors driving this new wave of land grabs are in fact repeat offenders from the global farmland grab that took off a decade and a half ago. This is especially the case in Africa. (See Box 3: Africa’s land grabbers are back in business) There are also several companies from the forestry sector with histories of land grabbing and conflicts with local communities. Much of the vast eucalyptus plantations of Brazilian paper giant Suzano, for example, which is involved in three large-scale carbon plantation projects, have been grabbed from Brazil’s indigenous and traditional peoples.[17] And a non-negligible number of project developers have records of illegal dealings and financial scandal. They include:

• Ricardo Stoppe Jr, Brazil’s “carbon king”, who was arrested in June 2024 for running an illegal carbon credit sale and land grabbing scheme;[18]
• Martin Vorderwulbecke, a German businessman with a neem tree carbon project in Paraguay, who is accused of defrauding Slovenia’s national airline of millions of dollars;[19]
• Alexis Ludwig Leroy, a French/Swiss carbon trader developing tree planting projects in Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is reportedly under investigation for money laundering and financial connections to Colombia’s “queen of cocaine”;[20]
• Vittorio Medioli, an Italian/Brazilian businessman and politician with a carbon tree plantation in Brazil, who was convicted in Brazilian courts for currency evasion and sued for cartel and gang formation in the transport sector;[21] and,
• Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook al Maktoum, a member of the UAE royal family seeking tens of millions of hectares in Africa for carbon offset projects, who is accused of overcharging Ghana on the supply of Russian-made Covid vaccines and who was advised on his African carbon deals by an Italian businessman convicted for a bankruptcy fraud that sank one of Italy’s largest telecommunications companies.[22]

The money being hustled by these carbon cowboys comes mainly from the world’s most polluting corporations, who are interested in buying carbon credits to greenwash their emissions.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/land-grabbers-carbon-cowboys/5868860