Well…whoever said that money doesn’t grow on trees should take a look at yesterday’s headlines. There it was in black and white: “33 million carbon credits issued to Guyana from TREES”!! And even though “TREES” is an acronym for “The REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard”, the REDD – “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation” – is all about real trees that grow in the ground.
Remember when Jagdeo raised this option back in 2005 and most folks – especially the PNC – snickered? Well, they stopped snickering when Norway coughed up US$250 million to encourage us to keep our trees standing – to suck up that nasty Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere!!
$80 million of that money’s still around with the IDB as seed money for the Amaila Falls Hydro Electric Project (AFHEP) – which the PNC torpedoed by refusing to sign off as the Opposition. These carbon credits were issued by ART – Architecture for REDD+ Transactions – with the “+” signifying the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks. Don’t you just love how these environmental “save the planet” types just loooove their acronyms??
Your Eyewitness can just imagine them jumping up in the air and clicking their heels when they came up with the “TREES” acronym!! But hey, to each his own, especially when they’ll be doling out all those CERTIFIED carbon credits to us!!
Now, your Eyewitness can just hear you, dear reader, murmur, “And what, pray tell, are ‘carbon credits’?” Well, a carbon credit – which your Eyewitness, in the spirit of things environmental, will call “CC” – represents one metric ton of CO2 equivalent emission reduction or removal. We fall under “removal”, and we have 33 MILLION of them. They were issued by ART – which is recognised by the global community to “register, verify and issue high-quality REDD+ emissions reduction credits to countries and jurisdictions to attract REDD+ finance” to meet the Paris Agreement goals!
Our CCs are registered like gold-edged securities that can be exchanged for cold cash from polluting countries that want to eat their cake (keep burning fossil fuels to live high off the hog!) and have it too; it helps them to meet their Paris commitments!! Who says you can’t pay others to pay for your sins?!! We’re the VERY FIRST country in the world to get these ART CCs, and you can imagine the profligate polluters lining up to bid for them.
The price, of course, will depend on the penalties they’re trying to avoid in their own jurisdictions. So, we should continue championing the Low Carbon economy for the rest of the world!!
Imagine getting paid for being virtuous!! We just gotta ensure we bargain hard for the opportunity cost!!
…and voting
We’ve had a hot and sweaty debate on our Voters List ever since the PNC seized upon the claim that one of the reasons they were “ousted” was the list was “bloated” in 2020. “Inflated” deliberately by the PPP by raising the dead and apparating (a la Harry Potter!) the emigrated to vote them in!!
But in a seeming move away from the “he seh dem seh” accusations, an eminently qualified Biochemist Professor from Switzerland – we all over the globe, ain’t we? – jumped into the fray. Using some interpolations to create a new statistical category of voters based on our population – “Voter Age Population (VAP) – he concluded that the 2020 voters’ turnout as a percentage of the VAP was statistically anomalous at 91%. Fair enough. But when the PNC coalition won in 2015, the turnout was 86% – 11% more than 2011!! So, the 5% rise on the PPP’s win was anomalous, and the 11% rise for the PNC’s wasn’t??
Sounds like the same “he seh dem seh”!!
…on speculation
Most of us don’t appreciate that the price of most of the commodities traded in the world isn’t set by “supply and demand”, as we were taught in school. It’s set by speculators, who see it as a game!!
