The Missionary Position: The Export of Carbon Guilt to the Developing World
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) …We see the battle over rural development flashing at other points around the globe, but nowhere so starkly do we have a choice between the War on Poverty and the War on Carbon as we see in the heart of the oil palm industry in Indonesia and Malaysia. Like zealous, white-skinned Christian missionaries of an earlier age, a stream of NGO personnel flowing out of the West have had little success in changing Asian minds about priorities for the 21st Century.
The Asian reaction
To the missionaries’ pleas for environmental preservation, Asian authorities are (usually in private) wont to point out the fact that Europeans and Americans dismantled their massive forests, and dug up and burned their fossil fuel resources, for the purpose of industrial, and economic development in previous decades. Why should Asian forests become so suddenly sacrosanct? they ask. Is it not just another form of colonial suppression? Accompanied by a newly minted form of European messianic moral export program, aimed at justifying why the white man should have a monopoly on nuclear power, industrial might, and the economic base with which to develop high technology?
…Having taken down the forest of New York and Pennsylvania, extracted the fossil fuels and burned them, the citizens of urban, coastal cities – having feasted on the wealth piled up by generations of uncaring excess – now propose, in a fit of angst, to deny the right of Nebraska and the Dakotas to develop their own renewable resources.
…At the Digest, we think it is high time that carbon policy was no longer used as a mechanism to hold back development. Why not use technology to find new ways of development, instead of simply smashing the means of development in some Luddite orgy of economic destruction?
If someone needs to reduce carbon emissions so badly that generations of people must live in economic chains, by all means let the NGOs tear down the factories of Europe first, and protect the forests of Indonesia later. A few months of return to the economic conditions of the Middle Ages, and we suspect that the European left will rediscover the virtues of rural economic development. READ MORE
Related posts:
- “You Have a Friend in Bioenergy”: Sustainability, Advanced Biofuels, Rural Incomes and the Developing World
- 90 US Scientists Demand Revision of Biofuels Carbon Accounting
- Biomass Better than Coal? War over Carbon Accounting Erupts
- RFA: Carbon Accounting Should Be Equitable, Based on Science
- A Simpler Path to Cutting Carbon Emissions
