ONFARM, 22/3/2023
In 1933 the United States went away from a gold standard for its currency, since then the monetary system has not been back by gold. With a fiat currency backed by sentiment alone, the credit culture was set loose. In 1944, forty-four countries met and agreed on the Brenton Woods system of pegging all their currencies to the US dollar with the dollar once again being backed by gold at a rate of $35 per ounce. No reserve ratio was set as to how many dollars could be created for each unit of gold. On the 15th August 1971 the Bretton Woods system was overwhelmed and President Nixon decreed the USD was no longer convertible to gold. Instantaneously every currency in the world became paper fiat currency.
Money is no longer the value of goods traded, it is the value by which they are traded. One of the only true physical assets in the world is farmland, it will provide shelter and sustenance and a constant source of multi-generational wealth creation through capital appreciation. As it is an asset rich and cash poor business the families which have survived the generations have been forced to live within their means instead of pursuing costly passions beyond the means of a season and a commodity driven business.
The temptation to get into a too-good-to-be-true scheme is too much for many. Selling Carbon is leaving yourself wide open to the liability of having to repay that Carbon at a much higher rate at some time in the future, if you have not sequestered enough carbon for the contracted amount you signed up to. Alternatively if the contract you sign lowballs the amount, you could miss out on income. Speculating the future of your farm on being able to hold carbon in the soil in an unknown future of crippling bureaucratic rules, droughts, fires, invasive species, disease outbreaks and irrational policy changes, may see you operating in a futures market that writes its own rules.
If Carbon is the real problem here, then we should stop emitting it. Anything else is arguing at what speed we should drive the car of humanity, off the cliff. This simple video tutorial explains how paying for carbon offsets does nothing to reduce humans from emitting the gases in the first instance. It does nothing to address the underlying cause of reducing how much we emit, it's just a cover up. It just transfers the problem of what we're emitting to another project in the world. The author compares it to 'killing panda bears and then donating to WWF to help protect them'.
Here is an example of some educational propaganda targeting millions of students and teachers claiming ways to address the root cause of climate change, one of which includes eating less beef.
The world stopped the production of CFC's (Chlorofluorocarbon) propellants in the late 1980's due to its ozone depleting effects. Now you can emit as much Carbon as you could possibly want as long as you pay a Carbon Tax. The money you spend on Carbon schemes may be used to protect a forest which was never going to be cut down, or to lock up farmland in western NSW so it can burn twice a decade. And then we have the current practice of taking good farm lands and degrading them in order to get a 'low' baseline of carbon recorded, only to get paid to bring them back to where they were. Or locking up land and displacing farming families and destroying the fabric of outback communities. Then there's the hundreds of millions of dollars they pay for fires to burn in the Top End that were going to be lit in any event, and the list goes on. Discussing Carbon reductions at a global level is ludicrous whilst developing nations are pushing ahead at whatever rate suits them.
The Carbon trading schemes are a great tool for the commercially sophisticated to transfer ownership of real wealth to themselves but it doesn't address the underlying cause of climate change and environmental decline.
Interestingly the author presents beef as being a major contributor to the increase in global temperature that has occurred since 1960 as shown in the IPCC graphs. This is despite the global cow herd remaining stable at around 1 billion head over that time. The beef industry still has much to do in terms of educating the people and the policy advisers. The way these passionate patrons are getting their messages out is by way of crowdfunding their video productions which have so far been watched over 2 million times.
If you would like to see the same thing being done for the cattle industry, a crowdfunding campaign has been set up to produce educational tutorials around the role that grazing pastoralists play in the whole biogenic cycle of methane and carbon sequestration through the management of grasslands.
Updates will be posted inside the campaign to keep contributors updated with the progress of these productions for everyone to share.
You can view the campaign by clicking here.