Focus on Arts and Ecology

Carbon credits are “an illustration of the power of Western propaganda”.

by cHRIS LANG, NOV 18, 2023

Mordecai Ogada is a carnivore ecologist and conservation writer. He is the co-author of “The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya”. In July 2017, I wrote a review of the book on Conservation-Watch:

Shortly after writing that review, I sent some interview questions to Ogada, also for Conservation-Watch. One of my questions was about REDD. Here’s his answer:

I don’t believe the whole REDD/carbon trade business has any benefit for African communities. The less I say about it the better.

I’m delighted to report that Ogada is now saying considerably more about carbon credits. He recently did an interview with Wandia Njoya about the scam of carbon credits:

As a follow-up to that interview, Ogada has now made a short video explaining why the scam of carbon credits is accepted worldwide, despite the fact that it is so obviously dishonest.

Here’s the video, with a transcript below:

Hi everyone and welcome to today’s monologue.

One of the most interesting responses I’ve had to recent video we did with Wandia Njoya about carbon credits is that just how is this scam accepted all over the world, yet it is so obviously dishonest?

Well it’s simple. This is an illustration of the power of Western propaganda. We sort of live in a world today where if the West wants something it gets made acceptable by a combination of media, celebrities, financial muscle, and also the aquiescence of acolytes like Kenya as the country.

So what’s happening with with carbon credits is just that it’s so overwhelming and the amount of money and the aroma of money going around has placed people into a number of different categories.

One is the government people who have accepted it wholesale and are pushing it as part of a policy agenda because of the aroma of money around it.

Secondly it’s the government apparatchiks the lower people who are all pushing it because their senior officer, either the PS [private secretary], or the minister, or whoever is above them, has accepted it so they don’t want to question it either.

Then there is also the civil society people, I mean this is the conservation civil society NGO people who are also afraid, who know that it’s problematic, but will not speak up against it because the sources of funding come from the same places that the funding for their work comes from.

So you hear conservation NGO people saying things like: “Oh, we need more information about it;” “We need more material to make community members understand what it’s about;” “We need to give it more time, we need to wait and see;” or “We are not sure, it works in some places.”

All that is rubbish. And I repeat all that is rubbish.

Anyone saying that is saying it from either a position of being an extreme coward and not wanting to speak out, or a position of being dishonest, being a broker and gaining materially from pushing this agenda.

So carbon credits I repeat are a scam. Probably the biggest scam visited on mankind in history, and they are going to lead to the annexation of many lands. That’s the bottom line of it.

And the best thing about, or why I’m comfortable saying this is that you don’t have to take my word for it. Anyone who gets into it will soon find out this truth.

And don’t forget we live in a world where genocides, either immediate violent burning genocides, or slow burning genocides like carbon credits and the annexation of African lands, are easily made acceptable by the acquiescence of the press, governments, and global bodies including the UN.

So just look at this thing straight in the eye and try and understand what it is. Because the only outcome of it will be loss of resources and violence.

But we can no longer rely on society and social structures because of the power of social media and as I said propaganda, these will always make any absurdity in the world today seem normal. They normalise so many absurdities you can’t even get into them.

What we must understand as African people now is that we are the home of the world’s remaining great resource pool, whether human resources, natural resources, biological diversity resources, etc, and propaganda has placed us black African people in the position of being counted as a quote unquote “threat to biodiversity”, and this normalises our oppression. And this means we cannot have peace simply because we are custodians or live close to something that the West so deeply desires.

So we must understand our place as owners of this biodiversity. It’s not for sale. We don’t need to make it marketable, or attractive to outsiders. God knows they desire it so deeply already.

So let’s take care of it like the precious resource it is to us, especially because our coming generations, future generations, will need to make use of it the way we are making use of it now, and the way our forefathers did before us.

So it has to survive. And it’s been threatened by World Wars, by Imperial colonialism. It is now threatened by propaganda that turns Africans against fellow Africans with guns, killing their brothers, purportedly to protect rhinos, to protect elephants, to protect creatures that existed long, long before the killers and the victims existed.

So let’s get our act together and understand our responsibility to the environment. Not to the global environment, but to our own environment here. As long as we take care of our environment our contribution to the global environmental cause will be intact.

And so far we’ve been doing quite well. Unfortunately we’ve been put in a position now where we start suspecting each other of being of being harmful to the environment. We are being told our population is a threat to the environment. Not our consumption, because our consumption is rock bottom. But we’re being told our population, our children, are a threat to the environment.

Industrialised countries are telling us that our livestock are a threat to the environment. And this is the propaganda that comes out all the time in art, in documentaries, in scientific publications, and all these other channels. And the worst thing that can happen to us today is to believe it and actually think that we as a people are a threat to the environment. We have never been, and we will never be, as long as we stay responsible.

But at the the bottom line it is about us, it cannot be about what the UN wants. It can’t be about sustainable development goals, millennium development goals, and all that other drivel.

We must recognise the inherent violence that exists in imposing anything, whether it’s a theory, whether it’s a religion, whether it’s a political belief. Anything being imposed on the entire world, being called a global goal, being called a world objective that everyone must adhere to, that is the essence of fascism on a global scale.

So we must make our own standards, keep to them, and keep responsible the way our forefathers were, and the way so many people in the African continent are. Because we have the resources, we have the energy, we have the ideas. So let’s keep to it.

So ignore things like carbon trading, biodiversity credits, nature finance, all these financial instruments. They’re being proposed by people who do do not have natural wealth. What they have is paper wealth. And one thread that runs through all these things is the exchange of paper money for real wealth, that is natural resources, human resources, land, the water we drink, the air we breathe. That belongs to us. What we do with it, the result of what we do with it, will come directly to us.

So let’s keep it well and most of all let’s keep it in our own hands. Do not listen to anyone that purports to put us in a position that serves interests other than our own.

That’s it, it’s really very simple. That’s why it’s such an audacious scam.

(Sources: REDD)