Respiration, the latest trend in carbon credit schemes

My good friend DirtCrashr has an excellent piece up over at his place on the latest fad in Euro-Centric Eco-guilt-tripping; requiring third world farmers to perform hours of back-breaking manual labor in a quest to make themselves (that'd be the NGO's and bureaucrats creating "policy") feel better about "saving" the evironment.

I'd laugh about this if it wasn't so...enraging.

My favorite part of the link,

"for the poorest people around the world, ‘reducing carbon output’ means saying no to machinery and instead getting your family to do hard physical labour,"

which is, of course, one of the oddest things that I can think of, as it completely ignores the human mind's need to solve a problem, that being a better method for doing any given task. Man has been inventing and using tools (machines) to better his life and surroundings, ya know, manipulating the environment, since before recorded history. It is part of what I do for a living, making a hospitable environment, designing buildings, as in, putting a roof over one's head to keep the rain and chill off. It's a fundamental need and urge of the human psyche to seek these things out and to find new and better ways to doing it. If these nitwits over at Climate Care (snort, laugh) get hold of the reins, it's all going to shit in a big hurry. Bah!

Good thing I brought the range bag today, I need the therapy.