Well, since Haiti is in the news because of its tragic earthquake, I will put another hardship on their pile of already depressing environmental conditions. Not only are these poor souls being oppressed by their elites, not only are they uneducated and suffering, not only have they been victims of colonialism, twice, no they also have to heat with charcoal. In itself only a clean ressources when done in a modern first world country with the appropriate heaters, it is also deadly for the Island itself.
Haiti has no fuel except wood. People cook with charcoal. This requires massive amounts of wood to provide fuel for 6 million people. Thus the demand on wood as a crop is the immediate cause of the denuding of the mountains of Haiti. – Bob Corbett (Webster.edu)
On Haiti there was only one source for heating: Charcoal made of wood.
This is the dream world of green planners, who believe that the naturally sequested CO2 of burned wood is better than the natural sequested CO2 of burned oil. But it is an environmental nightmare for the people on Haiti. Soil errosion being only the most obvious, health issues being close second of reasons not to do it.
And we wanna really go down the same road?
Update #1: As a side issue, the wood-cutters are doubly unsustainable, because they don’t own the land they cut the trees down on. So, tree-cutters have even less incentives to replant those cut down trees than landowners. This is again a good example of the environmental disasters following the absence of owernship and property rights. One of the reasons socialism was so bad for the Eastern European countries and their environment was the collective absence of property rights.
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