Dear Editor,
The following is an excerpt from an article titled: The world needs more Ethiopia and less Exxon, by Toby A.A. Heaps, November 15, 2019, Fall 2019 Issue of Corporate Knights.
“The Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali won the Nobel Peace Prize this year for ending a multi-decade war with Eritrea. Equally notable, he made one of the boldest moves of any world leader yet to end the war on nature. On a single day on July 29, he led a blitz to plant 353 million trees (part of a larger program to plant 4 billion), for an estimated cost of US$548 million, representing almost 1% of Ethiopia’s gross domestic product.
“To put that number in perspective, if a rich country like Canada were to invest 1% of its GDP planting new trees over a period of just eight years, it could remove up to half of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) that have been deposited by humankind in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.”
The idea expressed in this excerpt is quite eye opening and speaks to the importance that the Guyana Shield holds in the world. It also speaks to the opportunities that we as human beings have before us to have a positive impact on our planet. As a new oil producing nation we should play our part in replanting the trees we deplete in our forest industry in order to achieve both:
1. GHG neutralization due to our oil & gas industry
2. Sustainable harvesting of our lumber.
This could be financed by the forest industry via an environmental tax and our country will avoid adding to the problem of climate change. Also we should implement a similar environmental tax in the gold mining industry where the proceeds will also be utilized for tree planting after the completion of mining. Allowing for botanical bioremediation of areas affected by the use of mercury in the mining process, with the added benefit of GHG neutralization from the oil & gas industry.
Yours faithfully,
Jamil Changlee
