Fiji Water's Carbon Trade- A Can of Worms?

The issue of trading carbon off-sets has forced Fiji Water to come clean with their proposal, amid the mass hysteria of their shipping practices.
Blog-TerraPass comments on Fiji Water's environmental track record.

"Understand that the carbon community holds Fiji Water in roughly the same regard they do Hummers. That is, with a disdain that borders on the irrational[...]"

The issue of carbon foot print is a contenscious issue also facing California's jet-setting Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger according to Sacramento Bee article. Excerpt of Sacbee article:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger crisscrosses the globe in a private Gulfstream 400 jet, advocating environmental virtues after signing a significant global warming reduction bill last year. He says he offsets his plane's greenhouse gas damage by financing projects that reduce carbon emissions elsewhere.

But the governor refuses to reveal how much money he has spent on emissions credits, making it impossible to determine how much he has reduced his carbon footprint. The governor also refuses to say how many hours he has flown.

"As is the case with most public officials, personal and financial details of their life are often kept private," said Schwarzenegger press secretary Aaron McLear. "It's important that a public official is able to have some kind of a private life, and that's why we have a policy not to discuss his private financial life."

Schwarzenegger's Gulfstream 400 plane emits as much as 4.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide per hour, according to the online luxury journal Helium Report, roughly the equivalent of what a small passenger car produces in one year over the course of 8,000 miles.

New York Times article excerpt:

[...]The Fiji Water Foundation, led by Lynda and Stewart Resnick, Fiji’s owners, has also pledged money to protect the Yaqara Valley watershed, the main source of Fiji Water, and to preserve the Sovi Basin, a vast lowland rainforest owned by native Fijians that is home to many plant and animal species.


The Yaqara is important to Fiji Water, but the Sovi Basin is important to all of Fiji,” said Glenn T. Prickett, a senior vice president of Conservation International, a nonprofit group that has been helping Fiji Water devise and carry out its programs. “The Fijians are poor people, and without this money, logging would be their only economic alternative”[...]

The question of who actually benefits from the carbon offsets; is something the displaced native landowners have to ask themselves.

Although, Conservation International Vice-President was correct in stating that most of Fiji's native inhabitants are poor. It is also worthwhile to pursue the parameters of that statement carefully because it infers erroneously that, Fiji Water's carbon trading plan will converted to cash and bundles will be handed out to "the people" as if it grew on trees. Whether it is the citizens of Fiji or the native owners of Yaqara; both segments should not bank their hopes or prayers on corporate trickle down economics.
How many native landowners or Fiji Citizens are part of this Fiji Water Foundation? Is the entity more of a convenient tax deduction vehicle; recognized by the IRS and not Fiji's Inland Revenue agency, because Fiji does not have double taxation agreements with the U.S Government according to a website that publishes an alphabetical list of countries that have maintained tax treaties with the US.

In fact, Fiji Water does not pay royalties(using volumetric standards) directly to any landowning unit. The ownership of Yaqara is also in question and appears to be one of those blotches on the conscious of Fiji Water and the Government.

The issue of ownership of Yaqara has been addressed by a post by S.i.F.M.



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