The Stone Age, the Oil Age and the “OPEC of the Forests”

It was the CarbonCreditMarkets blog that early in November highlighted the pre-COP27 meeting held between October 3rd and 5th in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), when Brazil, Indonesia and Congo itself concluded negotiations to form a "strategic alliance" to coordinate the conservation of their forests, impacting 52% of the world's tropical forests.

Or exactly as it was said by Eve Bazaiba, Vice -Prime Minister and Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development of the DRC: “The DRC is also in tune with the strategy of claiming the rights of our populations, to have a common position on the price of a ton of carbon. Because, from there, it can give us (the possibility) – we the countries that are wealthy in terms of the environment – to help other countries that do not have forest cover like us”.

Global environmental activists immediately coined the group “OPEC of the rainforests,” in reference to the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC.

It is worth complementing here another interesting link with OPEC.

In 2000, in an interview for Reuters on purpose of the 40th anniversary of OPEC, its then powerful leader Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, made a “visionary” pronouncement, considering that, at the time, renewable energies were in their infancy.

"The Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." he said.

Below, image of the slide with his phrase, presented at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco, United States, in August 2018, during the IBGC Study Tour to Silicon Valley.

And by clicking on the same image you can access the article of November 14th “Report from COP27: The Fossil Fuel Industry Continues to Block the Path to Climate Justice”, by the Union of Concerned Scientists, source of one of our most popular posts (“Participation of each country in CO2 emissions. Since 1750”).