Thread by @PeterGelderloos

The fires in Quebec are raging in tree plantations that get counted as carbon offsets.
To the millions being evacuated or choking on the toxic smoke: anything you do against those responsible for greenwashing is legitimate self-defense.

A forest is a complex, resilient ecosystem. It's also vulnerable to climate change, but Canada doesn't actually have much forest. It is mostly tree plantations, which are more similar to a monocrop desert than to a forest, and much more prone to catastrophic burns.
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What are the advantages of a tree plantation over a forest? Both are counted as carbon offsets by governments & companies trying to generate favorable media for honoring their emissions reduction pledges in the IPCC framework, which is a giant scam that keeps us all in danger.
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"Reforestation" can happen quicker and according to plans carried out by subcontractor cronies, so govt officials and environmental NGOs prefer them to the regeneration of actual forests, which take the stewardship of local human communities over decades,
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and favor local, territorialized, embodied, and Indigenous knowledges and organizational forms which are unknowable to experts, which cannot be reduced to blueprints and paperwork. In other words real forests make governments weaker, not least in so-called Canada where
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Indigenous movements present a threat to state power.
Tree plantations are part of the industrial system of extraction and production. A form of monocrop farming, they are the basis for the profits of the logging industry, which is more in demand as green products proliferate
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like new energy sources that can be labelled as renewable fuels, which takes on importance in the IPCC framework of emissions accounting, and is thus important to governments, environmentalist NGOs and scientists, and greenwashing corporations.
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Tree plantations are also advantageous because they are fully integrated with the mining industry, using some of the same extraction infrastructure and helping cover up part of the sacrifice zones mining leaves behind. Lithium mining in particular is experiencing a major boom
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in Canada right now, encouraged primarily by mainstream environmentalism and the official "climate crisis" framework (as opposed to an anti-state and anticolonial ecological crisis framework), which has created a huge market for green energy and electric cars,
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that actually do nothing to reduce fossil fuel usage because of the basics of capitalist economics.
What do we notice about the causes of this catastrophe, currently poisoning the lungs of millions, and killing millions more (mostly not human, but people nonetheless)?
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Fossil fuel companies bear the blame, as does an economy based on profit, but it goes deeper than that. These fires are also tied to how governments operate at a fundamental level, even and especially when they try to address earlier problems they caused. 11/

Environmentalist NGOs and scientists are also fully to blame, as they have created the false discourses and frameworks that are driving the newest forms of extraction and destruction while hiding the roots of the problem in capitalism, in colonialism, in the State.
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All of these powerful actors have blood on their hands. They are threatening our lives. Whatever it takes to stop them is legitimate self-defense.
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What the integenerational memory of anarchist struggle teaches us, though (and what the leftists flocking back to Leninism want to forget), is that it is never okay to justify harming bystanders or causing unnecessary suffering, even against those we have to fight & dethrone,
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because that turns us into what we are trying to abolish, and only preserves the murderous hand of the State on the world.

To learn more about anarchist , anticolonial, and Indigenous movements around the world that are actually doing what it takes:
plutobooks.com/9780745345116/…

And here's a shorter piece, easy to share, quick to read, on why green energy is a scam that doesn't actually decrease fossil fuel production.

https://twitter.com/PeterGelderloos/status/1644368646943252481?t=oCt2QLkmtI8wowLwTPfkJw&s=19

Oh fudge, I forgot the Alt text again! Sorry to the folks who depend on that!
The first image is a picture of a huge forest fire in Canada, and the second is a screenshot of a NYT article about how climate change dried out the forest and also littered the forest floor
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with broken branches from an unseasonal freeze. The article mentions very briefly the presence of the logging and mining industry in the area of the fires, without going into any detail.

Update:
Some people have been sowing confusion around the arguments made in this thread; in some cases they're trolls, in other cases people who are simply confused about the issues. Here are some clarifications.

Most urban people and settlers do not know what a forest is.
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They see trees, and think it is a forest. Governments use the term "forest" without distinguishing between a forest ecosystem and a tree plantation. When I talk about a forest, I'm talking about a robust ecosystem. Granted, non-forests exist on a continuum
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from monocrop tree plantations planted in rows to post-clearcut regrowth that is managed and commercially harvested.

The forest fires in Quebec and Ontario are originating disproportionately in "managed forest" which are on the continuum of tree plantations.
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Citing an academic article on what "management" looks like in these forests: "timber harvesting, site preparation
for artificial or natural regeneration, pre-commercial thinning to
reduce competition, and some active stand re-establishment (e.g. tree planting, seeding)
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following harvesting"
cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/pubwarehouse/p…
(Compare map of managed forest in this article with maps below of origin points of the current fires.)
Not all the fires are breaking out in industrial monocrop tree fields, but that is a red herring.
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Drought and other effects of the climate crisis can cause catastrophic fires even in previously healthy forests,
and fires at this magnitude create their own weather systems. The preponderance of fires starting in tree plantations and commercially "managed" areas is enough
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to spark a system of catastrophic fires across multiple provinces.

Finally some people doubted these were "all" carbon offset plantations. They don't seem to realize that for years, within the Kyoto and IPCC frameworks, governments are drawing up total carbon "inventories"
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and "budgets" calculating ALL the stored carbon they can possibly take credit for, and using this for negotiations and business opportunities. With the participation of the relevant scientists.
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A total synthesis between scientists, government, and business around the practices of industrial tree plantations, carbon offsetting, "forest" management, carbon inventories, climate negotiations, and government promises for emissions reduction.
And it's all going up in smoke.

I love how the big gotcha the trolls are using to obfuscate all this is, "brah, Canada is, like, all forest" like the abundance of trees is some watertight argument.

I imagine them shopping at REI, driving out of the city for hiking trips on the weekend, maybe they even know how

to identify a tree species or two
This next weekend they'll be out there appreciating a mass of undifferentiated green, "forest", taking in deep breaths of appreciation, snapping some pictures on their smartphones for social media then back to their car and their brilliant lives.