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So Few Words, So Much Stupidity.

Posted on 28th July 2022

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This article on Vice.com contains plenty of stupidity in just the headline and the first two-line paragraph.

The headline reads "'Our Priority Is Not to Save the Planet': Rainforest Auctioned for Oil Drilling." Whilst technically correct, it is easily misinterpreted to mean "Our Priority Is To Not Save the Planet". It would have been better to say "It is not our priority to save the planet." I suspect that the journalist is not to blame, since it seems to be a quote of something said by a representative of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

My issue with the journalist is the statement that "DR Congo will sell parts of the world's second-largest rainforest and peatlands that currently absorb a decade's worth of global carbon emissions. The absorption of carbon by the rainforest and peatlands is defined as a rate of absorption; the global carbon emissions are an amount; a rate and an amount cannot be directly compared. To put it another way, even a small 1 meter square of forest or peat can absorb a decades worth of global carbon emissions, if one waits long enough.