Palm Oil Truth Foundation - Palm Oil: The Great Environmental Con

Palm Oil: The Great Environmental Con

Written by Frank Tate
Friday, 26 September 2008
This is a breathtaking story of probably the greatest conman who ever lived. Gregor MacGregor came from Latin America to London, England, in 1820 and pronounced that he had been created cazique (or prince) of the Principality of Poyais, an independent nation on the Bay of Honduras. Native chief King George Frederic Augustus I of the Mosquito Shore and Nation had given him the territory of Poyais, 12,500 mile² (32,400 km²) of fertile land with untapped resources, a small number of settlers of British origin, and cooperative natives eager to please. He had created the beginnings of a country with civil service, army and democratic government. Now he needed settlers and investment and had come back to the United Kingdom to give people the opportunity. At the time, British merchants were all too eager to enter the South American market that Spain had denied to them. The region had already become more promising in the wake of wars of South American independence, when the new governments of Colombia, Chile and Peru had issued bonds in London Royal Exchange to raise money. London high society welcomed the colorful figure of MacGregor, and he and his Spanish-American wife Josefa received many invitations. MacGregor was also introduced to Major William John Richardson and by the winter of 1821 he had made Richardson legate of Poyais. He had also moved to Oak Hall in Richardson's estate in Essex, England, befitting his station as a prince. An office for the Legation of the Territory of Poyais was opened at Dowgate Hill in the City of London. MacGregor also claimed that one of his ancestors was a rare survivor of the Darien Scheme, a failed Scottish attempt of colonization in Panama in 1690s. In order to compensate for this, he said, he had decided to draw most of the settlers from Scotland. For this purpose, he established offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In Edinburgh, MacGregor began to sell land rights for 3 shillings and 3 pence per acre (£40.15/km²). Note that the worker's weekly wage at the time was about £1, which meant that the price was very generous. The price steadily rose to 4 shillings (£0.20). Many people willing to have a new start in the new land signed on with their families. On October 23, 1822 MacGregor raised a loan with the total of £200,000 on behalf of the Poyais government. It was in the form of 2,000 bearer bonds worth £100 each. Also in 1822 MacGregor published a 350-page guidebook entitled Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, including the Territory of Poyais, descriptive of the country, supposedly written by one Captain Thomas Strangeways. It described the Poyais in glowing terms and mainly concentrated on how much profit one could get from the country's ample resources. Poyais was said to be a very anglophilic region with already existing infrastructure, untapped gold and silver mines and large amounts of fertile soil ready to be settled. The region was even free of tropical diseases. The book also claimed that British settlers had founded the capital of Poyais, St Joseph, in the 1730s. The Legation of Poyais chartered a ship called Honduras Packet and another called the “Kennersley Castle” with a total of 270 would-be settlers. The ships arrived in the appropriate place on March 20th and spent two days looking for a port. Sadly, what the settlers had found was an untouched jungle, some natives and couple of American hermits who had made their homes there. "St Joseph" consisted of only a couple of ruins of a previous attempt at settlement abandoned during the previous century. There was no settlement of any kind. The Honduras Packet had been swept away by a storm. When some of the laborers began to build rudimentary shelter for themselves, the officers and civil servants decided to try to find a way out. Lieutenant-Colonel Hector Hall, would-be-governor of Poyais, had left to look for the Honduras Packet or another ship to take them back to Britain. The would-be-settlers began to argue with each other and some of them, who had expected better accommodation, refused to do anything. The Kennersley Castle sailed away. Tropical diseases had also begun to take their toll. One settler committed suicide. However, regardless of the experiences of the survivors, some of them refused to believe that MacGregor was the main culprit. One of them, James Hastie, who had lost two of his children to tropical diseases, wrote and published a book "Narrative of a Voyage in the Ship Kennersley Castle from Leith Roads to Poyais". He blamed Sir Gregor's advisers and publicists for spreading the false information. A group of survivors signed a declaration of their belief that had Sir Gregor gone with them, things would have turned out differently. Major Richardson sued the papers for libel and defended MacGregor against the charges of fraud. MacGregor himself, however, had already left for Paris, France, in October. Today an even bigger scam lurks and this scam is unfolding and is being played out before our very eyes. What is sad is that this scam has the blind support of states, politicians, environmental organizations, the main stream media, universities, some weather scientists, a Nobel Laureate named Al Gore and even the United Nations! The scam is global warming. This scam is even more profitable for its proponents like the environmental outfits such as the Friends of the Earth (FOE), Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Wetlands and others too numerous to mention, that have attracted combined funds to their “cause” that would exceed the budget of a few developing countries! Why FOE alone has combined global funds in excess of US$300 million. It is indisputable that global warming is cyclical having been observed on earth through the millennia alternating with an ice age, all this occurring with remarkable regularity even when the earth was not inhabited by man. Why do scientists then so often offer dire predictions about the future of the environment? In a well researched book Meltdown, climatologist Patrick J. Michaels says it’s only natural. He argues that the way we do science today--when issues compete with each other for monopoly funding by the federal government--creates a culture of exaggeration and a political community that then takes credit for having saved us from certain doom. Michaels starts with a succinct discussion of climate-change science and then unrolls a litany of falsehood, exaggeration, and misstatement. He cites hundreds of errors and exaggerations in scientific papers, news reports, and television sound bites--from the “National Assessment” of global warming, a Clinton-era document that used computer models that its authors knew did not work, to the infamous New York Times story about the melting of the North Pole, published in September 2000 and halfheartedly retracted three weeks later. (i) That by itself, should not concern the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, except that RAN, FOE, Greenpeace, Wetlands, et al unfortunately chooses to attack palm oil using the flawed premise of palm oil being an active contributor to global warming and therefore threatening the extinction of orang utans and by implication, mankind itself. In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, not only is the premise flawed, but it is also patently untrue! For one, palm oil is one of the most productive of oil seeds yielding 4.5 metric tons of edible oils per hectare, compared to the measly output of 0.5 metric tons typically yielded by its competing oils such as soy, sunflower and rapeseed. Strangely, it is only when palm had made significant growth in its export to the developed west that these attacks against palm oil began. This was especially so when palm oil began gaining popularity as a superior source of feedstock for biofuel and biodiesel in Europe, in view of its suitability and relatively low price. The high productivity of palm oil calls the lie to the assertions of RAN that palm oil is responsible for massive deforestation. Why, Malaysia the erstwhile largest producer of palm oil has been planting palm oil for over a century. Yet, the country can still boast forest cover in excess of 65%. How many countries of the industrialized west from which these paragons of environmental conservation like RAN, FOE and Greenpeace hail can even claim to have more than 20% green cover? With an estimated orang utan population of between 49,000 to 69,000 in Borneo alone, how can it even remotely be possible for orang utans to become extinct in 2011 as claimed by the reckless RAN in their website? What organizations like RAN, FOE and Greenpeace fail to grasp is that wild and unsubstantiated allegations like these only augments the growing belief amongst casual observers that their attacks against palm oil are nothing more than an elaborate scam to attract funds. THE END. Reference (i) “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media”, Patrick J. Michaels

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