Following my post on Oxygen Conservation’s purchase of Kinrara yesterday (see here) a reader sent me a few photos taken on Friday which provides up to date evidence about the state of Kinrara and confirms that BrewDog has treated the land as a “construction” project to the very end.
In their news release Oxygen Conservation made the following claim what BrewDog had achieved at Kinrara:
“The Lost Forest – one of Scotland’s most ambitious woodland creation projects. They [BrewDog] took on a complex, challenging landscape and delivered it to a high standard”.
Really?
The general public and city investors need to know that when Oxygen Conservation describes work as being of “a high standard”, they apparently include work such as this. Why diggers are still being driven over the hillside, breaking up the ground, mixing mineral and carbon soils, making the surface liable to erosion etc etc is unclear.
This damage may appear to be a relatively small matter to those in the world of finance, who dream in £millions, but if Oxygen Conservation are prepared to claim this is high quality, what does that say for the quality of the carbon credits they are intent on selling? The point here, which I will come back to, is Oxygen Conservation appear to have a complete blindspot when it comes to planting trees on organic soils and the fact that peaty soils store more carbon than trees can ever do.
It is over two years now since BrewDog’s attention was first brought to the damage that diggers had done to this fine stone bridge on the Burma Rd (see here). They promised to repair it but never did and Oxygen Conservation appears not to have noticed. High standards all round! Would-be investors please note.
Its great that other people are now publicly criticising the carbon trading land racket but it takes considerable courage for someone working in native woodlands to call for carbon credits to be abolished. I am pleased therefore to re-publish this letter to the Scotsman from Victor Clements who comments regularly on this blog:
Given that Benny Higgins (former banker) heads up Oxygen, I fully expect a windfarm application…
Oh! That’s something I didn’t know. ‘Quelle surprise!
This damage is typical of main stream forestry practices – contractors use big machines and cut corners (literally). One of the reasons I left the commercial forestry sector back in the late 1980s was due to their flagrant breaches of relevant codes of good practice (and the law) relating to ploughing and especially drainage. I once spent the day laying out drainage lines for a new plantation in western Perthshire. It was planted on steep slopes and prone to flash flooding due to the topography. I therefore took great care in laying out the drains so as not to breach the code (less than 3 degrees I think). The next day my boss had a call from the drainage contractor who was upset because the drain layout was less straight than he wanted. It would have cost him money he claimed as he was on piece work (£s/m). My boss with no thought to my standing as a manager of the scheme re-laid the drains almost straight down the hill!! I resigned within the month.