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First published on September 8, 2023

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Bill Gates and other investors are betting Kodama Systems can reduce carbon dioxide in the air by chopping down and burying trees. The move will see 70 million acres of forests, mostly in the Western United States, cut down over the next decade.

After cutting down the trees, Kodama plans to bury them – to reduce global warming. However, “global warming” is a scam to enable the rich to become richer and the real reason for the destruction of forests is to reap saleable carbon offsets.

The Carbon Cycle

The following text in this section is extracted from National Geographic’s encyclopaedia intended for children aged 10 to 13.

Carbon is in a constant state of movement from place to place. It is stored in what are known as reservoirs, and it moves between these reservoirs through a variety of processes, including photosynthesis, burning fossil fuels, and simply releasing breath from the lungs. The movement of carbon from reservoir to reservoir is known as the carbon cycle.

Carbon can be stored in a variety of reservoirs, including plants and animals, which is why they are considered carbon life forms. Carbon is used by plants to build leaves and stems, which are then digested by animals and used for cellular growth.

In the atmosphere, carbon is stored in the form of gases, such as carbon dioxide. It is also stored in oceans, captured by many types of marine organisms. Some organisms, such as clams or coral, use the carbon to form shells and skeletons.

Most of the carbon on the planet is contained within rocks, minerals, and other sediment buried beneath the surface of the planet.

Because Earth is a closed system, the amount of carbon on the planet never changes.

The carbon cycle is vital to life on Earth. Nature tends to keep carbon levels balanced, meaning that the amount of carbon naturally released from reservoirs is equal to the amount that is naturally absorbed by reservoirs. Maintaining this carbon balance allows the planet to remain hospitable for life.

Read more: The Carbon Cycle for Grades 5-8, Encyclopaedic Entry, National Geographic

Anthropogenic Climate Change Is a Fraud

The National Geographic Encyclopaedic Entry above ends with the sentence:

“Scientists believe that humans have upset this [carbon] balance by burning fossil fuels, which has added more carbon to the atmosphere than usual and led to climate change and global warming.”

National Geographic must be referring to either corporately funded scientists or scientists employed by corporations.  As we will see in the next section, scientists who are truly concerned about the planet and the life it supports reveal the facts.

Anthropogenic or human-caused climate change is a fraud and has been known to be a fraud from the outset.  This was demonstrably revealed to the world in 2009 with the release of leaked emails dubbed Climategate.

As it leads into the next section, it’s also worth noting an eye-opening 2013 article published by Forbes that used quotes from climate alarmists to reveal the truth about the climate change agenda.  The article was aptly titled:  ‘In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their ‘Science’.’

Bill Gates Plans to Cut Down Trees

At the end of July, Forbes was given the task of promoting Gates’ latest plan to destroy and capitalise on the natural world in the name of “climate change” in an article titled: ‘Chop Down Forests to Save the Planet? Maybe Not as Crazy as it Sounds’.  Yes, it is as crazy as it sounds.

At least Forbes was honest enough to highlight why the article was being published in its drop head: “Bill Gates and other investors are betting Kodama Systems can reduce carbon dioxide in the air by chopping down and burying trees. Now if only Uncle Sam would get on board with tax credits, too.”

The final sentence gives a clue to what this latest scam is all about – money.  Let’s see what the article has to say and how Forbesmanipulates and outright lies to try to sell the idea that Gates and other investors are doing this for the good of the planet.

It’s not long into the article that Forbes links carbon to trading of carbon credits and carbon offsets:

Yes, the conventional idea is to plant trees to soak up carbon dioxide from the air and to then sell credits to corporations, private jet owners and others who need or want to offset their emissions. But scientists say burying trees can reduce global warming as well – particularly if those trees would otherwise end up burning or decaying, spewing their stored carbon into the air.

Chop Down Forests to Save the Planet? Maybe Not as Crazy as it Sounds, Forbes, 28 July 2023

Trees are “spewing” carbon into the air. Really?  It’s shameless propaganda.

Forbes may benefit from reading National Geographic’s encyclopaedia for children.  And then, if the author feels he can cope with more grown-up content, perhaps he can listen to Patrick Moore explain that the idea of CO₂ being a pollutant is dangerous propaganda.  Or perhaps he can examine satellite imagery that demonstrates how CO₂ as nature’s fertilizer has steadily been enriching Earth’s atmosphere.

And, should Forbes feel it necessary to fall back on the default “human-caused climate crisis” narrative, a study conducted on data from 1750 to 2018 will clarify things for him.  The study estimated that the value of the atmospheric concentration of anthropogenic fossil-derived CO₂ in 2018 was 46.84 ppm out of a total of 405.40 ppm.

Forbes then turned to wildfires to argue the case for Bill Gates and other investors:

California’s enormous 2020 wildfires drove home the risks to air, property and life posed by overgrown forests … To help address the problem, the U.S. Forest Service aims to thin out 70 million acres of western forests, mostly in California, over the next decade, extracting more than 1 billion tonnes of bone-dry biomass.

Chop Down Forests to Save the Planet? Maybe Not as Crazy as it Sounds, Forbes, 28 July 2023

According to Roger Pielke, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado, Canada’s wildfire trends show no increase in recent decades, wildfires used to be much more extensive in past centuries and wildfires are a part of the natural ecosystem.

Wildfires across the world that corporately funded media have enthusiastically publicised have been the result of man’s intervention – but not the human-caused climate change that corporate media supports.

The fires in Greece, Spain, Italy and the Amazon rainforest are most likely due to arson.  And regarding the recent fires in Hawaii – there are so many questions without honest answers concerning the destruction of Lahaina in Maui, that even people who normally trust the government are starting to wonder what has really happened there.

Forbes then attempts to justify burying wood in man-made vaults, which should be a nice little earner.  In fact, Yale Carbon Containment Lab (“CC Lab”), Kodama’s partner, is hoping to make a business out of “earthen vaults” or “biomass vaults.”

It is customary, after such forest thinning, for logs of marketable size to go to sawmills, with most of the rest piled up and later burned under controlled conditions. Kodama wants to bury the leftovers instead – in earthen vaults designed to maintain dry and anoxic (oxygen-free) conditions and protect the wood from rotting or burning.

Chop Down Forests to Save the Planet? Maybe Not as Crazy as it Sounds, Forbes, 28 July 2023

CC Lab admits biomass vaults are not viable: “The greatest risk for this project is the high cost to transport wood from dispersed sources to a single storage site. Transporting wet wood is significantly more time and energy-intensive than leaving it in the forest. Logistics greatly impact project viability, even if the price of carbon is high.” And, “the carbon containment value of burying large volumes of wood may be offset partially or totally by the carbon released from the soils when excavating a storage pit.”

Despite this, as MIT Technology Review noted, Merritt Jenkins, Kodama’s co-founder and chief executive, says they plan to earn revenue from their forest thinning work, as well as by selling usable timber and carbon credits from its burial projects. 

Forbes summed up the potential benefits for Kodama and its investors:

Along with the [venture capital] seed money, Kodama has already received $1.1 million in grants from California’s forest fire agency and others, as well as purchase commitments for the carbon credits tied to the first 400 tonnes of trees it buries. On the open market, those credits should fetch $200 a tonne. Eventually, Kodama wants to cut down and bury more than 5,000 tonnes of trees a year.

If you want to cut down trees and pelletise them to burn in place of coal, there are tax credits for that too. But not, as of now, for burying them.

Chop Down Forests to Save the Planet? Maybe Not as Crazy as it Sounds, Forbes, 28 July 2023

So, we can conclude the idea is don’t use the wood, don’t recycle it and don’t allow it to enrich the environment, simply cut trees down and bury them.  Does it sound crazy to you?

We have a crisis but it’s not a climate crisis. Green policies are killing people, economies and, increasingly, the planet. The goal to reduce carbon emissions is a scam to enable the rich to become richer off the backs of the poor.

The Investors

Kodama Systems, based in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Sonora, has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded in the summer of 2021, MIT Technology Review wrote. “Stealth mode”? Is that another way of saying Kodama has been illegally logging and then burying the evidence?  If so, the illegal loggers have since raised millions.

In December 2022, Kodama announced that it had raised $6.6 million in a Series Seed funding round co-led by leading climate-technology investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Congruent Ventures. Kodama has additionally received a business development grant from California’s forestry and fire protection services CAL FIRE to develop site connectivity and automation for forest thinning, and a carbon removal research and development grant from Frontier Climate for a biomass storage pilot project in partnership with the Yale Carbon Containment Lab.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures (“BEV”) was founded by Bill Gates and is backed by many of the world’s top business leaders, BEV has raised more than $2 billion in committed capital to support cutting-edge companies that are leading the world to net-zero emissions. BEV is a purpose-built investment firm that is seeking to invest, launch and scale global companies that will eliminate greenhouse gas emissions throughout the economy as soon as possible.

Congruent Ventures is a leading early-stage venture firm focused on partnering with entrepreneurs to build companies addressing climate and sustainability challenges. Congruent is one of the most active US investors in climate. Its portfolio represents companies that will “help to decarbonise” every sector of the economy – energy, fleet electrification, farming, new food products, sustainable aviation fuels, manufacturing, and more.  In April 2023, it had more than $700 million in assets under management.

Frontier Climate was founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, McKinsey and tens of thousands of businesses using Stripe Climate.  Frontier aims to act as the middleman between buyers and sellers of carbon removal.  What this means in simple terms is buyers decide how much they want to spend on carbon removal each year, Frontier aggregates the buyers’ budgets and then pays suppliers to remove the carbon.

MIT Technology Review reported that on 15 December Stripe revealed it would provide a $250,000 research grant to Kodama and Yale Carbon Containment Lab as part of a broader carbon removal announcement. That grant will support a pilot effort to bury waste biomass harvested from California forests in the Nevada desert and study “how well it prevents the release of greenhouse gases that drive climate change.”

Stripe also agreed to purchase about 415 tonnes of carbon dioxide eventually sequestered by Kodama for another $250,000, if that proof-of-concept project achieves certain benchmarks.

For the last several years, Stripe has pre-purchased tonnes of carbon dioxide that start-ups aim to eventually draw out of the air and permanently sequester, in an effort to help build up a carbon removal industry.

Let’s Keep the Trees and Get Rid of the Billionaires

Even scientists who have been bought off or indoctrinated with the “climate crisis” ideology have had enough of the billionaires’ antics.  Some have called for a shareholder-based carbon tax. The wealthiest 10 per cent in the USA are the source of 40 per cent of US national greenhouse gas emissions, they say. And, the wealthiest 1 per cent of households are responsible for between 15 per cent and 17 per cent of emissions.

And increasingly, climate activists are setting their sights on the 1 per cent.  Billionaires’ lifestyles are unsustainable, billionaires are bad for the planet they say.  We may agree for different reasons but we do agree that billionaires are bad for the planet.

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Featured image is from The Expose