For many of the bureaucratic wankers of the world there is only one subject: climate. The tunnel vision resulting from their hyper focus on this subject leads them to make crushingly stupid remarks.

Simple land management practices – like planting trees, improving the efficiency of nitrogen fertilization, and adding more organic inputs to the soil – could contribute significantly to avoiding greenhouse gas emissions, providing 25 percent or more of the solutions available in the near term. . .

Carbon contracts could help, but their transaction costs are prohibitively high for the smallholders who make up the great majority of land users in the developing world, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of the potential for capturing carbon through improved land use. As a result, it simply isn’t worth farmers’ while to undertake the monitoring, reporting and verification necessary to prove mitigation. . .

According to Smukler and Palm, remote-sensing capabilities are improving, as new technologies with better resolution emerge, and their costs are likely to decline within the next decade. New digital soil mapping initiatives are substantially improving ground-based sampling and the potential to model carbon dynamics across landscapes.

Now, significant investment is needed in technology transfer, accounting systems and training in developing countries to provide cost-effective approaches for abating climate change. Smallholder farmers in the developing world and global society as a whole have much to gain, so there’s no time to lose!

The last thing that farmers should be spending time and resources doing is carbon accounting. This is a complete waste of energy, resources and human attention. The needs of bureaucrats do not justify this amoral waste when there are real problems - such as about a billion hungry people - that farmers would do well to work on.

The carbon wankers should be completely defunded, zeroed out, and their budgets directed to real problems. The resources being squandered on this issue are criminal. The ICC should prosecute them, except that is also a waste of resources.

Spend the time and money on improving agronomic practice - without brain dead fetishes such as "organic" - and for once make some real progress on real problems.