Nope, I'm not joking:
A "carbon offset company" is jargon for "we plant trees."
Forestation services work to cultivate trees that use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to build their bulky bodies, thereby pulling it from the air.
Don't get me wrong: Trees are awesome. They provide shade, stop erosion, help us breathe, and they are ridiculously beautiful.
But if you're going to exist as a company that gets rich by catering to the climate cult, you might not want to start a raging 35,000-acre wildfire.
On Monday, Dutch reforestation company Land Life started what has become a 35,000 acre forest fire in Spain.
The fire started in Bubierca, a province of Zaragoza, the capital of autonomous community Aragon, when a Land Life contractor planting trees accidentally set off sparks that ignited nearby plant life.
I don't want to take away from the catastrophe or historic levels of irony, but I really hope the person responsible for this was named Ryan.
"The fire started while one of our contractors was using a retro-spider excavator to prepare the soil to plant trees later this winter," Land Life said in a statement on Thursday. "The operators alerted the emergency services. The emergency teams are working non-stop to control the fire and have fortunately established the fire perimeter. Nonetheless, we are devastated by the latest estimate that the damage will be around 14,000 hectares," or roughly 35,000 acres."
"While a contractor was working on forest restoration in the area, a spark from one of the excavators started the fire," the company wrote in an earlier press release.
The fire has erased all the company's work over at least the last two years.
Note that the company's goal on their website is "to restore nature in our lifetimes."
Land Life is a carbon offsetting firm, which means that it plants trees to, in theory, make up for the carbon emissions of polluting industries. It's not clear how many acres Land Life has actually planted trees in—one blog post suggested the company aimed to plant around 20,000 acres between 2020-2021.
The fire has caused five towns with a total of 2,000 people to be evacuated. A nursing home also had to be evacuated.
But somehow, it gets worse.
...it is also not the first forest fire caused by Land Life—on June 20, it sparked another inferno that wiped out 20 hectares. (49 acres). "It is not good that it happens once and that they continue working," the mayor of Bubierca told local media. "The Government of Aragon, instead of recommending that the activity cease, should have prohibited it"
Live look at Land Life employees fighting climate change:
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