Milliband proposes internationally enforced taxation?

According to this morning's Telegraph, David Milliband is going to propose selling the Amazon rainforest as a means to combating climate change. Yes, I know, sounds absurd and silly doesn't it, the most worrying thing is that the idea came from Frank Field who I actually quite like. Essentially the proposal is to set up an international trust which will own the Amazon rainforest and then sell it's trees back to individuals and business as part of carbon offsetting.

Now, for some reason this is being billed as some sort of "privatisation" of the rainforest which it patently isn't. It is though a proposal for the effective wholesale theft of a nation's sovereign land under the veil of the "international community". Essentially a UN body no doubt. The most amazing thing is the understatement of Milliband to what would be a fundamental rebalancing of sovereignty and a worrying precedent for the very notion of the nation state.

He said: "Obviously there are sovereignty issues but deforestation is a massive issue… and any plan, however radical, is worth looking at." That's it then, "issues" is how we define the idea of an international body simply taking land from a nation state and placing it into a "trust"?

There is of course one other obvious problem with the entire idea, the whole point of carbon offsetting is that you plant new trees. You can't sell back already existing trees to offset. It doesn't work like that. The only reason for it can be to make money on the dodgy pretense that you're helping the planet.

At it's best the idea is pointless and silly, and at it's worst it's a represents a fundamentally shift in sovereignty away from nations and the introduction of an internationally enforced tax.