southern Brazil, for example, villagers living next to the Guaraqueçaba Climate Action Project – an $18m scheme funded by General Motors, Chevron and American Electric Power – found themselves blocked from hunting, fishing or tending their forest gardens by local environmental police, known as the Green Force.

NGOs and governments reported these horror stories to the UN climate talks. Forest campaigners accustomed to working with indigenous landowners were not surprised. When money and trees mix, it is normally local people who get screwed. To its critics, the early troubles of REDD illustrated two fundamental problems in its design. The first was that Conrad’s central insight was an abstraction. The idea that developing countries should be paid for the emissions that would have been caused if they had cut downright.” On the other hand, there are such things as ideas that are impossible to realise, and they do not help anyone at all.

The appeal of logging

I landed in Port Moresby at dawn on a Friday morning.There was a drift of smoke curling among the iron rooftops of a small settlement across the highway from the guesthouse where I was staying. There had been a fight the night before. A highlander had been shortchanged at the local market, and someone was stabbed with an umbrella. Things had escalated, and a few houses got burned down.

I listened to this, a little stunned and jet-lagged, and found myself staring at a pair of hills rising in the distance. Port Moresby is a scatter of neighbourhoods, rather than a continuous city.