The otherwise nondescript nation of Gabon made history last week as the first African country to “get paid” to preserve its rainforest. At the end of an arduous, four-year process of “conforming,” on June 24, the Norwegian government distributed a $17 million payment, with the fantastic sum of $150 million still in the wind. The payment was allocated under the UN-initiated Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI). While not technically a part of UN Climate czar Mark Carney’s over-hyped “climate offset” scheme, this deal provides a window into the process, and will likely serve as a model.
In June of 2017, under the CAFI program, the nation of Gabon signed a Letter of Intent with the nation of Norway, and the Multi Partner Trust Fund of the United Nations Development Program, under which Gabon would agree to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% below the 2005 level, as well as agree to perform a series of “milestones”– which ultimately saw Gabon creating 13 “national parks”– effectively locking up the vast majority of its land area, prohibiting logging and other access to resources. Only at the end of the long process would Gabon get paid. That final “millstone” was passed in 2019, with an announcement at the Climate Action Summit in New York. For all its efforts and sacrifices, Gabon would receive $150 million over the next 10 years (assuming continued compliance). Last Thursday’s $17 million payment was the first evidence that its years of sacrifice would amount to anything at all.
First established in 2015, the CAFI brought together European governments, specifically Norway, France, Germany and the UK, along with six central African (rainforest) countries, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central Africa republic, Cameroon, and both “Congos.” The “rationale” behind CAFI was the reduction of carbon emissions. The year before had seen Norway sign a deal promising $150 million to Liberia, a model which CAFI then extended across the mid-section of the entire continent. In 2019, timed with the signing of Gabon in New York, a similar deal worth $65 million — between France and the Republic of Congo — was announced in Paris. There are likely similar efforts afoot in South America and the Indo-Pacific, the other “rainforest regions” of the world, which need to be investigated.
However, the idea that Africa needs to {reduce} its carbon emissions is farcical on the face of it, something which is slowly dawning on African leaders, as more and more evidence of this type of exploitation emerges. Africa’s total greenhouse gas emissions are 4% of the global total, yet CAFI used that global mantra to convince these six LNI (Low National Income) countries to mortgage their future with the promise of mere pennies.
The other hidden force at play here is the elusive “carbon market.” Norway, which now “owns” the Gabonese forests for the next ten years, now has an amount of carbon offset equivalent to 3X the national output of the entire United Kingdom. (The Gabon deal is celebrated for “setting a floor price of carbon” at $10 per certified ton.) Could Norway, for example– at some date in the future– put this “asset” (or a derivative based on it) up for sale, to be bought by a carbon-belching airline or steel foundry? If they did, and got a higher price for it, would Gabon see any of the profits?
These are the questions currently weighing down the heads of Mark Carney and friends in Davos, Switzerland. The weight may yet draw them down to Hell.
Brits Confirm: HMS Defender Deliberately Provoked Russia
June 24, 2021 (EIRNS)–Confirmation that the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender’s sailing into waters claimed by Russia near Crimea was a deliberate provocation, came yesterday from none other than the BBC, which had one of its own reporters on the ship. The reporter, Jonathan Beale, confirmed that the Russians did issue radio warnings to the crew, that the crew was prepared for a possible confrontation, that gunfire was indeed heard, that some 20 Russian aircraft passed by overhead and that two Russian coast guard vessels came within 100 meters of the British ship. “This is at odds with statements from both the British prime minister’s office and defence ministry, which denied any confrontation,” the BBC reported.
“While Moscow claims the peninsula and its waters are Russian territory, the UK says HMS Defender was passing through Ukrainian waters in a commonly used and internationally recognised transit route,” the BBC reported further. “A source told BBC diplomatic correspondent James Landale that the Defender was not there to pick a fight but to make a point — to assert its right to freedom of navigation in international waters.”
Beale himself added: “This would be a deliberate move to make a point to Russia. HMS Defender was going to sail within the 12-mile (19km) limit of Crimea’s territorial waters. The captain insisted he was only seeking safe passage through an internationally recognised shipping lane.” The logic behind this is that since the UK does not recognize the return of Crimea to Russia, the territorial waters that extend from the peninsula still belong to Ukraine. Therefore, according to the British view, the HMS Defender was merely exercising the right of innocent passage on its transit from Odessa to Georgia.
The Russians regard the incursion by the HMS Defender as a violation of international law. “Russian Defense Ministry views the dangerous actions of the Royal Navy Destroyer as a blatant violation of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Russian military ministry called on the British side to conduct a thorough investigation of the HMS Defender crew for prevention of similar incidents in the future,” the Defense Ministry said.
World Food Program Warns There Are 41 Million People at Famine’s Door
June 22 (EIRNS)–The World Food Program today issued a warning headlined, “41 Million People Now at Imminent Risk of Famine.” The UN WFP press release quotes Executive Director David Beasley, who addressed the WFP Board on June 21, “I am heartbroken at what we’re facing in 2021. We now have four countries where famine-like conditions are present. Meanwhile, 41 million people are literally knocking on famine’s door. If you look at the numbers, it’s just tragic—these are real people with real names. I am extremely concerned.”
The four countries with famine-like conditions are Ethiopia, Madagascar, South Sudan and Yemen, where people are experiencing famine-like conditions, which is phase 5, “famine/catastrophe,” on the IPS acute food insecurity index from 1 to 5. Nigeria and Burkina Faso also have people in this worst category.
The 41 million people are across 43 countries. “The slightest shock will push them over the precipice. This number has risen from 27 million in 2019,” said the release.
Further from the release, “Conflict, climate change and economic shocks have been driving the rises in hunger, but pressures on food security are being compounded by soaring prices for basic foods this year. Global corn prices have soared almost 90% year-on-year, while wheat prices are up almost 30% over the same period.
“In many countries, currency depreciation is adding to these pressures and driving prices even higher. This in turn is stoking hunger in countries such as Lebanon, Nigeria, Sudan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
“This year, the UN World Food Program is undertaking the biggest operation in its history, targeting 139 million people this year.” Beasley asks for $6 billion. “We need funding and we need it now.”
June 19 (EIRNS) — The big surprise with the No vote over the new Swiss CO2 law was the fact that the majority of young people voted against it. According to the website 20 Minuten website, 54% of those over 65 — that is to say the Boomers — voted in favor of the new law, while 58% of those under 34 voted against it, according to a 20 Minuten and Tamedia survey of 16,249 participants. See report here.
The leading Swiss weekly Weltwoche wrote that the result signaled a “turning point in international climate policy,” a “popular uprising” in which the Swiss electorate rebelled “against the dictates of the elites…. The Swiss are going on a climate strike, just differently than what those in power intended. They want less government action against climate change instead of more.”
The claim that was circulating, that many people voted against the new law because it was not “strong enough” also seems to have not been decisive, according to the survey, since only 2% of the no voters claimed they cast their ballot against it for that reason. According to the survey, fear of higher costs was the main argument against the CO2 law, including among young people.
Swiss Social Democratic Party parliament group leader Roger Nordmann claimed that the no vote was not a strike against climate policy, but had to concede that it showed that “the ‘green wave’ has ebbed — that’s clear. The rejected proposal has shown that the policy of big tones, of constant outbidding with even more ambitious climate targets has had its day.” He called for a climate policy of small steps, and not expensive and extravagant “wallet-regulated” ones.
The Swiss national broadcaster SRF had a similar take on the young no vote, quoting a 19-year-old saying: “You certainly have the money in the back of your mind, that you will have to pay more afterwards. In fact, that was the most important point when I think about it. “
Official statistics on the voting are expected to be released sometime in July.
Interestingly, another poll showed that 51% of Swiss would have voted against the framework agreement with the EU, which the government walked away from last month. Only 35% would have backed it, according to a survey. There was overwhelming support for suspending the talks.
The climate is heating up for those tyrants!
Navalny Supporters Re-group for Spring Offensive To Try To Topple Putin
Feb. 15 (EIRNS)—The Russian opposition to President Putin led by Alexey Nalvany has gone into what it calls a “strategic pause” until Spring, after more than 10,000 people were detained in two consecutive weekends of street protests throughout Russia demanding Navalny’s release from jail, Isabelle Khurshudyan reports in the Feb. 14 {Washington Post}. To avoid jail and other actions by the government, Navalny’s forces have decided to regroup and return to the streets in the Spring, and back candidates in the September Parliamentary elections to challenge Russian President Putin’, and his Party’s hold on power. Navalny has already been sentenced to two years in prison for parole violations, with other cases pending. He returned to Russia from Germany in January, after his recovery from what was claimed by Porton Down to be poisoning.
Navalny’s “Chief of Staff” Leononid Volkov told the {Post} Feb. 5 that Navalny’s forces “could not sustain the detentions and beatings” and that continued protests could hinder their goal of winning more opposition seats in the September elections, as well as “paralyze the work of the regional headquarters. Alexei has asked us to concentrate on this autumn, when State Duma elections will be held,” Volkov said, according to the {Post}. Germany’s {Der Spiegel} reported that Navalny’s wife is now in Frankfurt, Germany for “a private visit.”
Last year in Belarus, with 9 million population vs. Russia’s 150 million, much larger daily demonstrations than those for Navalny were held for months after opposition groups, and some Western countries said the elections were rigged in favor of Belarus’s longtime leader, Alexander Lukashenko. These demonstrations sometimes had 200,000 people on the streets. But they steadily lost momentum, Khurshudyan writes.
Two years ago, ahead of Moscow City Council elections, Navalny promoted a system he called “Smart Voting,” which involves informing voters which candidates had the best chances to defeat candidates from Putin’s ruling United Russia Party, but the author claims members of Navalny’s Party are typically prohibited from becoming candidates.
China to US: Our Security Laws Contrasted with Yours
June 19 (EIRNS)–Chinese authorities in Hongkong arrested five executives of the Apple Daily newspaper under the new security law. This is the paper of Jimmy Lai, the pal of the core neocons in the US and the darling of the regime change institutions. Lai financed and publicized much of the anarchist terror that swept Hongkong in 2019, as well as the earlier “umbrella revolution.” Lai has been convicted and is now in jail.
The Global Times editorial today quotes the responses from the US and UK foreign affairs officials: “On Twitter, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab inaccurately accused that the search and arrest `demonstrate Beijing is using the National Security Law to target dissenting voices, not tackle public security.’ The US State Department `condemned’ the arrests and asked for their immediate release. `We are deeply concerned by Hong Kong authorities’ selective use of the national security law to arbitrarily target independent media organizations,’ Ned Price, US State Department spokesperson, said.”
GT responded: “The US and the UK must accept the reality that they can no longer influence the situation in Hong Kong. The city has returned to its motherland, and is now governed by the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China and the Basic Law.” They noted that Hongkong is now peaceful, allowing the population the freedom to go about their lives, which was massively disrupted during the riots.
Most interesting, they show the restraint shown in Hongkong compared to the police actions in the US: “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has been focusing on rebuilding the people’s consensus while exercising restraint in taking legal enforcement action. At least 521 people have been arrested and charged with crimes in the US’ few-hour long Capitol Hill riots; yet since the turmoil in Hong Kong, much more severe social damage has been made in Hong Kong, and only 62 people were prosecuted after the national security law came into effect.”
Southwest Power Blackout Disaster: What Can Save the U.S. Economy?
Feb. 15: By Monday night Americans in parts of numerous Southwest and western states were enduring rolling blackouts, some lasting hours in the deep sub-freezing cold of a polar vortex. Many lives were in danger for lack of power and/or electric heat. This shocking event must be a wake-up call to all those, from trade union members to high school and college students, who have been either accepting, celebrating or applying for work to the so-called “Green New Deal”.
“Green” technology – throwback technology – can kill you.
As in the electric grid emergency in Japan’s snowstorms in December, windmills are freezing up in Texas. That state’s 23% of rated electric power capacity which is wind, has largely stopped working, and more than 3 million Texans were without power Monday afternoon in near-zero temperatures. The {Austin Statesman} had reported Feb. 14 (“Frozen wind turbines hamper Texas’ power output”) that wind power, usually rated at 25,100 MW in the state, was rated at just 12,000 MW on Sunday, and actually generating considerably less than that. The state’s regulator, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), was conducting load-shedding operations and warning of potential blackouts, which became actual with 10,500 MW of customer lode cut off on Monday. Late Monday, rolling blackouts were beginning to affect the Southwest Power Pool, involving parts of 15 other states.
The states of the Midwest, gripped by the same polar vortex cold, were saved from blackouts by {coal}. An energy attorney on the board of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the Missouri Public Service Commission, Terry Jarrett, wrote a Sunday column on the Upper Midwest situation on mainlinemedianews.com, called “Coal Rescues U.S. Power Grid During Polar Vortex”. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which distributes power in 15 states, said coal was on Sunday generating more than half of all power there in the polar vortex, some 41,000 out of 78,000 MW. Natural gas was generating 22,000 and nuclear 10,000 MW. Wind turbine output, predictably, fluctuated wildly, reaching 2,300 MW at most. Solar? 231 MW. “That means these much-vaunted renewable systems produced only about 4 percent of the electricity needed across 15 states,” Jarrett concluded.
In Texas, some natural gas wellheads also froze, along with refining facilities in some locations. The great demand came both from the extraordinary cold, and from the freeze-up and failure of wind and solar power, the ready back-up power for which is almost always natural gas turbine electric plants.
The Green New Deal has been coming at us for 20 years and more from an instigating center – where? In the British royal family, particularly Prince Charles, who is known along with his father Prince Philip for wishing, {very publicly}, that there were far fewer human beings on this planet than there are. Wind power is just one of the dangerous technological leaps backward it promotes. Just two weeks ago, a big five-day conference of the World Economic Forum, Europe’s center for the Green Deal, targeted “the cement, steel, aluminum and chemical industries, as well as the ships, planes, and trucks that move them.” It claimed these sectors “exceeded the total amount of carbon the world can emit”. And don’t get them started about food – the Royal Institute of International Affairs reported to that conference that you should eat no meat, only plant food, and less of that than you do now.
Do you need any of these to live? Food? Electric power? Do you farm with animals? Work with chemicals or steel or cement? Stop kidding yourself that the Green New Deal is “infrastructure” and “jobs”. Put yourself in a car in Austin or Houston looking for heat in zero weather and to charge your phone. The Green New Deal is physical economic collapse, and deadly.
What will save us? Cooperating with the other major countries that don’t accept this green nonsense – especially China and Russia. Build real infrastructure, especially nuclear and fusion power and space travel technology. Listen to the late Lyndon LaRouche, in a speech eight years ago, “No to the Green Policy; Build the Credit System”:
“So mankind has to change his policy: Dump the Green policy, which is presently the greatest single threat to humanity, that’s a killer! And we have to understand that it is the increase of man’s intelligence, which means also scientific intelligence, the ability to create, the ability to generate higher energy-flux densities per capita and per square kilometer of territory—these are the standards on which credit is generated. It’s to increase the population of the planet: increase it! Stop this killing people: increase it! Because we need more work done. We need, also, increases of the energy-flux density of the work being done. These are absolute necessities for us…. So the point is, we need every human being. We need them to live longer and better. We need them to become more creative. We need to have their children better educated, and developed. We need an increase of the potential productivity of the human force, per capita and per square kilometer, and those are the missions that we must fulfill.”
June 18 (EIRNS)–NSA Jake Sullivan was emphatic at his Thursday on-the-record call with reporters that Biden would follow up on his summit with Vladimir Putin, with a discussion with China’s Xi Jinping. The White House transcript stated, “[T]he notion that President Biden will engage in the coming month with President Xi in some way to take stock of where we are in the relationship and to ensure that we have that kind of direct communication that we found valuable with President Putin yesterday, we’re very much committed to that. It’s now just a question of when and how.”
The bulk of his press conference was to report how successful Biden had been on his European trip, basically, that he’s taken leadership of the West with his B3W–Build Back Better World, “a new infrastructure initiative… that will be a high-standards, transparent, climate-friendly alternative to the Belt Road Initiative.” He has NATO sold on “tackling China… for the first time, truly taking the security challenge posed by China seriously… and standing up to, countering and pushing back on China’s non-market economic practices…” With no irony intended, he described how governments supervising a deal between Airbus and Boeing (with agreements on investments and tariffs) so as to curtail China’s large passenger aircraft industry, is an example of the ending of “non-market economic practices.”
Sullivan described how pulling together such a Western alliance means that one can deal with Russia as a “principled engagement” – presumably, making our values clear to the opponent while identifying areas to work together. The question was posed: After Russia, does that mean “you can go on to a bilateral discussion with President XI and how’re you taking that on”?
Sullivan then elaborated: “[W]hat the President said, about there being no substitute for leader-level dialogue as a central part of why he held the summit with Putin yesterday, also applies to China and to President Xi Jinping. He will look for opportunities to engage with President XI going forward. We don’t have any particular plans at the moment, but I would note that both leaders are likely to be at the G20 in Italy in October…[W]e will sit down to work out the right modality for the two presidents to engage.” He referred to two modalities – possibly by phone or by a side-meeting at an international meeting – and then, or “something else.” Sullivan’s briefing remarks are here.
At a follow-up press conference on Thursday with the State Department’s Ned Price, Robert Delaney, the Washington DC reporter for the South China Morning Post, referred to Sullivan’s announcement and brought up the previous roadblocks (the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Wuhan lab and the coronavirus, and such). Price referred back to Sullivan’s explanation and then reaffirmed the “principled engagement” line.
June 18 (EIRNS) — Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov commented very positively on the Biden-Putin Summit in an interview with TASS, posted today.
“It was an active dialogue, rich in terms of contents and specifics, multi-layered. Generally, I note for myself that it was a summit meeting in every sense of this word,” Ryabkov said.
“A new start. A new beginning…Whether there will be an upward movement – the question remains open,” He continued. “But the fact that the desire not to escalate [tensions] further, but to look for ways out of deadlocks prevailed, that is a fact,” he said.
“There were no major breakthroughs, but given the state of relations, there could not have been. Nevertheless, especially in terms of the stability and security in the field of information and communications technology, they have achieved shifts in a constructive direction. As for the regional issues — it was rather an exchange of estimates and well-known views so it passed rather predictably,” the deputy minister explained.
On the proposal made at the summit for strategic stability talks Ryabkov said, “I would say that we have a chain of direct instructions from the leadership in order to avoid pauses in practical interaction with the U.S. This specifically concerns strategic stability and ICT security…,” the senior diplomat said.
“We are launching without delay and without pauses the implementation of the achieved understandings, putting their translation into practice. And we expect very much an American response,” Ryabkov stressed.
According to Ryabkov, Biden did not engage in barnstorming for U.S. allies at the summit, but dealt with bilateral concerns.
“Specifically at this meeting, I would not say that there was talk about such American intercession, similar to the one that took place a few weeks ago, when Washington suddenly became very concerned about including the Czech Republic in our list of unfriendly states. There was not anything similar at this meeting,” he said. “But it is also the fact that [U.S. President Joe] Biden came to Geneva with a whole series of joint documents the Collective West, as they say, adopted recently in different formats behind him, and it was felt. This was expected, and ultimately it is not so important whether this or that position of the United States is being worked out individually, or is shared by a number of other states. After all, it is the substantial part, which is important, and we receive it in the form of signals, some expectations or claims. We focus on the meaning, and not on the number of signatories under this or that signal”.
As for allegations against Russia made by Washington, he said they were totally groundless.
“We have no need to explain the red lines to the U.S. We have long understood what our colleagues in Washington talk about, when they use various languages of this or similar meaning. But we don’t even cross these red lines, because all their accusations that we act like we should not, are totally groundless. And this is one of the fundamental problems in relations with the U.S.,” he said.
“As for our red lines, I think President [Putin] explained it so clearly for everyone that I don’t think any further comment is necessary. And the talk about where we see the special acuteness of problems in regards to the U.S.’s behavior was quite straightforward and honest in Geneva,” the senior diplomat noted.
June 18 (EIRNS)–The National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. published on June 16 a package of interviews with all of the U.S. ambassadors to Russia since the late 1980’s, starting with Jack Matlock. EIR has yet to review the entire package but Russian President Vladimir Putin figures largely in the interviews as he’s been there for the entire period of those ambassadorships. The response of Jack Matlock, who was ambassador to the then-Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, to a question on Putin, is of significance, given the recent British effort to mythologize the history of that period, particularly with respect to German re-unification and NATO expansion.
“I think to be fair to Putin, I would say he started out being-–hoping to be-–an ally of the United States. He was the first to call President Bush after 9/11; he offered full cooperation in our invasion of Afghanistan, including overflights, intelligence, and so on,” Matlock noted. “What did we do in exchange?”
“We withdrew from some of our most basic agreements with Russia,” Matlock went on, answering his own question. “We kept expanding NATO, something that the first President Bush had promised Gorbachev we would not do if he allowed the unification of Germany and Germany to stay in NATO. Step by step we pulled out of even our most basic agreements and then, increasingly, are surrounding Russia, right up to their borders, right up to beyond their borders of the former Soviet Union, with a military alliance which they are not in.”
Matlock was not endorsing the style of internal politics in Russia and expressed his own view that there are things he believes Putin has done that have been damaging to Russia but, he stressed, “the Russian people are entitled to choose their leadership, and though his popularity may not be quite what it used to be, it is still greater in Russia than any of our recent presidents have been in the United States. And I would suggest that, before we condemn him too much, we think about that.”