Climate is the new Covid

[Harvey]

Safer to assume that Covid is the new climate. And into that climate of health related fear...

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/this-biden-proposal-could-make-the-us-a-digital-dictatorship/

This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship

May 5, 2021

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.”

Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur. Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic “pre-crime” organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as “wrongthink.”

The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden’s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley–dominated Broad Institute, has been controversial for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new “health DARPA.”

This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds would not be peer reviewed prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants.

ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID. BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.

Other “innovative” technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.
The Long Road to ARPA-H

ARPA-H is not a new and exclusive Biden administration idea; there was a previous attempt to create a “health DARPA” during the Trump administration in late 2019. Biden began to promote the idea during his presidential campaign as early as June 2019, albeit using a very different justification for the agency than what had been pitched by its advocates to Trump. In 2019, the same foundation and individuals currently backing Biden’s ARPA-H had urged then president Trump to create “HARPA,” not for the main purpose of researching treatments for cancer and Alzheimer’s, but to stop mass shootings before they happen through the monitoring of Americans for “neuropsychiatric” warning signs.
Still from HARPA’s video “The Patients Are Waiting: How HARPA Will Change Lives Now”, Source: http://harpa.org

For the last few years, one man has been the driving force behind HARPA—former vice chair of General Electric and former president of NBCUniversal, Robert Wright. Through the Suzanne Wright Foundation (named for his late wife), Wright has spent years lobbying for an agency that “would develop biomedical capabilities—detection tools, treatments, medical devices, cures, etc.—for the millions of Americans who are not benefitting from the current system.” While he, like Biden, has cloaked the agency’s actual purpose by claiming it will be mainly focused on treating cancer, Wright’s 2019 proposal to his personal friend Donald Trump revealed its underlying ambitions.

As first proposed by Wright in 2019, the flagship program of HARPA would be SAFE HOME, short for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes. SAFE HOME would suck up masses of private data from “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo, and Google Home” and other consumer electronic devices, as well as information from health-care providers to determine if an individual might be likely to commit a crime. The data would be analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms “for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence.”

The Department of Justice’s pre-crime approach known as DEEP was activated just months before Trump left office; it was also justified as a way to “stop mass shootings before they happen.” Soon after Biden’s inauguration, the new administration began using information from social media to make pre-crime arrests as part of its approach toward combatting “domestic terror.” Given the history of Silicon Valley companies collaborating with the government on matters of warrantless surveillance, it appears that aspects of SAFE HOME may already be covertly active under Biden, only waiting for the formalization of ARPA-H/HARPA to be legitimized as public policy.

The national-security applications of Robert Wright’s HARPA are also illustrated by the man who was its lead scientific adviser—former head of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office Geoffrey Ling. Not only is Ling the main scientific adviser of HARPA, but the original proposal by Wright would have Ling both personally design HARPA and lead it once it was established. Ling’s work at DARPA can be summarized by BTO’s stated mission, which is to work toward merging “biology, engineering, and computer science to harness the power of natural systems for national security.” BTO-favored technologies are also poised to be the mainstays of HARPA, which plans to specifically use “advancements in biotechnology, supercomputing, big data, and artificial intelligence” to accomplish its goals.

The direct DARPA connection to HARPA underscores that the agenda behind this coming agency dates back to the failed Bio-Surveillance project of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program, which was launched after the events of September 11, 2001. TIA’s Bio-Surveillance project sought to develop the “necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches,” accomplishing this “by monitoring non-traditional data sources” including “pre-diagnostic medical data” and “behavioral indicators.”

While nominally focused on “bioterrorist attacks,” TIA’s Bio-Surveillance project also sought to acquire early detection capabilities for “normal” disease outbreaks. Bio-Surveillance and related DARPA projects at the time, such as LifeLog, sought to harvest data through the mass use of some sort of wearable or handheld technology. These DARPA programs were ultimately shut down due to the controversy over claims they would be used to profile domestic dissidents and eliminate privacy for all Americans in the US.

That DARPA’s past total surveillance dragnet is coming back to life under a supposedly separate health-focused agency, and one that emulates its organizational model no less, confirms that many TIA-related programs were merely distanced from the Department of Defense when officially shut down. By separating the military from the public image of such technologies and programs, it made them more palatable to the masses, despite the military remaining heavily involved behind the scenes. As Unlimited Hangout has recently reported, major aspects of TIA were merely privatized, giving rise to companies such as Facebook and Palantir, which resulted in such DARPA projects being widely used and accepted. Now, under the guise of the proposed ARPA-H, DARPA’s original TIA would essentially be making a comeback for all intents and purposes as its own spin-off.
Silicon Valley, the Military and the Wearable “Revolution”

This most recent effort to create ARPA-H/HARPA combines well with the coordinated push of Silicon Valley companies into the field of health care, specifically Silicon Valley companies that double as contractors to US intelligence and/or the military (e.g., Microsoft, Google, and Amazon). During the COVID-19 crisis, this trend toward Silicon Valley dominance of the health-care sector has accelerated considerably due to a top-down push toward digitalization with telemedicine, remote monitoring, and the like.

One interesting example is Amazon, which launched a wearable last year that purports to not only use biometrics to monitor people’s physical health and fitness but to track their emotional state as well. The previous year, Amazon acquired the online pharmacy PillPack, and it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which data from Amazon’s Halo wellness band is used to offer treatment recommendations that are then supplied by Amazon-owned PillPack.

Companies such as Amazon, Palantir, and Google are set to be intimately involved in ARPA-H’s activities. In particular, Google, which launched numerous health-tech initiatives in 2020, is set to have a major role in this new agency due to its long-standing ties to the Obama administration when Biden was vice president and to President Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander.

As mentioned, Lander is poised to play a major role in ARPA-H/HARPA if and when it materializes. Before becoming the top scientist in the country, Lander was president and founding director of the Broad Institute. While advertised as a partnership between MIT and Harvard, the Broad Institute is heavily influenced by Silicon Valley, with two former Google executives on its board, a partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock Partners, and the former CEO of IBM, as well as some of its top endowments coming from prominent tech executives.
The Broad Institute, Source: https://www.broadinstitute.org

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was intimately involved with Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and who is close to the Democratic Party in general, chairs the Broad Institute as of this April. In March, Schmidt gave the institute $150 million to “connect biology and machine learning for understanding programs of life.” During his time on the Broad Institute board, Schmidt also chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a group of mostly Silicon Valley, intelligence, and military operatives who have now charted the direction of the US government’s policies on emerging tech and AI. Schmidt was also pitched as potential head of a tech-industry task force by the Biden administration.

Earlier, in January, the Broad Institute announced that its health-research platform, Terra, which was built with Google subsidiary Verily, would partner with Microsoft. As a result, Terra now allows Google and Microsoft to access a vast trove of genomic data that is poured into the platform by academics and research institutions from around the world.

In addition, last September, Google teamed up with the Department of Defense as part of a new AI-driven “predictive health” program that also has links to the US intelligence community. While initially focused on predicting cancer cases, this initiative clearly plans to expand to predicting the onset of other diseases before symptoms appear, including COVID-19. As noted by Unlimited Hangout at the time, one of the ulterior motives for the program, from Google’s perspective, was for Google to gain access to “the largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world,” which is held by the Defense Health Agency. Having exclusive access to this data is a huge boon for Google in its effort to develop and expand its growing suite of AI health-care products.

The military is currently being used to pilot COVID-19–related biometric wearables for “returning to work safely.” Last December, it was announced that Hill Air Force Base in Utah would make biometric wearables a mandatory part of the uniform for some squadrons. For example, the airmen of the Air Force’s 649th Munitions Squadron must now wear a smart watch made by Garmin and a smart ring made by Oura as part of their uniform.

According to the Air Force, these devices detect biometric indicators that are then analyzed for 165 different biomarkers by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency/Philips Healthcare AI algorithm that “attempts to recognize an infection or virus around 48 hours before the onset of symptoms.” The development of that algorithm began well before the COVID-19 crisis and is a recent iteration of a series of military research projects that appear to have begun under the 2007 DARPA Predicting Health and Disease (PHD) project.

While of interest to the military, these wearables are primarily intended for mass use—a big step toward the infrastructure needed for the resurrection of a bio-surveillance program to be run by the national-security state. Starting first with the military makes sense from the national-security apparatus’s perspective, as the ability to monitor biometric data, including emotions, has obvious appeal for those managing the recently expanded “insider threat” programs in the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

One indicator of the push for mass use is that the same Oura smart ring being used by the Air Force was also recently utilized by the NBA to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks among basketball players. Prior to COVID-19, it was promoted for consumer use by members of the British Royal family and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for improving sleep. As recently as last Monday, Oura’s CEO, Harpeet Rai, said that the entire future of wearable health tech will soon be “proactive rather than reactive” because it will focus on predicting disease based on biometric data obtained from wearables in real time.

Another wearable tied to the military that is creeping into mass use is the BioButton and its predecessor the BioSticker. Produced by the company BioIntelliSense, the sleek new BioButton is advertised as a wearable system that is “a scalable and cost-effective solution for COVID-19 symptom monitoring at school, home and work.” BioIntelliSense received $2.8 million from the Pentagon last December to develop the BioButton and BioSticker wearables for COVID-19.
BioIntelliSense CEO James Mault poses with the company’s BioSticker wearable. Source: https://biointellisense.com

BioIntelliSense, cofounded and led by former Microsoft HealthVault developer James Mault, now has its wearable sensors being rolled out for widespread use on some college campuses and at some US hospitals. In some of those instances, the company’s wearables are being used to specifically monitor the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine as opposed to symptoms of COVID-19 itself. BioIntelliSense is currently running a study, partnered with Philips Healthcare and the University of Colorado, on the use of its wearables for early COVID-19 detection, which is entirely funded by the US military.

While the use of these wearables is currently “encouraged but optional” at these pilot locations, could there come a time when they are mandated in a workplace or by a government? It would not be unheard of, as several countries have already required foreign arrivals to be monitored through use of a wearable during a mandatory quarantine period. Saint Lucia is currently using BioButton for this purpose. Singapore, which seeks to be among the first “smart nations” in the world, has given every single one of its residents a wearable called a “TraceTogether token” for its contact-tracing program. Either the wearable token or the TraceTogether smartphone app is mandatory for all workplaces, shopping malls, hotels, schools, health-care facilities, grocery stores, and hair salons. Those without access to a smartphone are expected to use the “free” government-issued wearable token.
The Era of Digital Dictatorships Is Nearly Here

Making mandatory wearables the new normal not just for COVID-19 prevention but for monitoring health in general would institutionalize quarantining people who have no symptoms of an illness but only an opaque algorithm’s determination that vital signs indicate “abnormal” activity.

Given that no AI is 100 percent accurate and that AI is only as good as the data it is trained on, such a system would be guaranteed to make regular errors: the question is how many. One AI algorithm being used to “predict COVID-19 outbreaks” in Israel and some US states is marketed by Diagnostic Robotics; the (likely inflated) accuracy rate the company provides for its product is only 73 percent. That means, by the company’s own admission, their AI is wrong 27 percent of the time. Probably, it is even less accurate, as the 73 percent figure has never been independently verified.

Adoption of these technologies has benefitted from the COVID-19 crisis, as supporters are seizing the opportunity to accelerate their introduction. As a result, their use will soon become ubiquitous if this advancing agenda continues unimpeded.

Though this push for wearables is obvious now, signs of this agenda were visible several years ago. In 2018, for instance, insurer John Hancock announced that it would replace its life insurance offerings with “interactive policies” that involve individuals having their health monitored by commercial health wearables. Prior to that announcement, John Hancock and other insurers such as Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare offered various rewards for policyholders who wore a fitness wearable and shared that data with their insurance company.

In another pre-COVID example, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article in August 2019 that claimed that wearables “encourage healthy behaviors and empower individuals to participate in their health.” The authors of the article, who are affiliated with Harvard, further claimed that “incentivizing use of these devices [wearables] by integrating them in insurance policies” may be an “attractive” policy approach. The use of wearables for policyholders has since been heavily promoted by the insurance industry, both prior to and after COVID-19, and some speculate that health insurers could soon mandate their use in certain cases or as a broader policy.

These biometric “fitness” devices—such as Amazon’s Halo—can monitor more than your physical vital signs, however, as they can also monitor your emotional state. ARPA-H/HARPA’s flagship SAFE HOME program reveals that the ability to monitor thoughts and feelings is an already existing goal of those seeking to establish this new agency.

According to World Economic Forum luminary and historian Yuval Noah Harari, the transition to “digital dictatorships” will have a “big watershed” moment once governments “start monitoring and surveying what is happening inside your body and inside your brain.” He says that the mass adoption of such technology would make human beings “hackable animals,” while those who abstain from having this technology on or in their bodies would become part of a new “useless” class. Harari has also asserted that biometric wearables will someday be used by governments to target individuals who have the “wrong” emotional reactions to government leaders.

Unsurprisingly, one of Harari’s biggest fans, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, has recently led his company into the development of a comprehensive biometric and “neural” wearable based on technology from a “neural interface” start-up that Facebook acquired in 2019. Per Facebook, the wearable “will integrate with AR [augmented reality], VR [virtual reality], and human neural signals” and is set to become commercially available soon. Facebook also notably owns the VR company Oculus Rift, whose founder, Palmer Luckey, now runs the US military AI contractor Anduril.

As recently reported, Facebook was shaped in its early days to be a private-sector replacement for DARPA’s controversial LifeLog program, which sought to both “humanize” AI and build profiles on domestic dissidents and terror suspects. LifeLog was also promoted by DARPA as “supporting medical research and the early detection of an emerging pandemic.”

It appears that current trends and events show that DARPA’s decades-long effort to merge “health security” and “national security” have now advanced further than ever before. This may partially be because Bill Gates, who has wielded significant influence over health policy globally in the last year, is a long-time advocate of fusing health security and national security to thwart both pandemics and “bioterrorists” before they can strike, as can be heard in his 2017 speech delivered at that year’s Munich Security Conference. That same year, Gates also publicly urged the US military to “focus more training on preparing to fight a global pandemic or bioterror attack.”

In the merging of “national security” and “health security,” any decision or mandate promulgated as a public health measure could be justified as necessary for “national security,” much in the same way that the mass abuses and war crimes that occurred during the post-9/11 “war on terror” were similarly justified by “national security” with little to no oversight. Yet, in this case, instead of only losing our civil liberties and control over our external lives, we stand to lose sovereignty over our individual bodies.

The NIH, which would house this new ARPA-H/HARPA, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars experimenting with the use of wearables since 2015, not only for detecting disease symptoms but also for monitoring individuals’ diets and illegal drug consumption. Biden played a key part in that project, known as the Precision Medicine initiative, and separately highlighted the use of wearables in cancer patients as part of the Obama administration’s related Cancer Moonshot program. The third Obama-era health-research project was the NIH’s BRAIN initiative, which was launched, among other things, to “develop tools to record, mark, and manipulate precisely defined neurons in the living brain” that are determined to be linked to an “abnormal” function or a neurological disease. These initiatives took place at a time when Eric Lander was the cochair of Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology while still leading the Broad Institute. It is hardly a coincidence that Eric Lander is now Biden’s top science adviser, elevated to a new cabinet-level position and set to guide the course of ARPA-H/HARPA.

Thus, Biden’s newly announced agency, if approved by Congress, would integrate those past Obama-era initiatives with Orwellian applications under one roof, but with even less oversight than before. It would also seek to expand and mainstream the uses of these technologies and potentially move toward developing policies that would mandate their use.

If ARPA-H/HARPA is approved by Congress and ultimately established, it will be used to resurrect dangerous and long-standing agendas of the national-security state and its Silicon Valley contractors, creating a “digital dictatorship” that threatens human freedom, human society, and potentially the very definition of what it means to be human.

[Monk]

Think of it this way: the world economy is controlled by a few hundred multinational corporations, most of them in finance. They're the ones funding everything, which includes climate science and climate change denial. Why? Because they want to be one step ahead in terms of crises but at the same time want to assure people that everything will be fine in the long run. That's why even climate denial is filled with contradictions: there's no climate change because everything's fine, there's no global warming because there'll be an ice age soon, there's probably climate change (man-induced or otherwise) but innovation and science will prevail (which is why if you're rich, you can buy lots of nice mansions, travel by personal jet, and tell everyone that if they just change light bulbs everything will be fine), there's climate change but it's natural (which means we're doomed because we can't do anything about it, but at least we can feel good knowing that it's not our fault, lol), climate scientists are profiting but they should still be funded because the science isn't "settled," and so on. Meanwhile, who's the one issuing reports to their clients and personnel concerning preparations not only for climate change but even a resource crunch? HSBC. Lloyds of London. The Department of Defense. The U.S. armed forces. Who's the one buying up farm land besides Chinese companies? Bill Gates. Who's the one buying doomsteads in NZ? James Cameron. And who's the one financing solar power? Oil companies and the Kochs, who also funded climate skepticism!

And conspiracy theorists argue that there's no pandemic problem just like there's no climate problem? How are they any different from the mainstream who happily borrow and spend, thinking that everything will be fine in the long term? And of course that's expected. The majority of human beings want to think that tomorrow will be like yesterday, that they'll get good jobs and promotions, spend on entertainment and luxuries, that their kids will have a bright future, that everything will be fine in the long term, and can't wait to watch the next season of their favorite TV show or sports event, to watch the next installment of their favorite movie franchise, etc. And the businesses that they work for and that sell to them want to think the same thing: how else can they go on making their investors happy if not through increasing sales of goodies?

So, when someone says that climate or peak oil or environmental damage or a resource crunch is the new covid, and you agree, then you're better off not even pointing that out. Just do your work, go home, sit down and seek entertainment, and plan for your next outing. Just follow what everyone else is doing: imagine that any bad news isn't probably that bad, and any good news can only get better. If you want to talk about something distressing, then choose only those that look fun, like celebrities flashing Illuminati signals or stories about pizza restaurants and pedophiles. That way, everyone still gets entertained.

Which is what the mainstream want, anyway.

[Harvey]

^ Yes.

[conniption]

off-guardian
(embedded links)

The first “climate change” diagnosis is here. It will not be the last.

A doctor in British Columbia has taken an unprecedented step, and actually diagnosed an elderly patient as “suffering from climate change”. But why? And what does that mean for the future?

Kit Knightly
Nov 9, 2021

Doctor Kyle Merritt, an attending physician at an emergency department in Nelson BC, added “climate change” as a contributing factor to the medical issues of one of his patients. And, in so doing, has achieved a remarkable and troubling world first.

The first-ever medical diagnosis of “climate change”.

Dr Merritt said in an interview with Glacier Media:

If we’re not looking at the underlying cause, and we’re just treating the symptoms, we’re just gonna keep falling further and further behind,” the emergency room doctor told Glacier Media. […] It’s me trying to just… process what I’m seeing.”

The entire situation raises some interesting questions.

Does it make medical sense?

Of course it doesn’t.

He diagnosed her as “suffering from climate change”. You can’t do that, it is insane.

That’s like diagnosing someone who was struck by lightning as “suffering from the effects of rain” or a person having a heart attack as “suffering from the effects of Mcdonald’s”.

…actually, it’s worse than that. At least my examples have a distinct cause-and-effect relationship, and there are no scientific papers suggesting Mcdonald’s doesn’t actually exist.

The patient in question is over 70, asthmatic, diabetic and suffering from heart failure. She’s very, very sick…no matter the climate.

Even if Dr Merritt can somehow trace a decline in her health due to the weather (and there’s no evidence at all that he can), actually diagnosing it is completely bonkers.

…so why do it?

It’s a staged PR move. A very obvious one, when you think about it.

For one thing, there’s the question of how the media ever found out it happened, since medical records and diagnoses are completely private.

Clearly Dr Merritt didn’t just diagnose his patient with “climate change”, he then immediately called up the local media to tell them he had done it.

Throw in the fact that this happened to occur during the COP26 conference in Glasgow, which only today warned of “climate-linked health risks” rising, and that the move has already spawned a new NGO, “Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health”, and you have a textbook example of a stage-managed media rollout.

Why now?

In simple terms, because Covid worked and climate didn’t.

They have been stoking up public fear of “a new ice age” and acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer and myriad other supposedly incipient climate disasters for literal decades, and never touched one-tenth of the level of hysteria created by the Covid19 “pandemic”.

Somewhere, some not especially bright public relations executive has decided that the way to push the “pivot from Covid to climate” is to try and turn the long-predicted environmental disaster into a public health issue.

It’s hamfisted, a little funny, and probably won’t work, but it does open up some troubling possibilities going forward.

Like what?

Well, for starters, this may be the first “climate change diagnosis”, but do you honestly believe it will be the last?

Don’t be surprised if we see a huge spike in “climate diagnoses” in the next few months.

There are already widespread academic efforts to create a causal link between “climate change” and common illnesses.

A few days ago, the Independent headlined The climate crisis is not just about the environment – it’s about health too.

As I mentioned earlier, just today the COP26 panel warned that “climate-linked health risks” are going to rise.

Only last week the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published a paper titled “Climate Change and Global Issues in Allergy and Immunology” which argues climate change is already making asthma and some allergies worse.

It’s not hard to put together a list of other common afflictions that are already being linked back to climate change.

Cancer, pneumonia, heatstroke, diabetes, heart disease and essentially all lung conditions.

There’s also all diseases spread by mosquitos or other zoonotic agents, plus every waterborne illness.

And that’s without even severely stretching logic, which Covid has shown our medical and scientific institutions have no trouble doing.

They are already discussing “climate-related” mental health issues such as stress, anxiety and depression. These could easily become further types of “climate-related diagnoses” too.

Now, allow me to speculate for a few paragraphs…

The practice of “climate-related diagnosis” is likely going to expand. When questions about the science behind this are raised by sceptics, they will naturally be accused of “climate denial”.

Opinion pieces will appear torturing reason to defend the practice of diagnosing “climate illness”. So-called journalists, or mercenary experts in made-up fields like “climate ethics”, will crochet strands of reason into positions so full of holes they barely exist.

We’ll be told that even if the practice is technically inaccurate, it’s serving a greater truth. That people might not literally be sick due to climate change, but we are all figuratively dying of it.

“Covid has shown us people only do what’s right when they’re scared: We need to make them feel climate fear.”

“Climate change diagnoses are on the rise. And that’s a good thing.”

“Healthcare workers take stand on climate with new diagnosis trend.”

“NHS workers saved us from Covid, and now want to take on climate.”

…you don’t have to read the Guardian as much as I have to feel those headlines, or ones very like them, in our future.

Then the deaths can start happening. Covid has demonstrated that you can create a “mass casualty” scare by essentially just adding an extra line on a death certificate. They can do that for climate too. The headlines will carry on…

“Physicians see spike in “climate deaths” as people suddenly feel the consequences of inaction”

When people point out the flaws in reasoning the papers will argue that, even if people aren’t really dying of climate change, symbolically putting it on death certificates is the best way to illustrate how much danger we’re in.

They’ll backhandedly admit the statistic isn’t real, but then use it as an excuse to call for action anyway:

“Weekly climate deaths are outstripping Covid – we need to address the “climate pandemic.”

…it will go on and on.

Climate change will start being listed as an “underlying cause of death” for more and more diseases. I already mentioned cancer, lung disease and heart disease. They’ll all be “climate-related”.

The press spent the last year telling us that climate change “makes pandemics more likely”, so any future “pandemic” can be linked to climate and boom, a few hundred thousand climate deaths.

Climate change is allegedly bad for unborn babies, so stillbirths and miscarriages can all be “climate deaths”.

They can do a study finding “higher levels of solar radiation” can “increase the risk of cancer”, and then start saying anyone who dies of cancer also died of climate.

They don’t even have to limit it to natural causes.

Drowned in a flash flood? That’s a climate death.

Starved due to drought? Climate death.

Committed suicide? “he was pretty upset about the climate”.

Attacked by a polar bear? Well, climate change forced it out of its natural habitat.

I’m not being funny. This is not satire, I wish it were. Believe me, they could easily actually say it, or something like it, eventually.

If the past twenty months have done nothing else, they should at least have taught you this valuable lesson: There is nothing – NOTHING – too dishonest, too cynical or even too insane for the establishment to sell.

It doesn’t matter if it’s unlikely, or self-contradictory or irrational – it doesn’t even matter if it’s literally physically impossible – they will say it, and they will expect you to believe it.

We now have our first climate “case”. The first death “with climate” probably won’t be far behind. Thousands more will likely follow.

That’s when talk of “climate lockdowns” will come back.
_______
comments

https://off-guardian.org/2021/11/09/the ... -the-last/

[Marionumber1]

I'm sorry, but this article really is a sad example of how much garbage tier "journalism" runs on OffGuardian these days. Very emblematic of how if you're not careful to apply skepticism to your (justified) anti-establishment position, you just start reflexively assuming everything in the mainstream press is false.

As far as I can tell, the doctor literally never said the words "suffering from climate change" or claimed that climate change itself was a medical condition. This OffGuardian author seemingly took one of the sensational headlines at face value (like "B.C. doctor clinically diagnoses patient as suffering from 'climate change'") and butchered the quote to expand it in a way that made the story more outrageous than it really was, then spun a whole rant off of this misreading. If you read the aforementioned linked article, Dr. Merritt's position sounds pretty reasonable. British Columbia had been undergoing a massive heat wave that is exacerbating people's health issues, and this doctor was concerned enough about a larger environmental cause that he noted climate change down as a contributing factor (not a medical issue) and started banding together with other doctors who shared these concerns.

[drstrangelove]

Seems to me the pandemic is just a quasi manufactured crisis to justify an authoritarian response required to maintain social order during the current transitory period of Western Civilisation's industrial era into its post-industrial one, whatever that is shaping out to be. The pandemic being a temporary crisis to help manage the solution to the systemic crisis of industrialised civilisation. Climate change just being a sort of euphemism for what was openly acknowledged in the 1970s as an overpopulation, energy, and pollution crisis.

The pandemic and climate change crisis are both designed to get populations to accept the restrictions, controls, and changes necessary in getting them to accept the reductions in their material standards of living necessary to 'reform' the industrial system.

This would all be reasonable and just, if it weren't for the fact that the mode of 'reform' is being driven by the scions and degenerative legacy of the old psychopathic institutions responsible for the crisis they now preside over. Which means more artificial growth through the further removal of humans from the natural environment via technology.

[Elvis]

Thank you for this.

I'm sorry, but this article really is a sad example of how much garbage tier "journalism" runs on OffGuardian these days. Very emblematic of how if you're not careful to apply skepticism to your (justified) anti-establishment position, you just start reflexively assuming everything in the mainstream press is false.

As far as I can tell, the doctor literally never said the words "suffering from climate change" or claimed that climate change itself was a medical condition. This OffGuardian author seemingly took one of the sensational headlines at face value (like "B.C. doctor clinically diagnoses patient as suffering from 'climate change'") and butchered the quote to expand it in a way that made the story more outrageous than it really was, then spun a whole rant off of this misreading. If you read the aforementioned linked article, Dr. Merritt's position sounds pretty reasonable. British Columbia had been undergoing a massive heat wave that is exacerbating people's health issues, and this doctor was concerned enough about a larger environmental cause that he noted climate change down as a contributing factor (not a medical issue) and started banding together with other doctors who shared these concerns.

[Elvis]

Climate Delay Discourses.png

[Elvis]

So new.

coal climate 1912.jpg

[Elvis]

Many links in original:

The Green New Deal will be tremendously expensive. Every penny should go on the government's tab.

Nathan Tankus, Andrés Bernal, and Raúl Carrillo
Sep 23, 2019


— The Green New Deal is a vital way to address the social threat of climate change.

— Some GND advocates want to make the idea more palatable by relying on indirect financing like public-private partnerships or loans to private companies.

— While the ideas are designed to make the Green New Deal more politically palatable, indirect financing will also blunt the changes made by the GND.

— Therefore the government should pay for the entirety of the Green New Deal.


Although its seeds are freshly planted, the Green New Deal (GND) resolution has already regenerated the US policy landscape.

By coupling concrete, evidence-based goals with policy proposals that explicitly support these goals, Green New Dealers have shown not only courage but savvy.

Advocates of the GND reject "soft denialist" suggestions that the climate crisis is merely a technical problem we can fix by "unrigging" old markets, manufacturing new markets, or implementing isolated taxes. This recognition has helped shift the discussion toward ambition — and toward survival.

In support of this evolution, most advocates embrace another cold, hard truth: Only the federal government holds the fiscal tools powerful enough to achieve a just transition.

Accordingly, people who truly want to see a GND in our time should fully embrace the power of the public purse. Instead of focusing on financial returns or relying on failed ideas like public-private partnerships, the GND should be financed through public spending and nothing else.

From the onset, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — one of the GND's most visible supporters — has demanded our elected officials approach the crisis as straightforwardly as possible, just as policymakers responded to World War II.

The analogy is on point. During the war, Treasury economists learned an important lesson: Ultimately, the US federal government is constrained not by financial resources but by the physical resources (like labor and machinery) that it can marshal with its spending.

It doesn't mean elected officials should ignore the effects of new spending; rather, Congress should appropriate as much public money as necessary to accomplish GND projects, while avoiding the widespread shortages of goods and services that may result from the creation of excess purchasing power. This framework aligns with the actual goals of the GND rather than distractions — like boosting financial returns on investment.


Trying to make a Green New Deal more 'politically palatable' is a mistake

Some GND advocates want the explicitly transformational agenda to appear less costly and less "invasive." Whether they do this out of concern for the "price tag," a "socialist label," or both, matters little. They want to "leverage markets," "unlock the potential" of private capital, and otherwise minimize the ostensible burden of the GND on government balance sheets.

Their proposals typically involve the federal government either substituting public spending for public "lending," via a national development bank or a network of public banks, or taking "equity stakes" in private companies (thereby granting the federal government the right to a percentage of future profits, as well as influence, but not ownership, over the private businesses.)

At first blush, these approaches bear a certain "political lightness." The public has been told that cost-sharing with corporations is necessary to sell the GND to moderates and conservatives. It is difficult to say whether this is true or just another case of policy entrepreneurs appealing to a tiny deficit-obsessed constituency.

And while public banking is rightly popular at the local and state levels for offering an alternative to extractive investment and financial services, we do not think it makes sense to tether that important mission to an entirely different transformative endeavor.

We are also not convinced the country is clamoring for more public-private partnerships — many of which could involve the very corporations that created the climate crisis in the first place.

In any case, the chief issue is crystal clear: The potential for federal lending and investment — or "indirect" financing — proposals to transform our economy pales in comparison to more direct proposals. Worse, the indirect plans would reorient the GND toward financial rather than social goals.


Indirect financing could blunt the GND's impact

As a matter of basic accounting, the indirect approaches deny new income to the economy. Loans must be repaid. Shareholders must be satisfied.

Although advocates of indirect approaches like to cast loans and equity stakes as scalpels compared to the sledgehammer of spending, previous attempts to wield the tools of private finance under the guise of public finance suggest the opposite. Indeed, loans and equity stakes necessarily force companies to scramble to service loans or keep equity values high to the detriment of other priorities.

The negative consequences are illustrated well by the move to financing US higher education through lending rather than grants. When students cannot pay back their loans, their debt becomes an albatross. For students who succeed at getting high-paying jobs, having to pay down their debts does little to restrain their high income. Meanwhile, the move to federal lending hasn't reduced higher education spending or inflation. In other words, this policy change has increased inequalities and worsened higher education while misdirecting labor.

There is no reason to think a similar approach will succeed at accomplishing the Green New Deal. In contrast to the private-equity mantra, loading companies with debt doesn't make them more efficient.

Oddly, many of the same people attracted to the GND lending approach are also cheering on federal student-debt cancellation. If we claim public education is too important to accomplish through lending rather than spending, then why don't we say the same about the GND?

Politically speaking, indirect financing proposals create longer and more complex chains of decision-making responsibilities. Subsidized loans or equity stakes provide very little leverage over companies relative to grants and procurement contracts. Relevant private decision-makers would be incentivized to meet financial metrics, which can conflict with meeting more important social metrics such as labor protections, decarbonization, and innovation.

Indeed, the indirect approaches abdicate the federal government's duty to meet the social goals of the GND. Members of Congress seeking to steer the GND would be reduced to lobbying private executives and pounding the table for returns.

Ultimately, the emphasis on profitability perversely shifts our attention toward a perpetually renewable resource (money) and away from currently bottlenecked resources (labor, natural resources, green technology). The contradictions are clear: How would GND decision makers prioritize between the financial and social goals? More succinctly — when would one kind of "green" take priority over the other?


The push for profit would hurt cooperation

Indirect financing approaches also reinforce flawed metrics of value: They suggest the US government is a corporation that must prioritize its bottom line. Above all, the profit desire would pressure us to compete precisely when we must cooperate.

We can already see this risk unfolding in real time, as politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren drive the equity stake approach into explicitly nationalistic territory. While Warren is better on the Green New Deal than many candidates, her GND proposals articulate the need for US firms to "be the leaders and the owners" of the "$23 trillion market coming for green products." If her vision were to come true, US-based multinationals would continue to hoard intellectual property and keep species-saving research to themselves.

We contend that decarbonization technology is too important to humanity to hide it behind US patents and trade secrets. To confront the crisis equitably and efficiently, we should publicly fund technological development and share the research with the world free. The GND should usher in a global ecological commons, not more profit-centric competitions over "scarce resources."

The GND challenge undoubtedly presents us with difficult choices about the use of physical resources. But we cannot make those choices clearly when we are afraid of a big budget or balance sheet number. Neither should we set ourselves up to abandon valuable green projects because they fail the test of narrow profitability.

If we're genuinely concerned about the effects of expansive fiscal policy on inequality and price stability, we can impose a whole suite of tax-policy changes and a comprehensive suite of labor, environmental, financial, corporate, and competition law reforms.

The indirect approaches to financing a GND cannot deliver the outcomes we need on the timeline we require. If we've learned anything from the run-up to the climate crisis, it's that we should not concede the necessity of "market"-driven finance or "public-private partnerships" to achieve core public goals.

Ultimately, there's a simple guiding principle: If it's necessary for the collective good, the public should take responsibility, and political credit. No money mazes, no middlemen. For the GND, it means the federal government must appropriate public money with an eye toward our singular objective: collectively and justly combating climate change.


https://www.businessinsider.com/green-n ... ney-2019-9

Edited to add link

[Elvis]

Along those same lines, Aussie economist Bill Mitchell speaks:

The financial markets should be kept away from the climate crisis solution

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

It’s Wednesday and today, apart from presenting some great music, I am commenting on the ridiculous notion, that even progressive greenies propagate that we need to harness the financial resources of the markets (Wall street types) to help governments decarbonise their societies. The narrative that has emerged – that the financial CEOs with “trillions in assets” (all at COP26 because they could smell lucre) are a key to solving the climate challenge – is as ridiculous as progressives saying we need to tax them to fund schools and hospitals. Both narratives reflect the dominance of mainstream macroeconomics which has convinced us that currency-issuing governments are like big households and can ‘run out of money’. That is fiction but is part of the reason we have a climate crisis. Read on.

Don’t let the financial markets near this

A few years ago I was on a panel in Scotland with the leader of the Greens there. The topic was a Green Transition and when it was her turn to talk she spoke effusively about the need for ‘green bonds’ and to embrace the capacity of the financial markets to fund the decarbonisation.

That view is shared by many progressives.

[...]

More recently, they are about ‘taxing the rich’ so we can have good schools and hospitals.

1. Governments do not need the savings of the rich, nor their taxes! (April 15, 2015).

2. The ‘tax the rich’ call bestows unwarranted importance on them (February 21, 2018).

3. Tax the rich to counter carbon emissions not to get their money (January 22, 2020).

Meanwhile, the financial markets – the casino which seeks massive profits irrespective of how it is gained and the short- and long-term fallout that results – are circling with their ambitious plans to save the world through so-called ‘green financing’.

The talk at COP26 was less about identifying and solving the problems of climate change and more about how the financial markets can get their claws into the picture and create even more speculative products upon which they can make profits from, and, basically, whiteant the whole effort.

[...]

The last thing the World needs is more financial products. There are more than enough gambling vehicles out there already and the challenge, as part of the process which will involve taxes and regulations, is to reduce those vehicles through legislative bans.

Eliminating most of the speculative products that feed the wealth accumulation in the financial markets has to be the goal.

Those transactions do nothing to advance the well-being of the majority of us.

They should be banned.

And the first place to start is to ban all derivative products associated with food and energy.

It is beyond criminal to buy up staple agricultural products like maize, to store them while the market is manipulated to create artificial shortages and price rises (and profits upon sale), while there is food poverty around the world.

Ban the lot of it.


...more: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=48650

[JackRiddler]

.

As so often the case, the premise of this thread is a 180-degree inversion of the reality.

The Covidian panic and control regime growing from it serve, on the contrary, to distract and delay from dealing substantively with the ecological catastrophe and global extinction event that the institutional ideology describes misleadingly as being only about 'climate'. Covid has been turned into the manageable (and lucrative, for some) crisis that prevents action on reducing hydrocarbon fuel consumption, as well on a host of other crises stemming from the capitalist status quo. PTB are finding ways to continue Covidian emergency rule, but show no signs of repurposing it to action on 'climate'.

.

[conniption]

off-guardian
(embedded links)

Saving Capitalism or Saving the Planet?

Colin Todhunter
Nov 15, 2021

The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team helped to push the public towards accepting the COVID narrative, restrictions and lockdowns. It is now working on ‘nudging’ people towards further possible restrictions or at least big changes in their behaviour in the name of ‘climate emergency’.

From frequent news stories and advertisements to soap opera storylines and government announcements, the message about impending climate catastrophe is almost relentless.

Part of the messaging includes blaming the public’s consumption habits for a perceived ‘climate emergency’. At the same time, young people are being told that we only have a decade or so (depending on who is saying it) to ‘save the planet’.

Setting the agenda are powerful corporations that helped degrade much of the environment in the first place. But ordinary people, not the multi-billionaires pushing this agenda, will pay the price for this as living more frugally seems to be part of the programme (‘own nothing and be happy’). Could we at some future point see ‘climate emergency’ lockdowns, not to ‘save the NHS’ but to ‘save the planet’?

A tendency to focus on individual behaviour and not ‘the system’ exists.

But let us not forget this is a system that deliberately sought to eradicate a culture of self-reliance that prevailed among the working class in the 19th century (self-education, recycling products, a culture of thrift, etc) via advertising and a formal school education that ensured conformity and set in motion a lifetime of wage labour and dependency on the products manufactured by an environmentally destructive capitalism.

A system that has its roots in inflicting massive violence across the globe to exert control over land and resources elsewhere.

In his 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequalities and its solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.

By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their means of production) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).

Hickel argues that none of this was inevitable but was rooted in the fear of being left behind by other countries because of Europe’s relative lack of land resources to produce commodities.

This is worth bearing in mind as we currently witness a fundamental shift in our relationship to the state resulting from authoritarian COVID-related policies and the rapidly emerging corporate-led green agenda. We should never underestimate the ruthlessness involved in the quest for preserving wealth and power and the propensity for wrecking lives and nature to achieve this.

Commodification of nature

Current green agenda ‘solutions’ are based on a notion of ‘stakeholder’ capitalism or private-public partnerships whereby vested interests are accorded greater weight, with governments and public money merely facilitating the priorities of private capital.

A key component of this strategy involves the ‘financialisation of nature’ and the production of new ‘green’ markets to deal with capitalism’s crisis of over accumulation and weak consumer demand caused by decades of neoliberal policies and the declining purchasing power of working people. The banking sector is especially set to make a killing via ‘green profiling’ and ‘green bonds’.

According to Friends of the Earth (FoE), corporations and states will use the financialisation of nature discourse to weaken laws and regulations designed to protect the environment with the aim of facilitating the goals of extractive industries, while allowing mega-infrastructure projects in protected areas and other contested places.

Global corporations will be able to ‘offset’ (greenwash) their activities by, for example, protecting or planting a forest elsewhere (on indigenous people’s land) or perhaps even investing in (imposing) industrial agriculture which grows herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that are misleadingly portrayed as ‘climate friendly’.

FoE states:

Offsetting schemes allow companies to exceed legally defined limits of destruction at a particular location, or destroy protected habitat, on the promise of compensation elsewhere; and allow banks to finance such destruction on the same premise.”

This agenda could result in the weakening of current environmental protection legislation or its eradication in some regions under the pretext of compensating for the effects elsewhere.

How ecoservice ‘assets’ (for example, a forest that performs a service to the ecosystem by acting as a carbon sink) are to be evaluated in a monetary sense is very likely to be done on terms that are highly favourable to the corporations involved, meaning that environmental protection will play second fiddle to corporate and finance sector return-on-investment interests.

As FoE argues, business wants this system to be implemented on its terms, which means the bottom line will be more important than stringent rules that prohibit environmental destruction.

Saving capitalism

The envisaged commodification of nature will ensure massive profit-seeking opportunities through the opening up of new markets and the creation of fresh investment instruments.

Capitalism needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall (according to writer Ted Reese, it has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s). The system suffers from a rising overaccumulation (surplus) of capital.

Reese notes that, although wages and corporate taxes have been slashed, the exploitability of labour continued to become increasingly insufficient to meet the demands of capital accumulation. By late 2019, the world economy was suffocating under a mountain of debt.

Many companies could not generate enough profit and falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent. In effect, economic growth was already grinding to a halt prior to the massive stock market crash in February 2020.

In the form of COVID ‘relief’, there has been a multi-trillion bailout for capitalism as well as the driving of smaller enterprises to bankruptcy. Or they have being swallowed up by global interests. Either way, the likes of Amazon and other predatory global corporations have been the winners.

New ‘green’ Ponzi trading schemes to offset carbon emissions and commodify ‘ecoservices’ along with electric vehicles and an ‘energy transition’ represent a further restructuring of the capitalist economy, resulting in a shift away from a consumer-oriented demand-led system.

It essentially leaves those responsible for environmental degradation at the wheel, imposing their will and their narrative on the rest of us.

Global agribusiness

Between 2000 and 2009, Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside. Consider too that Brazil and Indonesia have spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid from the UN to prevent it.

These two countries gave over $40bn in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012, some 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rain forests.

India is the world’s leading importer of palm oil, accounting for around 15% of the global supply. It imports over two-­thirds of its palm oil from Indonesia.

Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Under pressure from the World Trade Organization (WTO), import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with.

This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms.

Indonesia leads the world in global palm oil production, but palm oil plantations have too often replaced tropical forests, leading to the killing of endangered species and the uprooting of local communities as well as contributing to the release of potential environment-damaging gases. Indonesia emits more of these gases than any country besides China and the US, largely due to the production of palm oil.

The issue of palm oil is one example from the many that could be provided to highlight how the drive to facilitate corporate need and profit trumps any notion of environmental protection or addressing any ‘climate emergency’. Whether it is in Indonesia, Latin America or elsewhere, transnational agribusiness – and the system of globalised industrial commodity crop agriculture it promotes – fuels much of the destruction we see today.

Even if the mass production of lab-created food, under the guise of ‘saving the planet’ and ‘sustainability’, becomes logistically possible (which despite all the hype is not at this stage), it may still need biomass and huge amounts of energy. Whose land will be used to grow these biomass commodities and which food crops will they replace? And will it involve that now-famous Gates’ euphemism ‘land mobility’ (farmers losing their land)?

Microsoft is already mapping Indian farmers’ lands and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, farmers’ personal details, profile of land held (cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions), production details (crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession) and financial details (input costs, average return, credit history).

Is this an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who find themselves ‘land mobile’?

This is a major concern among farmers and civil society in India.

Back in 2017, agribusiness giant Monsanto was judged to have engaged in practices that impinged on the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food and the right to health. Judges at the ‘Monsanto Tribunal’, held in The Hague, concluded that if ecocide were to be formally recognised as a crime in international criminal law, Monsanto could be found guilty.

The tribunal called for the need to assert the primacy of international human and environmental rights law. However, it was also careful to note that an existing set of legal rules serves to protect investors’ rights in the framework of the WTO and in bilateral investment treaties and in clauses in free trade agreements. These investor trade rights provisions undermine the capacity of nations to maintain policies, laws and practices protecting human rights and the environment and represent a disturbing shift in power.

The tribunal denounced the severe disparity between the rights of multinational corporations and their obligations.

While the Monsanto Tribunal judged that company to be guilty of human rights violations, including crimes against the environment, in a sense we also witnessed global capitalism on trial.

Global conglomerates can only operate as they do because of a framework designed to allow them to capture or co-opt governments and regulatory bodies and to use the WTO and bilateral trade deals to lever influence.

As Jason Hickel notes in his book (previously referred to), old-style colonialism may have gone but governments in the Global North and its corporations have found new ways to assert dominance via leveraging aid, market access and ‘philanthropic’ interventions to force lower income countries to do what they want.

The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ and its ongoing commitment to an unjust model of globalisation is an example of this and a recipe for further plunder and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few.

Brazil and Indonesia have subsidised private corporations to effectively destroy the environment through their practices. Canada and the UK are working with the GMO biotech sector to facilitate its needs. And India is facilitating the destruction of its agrarian base according to World Bank directives for the benefit of the likes of Corteva and Cargill.

The TRIPS Agreement, written by Monsanto, and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, written by Cargill, was key to a new era of corporate imperialism.

It came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme.

Powerful corporations continue to regard themselves as the owners of people, the planet and the environment and as having the right – enshrined in laws and agreements they wrote – to exploit and devastate for commercial gain.
Partnership or co-option?

It was noticeable during a debate on food and agriculture at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow that there was much talk about transforming the food system through partnerships and agreements. Fine-sounding stuff, especially when the role of agroecology and regenerative farming was mentioned.

However, if, for instance, the interests you hope to form partnerships with are coercing countries to eradicate their essential buffer food stocks then bid for such food on the global market with US dollars (as in India) or are lobbying for the enclosure of seeds through patents (as in Africa and elsewhere), then surely this deliberate deepening of dependency should be challenged; otherwise ‘partnership’ really means co-option.

Similarly, the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that took place during September in New York was little more than an enabler of corporate needs. The UNFSS was founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum and was disproportionately influenced by corporate actors.

Those granted a pivotal role at the UNFSS support industrial food systems that promote ultra-processed foods, deforestation, industrial livestock production, intensive pesticide use and commodity crop monocultures, all of which cause soil deterioration, water contamination and irreversible impacts on biodiversity and human health. And this will continue as long as the environmental effects can be ‘offset’ or these practices can be twisted on the basis of them somehow being ‘climate-friendly’.

Critics of the UNFSS offer genuine alternatives to the prevailing food system. In doing so, they also provide genuine solutions to climate-related issues and food injustice based on notions of food sovereignty, localisation and a system of food cultivation deriving from agroecological principles and practices. Something which people who organised the climate summit in Glasgow would do well to bear in mind.

Current greenwashed policies are being sold by tugging at the emotional heartstrings of the public. This green agenda, with its lexicon of ‘sustainability’, ‘carbon neutrality’, ‘net-zero’ and doom-laden forecasts, is part of a programme that seeks to restructure capitalism, to create new investment markets and instruments and to return the system to viable levels of profitability.
_______
Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/11/15/sav ... he-planet/