Summary
- The public will be told what you can and what you cannot eat.
- Venture Capitalists now own the natural world to "protect it."
- The entire global population will be tracked and traced using carbon credits to control your movements.
- A Global Government is needed to "save the world."
James Corbett:
Whitney Webb, Iain Davis and Cory Morningstar:
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Articles
Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class
A project of the multilateral development banking system, the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange recently created a new asset class that will put, not just the natural world, but the processes underpinning all life, up for sale under the guise of promoting “sustainability.”
Last month, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it had developed a new asset class and accompanying listing vehicle meant “to preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow the natural assets they commodify, with the end of goal of maximizing the aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable.
Though described as acting like “any other entity” on the NYSE, it is alleged that NACs “will use the funds to help preserve a rain forest or undertake other conservation efforts, like changing a farm’s conventional agricultural production practices.” Yet, as explained towards the end of this article, even the creators of NACs admit that the ultimate goal is to extract near-infinite profits from the natural processes they seek to quantify and then monetize.
NYSE COO Michael Blaugrund alluded to this when he said the following regarding the launch of NACs: “Our hope is that owning a natural asset company is going to be a way that an increasingly broad range of investors have the ability to invest in something that’s intrinsically valuable, but, up to this point, was really excluded from the financial markets.”
Framed with the lofty talk of “sustainability” and “conservation”, media reports on the move in outlets like Fortune couldn’t avoid noting that NACs open the doors to “a new form of sustainable investment” which “has enthralled the likes of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink over the past several years even though there remain big, unanswered questions about it.” Fink, one of the world’s most powerful financial oligarchs, is and has long been a corporate raider, not an environmentalist, and his excitement about NACs should give even its most enthusiastic proponents pause if this endeavor was really about advancing conservation, as is being claimed.
How to Create a NAC
The creation and launch of NACs has been two years in the making and saw the NYSE team up with the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), in which the NYSE itself holds a minority stake. IEG’s three investors are the Inter-American Development Bank, the Latin America-focused branch of the multilateral development banking system that imposes neoliberal and neo-colonalist agendas through debt entrapment; the Rockefeller Foundation, the foundation of the American oligarch dynasty whose activities have long been tightly enmeshed with Wall Street; and Aberdare Ventures, a venture capital firm chiefly focused on the digital healthcare space. Notably, the IADB and the Rockefeller Foundation are closely tied to the related pushes for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and biometric Digital IDs.
The IEG’s mission focuses on “pioneering a new asset class based on natural assets and the mechanism to convert them to financial capital.” “These assets,” IEG states, make “life on Earth possible and enjoyable…They include biological systems that provide clean air, water, foods, medicines, a stable climate, human health and societal potential.”
Put differently, NACs will not only allow ecosystems to become financial assets, but the rights to “ecosystem services”, or the benefits people receive from nature as well. These include food production, tourism, clean water, biodiversity, pollination, carbon sequestration and much more. IEG is currently partnering with Costa Rica’s government to pilot its NAC efforts within that country. Costa Rica’s Minister of Environment and Energy, Andrea Meza Murillo, has claimed that the pilot project with IEG “will deepen the economic analysis of giving nature its economic value, as well as to continue mobilizing financial flows to conservation.”
With NACs, the NYSE and IEG are now putting the totality of nature up for sale. While they assert that doing so will “transform our economy to one that is more equitable, resilient and sustainable”, it’s clear that the coming “owners” of nature and natural processes will be the only real beneficiaries.
Per the IEG, NACs first begin with the identification of a natural asset, such as a forest or lake, which is then quantified using specific protocols. Such protocols have already been developed by related groups like the Capitals Coalition, which is partnered with several of IEG’s partners as well as the World Economic Forum and various coalitions of multinational corporations. Then, a NAC is created and the structure of the company decides who has the rights to that natural asset’s productivity as well as the rights to decide how that natural asset is managed and governed. Lastly, a NAC is “converted” into financial capital by launching an initial public offering on a stock exchange, like the NYSE. This last stage “generates capital to manage the natural asset” and the fluctuation of its price on the stock exchange “signals the value of its natural capital.”
However, the NAC and its employees, directors and owners are not necessarily the owners of the natural asset itself following this final step. Instead, as IEG notes, the NAC is merely the issuer while the potential buyers of the natural asset the NAC represents can include: institutional investors, private investors, individuals and institutions, corporations, sovereign wealth funds and multilateral development banks. Thus, asset management firms that essentially already own much of the world, like Blackrock, could thus become owners of soon-to-be monetized natural processes, natural resources and the very foundations of natural life itself.
Both the NYSE and IEG have marketed this new investment vehicle as being aimed at generating funds that will go back to conservation or sustainability efforts. However, on the IEG’s website, it notes that the goal is really endless profit from natural processes and ecosystems that were previously deemed to be part of “the commons”, i.e. the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. Per the IEG, “as the natural asset prospers, providing a steady or increasing flow of ecosystem services, the company’s equity should appreciate accordingly providing investment returns. Shareholders and investors in the company through secondary offers, can take profit by selling shares. These sales can be gauged to reflect the increase in capital value of the stock, roughly in-line with its profitability, creating cashflow based on the health of the company and its assets.”
Researcher and journalist Cory Morningstar has strongly disagreed with the approach being taken by NYSE/IEG and views NACs as a system that will only exacerbate the corporate predation of nature, despite claims to the contrary. Morningstar has described NACs as “Rockefeller et al. letting the markets dictate what in nature has value – and what does not. Yet, it’s not for capitalist institutions and global finance to decide what life has value. Ecosystems are not ‘assets.’ Biological communities exist for their own purposes, not ours.”
A New Way to Loot
The ultimate goal of NACs is not sustainability or conservation – it is the financialization of nature, i.e. turning nature into a commodity that can be used to keep the current, corrupt Wall Street economy booming under the guise of protecting the environment and preventing its further degradation. Indeed, IEG makes this clear when they note that “the opportunity” of NACs lies not in their potential to improve environmental well-being or sustainability, but in the size of this new asset class, which they term “Nature’s Economy.”
Indeed, while the asset classes of the current economy are value at approximately $512 trillion, the asset classes unlocked by NACs are significantly larger at $4,000 trillion (i.e. $4 quadrillion). Thus, NACs open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to not just dominate the human economy, but the entire natural world. In the world currently being constructed by these and related entities, where even freedom is being re-framed not as a right but “a service,” the natural processes on which life depends are similarly being re-framed as assets, which will have owners. Those “owners” will ultimately have the right, in this system, to dictate who gets access to clean water, to clean air, to nature itself and at what cost.
According to Cory Morningstar, one of the other aims of creating “Nature’s Economy” and neatly packaging it for Wall Street via NACs is to drastically advance massive land grab efforts made by Wall Street and the oligarch class in recent years. This includes the recent land grabs made by Wall Street firms as well as billionaire “philanthropists” like Bill Gates during the COVID crisis. However, the land grabs facilitated through the development of NACs will largely target indigenous communities in the developing world.
As Morningstar notes:
“The public launch of NACs strategically preceded the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the biggest biodiversity conference in a decade. Under the pretext of turning 30% of the globe into “protected areas”, the largest global land grab in history is underway. Built on a foundation of white supremacy, this proposal will displace hundreds of millions, furthering the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. The tragic irony is this: while Indigenous peoples represent less than 5% of the global population, they support approximately 80% of all biodiversity.“
IEG, in discussing NACs, tellingly notes that proceeds from a NAC’s IPO can be used for the acquisition of more land by its controlling entities or used to boost the budgets or funds of those who receive the capital from the IPO. This is a far cry from the NYSE/IEG sales pitch that NACs are “different” because their IPOs will be used to “preserve and protect” natural areas.
The climate change panic that is now rising to the take the place of COVID-19 panic will surely be used to savvily market NACs and similar tactics as necessary to save the planet, but – rest assured – NACs are not a move to save the planet, but a move to enable the same interests responsible for the current environmental crises to usher in a new era where their predatory exploitation reaches new heights that were previously unimaginable.
Source here.
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UN Press Release: New Financial Alliance for Net Zero Emissions Launches
PRESS RELEASE ISSUED ON BEHALF OF THE COP25 and COP26 CLIMATE CHAMPIONS
Industry-led and UN-convened Net Zero Banking Alliance also announced today, co-launched by the UNEP Finance Initiative and the Financial Services Taskforce of the Sustainable Markets Initiative
• The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), chaired by Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, brings together over 160 firms (together responsible for assets in excess of $70 trillion1) from the leading net zero initiatives across the financial system to accelerate the transition to net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.
• All GFANZ member alliances must be accredited by the UN Race to Zero campaign. They must use science-based guidelines to reach net zero emissions, cover all emission scopes, include 2030 interim target setting, and commit to transparent reporting and accounting in line with the UN Race to Zero criteria.
• 43 banks from 23 countries (with assets of $28.5 trillion) form the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) today - which joins GFANZ - with its members committing to align operational and attributable emissions from their portfolios with pathways to net-zero by 2050 or sooner.
• The Net-Zero Banking Alliance is convened by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative and co-launched by the Prince of Wales’ Sustainable Markets Initiative Financial Services Taskforce (FSTF).
21 April 2021 - Today, on the eve of President Biden’s Head of State Climate Summit, Mark Carney (the UK Prime Minister’s Finance Advisor for COP26 and UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance) – in partnership with the UNFCCC Climate Action Champions and the UN Race to Zero campaign, and the COP26 Presidency – join the Honorable John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate and the Honorable Janet Yellen, US Treasury Secretary to launch a global alliance that brings together existing and new net zero finance initiatives into one sector-wide strategic forum: The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero
(GFANZ)
GFANZ will work to mobilise the trillions of dollars necessary to build a global zero emissions economy and deliver the goals of the Paris Agreement. GFANZ will provide a forum for strategic coordination among the leadership of finance institutions from across the finance sector to accelerate the transition to a net zero economy. All initiatives in GFANZ require signatories to set science-aligned interim and long-term goals to reach net zero no later than 2050 in line with Race to Zero’s criteria. These goals are supplemented by member-determined short-term targets and action plans.
The industry-led Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and co-launched by the Financial Services Taskforce (FSTF) of the Prince of Wales’ Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), is the newest net zero alliance. NZBA brings together an initial cohort of 43 of the world’s leading banks with a focus on delivering the banking sector’s ambition to align its climate commitments with the Paris Agreement goals with collaboration, rigour, and transparency.
The NZBA joins existing initiatives: the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative and the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance.
State Street Global Advisors, Trillium Asset Management, and Coutts are also joining the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative today, bringing its membership to 87 members with assets under management representing over $37 trillion. The Paris Aligned Investment Initiative is joining the Race to Zero. The UN-convened Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance’s 37 members, with over $5.7 trillion assets under management, are demonstrating ambition by already setting science-aligned targets for 2025.
These alliances will shortly be joined by some of the world’s leading insurers and reinsurers in the soon-to-be launched UN-convened Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA).
By bringing together leading existing and new net zero finance initiatives in the Race to Zero together in one sector-wide strategic forum, GFANZ will catalyse strategic and technical coordination on the steps firms need to take to align with a net zero future.
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1The Glasgow Finance Alliance includes 160+ financial institutions across Race to Zero initiatives. These institutions include: 87 asset managers representing US$36.95 trillion in assets under management; 42 banks with US$28.5 trillion in assets; and 58 asset owners with US$7.4 trillion in assets under management. Each entity has made its own net zero commitment with potential overlap across initiatives, institutions and assets.
Raising the bar, coordinating action
To unlock the trillions needed to achieve a resilient, zero emissions future, GFANZ will:
Broaden Race to Zero’s existing finance sector campaign to establish credible net zero commitments covering all financed activities in all sectors of the financial system.
Expand the number of financial institutions with high ambition, credible, and transparent commitments to financing the transition to net zero.
Ensure that commitments are backed by interim targets (2030 or sooner), alongside robust transition plans consistent with 1.5°C above pre- industrial levels as required by Race to Zero.
Coordinate commitments and actions across the financial system to support economy-wide transition, including the critical analytical tools and market infrastructure (such as credit rating agencies, auditors and stock exchanges) for financial institutions to implement their net zero strategies.
Support technical collaboration on substantive and cross-cutting issues that will accelerate the alignment of investment and lending with net zero.
Advocate for public policy that supports economy-wide transition to net zero.
UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, said: “Uniting the world’s banks and financial institutions behind the global transition to net zero is crucial to unlocking the finance we need to get there – from backing pioneering firms and new technologies to building resilient economies around the world. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero will lead this charge ahead of COP26 to scale-up our ambition, accelerate our shift and help us to build back greener together.”
U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said: “The largest financial players in the world recognize energy transition represents a vast commercial opportunity as well as a planetary imperative. As countries around the world move to decarbonize, the large sums these institutions are dedicating to climate solutions reflect a growing understanding that the transition to a low-carbon global economy will be critical for their business models. To be credible and effective as market signals, these financial commitments should adhere to clear definitions, metrics, and reporting. Ultimately, the transition to this new economy will create a massive number of new jobs and increase our collective ability to tackle climate change.”
COP26 President-Designate, Alok Sharma, said: "Without adequate finance, we simply will not achieve the change needed to safeguard our planet for future generations. As the world continues down a crucial decade of delivery on climate action, GFANZ will ensure much-needed acceleration towards net zero by uniting some of the world's most powerful financial actors. I look forward to seeing this new alliance drive up ambition as we look to COP26 and beyond."
Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and Prime Minister Johnson’s Climate Finance Advisor for COP26, said: “This is the breakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needs. I welcome the leadership of the SMI Financial Services Task Force and other global banks for their new commitments to net zero and for joining forces with GFANZ, the gold standard for net zero commitments in the financial sector. Most fundamentally, GFANZ will act as the strategic forum to ensure the financial system works together to broaden, deepen, and accelerate the transition to a net zero economy.”
Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme said: “In a critical year for climate and nature, these alliances speak to the high level of commitment and ambition that the world urgently requires from the financial sector. The end goal is a net-zero transition of the economy in line with science. Nothing less. Immediate, transparent and accountable actions underpin these commitments, and we encourage all financial institutions to follow their peers in committing to achieving the drastic reduction of emissions required over the next decade if we are to succeed in limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C.”
Nigel Topping, High-Level Climate Champion for COP26, said: “Already, a fundamental shift in capital is accelerating, with the world’s largest asset owners and managers – and now banks – joining the Race to Zero. But the finance gap remains in the trillions of dollars, particularly for developing economies, and concerted efforts are needed to translate necessary solutions into investable propositions, which is why I am delighted to be collaborating on GFANZ.”
Brian Moynihan, Co-Chair of the SMI and Chairman and Chief Executive of Bank of America, said: “This commitment to net-zero by the SMI financial services leaders is an example of the leadership that the CEOs of SMI companies can generate by working together. We will work closely with CEOs from other industry groups and others to continue to drive the other SMI priorities established by His Royal Highness in the Terra Carta earlier this year.”
Noel Quinn, Chair of SMI Financial Sector Taskforce and Group Chief Executive of HSBC, said: “A commitment to financing the transition to net zero is essential. It’s important that the banking sector is committed to providing the financial support needed to help customers on that transition. But we have to establish a robust and transparent framework for monitoring progress against that objective and we want to set that standard for the banking industry. Industry-wide collaboration is essential in achieving that goal. I’m delighted that banks from the SMI Financial Services Taskforce have joined forces to establish the Net Zero Banking Alliance.”
Ana Botin, Group Executive Chairman, Banco Santander, said: “If we are to green the world’s economy, we need a truly global effort - banks, companies, governments, regulators and civil society working together at pace. At Santander we are proud to be part of the founding members of this new alliance, and to accelerate progress towards net zero.”
Bringing in global banks
The industry-led Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA)2, convened by the UN, joins the Race to Zero and brings together 43 banks from around the world — from Latin America to Asia to Africa – elevating the vital role of banks in supporting the global transition of the real economy to net-zero emissions.
It sees the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), which will convene the alliance, join forces with banks from the Financial Services Taskforce (FSTF), an industry sub-group of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’ Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI). All banks that have signed the commitment will:
Align operational and attributable emissions from their lending and investment portfolios with pathways to net-zero by 2050 or sooner.
Within 18 months of joining, set 2030 targets (or sooner) and a 2050 target, with intermediate targets to be set every 5 years from 2030 onwards. All targets will be regularly reviewed to ensure consistency with the latest science (as detailed in IPCC assessment reports).
Banks’ first 2030 targets will focus on priority sectors where the bank can have the most significant impact, ie. the most GHG-intensive sectors within their portfolios.
Within 36 months of joining, banks will set a further round of sector-level targets for all or a significant majority of specified carbon-intensive sectors, including: agriculture; aluminium; cement; coal; commercial and residential real estate; iron & steel; oil & gas; power generation; transport.
The commitment is designed to ensure that banks engage with their clients’ own transition and decarbonisation, promoting real economy transition
Annually publish absolute emissions and emissions intensity in line with best practice and within a year of setting targets, disclose progress against a board-level reviewed transition strategy setting out proposed actions and climate-related sectoral policies.
Take a robust approach to the role of offsets in transition plans.
The commitment is underpinned by the bank-led UNEP FI Guidelines for Climate Target Setting for Banks, also launched today. These guidelines have been developed by banks from the Collective Commitment to Climate Action, a leadership group under the UNEP FI Principles for Responsible Banking.
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2 The UN-Convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance will deliver internationally consistent guidelines and a global community, with local implementation also supported by country chapters, the first of which will be established by the UK Bankers for Net Zero.
Coming soon: Insurers for net zero
Some of the world’s leading insurers and reinsurers are currently establishing the UN-convened Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) under the auspices of UNEP FI’s Principles for Sustainable Insurance (PSI), building on their climate leadership as investors via the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance. The seven companies involved in establishing the NZIA are AXA (Chair), Allianz, Aviva, Munich Re, SCOR, Swiss Re and Zurich Insurance Group. The NZIA has submitted a statement of intent to join the UN Race to Zero and become part of the GFANZ, and is expected to be officially launched at COP26.
For more information and a full list of participating banks see here.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
Register for the launch event here: https://www.theclimategroup.org/our-work/events/cop26-glasgow-financial-alliance-net-zero
GFANZ background document: https://racetozero.unfccc.int/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/GFANZ.pdf
UN-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance: www.unepfi.org/net-zero-banking
UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance: www.unepfi.org/net-zero-alliance
UN-convened Net-Zero Insurance Alliance: www.unepfi.org/net-zero-insurance
Net Zero Asset Manager Initiative: www.netzeroassetmanagers.org
Prince of Wales’ Sustainable Markets Initiative Financial Services Taskforce: https://www.sustainable-markets.org/financial-services-taskforce
Paris Aligned Investment Initiative: https://www.iigcc.org/our-work/paris-aligned-investment-initiative/:
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Amount of finance committed to achieving 1.5°C now at scale needed to deliver the transition
Capital committed to net zero now at over $130 trillion, up from $5 trillion when the UK and Italy assumed COP26 Presidency
Today, through the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), over $130 trillion of private capital is committed to transforming the economy for net zero.1 These commitments, from over 450 firms across 45 countries, can deliver the estimated $100 trillion of finance needed for net zero over the next three decades.
To support the deployment of this capital, the global financial system is being transformed through 24 major initiatives for COP26 that have been delivered for the summit. This work has significantly strengthened the information, the tools and the markets needed for the financial system to support the transformation of the global economy for net zero.
New analysis, commissioned by the UN High Level Climate Action Champions, finds that the private sector could deliver 70% of total investments needed to meet net zero goals.2 In its progress report published today, GFANZ announces that financial sector commitments to net zero now exceed $130 trillion, a 25-fold increase under the UK and Italian Presidency.3
Now firms across the entire financial spectrum – banks, insurers, pension funds, asset managers, export credit agencies, stock exchanges, credit rating agencies, index providers and audit firms – have committed to high ambition, science-based targets, including achieving net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest, delivering their fair share of 50% emission reductions this decade, and reviewing their targets towards this every five years. All firms will report their progress and financed emissions annually.
The progress report also outlines the ambitious body of work underway – led by GFANZ CEOs – to address some of the biggest climate finance challenges, including defining net zero pathways for carbon-intensives sectors, aligning on what constitutes a robust transition plan for corporates and financial institutions, and a sector-wide plan to mobilise capital needed for decarbonisation in emerging markets. Collectively, this work will accelerate the implementation of net zero commitments and help to rapidly scale capital flows to support the net zero transition.
It comes as UK Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced today new requirements for firms to publish net zero transition plans setting out how they will decarbonise through 2050. This follows calls from GFANZ for G20 countries to implement policies to unlock and accelerate capital to support the transition, including mandatory net zero transition plans.4 Already, firms are turning ambition into action that will align their portfolios with 1.5°C. Over 90 of the founding institutions of GFANZ have already delivered on setting short-term targets, including 29 asset owners that have committed to reducing portfolio emissions by 25-30% by 2025, as well as 43 asset managers that have published targets for 2030 or sooner.5 And the first targets have also been published by Net Zero Banking Alliance members.
The 24 other major finance initiatives, led by Mark Carney as part of the private finance priorities for COP26, will help transform the financial architecture by mainstreaming and scaling: climate-related reporting; climate risk management; climate-related investment returns and the mobilisation of private finance to emerging and developing economies.6 Today, the IFRS Foundation, the international accounting standard body, announces the establishment of a new International Sustainability Standards Board to develop globally consistent climate and broader sustainability disclosure standards for the financial markets. This work has been welcomed by Finance Ministers from over 50 countries stretching across 6 continents and follows support from the G7 and others to make climate disclosures mandatory.
Through the work of the Network for Greening the Financial System climate risk management is also being transformed. Thirty-eight central banks, in countries comprising 67% of the world’s emissions, have committed to climate-related stress tests to review the resilience of the world’s largest financial firms in the face of several climate-related risks. And 33 central banks and supervisors, representing 70% of the world’s emissions, have committed to issuing guidance to firms on managing climate-related financial risks. And to measure more accurately the alignment of lending, investment and underwriting with net zero, the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) has published guidance on metrics, targets and transition plans.
Finally, for COP26, GFANZ Co-Chair Mark Carney is publishing a new plan on how to scale private capital flows to emerging and developing economies. This includes the development of country platforms to connect the now enormous private capital committed to net zero with country projects, scaling blended finance through MDBs and developing high integrity, credible global carbon markets.7
GFANZ is supporting these mobilisation efforts and has identified an initial set of five catalytic initiatives to accelerate the transition in these countries, based on their scalability and potential impact. In doing so, GFANZ has committed to bring together technical expertise and balance sheets to scale capital commitments ahead of COP27.8 GFANZ is taking a number of measures to accelerate the global transition to net zero beyond COP26 with new leadership, announcing that UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions and Race to Zero Ambassador Michael Bloomberg will join UN Special Envoy Mark Carney as co-chair of GFANZ. Mary Schapiro, Head of the Secretariat for the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and former Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, will be the vice-chair. They join UN High Level Champion Nigel Topping in the GFANZ leadership team. A new permanent secretariat will have a presence in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. GFANZ also unveils it will periodically report on its work to the G20’s Financial Stability Board.
Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and COP26 Private Finance Advisor to PM Johnson said:
“The architecture of the global financial system has been transformed to deliver net zero. We now have the essential plumbing in place to move climate change from the fringes to the forefront of finance so that every financial decision takes climate change into account. Only this mainstream focus can finance the estimated $100 trillion of investment needed over the next three decades for a clean energy future.” “The rapid, and large-scale, increase in capital commitment to net zero, through GFANZ, makes the transition to a 1.5°C world possible. To seize this opportunity, companies must deliver robust transition plans and governments set predictable and credible policies. This will give finance the confidence to invest, pulling forward climate actions and smoothing the transition to net zero, driving growth and jobs upwards, and forcing emissions downwards. Let’s work together to seize this opportunity.” Nigel Topping, UN High Level Climate Action Champion for COP26 said: “To keep 1.5°C within reach, we need the owners, managers, lenders, and underwriters of capital to realign their business models with the climate science. The core of the financial system is now publicly committed to that task. And it will have a ripple effect across the global economy. Now we need governments to help get the job done, by setting the ambitious policies that can unlock, accelerate and help direct the investment to where it’s needed most.” Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer said: “I’m proud that under the UK’s leadership, the number of financial firms committed to Net Zero plans has tripled, with the assets now covered totalling $130 trillion. Harnessing the trillions of dollars controlled by these companies in the fight against climate change is crucial. So I’ve announced new requirements for firms to publish their net zero transition plans. Together we can provide the cash the world needs to stop catastrophic climate change.” Michael R. Bloomberg, Co-Chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero said: “Winning the battle against climate change will require vast amounts of new investment and the majority will have to come from the private sector. Leaders in finance have strong incentives to act, and under Mark Carney and Nigel Topping’s leadership, GFANZ has grown to include some of the largest financial institutions in the world. We look forward to building on this progress in the next phase of the alliance’s work, by creating the tools and industry wide coordination we need to turn commitments into action and speed up the transition to a net-zero global economy.” Klaas Knot, Vice Chair of the Financial Stability Board, said: “An orderly transition of the financial sector to meeting net zero commitments supports financial stability. So, we look forward to regular updates to the FSB on the progress of GFANZ, as part of the FSB’s broader outreach in taking forward its roadmap to address financial risks from climate change.”
1. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) is a global coalition of leading financial institutions in the UN’s Race to Zero that is committed to accelerating and mainstreaming the decarbonisation of the world economy and reaching net zero emissions by 2050. It provides a practitioner-led forum for financial firms to collaborate on substantive, crosscutting issues that will accelerate the alignment of financing activities with net zero and support efforts by all companies, organisations, and countries to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. To ensure credibility and consistency, access to GFANZ is grounded in the UN’s Race to Zero campaign, and entry requirements are tailored to the activities of the diverse firms represented. Further details can be found on https://www.gfanzero.com. Note that each entity in GFANZ has made its own net zero commitment with potential overlap across initiatives, institutions and assets across GFANZ and its sub-sector alliances. 2 Analysis undertaken by Vivid Economics. More detail found here: https://www.gfanzero.com/netzerofinancing 3 The full report The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero: Our progress and plan towards a net-zero global economy can be found here: https://assets.bbhub.io/company/sites/63/2021/11/GFANZ-Progress-Report.pdf 4 The Call to Action can be found here: https://assets.bbhub.io/company/sites/63/2021/10/GFANZ-call-to-action.pdf. 5All members of the UN-convened Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance or the UN-convened Net Zero Asset Manager Alliance. Source: https://www.unepfi.org/news/industries/investment/net-zero-asset-owner-alliance-members-to-cut-portfolio emissions-25-30-by-2025/ and https://www.netzeroassetmanagers.org/net-zero-asset-managers-initiative-signatories disclose-interim-targets-with-over-a-third-of-assets-managed-in-line-with-net-zero 6 Full details can be found in the Notes to Editors. 7 More details can be found here: https://www.gfanzero.com/ 8 For list of the initial initiatives, see Notes to Editors.
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COP26 Climate Politics: Contraction And Convergence
To grasp what is going down at the COP26 ‘last chance saloon’ in Glasgow besides Scotch whiskey, it is worth revisiting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s most ambitious creation, the Green Climate Fund. In climate politics, the devil resides in the detail and the history.
The Green Climate Fund is to become the main instrument for multilateral climate finance in the future. It will channel a significant share of international climate finance needed to keep global temperature increases to below 2° Celsius. GCF statement, Bonn, September 9, 2014
On November 14, 2014, the White House announced a ‘unique development in the U.S.-China relationship’. The ‘carbon pollution’ targets trumpeted that day would be torn up and replaced by the rhetoric of NetZero in less than a decade. Another case of climate déjà vu all over again.
The G20 Brisbane Summit kicked off the next day. Paragraph 19 of the Summit Communiqué reads:
We support strong and effective action to address climate change. Consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its agreed outcomes, our actions will support sustainable development, economic growth, and certainty for business and investment. We will work together to adopt successfully a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the UNFCCC that is applicable to all parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015……We reaffirm our support for mobilising finance for adaptation and mitigation, such as the Green Climate Fund.
Despite much media excitement, there was little new. UNFCCC’s search for ‘another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force’ for ‘mobilising’ developed world finance had been going on – with increasing urgency – since the 2009 Copenhagen COP15 debacle.
How did we get to this point?The UN climate-control and ‘climate-protection’ racket began in earnest in Mexico four years earlier at the Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort, Cancun. More than 15,000 delegates danced to the COP16 theme song: ‘Let’s put the CAN in Cancun!’ This event in early December, 2010, still sticks in the mind, if not the gullet, for some people.
It was here that UNFCCC’s new Costa Rican executive secretary, Christian Figueres, first warned that ‘the environmental stakes are high, because we are quickly running out of time to safeguard our future.’
The stakes were high too. Ms Figueres wanted the ‘multilateral UN climate change process’ to remain ‘the trusted channel for rising to the challenge’. To protect its ‘effectiveness and credibility’, GCF was conjured up as the mechanism for transferring eagerly anticipated billions of dollars from the developed to the developing world.
The ‘world’s poorest and most vulnerable’ were already facing nasty – invariably assumed to be human-induced – climate impacts. They urgently needed assistance – payment of ‘climate debt’ – to tackle ‘a problem that they did not cause’. Translation: Every extreme, random, unusual or destructive weather – or climate – event in the developing world was, is and would be – by dodgy definition – conveniently attributed to carbon dioxide emissions by the developed world.
Ms Figueres urged attendees to embrace the wisdom of Ixchel – a Mayan goddess with a writhing serpent headdress and crossed bones embroidered on her skirt. It worked. Governments – with the exception of the US under President Trump – continue to promote the novel notion that a huge bureaucracy – should, could and can – control the planet’s elusive thermostat; while demanding billions of dollars for ‘climate reparations’ and future ‘climate protection’ money from the developed world by demonizing – and monetizing via ‘carbon credits’ and grants on a grand scale – an invisible atmospheric trace gas crucial to global plant photosynthesis and all organic life, including homo net zero.
Four years later, Ms Figueres described the challenge of driving the greatest wealth transfer in history as:
probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model , for the first time in human history. We are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. February 3, 2015)
For some, it was a shrewd eco-Marxist tactic designed to solve other challenges, such as population growth and poverty. Saving the planet was an easy sell in a world awash with slogans and young eco-worriers.
On March 15, 2011, a decade ago, UNFCCC released The COP16 Cancun Agreement” (FCCC/CP/2010/7/Add.1, Decision 1/CP.16). Under Clause 103, GCF would be governed by a 24-member Board comprising equal numbers from developing and developed countries; representatives of relevant UN regional groups, small island developing States and least-developed countries.
Clause 98 spelt out the key commitment:
developed country Parties [shall] commit, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, to a goal of mobilizing jointly USD100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.
Yet many developed countries remain reluctant to share with their electorates precisely why, how – and for how long – they intend to fund multi-billion dollar ‘climate-resilient development pathways’ in the developing world – and help it ‘adapt’ to all the ‘adverse impacts of climate change’.
How the West came to agree to this goal — to pay the developing world annual ‘climate reparations’ of a ‘meaningful’ USD100 billion from 2020 remains a mystery. Was it the Tequila Effect or the Ixchelian spell of the Moon Palace Golf and Spa Resort? Whatever it was, President Obama woke to the occasion.
There’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other. And that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate. — President Obama, September, 2014
What, then, of the President’s USD3 billion pledge at the University of Queensland that week, which had local climate-crusaders urging Australia ‘to lead on the front foot’? An article in the Times of India described it (correctly) as ‘just peanuts’. Likewise the developed world’s total early pledges of about USD7.5 billion – USA ($3 billion), Japan ($1.5 billion), Germany ($1 billion), France ($1 billion), Sweden ($500 million), Netherlands ($125 million) South Korea ($100 million) and Mexico ($10 million).
Yet the UN’s grand decarbonisation mission powers ahead at the ‘make or break’ COP26, driven by the hope this COP will deliver finally a very big bag of money: ‘climate finance’.
It is clear from statistics that we need to re-channel trillions from the existing assets entrenching today’s unsustainable economy into greener growth. However it is less clear where the necessary finance to deliver the change will come from and how to mobilize it to enable this transition. — United Nations Environment Program
In early September 2014, the GCF held its second Initial Resource Mobilization (IRM) meeting in Bonn, just weeks after Germany pledged up to USD1 billion. At the informal consultation, Ms Figueres told representatives:
the Green Climate Fund is up, but it is not yet running. In order for that to happen, governments need to move from words to deeds. Between now and the next Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Lima, Peru, the capitalization of the Fund must begin. Initial funding of US$ 10 billion would be a good start and a good signal of intent as the world looks forward to a new climate agreement in 2015 that is both universal and meaningful.
Once GCF is ‘appropriately capitalized’, it will make grants and loans ‘for projects and programmes that enable developing countries to boost sustainable development, whilst curbing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change’.
What formula was used to determine the GCF’s annual dollar pledges and targets? There are clues in how the UN’s approach or ‘architecture’ has evolved over the past two decades – and, crucially, in the contraction-and-convergence ideology that informed its early development. That ideology is now imbedded with another core concept in the agency’s quest for global peace and happiness: ‘sustainability’.
The COP16 Cancun Agreement preamble reaffirmed that:
climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and that all Parties share a vision for long-term cooperative action in order to achieve the objective of the Convention under its Article 2, including through the achievement of a global goal, on the basis of equity and in accordance with common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities; this vision is to guide the policies and actions of all Parties, while taking into full consideration the different circumstances of Parties in accordance with the principles and provisions of the Convention.
All signatories – including Australia – continue to commit to that ‘global goal’ based on ‘equity’. They accept the notion of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’. For those who came in late, the first principle of the 1992 UNFCCC Agreement (Article 3) states:
The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.
When Presidents Obama and Xi made their joint announcement in late 2014, it was not about a formal agreement. They merely referred to future targets that have turned out not to be achievable. Nevertheless, they threw a much-needed bone to a UN climate bureaucracy anxious about another crisis of credibility – and a grenade into the procrastinator-camp.
The world’s two largest emitters – China then with 26 per cent and the US 17 per cent – did something else. They publicly endorsed the contraction – of US and developed world’s emissions – and their convergence – with China’s and the developing world’s emissions. They provided specific targets for the first time, even if they were provisional and lacked ‘legal force’.
This was indeed consistent with the Cancun Agreement, where signatories reaffirmed their intention to:
cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries, and bearing in mind that social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries and that a low-carbon development strategy is indispensable to sustainable development; in this context, further agrees to work towards identifying a time frame for global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions based on the best available scientific knowledge and equitable access to sustainable development.
The key date in the 2014 Obama/Xi announcement was 2030. This is the year when China’s national greenhouse gas emissions – and population – were projected to peak and reach ‘parity’ with the US. Last week it became 2060 for China and Russia, and 2070 in the case of India.
If one accepts the UN’s climate alarmism – ignoring for the sake of argument its many flaws – how are carbon dioxide emissions to be shared between countries – equitably and sustainably – in a world where the human population continues to grow and is expected to exceed nine billion people by 2050?
Source: Pacific Ecologist, Summer 2006/07
For contraction-and-convergence fans, the best way would be by convergence on an agreed per person amount of emissions by an agreed date, according to an agreed global contraction budget and schedule (see graph). Developed world wealth transfers, they argue, are required to settle past ‘climate debt’ and to fund urgent ‘adaptation’ projects forced on vulnerable societies by the West’s profligacy.
If last century’s Utopia was populated by Soviet Man, he has been superseded this century by Green Person and Net Zero, yet with eerily similar yearnings – this time for a ‘sustainable’ world free of ‘inequity’.
Paradoxically, the contraction-and-convergence concept’s surprise creator, Aubrey Meyer, is not a UN climate bureaucrat. He is a musician (viola) by training and former member of the UK Green Party. Now a climate campaigner and composer, he co-founded the Global Commons Institute in 1990.
Both the UN Charter and the US Declaration of Independence declare everyone is born equal. This proposal takes equity as the starting point for the whole world to resolve the twin problems of global warming and global inequity. Contraction and Convergence, along with the practice of Allocation and Trade, can be used to provide a structure for human societies to reach sustainability with the earth and its ecosystems. Without a plan of this sort, there will be an increasingly visionless future and many people will perish. — Aubrey Meyer, Pacific Ecologist, Summer 2006/07
According to Mr Meyer’s site, his first public “Contraction & Convergence” statement was published in The Guardian on June 18, 1991, with 250 signatories, including 50 UK Parliamentarians. The following year, he presented what appears to have been an influential paper on it — ‘The Unequal Use of the Global Commons’ — to Policy Working Group Three of the IPCC Second Assessment Report.
Meyer later said the world must collaborate with musical discipline to avert runaway climate change: that is, play his “contraction-and-convergence carbon reduction score in time, in tune and together”.
Was someone in the UN at that time tempted to put the dollar-cart before the dangerous climate-horse? Surely not. Yet Mr Meyer’s concept appeared years before UNFCCC’s emphatic reliance on attribution pseudoscience, the surge in activist “blah-blah-blah” waffle and the pandemic of climate anxiety that has led us to where we are today.
But that’s another story, perhaps one titled with a proverb: ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
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Beware Industry-Backed 'Nature-Based Solutions' Scam, Warns Global Climate Coalition
"What corporations and big conservation groups call 'nature-based solutions' is a dangerous distraction."
As a global climate summit continued in Glasgow, Scotland on Tuesday, an international coalition of advocacy groups warned world leaders that corporate polluters are pushing for "nature-based solutions" to capture planet-heating emissions so they can "keep burning fossil fuels, mine more of the planet, and increase industrial meat and dairy production." "The purported solutions will result in 'nature-based dispossessions.'"
The coalition announced that a sign-on statement on the issue—which is open for signature through the end of 2021—has so far been endorsed by 257 groups and 78 individuals from 61 countries.
"What corporations and big conservation groups call 'nature-based solutions' is a dangerous distraction," the statement says, blasting companies from Microsoft and Nestlé to Shell, Total, and Unilever for "peddling a dangerous scam" that "is dressed up with unproven and flawed data."
As the coalition explains: When corporations and big conservation groups talk about "nature," they mean enclosed space devoid of people. They mean protected areas guarded by armed rangers, tree plantations, and large monoculture farms. Their "nature" is incompatible with nature understood as territory, as a life space inseparable from the cultures, food systems, and livelihoods of the communities who care for it and who see themselves as intrinsic parts of it. What's more, behind a marketing front of genuine agroecology and natural regeneration initiatives, backers of "nature-based solutions" are preparing to advance yet more harmful practices such as monoculture tree plantations and industrial agriculture. Rather than helping the world tackle the climate emergency, the coalition continues, "the purported solutions will result in 'nature-based dispossessions'" that negatively impact Indigenous peoples, peasants, and other forest-dependent communities. Businesses and some nonprofits are advocating for such "scams" at the Scotland summit—COP26—and beyond to "buy another decade or two of unrestrained corporate profiteering from fossil carbon extraction and industrial agriculture while increasing outside control over community territories," the statement warns, urging governments to instead listen to the "growing movement of frontline communities, organizations, and activists for climate justice."
Echoing a Monday letter supported by over 700 groups worldwide demanding "real climate solutions, not net-zero promises," the coalition's statement asserts that "only a rapid, time-bound plan to leaving the remaining coal, oil, and gas reserves in the ground and industrial agriculture overhauled will avert catastrophic climate chaos." On Tuesday, Focus on the Global South, one of a dozen organizations that launched the coalition, distinguished between industry-backed "nature-based solutions" and locally informed efforts to care for lands and waters.
"Forests, soils, ecosystems, and biodiversity must be restored and protected for sure," the group said. "But to meaningfully address the havoc wreaked by industrial agriculture, globalized industrial food systems, and global trade, we need systemic transformation such as agroecology, local sustainable food systems, short supply chains, and territorial markets." Focus on the Global South also reiterated that "the climate damage caused when corporations keep releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere cannot be offset through planting trees, protecting forests, restoring soils, or tweaking industrial farming practices."
In the lead-up to COP26, signatories to the statement and other critics of greenwashing have tried to warn global leaders against such "dangerous" distractions. Last month, Friends of the Earth International (FOEI)—the world's largest grassroots environmental federation and another coalition initiator—put out a position paper on nature-based solutions. Such false solutions are "a bad idea dressed up in acceptable terminology and beautiful imagery—a sheep in wolf's clothing," said Sara Shaw, co-author of FOEI's paper. "The term sounds good but is so broad and vague that it can refer to anything—from real solutions such as Indigenous-based ecosystem restoration to damaging activities like monoculture tree plantations."
"Much of what is being done in the name of nature-based solutions is little more than a repackaging of previously discredited market-based approaches," she said, pointing to the example of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). "Companies must cut carbon emission at source, not go in for greenwashing and displacement activities."
Fiore Longo, a research and advocacy officer at coalition member Survival International, made similar arguments in a recent opinion piece for Common Dreams, emphasizing the need for climate solutions rooted in justice. Emissions offsetting schemes such as nature-based solutions, Longo wrote, "should be abandoned, and instead governments should put in place real regulations over companies and finance to tackle the real causes of environmental destruction: exploitation of natural resources for profit and growing overconsumption, driven by the Global North." "We also need to decolonize our approaches and stop marginalizing and silencing Indigenous peoples and other local communities, who have been protecting our planet for generations," she argued. "Finally, we need a radical change of our economic structure and of our way of living."
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And Now For The 100 Trillion Dollar Bankster Climate Swindle
Quick: what's the first thing you remember about the climate conference in Paris last December?
The weather astrologers' absurd resolution to control the amount of temperature rise the world will experience over the next century?
Politicians grandstanding on the freshly-dead victims of their latest false flag to proclaim that their global warming nonsense was a "powerful rebuke" to their proxy terror army in Syria?
The predictable (but no less retch-inducing) hypocrisy of the jetset glitterati descending on Paris in their private jets and limousine fleets to dine on banquet lunches from Micheline-starred chefs before lecturing humanity on how we'll all have to tighten our belts for the new climate austerity?
Of course that's what you remember. Because that's what you're expected to remember. As long as you never peek under the hood, never lift the lid to check what's inside the COP21 documents, they're perfectly happy for the usual drivel about saving the planet to be printed in the mainstream press. They're perfectly happy for the progressive press to print the usual nonsense lamenting the fact that there isn't a strong enough global government to save us from the weather demons. They're even happy for the dissenters to debunk the flawed science and point out the hypocrisies and lambaste the silly political statements because all of these things miss the heart of the issue.
The heart of the issue (for those who need it elaborated) is this: the future of $90 trillion of energy infrastructure investments and the $1 trillion green bond market and the multi-trillion dollar carbon trading market and the $391 billion (and growing) climate finance industry hangs in the balance.
Of course it does. What else explains the convergence of interest in the organizations, structures and mechanisms for global governance that the magical global thermostat narrative affords?
It's why Enron and Goldman Sachs pioneered the emissions trading swindles (that--surprise, surprise!--are a complete and total fraud from top to bottom).
It's why General Electric, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Siemens, AIG and a host of other Fortune 500/CFR companies joined BP, ConocoPhillips, GM and a host of other oiligarch companies as founding members of the US Climate Action Partnership whose "Blueprint for Legislative Action" became the backbone of the Wall Street-backed Waxman-Markey bill of 2009.
It's why the Rockefellers and Rothschilds are at the forefront of the climate hysteria.
It's why over 400 global institutional investors worth over $25 trillion have decided to cash in on the bonanza with their "Investment Platform for Climate Actions."
Heck, it's why EDF, Engie, Air France, Renault, BNP Paribas and a host of other oiligarch companies footed 20% of the bill for the Paris conference itself (and why the French government bent over backwards to point out their "green" credentials).
Take just one structural element of the climate swindle: the Green Climate Fund. Never heard of it? Hardly surprising. It's just the facility through which the UN is expected to be clearing $100 billion in climate funding per year by the end of the decade. That's right: $100 billion per year. Every year.
The Fund was established at the 2010 edition of the UN Climate Conference (COP16) in Mexico in order "to support concrete mitigation actions by developing countries that are implemented in a transparent way," which is UN Newspeak for "create a bottomless trough of pork for corrupt kleptocrats, bureaucrats, kakistocrats and tyrants to siphon off before funneling some loose change into some makework projects." And it brags that it represents "a new and equitable form of global governance to respond to the global challenge of climate change" which you hardly need the globalist decoder to figure out. The Fund is headquartered in the Songdo Business District of Incheon, South Korea, because the Korean Secretary-General of the UN and the Korean President of the World Bank probably just threw darts at a map (since, as we all know, blatant political nepotism never happens at those institutions).
Even the Fund's biggest supporters are criticizing the "transparent way" it is handling its first disbursement. The Fund claims it consulted indigenous communities before approving $6.2 million for a Peruvian wetlands resilience programme, but there is no verification that this ever took place. Worse, details of the projects it has decided to fund so far have not been publicly released, only proposal documents (and in two cases, only a summary).
But for those who still believe this money is being handled by angels with nothing but the best interests of humanity in mind, note this passage from the Nature article on the Fund's shadiness:
"For some, another contentious issue is that the GCF is flowing its money mainly through international organizations, such as multilateral or private banks such as the World Bank and Deutsche Bank — rather than sending it directly to institutions in developing countries where the projects are taking place."
For some? You mean, for people with their head screwed on straight?
Oh, and the kicker? The Fund's Executive Director just happens to be an ex-Citibank investment banker. Who woulda thunk it?
Yes, the global climate swindle is well under way, brought to you by the same trustworthy folks in the banking industry and in the Fortune 500 / CFR / globalist jetset who have been steering us into the happy economic, political and environmental conditions that we enjoy today...
...oh, wait...
If there's any bright spot in all of this it's that so far the Fund has only managed to raise just over $10 billion in pledges from the developed countries. And even that is an inflated number which includes the $3 billion which Obama made a big show of pledging in 2014 but so far hasn't actually delivered. It's a long way to go to get to that $100 billion/year mark they're hoping to reach by 2020.
Don't feel too sorry for the globalists, though. Their game is a war of attrition, and as long as people continue to buy into the narrative that all of this money is going to help the poor and downtrodden (by way of the UN and the World Bank and their corporate crony Wall Street financial institutions) then it's only a matter of time before this thin edge of climate cronyism turns into the full wedge of global kleptocracy.
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Who Wants To Be A Carbon Trillionaire?
Eat your heart out, Al Gore. Being a carbon billionaire is so passé now that we're in the age of the $100 trillion climate swindle. So the real question is who (or at least which corporate front) will be the first carbon trillionaire? Will it be a carbon eugenics promoting Rockefeller or a global government promoting Rothschild, or a carbon divesting Saudi government, or one of the shady hedge funds that are spearheading weather derivatives and other Enron-developed financial instruments to try to cash in on the carbon fraud?
Whatever the answer, one thing is for certain: you won't see this question asked (let alone answered) in the establishment gatekeeping press. Instead you will see endless iterations of the accusation that anyone who disbelieves in the woo woo pseudoscience of climate catastrophism is funded by the very Big Oil oiligarchs who stand to benefit from the debunked climate scare.
Both mainstream press and pseudo-alternatives religiously trot out hit pieces from attack sites like Desmogblog to smear scientists and avoid actual scientific debate (which, for the record, the alarmists always lose). Conveniently left out of this chapter-and-verse reliance on Desmogblog is the fact that it is a PR front itself whose primary benefactor is a convicted money launderer. More to the point, they can't even research or accurately report on the most basic facts. I should know; when I started my ClimateGate.tv website with a free WordPress template and about $5/month of GoDaddy hosting they produced a laughable article claiming that the website was a tv station that was being funded by Big Oil.
No, there's not time at all in the mainstream press to raise even the slightest question about the hundreds of billions that are already being pumped into the carbon scam from government and institutional investors around the world or the tens of trillions that are expected to be spent in the coming decades. Instead, all of the media coverage is focused on the other side of the issue: who funds those who critique this (demonstrably incorrect) "consesnsus" on global warming?
A perfect case in point is the "exposé" that was published in the LA Times and InsideClimate News last year alleging that Exxon had the entire global warming puzzle solved as far back as the 1970s...and then actively worked to cover up that information. Never mind that they didn't actually withhold any of their research or findings from the public, and never mind their conclusion (namely, that the massive uncertainty surrounding climate variables meant that they had no clear picture of what is actually happening in the climate) was neither well-informed nor cause for panic; the narrative was already set.
A massive "#ExxonKnew" campaign was organized around the reports and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's claim that he would organize a posse of state AGs to investigate and prosecute Exxon for...something. Unsurprisingly, that campaign has disintegrated, not least because "investigators simply don’t know what a climate model is."
But here's the kicker: The original report was published by the LA Times and InsideClimate News, but it wasn't reported by them. It was reported by fellows at the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, which just happens to receive its funding from...(drum roll please)..."the Energy Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, Lorana Sullivan Foundation and the Tellus Mater Foundation."
Oh, and InsideClimate News (ICN)? The director of the Rockefeller Family Fund admitted earlier this year that the Rockefellers are pumping millions of dollars into organizations like ICN to promote their climate agenda. Of course, David Sassoon, ICN's publisher, was a former Rockefeller Brothers Fund employee, and Michael Northrup, an ICN Board Member, directs the Sustainable Development grantmaking program at RBF. As the New York Times admitted as far back as 2013, ICN is "an outgrowth of Mr. Sassoon’s consulting work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that emphasizes climate policy."
I could go on and on and on and on and on about the real sources of climate hysteria funding, and who really stands to benefit from claiming that the world is ending...unless you hand over your money and your rights to the UN, of course.
Of course, every time these topics are raised someone will say (quite correctly) that just because the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and Soros and other globalist scions are promoting the global warming agenda with such ferocity doesn't mean that the science behind the global warming scare is itself wrong. (Of course, this usually comes from the same people who claim that there is Big Oil (you mean, Rockefeller?) money behind every climate denier realist, so take their concern for logical fallacies with a grain of salt.)
OK, fair enough. Let's discuss the science. Let's discuss the models that are based on equilibrium sensitivity values that are derived from demonstrably flawed math, and how the IPCC has actively worked to bury that story. Let's discuss the lack of global warming fingerprint in the satellite record. Let's discuss the statistical trickery upon which this "consensus science" is based. Let's talk about how conservation success is being used to dishonestly push global warming narratives. Let's talk about the fundamental gaps in knowledge of basic climatic systems, like the grudging admission that the Antarctic is actually gaining ice, not losing it as previously claimed. Let's discsuss the 18 year 8 month long pause in global "warming" (which, after a brief El Nino break, could be back by December). Let's talk about "treemometers" and the unbelievable cherry picking of data that led to the long-debunked hockey stick. Let's talk about the fudging of the temperature record to make the past cooler and the present warmer. Let's talk about scientists actively colluding to keep non-alarmist science out of the literature. Let's talk about any of the hundreds of scientific issues surrounding this highly problematic and highly uncertain field of study that has done nothing but produce dramatically incorrect predictions about the climate so far.
...Or maybe you'd like to go back to discussing how all skeptical science is secretly funded by Big Oil.
So who are the real deniers? And where are their paychecks coming from? And why on earth should the public put blind faith in the pronouncement of Rockefeller/Rothschild/Soros funded publications on these issues, especially when there are literally trillions of dollars hinging on the science skewing towards alarmism?
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The Scamdemic Was So Last Year . . . Here's What's Coming Next
It’s invisible but deadly. It infects the air we breathe. We are all part of the problem.
SARS-COV-2? Oh, please. That’s so 2020. I’m talking about the next invisible bogeyman, the one that will see the transformations started by the scamdemic through to their [completely il]logical conclusion: the complete control of the movements, interactions and economic activity of every individual on the planet.
Yes, in case you missed the memo, the steps are already being taken to sweep the fear porn excesses of the scamdemic era under the rug, with the mockingbird MSM dinosaurs dutifully reporting that “Covid Counting Enters New Era” and that states are “scaling back” their COVID-19 reporting.
Of course this is not the end of the biosecurity paradigm. The “new scariants” of the invisible bogeyman will be around for a while yet and, as Mr. Scamdemic himself, Bill Gates, announced before he was so unceremoniously thrown under the bus by his globalist pals, Pandemic II is just around the corner. No, the biosecurity paradigm will be with us for a good while yet, I’m afraid.
But having said that, there is another hobgoblin that will soon eclipse the deadly COVID monster in the imagination of the populace. One that’s been around for decades, waiting for its chance to terrify the public into a Great Reset as we plunge into the New World Order. And that monster is . . .
. . . carbon dioxide.
BOO! Are you scared yet?
Yes, the good old anthropogenic climate change fairy tale is set to make a comeback with a vengeance in the 2020s. As I warned last September, The Pandemic is a Test Run for the systems of control that will scare the public into complying with all sorts of draconian limitations on their activities in the name of saving the earth from climate change.
The connection was made explicit in one influential article from last year: “Avoiding A Climate Lockdown” by Mariana Mazzucato. In the article, Mazzucato argues that the pandemic was actually a consequence of “environmental degradation”—presumably because the bat soup theory of SARS-COV-2’s origins were still fashionable at the time—and that the same types of controls that were instituted to deal with the one invisible nemesis will be good for dealing with the other. Specifically:
Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.
If only those were the ravings of some deluded Greta wannabe in an obscure environmental publication with no relation to power. Unfortunately, these ravings were published by Project Syndicate, which just happens to be funded by (prepare yourself) Goerge Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Google News Initiative among others.
If further proof were needed that those who have already demonstrated their ability to help bring the entire global economy to a standstill at the drop of a hat are planning on flexing this muscle to keep us safe from carbon dioxide in the near future, we could note:
the World Economic Forum’s intensive focus on “the race to net-zero emissions” during the online Davos Agenda earlier this year and its subsequent Climate Dialogues series;
Gates’ pre-fall from grace attempt to pivot the conversation to the climate threat with his new book and subsequent publicity campaign to scare people into accepting a new economic order based on carbon restrictions;
the UK Citizen Assembly’s call to “use coronavirus economic stimulus to rebuild economy for net zero carbon“;
and seemingly thousands of similar calls from all the usual gaggle of globalists and their dutiful dupes at think tanks and research institutions and their paid-off presstitutes in the dinosaur media.
So far, the fear porn campaign seems to be having its intended effect. A recent survey suggests that “for the first time European citizens consider climate change as the single most serious problem facing the world – despite the Covid-19 pandemic.” Now, like all polls, this one should be trusted precisely as far as you can throw it, but the fact that this is what the good folks in EUreaucracy want you to believe that everyone believes is telling in and of itself. This is clearly part of the agenda to transition us smoothly from the COVID scare story to the climate scare story.
As usual, though, perhaps the clearest way to gain a handle on where this round of climate scaremongering is heading is to follow the money. And make no mistake, there is no shortage of money to be followed in this story. When you hear “New Green Deal” you should be thinking “green” as in greenbacks.
Old hands at The Corbett Report will already know:
that Enron and Goldman Sachs pioneered the emissions trading swindles (that–surprise, surprise!–are a complete and total fraud from top to bottom);
that General Electric, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Siemens, AIG and a host of other Fortune 500/CFR companies joined BP, ConocoPhillips, GM and a host of other oiligarch companies as founding members of the US Climate Action Partnership whose “Blueprint for Legislative Action” became the backbone of the Wall Street-backed Waxman-Markey bill of 2009;
that former Bank of England governor, current United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance and all-round globalist insider Mark Carney delivered a speech in 2019 declaring that an entirely new (digital, of course) financial system was going to be needed to help transition the world to a net zero carbon economy;
that the Rothschilds and their bankster pals have been quietly laying the financial groundwork for the creation of an entire climate banking system to facilitate their debt-for-nature swaps and other attempts to monopolize the world in the name of “sustainable development“;
and myriad other aspects of the 100 trillion dollar carbon swindle that is taking place in plain sight right now.
But the climate lockdowns are where this has all been trending, and the fundamental alterations to the economy itself are going to be based on the climate change scare story.
Now, let’s add to that story some of the latest financial moves along this path to total technocratic control over the earth, its people and its resources. These moves may have fallen off your radar as they have largely taken place under cover of the scamdemic.
First, there is the growing pressure that is being placed on financial regulators around the world to “address climate as a systemic risk.” These calls have already resulted in:
the UN’s creation of its aforementioned “Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance” position;
European Central Bank chief (and convicted criminal) Christine Lagarde’s promise (threat?) to “paint the ECB green” by setting climate mitigation as one of the banks’ priorities;
Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen’s pledge to assess the risk posed by climate change] and increase reporting requirements for financial disclosures accordingly;
and similar pronouncements from banking regulators around the world.
But don’t let the “we’re looking into it” type pronouncements lull you into a false sense of security. These are not vague threats to take some unspecified action at some far off time. The attempt to bring the global economy under the control of the climate banking mafia is already well underway.
How so? Well, here’s Mark Carney in his own words describing how net-zero climate solutions are “the greatest commercial opportunity of our time”:
Companies, and those who invest in them and lend to them, and who are part of the solution, will be rewarded. Those who are lagging behind and are still part of the problem will be punished.
But how will they be punished? Why, by being shut off from their access to private finance, of course! (And if “private” finance won’t play along with the globalists’ game, they’ll be shut off, too!)
Private finance is judging which companies are part of the solution, but private finance, too, is increasingly being judged. Banks, pension funds and asset managers have to show where they are in the transition to net zero.
It’s the offer you can’t refuse straight from the don of the globalist banking/climate mafia.
Who could say no?
Oh, and here’s the best part. In order to enforce this new global climate fascism, small companies are now going to be saddled with an entirely new, unbelievably burdensome reporting regime that will require them to confess not only their own climate sins, but those of their suppliers and contractors and even the end users of their products:
If I’m running a company committed to net zero, what does that mean? It’s not just disclosing and managing the emissions in producing my product. It’s also the emissions involved in the energy I use, and the emissions all the way through my value chain, in other words, the emissions of my suppliers, many of whom are small businesses, as well as the emissions from people using a product. That company becomes responsible for disclosing all of those, and it has an incentive to manage all of those down. So it has an incentive to work with small businesses or choose those working towards lower emissions.
Once again, these are not idle threats. These things are already happening. I’m not even looking for this story in particular but there has been a steady drumbeat of stories here in Japan showing exactly how this type of pressure is already being applied to attempt to make businesses comply with the diktats of the global climate mafia. Observe these headlines from just the past few weeks:
Japanese insurers struggle to pinpoint climate change cost estimates
MUFJ board beats back climate resolution as activists falter in Japan
BOJ to launch new scheme for fighting climate change
I have little doubt that if you look for such stories in your own place of residence you will find them spilling forth from your newsfeeds as well.
But perhaps the biggest cookie crumb along this trail is “Net zero: a fiduciary approach” from our good friends at Blackrock. You know, Blackrock? The world’s largest asset manager with $9 trillion under its control? The “private” company that the Fed turned to to run its scamdemic bond buying spree (and which it subsequently used to bail out its own corporate ETFs)? The same investment firm that is buying up houses in the US at a blistering pace (because you don’t need to own a house anymore, silly!). Yes, that Blackrock.
Well, it turns out they’re fully on board with the climate change agenda. (Surprise, surprise!)
Yes, their new report informs us “that climate transition creates a historic investment opportunity.” Like Carney’s reflections cited above, the Blackrock report also stresses the importance of “measurement and transparency” for the goal of reaching a net zero carbon economy, promoting a “temperature alignment” metric for the company’s carbon disclosures that would measure “the global temperature change consistent with a portfolio’s holdings.” The standard, they admit, is being developed in conjuction with the shadowy Financial Stability Board‘s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which, oh by the way, is a thing.
Hmmm . . . lemme think here. A scheme in which every bit of energy that goes into the production of an item is accounted for and registered in real time, and in which these energy expenditure becomes the basis for the economic system? Where have I heard that before?
Ohhhhh, that’s right, that’s the literal definition of technocracy from the Technocratic Study Course, which posits that a technocratic system of distribution requires that the continental technocratic government of the future:
“Register on a continuous 24-hour time period basis the total net conversion of energy, which would determine (a) the availability of energy for Continental plant construction and maintenance, (b) the amount of physical wealth available in the form of consumable goods and services for consumption by the total population during the balanced load period;”
and that it:
“Provide a continuous 24-hour inventory of all production and consumption.”
Yes, they want complete and total insight over all human activity. And why do they want this insight? For control, of course. They aren’t even shy about this fact. The Technocratic Study Course outright tells us in its section on “The Human Animal” that:
Since it is human beings and their habits with which we are now obliged to deal, it is well that before proceeding further we inquire somewhat more deeply than heretofore into the nature of this human animal
before concluding that:
Human social habits and institutions tend to remain stable or else to undergo change extremely slowly, except in the case of a rapid change of the external environment, especially when this latter affects the basic biological necessities. When human beings are fed, clothed, and housed in a manner compatible with good health, are not obliged to do an uncomfortable amount of work, and are permitted normal social intercourse with their fellows, social habits and customs tend to become crystallize about this particular mode of procedure. Let any change of environment develop in such a manner that the biological necessities can no longer be met by activities according to the old habits, and these latter will be rapidly abandoned.
None of this will be surprising to those who have at all studied the Problem-Reaction-Solution formula by which would-be social engineers use false flags and other manipulations to shock the public into change along pre-determined paths. Heck, it should even be familiar to those normies who still trust Naomi “Conspiracy Smoothie” Klein to tell them the hard truths about The Shock Doctrine.
But this is where we start to see what this agenda is about. In case you somehow stumbled onto this editorial from the normiesphere, I’ll lay it out for you. This is not about “saving the planet” and it never was. The people who are constructing this total climate lockdown nightmare future society are laughing at you from their carbon tax-exempted private jets.
They are out to control you. To decide where and when you can leave your house and what transportation you can use when you do so. What you can buy and what you can’t buy. How you spend your time, where you live and who you can breed with (when you are allowed to breed). And the best way they can do this is by creating imaginary manbearpigs with which they can scare the public into submission.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The biosecurity paradigm is still here but it’s just a taste of the control grid that is about to be implemented.
COVID? Hospital occupancy rates? Masks? Ivermectin? Pfff. That’s so 2020. The oligarchy has moved on. Are you prepared for what’s coming next?
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Green cuisine: why it's time you watched your 'foodprint'
Menus that list CO2 emissions are a common sight at Cop26 – but things aren’t as straightforward as they appear...
A beef burger or a chocolate bar – which will do more harm to the environment? You probably think you know the answer. One comes from a bloated, methane-belching cow, a leading cause of climate change; the other is a fairly harmless – and delicious – snack. Alas, it’s not quite that simple.
Experts say chocolate is a leading cause of deforestation, due to the need to cut down tropical forests to plant cocoa. The “highest-impact” chocolate might actually be worse for the environment than lower-impact beef, says Anya Doherty, CEO of Foodsteps, an environmental consultancy, and former food researcher at the University of Cambridge. “No one’s going to like me for saying that,” she admits.
The issue of carbon “foodprints” – how much CO2 is emitted in the production, transportation, and preparation of various foods – is front-and-centre at this week’s Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. On Tuesday, it emerged that restaurants inside the conference centre are printing carbon estimates on their menus, alongside each item’s price.
So a Scottish beef burger will pump a staggering 3.9 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere for each kilogram of beef, according to one menu, while a kale and vegetable pasta will emit just 0.3kg.
In order to reach the goals defined in the Paris Agreement, we may soon have to limit our foodprint to no more than 0.5kg of CO2 emissions per meal. However, one dish served at the conference of haggis, neeps and tatties – essentially spiced offal with turnip and potatoes – is marked as having a carbon footprint equivalent to 3.4kg of CO2, around seven times the target foodprint needed to reach the goal of the Paris climate accords.
The markers are causing no end of confusion among delegates. Cop26 was forced to backtrack after wrongly labelling a plant-based croissant as more carbon-heavy than a bacon sandwich (the calculation was based on a normal croissant, they said). Amid the hoo-ha, France’s eco minister Barbara Pompili even suggested it was time for her country to eat fewer croissants. “A croissant is so good but it is fat and it’s not the best carbon footprint,” she explained to the BBC at the summit.
Despite the confusion, “carbon menus” are continuing to attract a great deal of interest, with calls to make them compulsory in restaurants across the UK. But sustainability experts have in fact been looking for years at how we can measure the carbon output of our food, which is responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Some of their results proved surprising.
Breakfast
It’s 7am. You stumble bleary eyed into your kitchen. In this age of climate anxiety, you might assume a bacon and sausage fry-up is off the cards. Fortunately, it’s not quite that simple. It’s certainly true that meat, in general, is responsible for more carbon than plant-based options. Meat and dairy alone are responsible for about a seventh of global greenhouse gas emissions – as much cars, lorries and aeroplanes put together.
But that distinction masks a world of complications, says Doherty. The pork in your sausage and bacon can have a high or low carbon impact, depending mostly on what the pig was fed. Lots of pigs around the world are fed soy, for example, which is responsible for deforestation.
“We don’t have a great transparency at the moment; it’s a really complicated supply chain,” says Doherty.
Your fry-up is also likely to involve beans, which get the thumbs up from climate experts. Along with lentils, they have among the lowest carbon impact of any food type. Lentils and beans are the top recommendation of nutritionist Dr Alona Pulde, advisor at Lifesum and author of the Forks Over Knives veg-based diet plan, who says they “help to replete their soil, reduce the need for fertilisers, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions”. But it’s better to swap your fry-up for porridge or another oat-based food. Oats, seeds and nuts are responsible for a low amount of carbon.