The Politics of Environmental Fundamentalism

re posted from                            UK COLUMN

The Politics of Environmental Fundamentalism

As the restrictions and obligations of biosecurity have mostly, but not entirely, been lifted since March 2022—while still being suspended over our necks like the axe of the fasces—their replacement by their equally fundamentalist environmental equivalents has shown the arbitrariness of the crises on which the Global Biosecurity State is being imposed—and their shared end. Last year’s COP27, the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2022, is a demonstration and model of how the forms of global governance that have assumed so much power over our lives on the justification of responding to numerous manufactured ‘crises’ will operate outside of any democratic representation or accountability. Held from 6 to 18 November 2022 in Egypt, COP27 was the twenty-seventh such conference held annually since the first UN climate agreement in 1992.

This led to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015 that committed participating nations to unquestionable orthodoxies. These included what it called the ‘scientific consensus’:

  1. that global warming is occurring, and
  2. that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are driving it.

The effect of this political agreement is that anyone, including climatologists, meteorologists or geologists, who asserts or presents evidence to the contrary is categorised and branded as a ‘climate-change denier’—exactly as those who question the equally authoritarian and unquestionable orthodoxies of the coronavirus ‘crisis’ are branded as ‘Covid deniers’. Among numerous voices excluded from this ‘consensus’ are members of the Global Climate Intelligence Group, whose World Climate Declaration: There is no climate emergency, published in October 2022, bears the signatures of 1,410 scientists and energy industry professionals from 54 countries.

 

Immense sums

Parties to this fundamentalist orthodoxy, and to the economic obligations and policies to which it commits them, include—by order of the size of their economy—the USA, China, Japan, Germany, India, the UK, France, Brazil, Italy, Canada and 182 other countries, which is to say, almost the whole world. To address what it melodramatically calls the ‘existential threat’ of climate change, the UK Government has committed to spending £11.6 billion of British taxpayers’ money on international climate finance, with funding for what it calls ‘climate adaptation’ tripling from £500 million in 2019 to £1.5 billion in 2025. £150 million of that funding will go to ‘protecting’ rainforests, including in the Amazon and the Congo Basin, the sites of some of the world’s largest reserves of the copper and cobalt required for electric batteries; £65 million to the Nature, People and Climate Investment Fund in Egypt, with a focus on hydrogen and wind power; and a further £2 billion to the UK-Kenya Strategic Partnership for ‘clean and green’ investment in geothermal, solar energy and hydroelectric power projects.

All this public financing will go to private companies selected by the international technocracies formed to do so in accord with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), a Miss World list of humanitarian objectives ranging from abolishing world hunger and poverty to peace, justice and gender equality that was adopted by the United Nations in 2015 under the rubric of Agenda 2030. In reality and practice, however, Sustainable Development Goals allocate the flow of global capital, investment and preferential treatment to governments and corporations according to their compliance with the Environmental, Social and corporate Governance (ESG) criteria.

Despite their UN branding, these targets are formulated and imposed by immensely wealthy international corporate asset managers, the most powerful of which, BlackRock, the Vanguard Group and State Street Global Advisor, between them hold 20 per cent of shares and with it something like government authority over the 500 largest companies on the New York Stock Exchange. Far from saving the planet from exploitation by predatory corporations, the Sustainable Development Goals are designed to increase the monopoly of wealthy Western economies and international companies able to meet their criteria over poorer countries, and in doing so create the financial framework for purchasing their UN-assigned quota of emissions in carbon credits.

On the same justification, developing countries will be loaded with debt by financial organisations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in order to fulfil these goals, and those unable to meet repayments through increased taxation and spending cuts to their already impoverished populations will be compelled to hand over their land and natural resources to their creditors.

Stakeholder capitalism

continue reading HERE: Source:

https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/the-politics-of-environmental-fundamentalism

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