Climate Colonialists Disrupt African Pipeline, Perpetuate Poverty
Vanessa Nakate
By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear Energy | April 28, 2022
Climate activists’ ill-founded opposition to fossil fuels threatens to stop a major pipeline project in East Africa and stymie economic growth in Uganda and Tanzania — home to some of the world’s poorest people.
Uganda is betting big on its fossil fuel reserves. In February, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and France’s TotalEnergies agreed to invest $10 billion to develop two Ugandan oil reserves. But the landlocked country needs the East African Crude Oil Pipeline project (EACOP) to transport its product to a port in Tanzania.
The 895-mile-long pipeline from Uganda’s Lake Alberta region to the seaport of Tanga will be the longest electrically heated crude oil pipeline in the world and will carry 216,000 barrels per day. The project received a green light for construction after the completion of an Environment and Social Impact Assessment.
The Africa Report says that the investment will be huge: “(A)bout $10 billion will be invested in the sector (oil and gas) before first oil is produced in 2025, mainly on the pipeline, refinery, and infrastructure. The government has been commissioning road construction in the region where oil will be produced, in Buliisa and Hoima districts, and an airport is also being constructed in the region.” The project is expected to generate around 10,000 jobs even after the construction phase.
The Government of Uganda expects massive employment of its citizens during construction: “This will be through direct employment of about 14,000 people by the companies, indirect employment of about 45,000 people by the contractors, and induced employment of about 105,000 people as a result of utilization of other services by the oil and gas sector. Of the direct employment, 57 percent are expected to be Ugandans, which is expected to result in an estimated $48.5 million annual payment to Ugandan employees.”
However, the global war against fossil fuel has now reached Ugandan soil and extremists are determined to stop this lifesaving, economically critical project.
Vanessa Nakate of StopEACOP rants against the pipeline in a recent column in the New York Times, saying the project would bring poverty and destruction to the people of Africa. She also references extreme weather in implying the pipeline will worsen the climate.
During a visit to the ultra-rich Vatican, Vanessa says: “It is evident that there is no future in the fossil fuel industry…. we know the impacts on our food. We know the impacts on our water. We know the impacts on our livelihood…… the climate crisis is already affecting so many people not only in Uganda, but the African continent.”
But her reasons for opposing the pipeline are scientifically inaccurate and logically senseless.
She points to a forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that predicts African droughts. But IPCC, by its own admission, has indicated that extreme weather events have no significant correlation with rising global average temperatures. Neither has there been any significant increase in the frequency of extreme cyclones, droughts, rainfall, and fires. Even if droughts and cyclones were to increase, a better socio-economic condition would enable people to adapt more effectively.
Contrary to Vanessa’s hyperbole, the world is experiencing near optimum temperatures for global food production and the advancement of human society, much as it did 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warm Period and 2,000 years ago during the Roman Warm Period. Globally, we now have better access to clean water, better access to nutritious food, people with higher income, and a very rapid increase in life expectancy rates. How are we in a crisis if climate is aiding the improvement of every metric used to measure the quality of people’s lives?
It is shocking how Vanessa ignores the plight of millions of her own people dwelling in persistent poverty and in need of affordable, dependable energy sources like coal, oil, and gas. It is less shocking if we understand the DNA of climate extremists, which has them deny the reality of energy needs and promote unreliable, primitive, and expensive wind turbines that even economic giants like Germany and the U.S. hesitate to adopt completely.
Climate extremists like Vanessa are fostering the continuation of abject poverty in Africa — a continent with the lowest level of electrification and highest rates of poverty in the world. Vanessa claims that the pipeline is another colonial project subjecting Africans to slavery. But, it is Vanessa and her ilk who are the colonialists and would-be slave masters.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and holds a Master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, England. He resides in Bengaluru, India.
Increased deaths in England for the age-range given the spring booster dose of Covid vaccine
Bartram’s Folly | May 5, 2022
I’ve mentioned previously that the roll out of a dose of vaccine has been associated with an increase in excess deaths (eg, here), and we seem to have seen the same effect in March.
At around the 21st March (week 12) England started to roll out the spring booster doses for those aged over 75 (and other vulnerable individuals). By the 7th April (week 14) the NHS had congratulated itself with the announcement that over 1 million doses had been given.
Here’s the data (from Euromomo) for excess deaths in England for those aged 75-85 since the start of the year:
I’ve highlighted the period where the million booster doses were delivered.
I note that we managed to get through the Omicron wave in the UK with normal levels of excess deaths in those aged 75-85, but as soon as the booster doses were rolled out we rapidly hit the threshold for a ‘substantial increase’.
Of course, it might be a coincidence — we have had rather a lot of coincidences over the last 15 months.
Life Expectancy Continues To Fall In The EU
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | MAY 7, 2022
Life expectancy has taken a rare hit in the European Union during the Covid-19 pandemic.
As Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below (using Eurostat data), despite a blip in 2015, life expectancy in the EU had been growing every year since at least 2003.
In 2020, however, the average years of life somebody born in the 27 countries dropped from 81.3 to 80.4. In 2021, this fell again by another 0.3 years.
You will find more infographics at Statista
As reported by Eurostat,“life expectancy has risen, on average, by more than two years per decade since the 1960s. However, the latest available data suggest that life expectancy (has) stalled or even declined in several EU Member States.”adding:
“The Covid-19 pandemic has had a negative effect with life expectancy at birth declining in almost half the EU Member States in 2021. The largest decreases have been estimated in Slovakia and Bulgaria (-2.2 years compared with 2020), followed by Latvia (-2.1) and Estonia (-2.0). Compared with the pre-pandemic year of 2019, the overall effect on life expectancies is still negative in all EU Member States except Luxembourg (+0.1), Malta and Sweden (same level).”
WHO Estimates of India’s Covid Deaths Are Highly Suspect
By Ramesh Thakur | The Daily Sceptic | May 8, 2022
On May 5th, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a new report estimating global excess deaths at 14.9m for two years of the pandemic 2020-21 as the true COVID-19 mortality toll, nearly triple the official toll of 5.44m. “Excess mortality” is the difference between the number of deaths that would be expected in any time period based on data from earlier years and the number of deaths that have occurred. For countries with robust data surveillance, reporting and recording systems, this poses no real difficulty. Unfortunately, these conditions are not met in many countries. Therefore their excess mortality can only be estimated and the accuracy is a function of the reliability of the methodology and modelling used in the exercise. Given the overwhelming evidence about the flaws and deficiencies of Covid-related modelling over the last two years, and the damage caused by governments trusting modelling projections over real-world data, this should immediately throw up a forest of red flags about the WHO report.
A second reason to be sceptical is the less than stellar role of the WHO in its well-known Covid-related deference to China, the abandonment of its own summary of the state of the art science on managing pandemics from October 2019, its willingness to manipulate definitions of ‘herd immunity’ in relation to vaccines and natural immunity in order to fit with the experimental pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that came to dominate Covid policy around the world, and its self-interest in expanding its budget, authority and role in steering global health policies and management by means of a new international treaty.
A third ground for scepticism is they ascribe the total death count to the direct effects of Covid “due to the disease” and indirect effects “due to the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society”. The first part is questionable because it fails to distinguish between deaths with and from Covid. The second is disingenuous because the indirect toll of the NPIs (lockdowns, masks, induced fear, lost schooling, lost jobs, cancelled screenings and operations, aborted immunisation programs, disruptions to global food production and distribution, etc.) and vaccine-related adverse events will prove to be significantly higher than the indirect effects of the disease per se. Any study that fails to disaggregate deaths caused by the disease and by policy interventions to mitigate it lacks credibility.
Figure 1: India’s COVID-19 Deaths, Jan. 1st 2020-Mar. 27th 2022. Source: World Life Expectancy, May 8th 2022
Like many others including Will Jones on this site, I was especially struck by the new figures for India. The report pushes India up to the very top of the Covid mortality toll with 4.74m deaths, nearly 10 times more than the count of 481,486 (as of December 31st 2021), almost one-third of the world total. Sorry, but that is simply not credible.
India’s geographic diversity, population size and economic conditions make data collection especially challenging. In public lectures in Australia and Canada, to drive home the point about the scale, I usually comment that the entire Australian population is a rounding error in 1.3bn-strong India. It suffers from persistent and widespread mass poverty – India is a country of a few mega-billionaires amidst the world’s biggest pool of poor, illiterate and sick people bar none. It might be nuclear-armed, but state capacity when it comes to administration and public and social services is easily the worst of all major economies. The public sector scores high on petty corruption but low on efficiency. The public health service is risible and high quality healthcare is neither accessible nor affordable for ordinary Indians. The best doctors work in the public sector, in medium to large clinics and hospitals in metropolitan centres and as individual practitioners in most towns and villages. Consequently, health statistics are not all that reliable. But this is a general pathology, not one unique to COVID-19.
From everything I know about India, the WHO estimate does not align with overall death data, historical trends and Covid death compensation claims on the Indian Government from states. Indian experts believe that official statistics capture over 90% of all deaths. But this also means that about 10% of deaths would have been missed in previous years, yet the WHO’s ‘excess deaths’ count uses the official numbers as the baseline against which to estimate the impact of Covid. In a related vein, why would under-reporting be limited to Covid-related deaths and not, say, to suicides with its heavy social stigma and traffic accidents where the operators of overloaded buses and vans would try to drastically reduce actual numbers in order to hide the illegal loads (Figure 2)? The WHO estimates are flawed also in relying on 2019 deaths instead of using a five year average 2015-19 to wrinkle out anomalies in any given year.
Figure 2: India’s Top Dozen Killer Diseases (March 1st 2020-May 7th 2022). Top six cancers in order: oral, lung, breast, cervical, stomach, colon. Source: Chart constructed by author drawing on data from World Life Expectancy, May 8th 2022
Estimates of India’s total annual death rate range from 738 per 100,000 people by the World Bank to 1,030 per 100,000 people by World Life Expectancy. The total annual death toll therefore would be somewhere in the 10-13 million range: a very wide range. The WHO estimate of the death rate for 2021 is within the higher range from World Life Expectancy. Simply put, the WHO estimate of all-cause deaths is within any realistic estimate of the margin of error in India’s unique circumstances of scale and state capacity.
The caveats to official data notwithstanding, the WHO estimate would mean almost one-quarter additional deaths than normal. In fact it’s worse. Looking at the detailed tables, the 4.74m excess deaths is calculated from a combined excess death rate for 2020–21 of 171 per 100,00 people. This is disaggregated into 60 and 280 per 100,000 people for 2020 and 2021, respectively. That would imply a 38% jump in all cause deaths in 2021. Despite all the horror scenes we saw on TV of corpses lying in the streets and washed ashore on riverbanks, that’s just not possible. Perhaps the clue to the error lies in the title of the actual document: “Global excess deaths associated with COVID-19 (modelled estimates)” (emphasis added).
Some Daily Sceptic readers had fun with this aspect of the WHO announcement. My favourite exchange was this:
India’s own estimates of excess deaths for 2020 compared to 2019 is 480,000, of which Covid-related deaths were just under 150,000. So over 300,000 excess deaths were due to non-Covid causes, which in itself is far more believable because of the impact of the lockdown measures on exacerbating most of the conditions underlying India’s leading causes of deaths. By contrast, in 2021 the Covid-related death toll was much higher at 332,492.
Much as I have been critical in the past of official dismissals of international reports on India including weakening democratic practices, in this instance the Government is right to reject the WHO methodology of mathematical modelling based on data on 17 Indian states collected from websites and media reports: “This reflects a statistically unsound and scientifically questionable methodology of data collection for making excess mortality projections in the case of India.” As well as defective data collection methodology, the report is marred also by three critically flawed assumptions: that uncounted excess deaths occurred only in 2020-21 and not before; they occurred only for COVID-19 and not other diseases; and Covid-related deaths were due solely to the disease and not caused by policy interventions to control and eradicate it.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General.
UK pledges more military aid for Ukraine
Samizdat | May 8, 2022
The UK pledged a further £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) in military support and aid to Ukraine on Saturday. London said the move nearly doubles London’s previous spending commitments to Kiev, and is the country’s highest rate of spending on a conflict since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The extra money will come from a reserve used by the government for emergencies. Like other NATO member states, the UK has been increasingly supplying Kiev with weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile systems and armored vehicles.
This week, London said it was sending 13 armored vehicles to Ukrainian police and the National Guard. The UK government has also been delivering tanks to Poland in order to replace those Warsaw has donated to Kiev.
Similarly, the US pledged an additional $150 million in military assistance to Ukraine on Friday. The package includes 25,000 155mm artillery rounds, as well as radars and electronic jamming equipment.
Russia has repeatedly criticized the West for “flooding” Ukraine with weapons, and warned in April that foreign arms become legitimate targets once they reach Ukrainian soil.
Ukraine lied to its encircled troops – commander
Samizdat | May 8, 2022
Ukraine told troops besieged by Russian forces in Mariupol that help was on its way, while making no actual attempts to end the blockade of the city, the commander of the country’s 36th Naval Infantry Brigade has told RT.
Colonel Vladimir Baranyuk and his unit were tasked with guarding the northern outskirts of Mariupol, a strategic port city in the southeast of Ukraine, amid the Russian military operation in the country.
He was even awarded the Hero of Ukraine honor for his “courage and effective actions in repelling enemy attacks,” with Kiev asserting that the colonel and the other defenders of Mariupol would never surrender.
But as the Russian forces kept gaining ground, Baranyuk ended up surrendering peacefully after being captured during a failed attempt to flee the city.
He was apprehended hiding in the fields together with a number of his men a few kilometers north of Mariupol.
The commander of the marines now says the Ukrainian government lied to him and his troops in order to keep them fighting.
“Kiev told us to hold on, [saying] that the units that will lift the blockade are coming, they’ll soon be here,” Baranyuk told RT.
The promise was made despite President Volodymyr Zelensky’s adviser, Alexey Arestovich, openly acknowledging in interviews that Kiev “won’t be able to save” its forces in Mariupol.
“We were promised certain help. Naturally, this help didn’t arrive. And this pushed us to come out,” the colonel said, explaining his decision to flee.
It was “painful” for the troops when they realized that they had been left for dead, but “everybody, including myself, understood it,” Baranyuk added.
Mariupol has seen the heaviest fighting during the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The city, which suffered immense destruction, is now almost entirely controlled by Russian forces, with the Azovstal steel plant remaining the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance.
Kiev’s servicemen and nationalist fighters of the notorious Azov Battalion, who are holed up at the massive site, had been given numerous opportunities to lay down their arms by Russia, but rejected all of them. Moscow has said that those inside the plant want to surrender, but cannot do so due to Kiev’s reluctance to give the relevant order.
THE VANDEN BOSSCHE WARNING
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | May 5, 2022
Acclaimed vaccinologist, Geert Vanden Bossche, sits down for his second groundbreaking interview with Del to explain why the intense pressure mass vaccination is putting on the Covid-19 virus will likely drive it to become catastrophically deadly.
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When Trump’s NIH pulled Peter Daszak’s grant to Wuhan in April 2020, the pushback was unimaginable
77 Nobel laureates begged NIH to give it back. So did 31 different “scientific societies” — see an article in SCIENCE magazine, the journal of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science
By Meryl Nass | March 28, 2023
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