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Fantasy Versus Reality In Woke-Land

By Francis Menton | The Manhattan Contrarian | May 6, 2021

JP Morgan Chase — it’s hard to find a more “woke” company than that one. Under celebrity CEO Jamie Dimon, JPM in its corporate pronouncements consistently positions itself at the most exquisitely correct end of the politically correct spectrum.

But reality can be tough. In its email of a couple of days ago, the Global Warming Policy Foundation links to JPM’s 2021 Annual Energy Paper. The Paper comes from JPM’s Asset and Wealth Management Group. The lead author is a guy named Michael Cembalest, who appears to have his ear right down on the ground of the global energy business. The bottom line is that all the talk about “deep de-carbonization” of the world economy any time soon is a ridiculous fantasy. Fossil fuels are not going away for a long time, if ever. Carbon emissions into the atmosphere are increasing? You’d better get used to that.

Once again, this “deep de-carbonization” thing is a case of the really “smart” people deceiving you, or maybe themselves; or more likely, both.

For starters, let’s consider some of the extreme wokeism that issues from the executive suites in JPMville. This is not limited to matters of “climate,” but extends as well to other usual topics, like for example “systemic racism.” On that subject, here is JPM CEO Jamie Dimon, as quoted in Forbes in October 2020:

“Systemic racism is a tragic part of America’s history. We can do more and do better to break down systems that have propagated racism and widespread economic inequality, especially for Black and Latinx people. It’s long past time that society addresses racial inequities in a more tangible, meaningful way.”

Meanwhile, over in the climate arena, JPM’s high-level pronouncements totally buy into the idea that we’re going to save the planet by financing a bunch of wind turbines, or something. Last October, JPM put out a big statement with the pompous title of “How one of the world’s biggest banks plans to tackle climate change.” Excerpt:

Climate change is among the most urgent problems facing humanity; businesses and governments have an imperative to act. Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, which aims to restrict a rise in the world’s average temperature, would enable us to take a giant step towards a safer, greener, more sustainable future. . . . For the world to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, there needs to be an acceleration of emerging technologies that are not yet widely commercially available or economically viable. . . . Our company, JPMorgan Chase, announced this month that we will start aligning our financing portfolio to meet the Paris goals.

Then just a couple of weeks ago, on April 15, JPM followed up by announcing a big new plan to “Advance Climate Action and Sustainable Development” with some $2.5 trillion in investments:

JPMorgan Chase aims to finance and facilitate more than $2.5 trillion over 10 years – beginning this year through the end of 2030 – to advance long-term solutions that address climate change and contribute to sustainable development. . . . This long-term target complements the firm’s Paris-aligned financing strategy and will help accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy by encouraging actions that set a path for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050

Wow, that sounds great! Or is it all just a cynical grab for some of the upcoming gusher of government subsidies, with no detectable effect at all on the climate, or even much effect on the use of fossil fuels? For some insights, let’s look at that 2021 Annual Energy Paper. The document is not short (42 pages), and certainly does not fall in the category of “climate skepticism,” but it does contain some notable doses of hard-headed realism that are normally completely lacking in this field.

From the Executive Summary:

Our main focus this year: why is the transition [away from carbon-based fuels] taking so long? Deep decarbonization plans assume massive changes in electric vehicles, electricity transmission grids, industrial energy use and carbon sequestration, but each faces headwinds often not accounted for by energy futurists. As shown below, many prior forecasts of the renewable transition were too ambitious since they ignored energy density, intermittency and the complex realities of incumbent energy systems. . . .

Maybe those “energy futurist” people are just kidding themselves?

President Biden just announced a new GHG emissions target: a 50% decline by 2030 vs a 2005 baseline. This very ambitious target implies a decarbonization pace in the next 10 years that’s four times faster than in the last 15 years. Even with the amount of money the administration plans to dedicate to the task, it’s an enormous hurdle. . . .

The even more important and larger question: even if the US succeeds, what about everyone else? Over the last 25 years, the developed world shifted much of its carbon-intensive manufacturing of steel, cement, ammonia and plastics to the developing world. . . .

Loudly proclaiming that you have achieved some (small) decreases in carbon emissions while offshoring most of your energy-intensive manufacturing — That’s one good way to fool yourself.

The world gets more energy efficient every year, but levels of emissions keep rising. . . .

It’s those pesky Chinese and Indians and Africans who think they ought to be able to have electricity and cars and air conditioning just like you do.

How is the global energy transition going? Taken together, the aggregate impact of nuclear, hydroelectric and solar/wind generation reduced global reliance on fossil fuels from ~95% of primary energy in 1975 to ~85% in 2020. In other words, energy transitions take a long time and lots of money. . . . [T]he IEA still projects that 70%-75% of global primary energy consumption may be met via fossil fuels in the year 2040. Why don’t rapid wind and solar price declines translate into faster decarbonization? As we will discuss, renewable energy is still mostly used to generate electricity, and electricity as a share of final energy consumption on a global basis is still just 18%.

Yes, all those thousands of wind turbines and solar panels blanketing the landscape are at best hoping to replace a minority of a sector that itself only represents 18% of energy use to begin with. Why are we spending (wasting) these many trillions of dollars again?

Getting beyond the Executive Summary and into the details of the Paper, there are many great tidbits. A section on “Transmission Realities” shows how bringing “renewable” power to where it’s needed runs into the same roadblocks from environmentalists as all other energy development:

While MIT and Princeton assume rapid growth in transmission infrastructure, actual development can be a hornet’s nest of siting challenges and legal costs even when projects are eventually built after years of planning. Let’s start with HydroQuebec’s plan to sell hydropower to the US. . . . Take Northern Pass, a 1.1 GW transmission project to bring hydropower from Quebec to the Northeast through New Hampshire (80% via existing right-of-ways or underground lines). . . . [A] New Hampshire siting committee blocked Northern Pass. . . . Now Massachusetts is trying to import Canadian hydropower through Maine (“New England Clean Energy Connect”) but has already run into an injunction due to opposition from environmental groups. . . .

And so on and on and on.

Then there’s the Holy Grail of carbon capture and storage, sometimes known as CCS. Hey, why not just take all of this dangerous CO2 and bury it somewhere in the ground? The Paper looks at some of the practical realities:

After 20 years of planning and conjecture, by the end of 2020 carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities stored just 0.1% of global CO2 emissions. . . . The highest ratio in the history of science: the number of academic papers written on CCS divided by real-life implementation of it. . . . The Princeton CCS buildout, just to sequester an amount equal to 15% of current US GHG emissions, would require infrastructure whose throughput volume would be higher than the volume of oil flowing through US distribution and refining pipelines, a system which has taken over 100 years to build. . . . Sequestering 25% of global CO2 through direct air capture would require 25%-40% of the world’s electricity generation plus 11%-17% of its primary energy.

And then there’s my favorite line in the whole Paper, from page 28:

We recommend that investors stick with oil & gas for now.

Read the full article here.

May 8, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Materials Acquisition for Global Industrial Change (MAGIC)

Biden relies on adherence to climate crisis creed and belief in MAGIC to transform USA, world

By Paul Driessen | Watts Up With That? | May 4, 2021

Via executive orders, regulatory edicts and partisan Green New Deal legislation, President Biden intends to slash US carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 50% below their 2005 peak by 2030, and eliminate them (and fossil fuel use) by 2050. But as AOC’s former chief of staff noted, the GND is not just about transforming America’s energy system; it’s about changing the entire economy.

This radical transformation is driven by three fundamental Articles of Faith, none of them based on reality.

1) The crisis of manmade climate cataclysms necessitates this GND. Team Biden believes natural forces no longer play a role; rising temperatures since the Little Ice Age ended two centuries ago are due solely to fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions, as are all extreme weather events over recent decades; and the 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall (from Wilma in 2005 to Harvey in 2017) is irrelevant – as is the significant decline in violent (F3-F5) US tornadoes 1986-2020 compared to 1950-1985, and that for the first time in history not one violent twister hit the United States in 2018.

1) American foreign policy must construct a values-based world order that can tackle humanity’s common problems in an organized, collegial manner. Team Biden believes such problems cannot be solved by national governments acting alone, so world leaders have no choice but to work together. Wall Street Journal global view columnist Walter Russell Means calls this the Biden Doctrine.

However, China, India and many other countries don’t view climate change as an existential threat – much less a problem that justifies sacrificing their energy needs, economic growth, national security and geopolitical aspirations. They may give lip service to the alleged “climate crisis,” “decarbonization” and “green energy.” But they know their futures are inextricably tied to the abundant, reliable, affordable energy that only oil, natural gas and coal (plus hydroelectric and nuclear) can provide. They are not going to “work together” with leaders who expect them to undermine their most vital goals.

The Biden Doctrine’s second inherent failing is that GND policies will inevitably hollow out America’s industrial and military might, destroy jobs, and reduce US leverage in future negotiations. China already controls the raw material supply chains for wind turbines, solar panels, battery modules for electric vehicles and backup power systems, and countless other technologies. Even our advanced military equipment relies on metals and minerals that are mined and/or processed by Chinese companies. GND policies would only worsen the situation.

3) Replacing the 80% of US energy that now comes from fossil fuels can be accomplished quickly, easily, affordably and ecologically – with clean, green, renewable, sustainable, carbon-free wind and solar technologies that will create millions of good jobs, and save our planet from climate devastation.

The foundation for this presumed global transformation is the Biden Administration’s Materials Acquisition for Global Industrial Change program – better known by its acronym: MAGIC.

(This is not an official name. In fact, there is no such program, and no evidence that Team Biden has a clue about what would be required to transform America from fossil to green energy. MAGIC simply provides the most accurate description of how they expect to achieve this transformation.)

The raw material requirements for a GND economy are astronomical, mind-numbing. To cite just one example of hundreds, Team Biden wants to install 30,000 megawatts of wind turbines off America’s Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coasts. Assuming 10,000 MW per coastline, total Atlantic coast wind capacity would barely meet three-fourths of peak summertime electricity demand for New York City – assuming full output 24/7/365. The entire 30,000 MW wouldn’t meet New York State’s current peak electricity needs.

However, at 3.6 tons per megawattjust this Phase 1 offshore wind scheme would require 108,000 tons of copper. At 0.8% metal in an average ore globally, that would involve mining, crushing and processing some 13,000,000 tons of ore, after removing millions of tons of rock to get to the ore bodies!

14-MW Vesta, GE or Siemens-Gamesa turbines stand 815-850 feet above 30-100 foot deep ocean waters (160 feet higher than the Washington Monument). Each blade is 350 feet long. Every turbine weighs in at 2,000-3,000 tons of metals, plastics and composites, plus massive concrete-and-rebar bases. Phase 1 alone will involve tens of millions of tons of materials, billions of tons of ores and overburden.

Add in materials for subsea electrical cables, onshore transmission lines, onshore wind turbines and solar panels, backup battery systems, electric vehicles, electric heating systems and other GND technologies – to run the entire USA – and we’re looking at tens of billions of tons of metals and minerals, trillions of tons of ores, and mines, processing plants and factories all over the world.

Team Biden claims “renewable” energy is “carbon-free.” It gets away with this deception by looking only at electricity generation after turbines and panels are installed – and ignoring how the raw materials are extracted and processed and how the technologies are manufactured … far from the United States … using fossil fuels every step of the way … under minimal to nonexistent laws for air and water pollution control, habitat and wildlife protection, mined land reclamation, child and slave labor, and workplace safety.

Unencumbered by Paris climate treaty restrictions, emerging economies will gladly sell us “green, renewable” technologies that send electricity costs soaring to several times today’s prices and drive factories and industries out of business, unable to compete with China and India.

The past winter’s Texas blackout will become commonplace. Wind electricity generation plummeted 93% – but natural gas generation rocketed 450% to make up the difference, even though pipelines could not supply enough fuel, because legislators and regulators had decreed that pipeline compressors run off the compromised grid, instead of on gas from the pipelines. Under the GND, though, there won’t be any gas generation backup – just freezing jobless in the dark.

Climate czar and private jetsetter John Kerry says unemployed oil and factory workers will get “good jobs” making solar panels. In reality, those jobs will be overseas. Americans workers will only assemble, install, maintain, repair, remove, recycle and landfill imported green tech. American families and businesses will be forced to rip out trillions of dollars of perfectly good gas furnaces, ovens, stoves, water heaters, vehicles and industrial systems – and spend more trillions replacing them with expensive new GND-approved equipment, backup batteries and upgraded electrical systems to handle the extra loads.

And this entire, vastly expanded all-electric world will be expected to function with unreliable, weather-dependent wind and solar power. (All this in a USA where opinion surveys have found the average citizen is willing to pay a minuscule $2-50 per year to reduce US dependence on fossil fuels and (supposedly) keep global average temperatures from rising any higher.)

President Biden’s inability to comprehend these realities may be due to his diminished mental capacity. But it could also be the result of rarely having to exercise his mind – in a political arena where woke, hard-green, climate-obsessed, cancel-culture ideologues permit no discussion, questions or dissent; where advisors, cabinet members, regulators and legislators are of the same mindset, or too timid to speak up; and where schools, news and social media, Big Tech, government agencies, corporate chiefs and even book publishers likewise silence, ignore, punish and banish anyone who offers differing views.

We can only hope enough citizens pound enough sense into our ruling classes to eliminate their belief in MAGIC, climate monsters and other countries crazy enough to follow Mr. Biden into economic suicide.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books, reports and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.

May 4, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

80 Groups Blast US Interference in Mexico’s Phaseout of Glyphosate and GM Corn

By Jessica Corbett | Common Dreams | April 29, 2021

A coalition of 80 U.S. agricultural, consumer, environmental, public health, and worker groups sent a letter Thursday to key figures in the Biden administration calling for them to “respect Mexico’s sovereignty and refrain from interfering with its right to enact health-protective policies” — specifically, the phaseout of the herbicide glyphosate and the cultivation of genetically modified corn.

“Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador quietly rocked the agribusiness world with his New Year’s Eve decree,” Timothy A. Wise of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (ITAP) noted earlier this year. “His administration sent an even stronger aftershock two weeks later, clarifying that the government would also phase out GM corn imports in three years and the ban would include not just corn for human consumption but yellow corn destined primarily for livestock.”

“Mexico imports about 30% of its corn each year, overwhelmingly from the United States,” Wise added. “Almost all of that is yellow corn for animal feed and industrial uses. López Obrador’s commitment to reducing and, by 2024, eliminating such imports reflects his administration’s plan to ramp up Mexican production as part of the campaign to increase self-sufficiency in corn and other key food crops.”

The groups’ letter on the Mexican policies and U.S. interference—published in English (pdf) and Spanish (pdf)—is addressed to recently confirmed U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. Its lead author is Kristin Schafer, executive director of Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA).

“We call on Secretary Vilsack and Trade Representative Tai, as key leaders in the new administration, to respect Mexico’s decision to protect both public health and the integrity of Mexican farming,” Schafer said in a statement. “It is completely unacceptable for U.S. public agencies to be doing the bidding of pesticide corporations like Bayer, who are solely concerned with maintaining their bottom-line profits.”

Fernando Bejarano, director of Pesticide Action Network in Mexico, explained that “we are part of the No Maize No Country Campaign, a broad coalition of peasant organizations, nonprofit NGOs, academics, and consumers which support the presidential decree and fight for food sovereignty with the agroecological transformation of agricultural systems that guarantee the right to produce and consume healthy, nutritious food, free of pesticides and transgenics.”

“We reject the pressure from corporations such as Bayer-Monsanto—and their CropLife trade association—which are working in both the United States and Mexico to undermine the presidential decree that phases out the use of glyphosate and transgenic corn,” Bejarano said.

The letter highlights Guardian reporting on U.S. government documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents revealed that CropLife America and Bayer AG—which acquired glyphosate-based herbicide developer Monsanto in 2018—worked with U.S. officials to lobby against Mexico’s plans.

According to journalist Carey Gillam’s mid-February report:

The emails reviewed by the Guardian come from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and other U.S. agencies. They detail worry and frustration with Mexico’s position. One email makes a reference to staff within López Obrador’s administration as “vocal anti-biotechnology activists,” and another email states that Mexico’s health agency (Cofepris) is “becoming a big time problem.”

Internal USTR communications lay out how the agrochemical industry is “pushing” for the U.S. to “fold this issue” into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade deal that went into effect July 1. The records then show the USTR does exactly that, telling Mexico its actions on glyphosate and genetically engineered crops raise concerns “regarding compliance” with USMCA.

Citing discussions with CropLife, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) joined in the effort, discussing in an inter-agency email “how we could use USMCA to work through these issues.”

Full article

May 2, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

World police: Washington seeks to imprison foreign businesspeople for violating illegal US sanctions

By STANSFIELD SMITH · The Grayzone · APRIL 27, 2021

The United States uses economic sanctions as a weapon against states that choose a development path independent of US global domination. Sanctions can take the form of blocking a nation’s financial and trade transactions, not allowing financial institutions to process them. The US can also freeze the assets of another country.

Washington employs sanctions as a tool to destabilize governments that refuse to kow-tow to it. Sanctions are a weapon of war on civilians. Richard Nixon made this clear when, with Chile’s 1970 election of socialist Salvador Allende, the US president ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream,” to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”

Sanctions can destroy the economy of a country by causing hyperinflation and unemployment and preventing the import of necessities such as food, medicine, and equipment to keep infrastructure and industries running. Sanctions drive capital flight from targeted nations, as corporations and financial institutions seek to avoid being hurt themselves. This results in deadly consequences for the civilian population.

According to the United Nations, US sanctions are unilateral coercive measures that violate international laws. The UN General Assembly has repeatedly called on all states not to recognize or apply unilateral coercive measures, such as those employed by the US. Every year since 1992 it has condemned the US blockade of Cuba; Washington’s response has been to worsen it. The 120 member Non-Aligned Movement has condemned sanctions on Venezuela.

This global influence enables the United States to block money transfers for even the smallest transaction, and to confiscate billions of dollars held by targeted governments and individuals. By controlling the international financial system, Washington can demand that banks in foreign countries accept US restrictions, or face sanctions themselves.

According to the United Nations, however, US sanctions are unilateral coercive measures that violate international laws. The UN Charter – which the US was itself instrumental in writing – clearly states only those sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council can be considered legal. Sanctions imposed by one country on another are not legal.

The UN General Assembly has repeatedly called on member states not to recognize or apply unilateral coercive measures, such as those employed by Washington.

Yet the US government continues to freely snub the UN and its Security Council by imposing unilateral sanctions on a variety of countries, most severely against Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, and Venezuela.

US sanctions contributed to 40,000 deaths in Venezuela just between 2017 and 2018, as well as to the deaths of 4,000 North Koreans in 2018, most of them children and pregnant women. In the 1990s, sanctions against Iraq led to the deaths of as many as 880,000 children under five due to malnutrition and disease.

Washington even brazenly threatened to sanction judges of the International Criminal Court if they dared investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan. National Security Advisor John Bolton bullied them, stating: “We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system … We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.”

This turned out to be no idle threat: the Trump administration ultimately slapped sanctions on the ICC and its staff.

In 2020 and 2021, the US government has taken its unilateral coercive measures to an even more ominous level by charging and attempting to extradite foreign businesspeople who have been abiding by international law, rather than the economic dictates of Washington.

Alex Saab, a Venezuelan national; Mun Chol Myong, a North Korean businessman; and Meng Wanzhou, from China’s Huawei tech giant, have each been charged with violating Washington’s unlawful sanctions – even though all are non-US citizens living and conducting business outside of the United States. The three are being politically persecuted for acting in the interests of their own countries, and not the US.

Alex Saab Venezuela US sanctions CLAP food

Venezuela’s Special Envoy Alex Saab, arrested for trying to buy food for the government’s CLAP program

The case of Venezuelan special envoy Alex Saab

The Obama administration justified unilateral sanctions against Venezuela in 2015 with the baseless claim that Venezuela poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States. As Reuters noted at the time, “Declaring any country a threat to national security is the first step in starting a US sanctions program.”

Alex Saab, a Colombia-born Venezuelan businessman, was appointed a special envoy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. His job was to help the government buy food for its social program, CLAP, which provides boxes of food and sanitary supplies to an estimated 80 percent of the population, helping keep them alive under the US economic attack.

Saab’s government role means he should have diplomatic immunity under international law. But Washington has ignored all international protocol in targeting him.

Saab was en route to Iran to acquire basic food, medicine, and medical equipment needed for the people of Venezuela when, on June 12, 2020, he was detained – in effect kidnapped – during a stopover in Cape Verde, due to a US government extradition request.

Since then, Saab has been detained, first in prison and now under house arrest. He says his “illegal detention is entirely politically motivated.”

The US government charged Saab with “money laundering.” However, in his case and those of the other two foreign nationals targeted by the US, money laundering means nothing more than making international trade transactions, which must generally go through the US-controlled SWIFT financial system through which all dollar transactions pass, that circumvent Washington’s unilateral sanctions.

Because of its control over the international financial system, the United States can impose sanctions on the trade any country undertakes with nations that Washington sanctions or blockades, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, or Russia. ”Money laundering” is the charge that Washington uses to enforce its unilateral coercive measures on the rest of the world.

Saab explained in an April interview with a Colombian news outlet, “I have worked since 2015 to ensure the supply of basic food and medicine and other items to supply the [Venezuelan] government’s social welfare food program (CLAP). Since April 2018 I have been working as a servant of the state, as a special envoy and not as a private businessman.”

“For seven months … from the first day of my abduction, they tortured me and pressured me to sign voluntary extradition declarations and bear false witness against my government,” Saab recounted. He refused, stating “President Maduro has shown incredible leadership in the face of unprecedented sanctions and dirty political tricks from the US. I am honored to be able to assist President Maduro in any way I can, as he seeks to ensure the well-being of the people of Venezuela.”

In jail, Saab said he was kept in the dark for 23 hours a day, “lying on the concrete [floor].” This led him to partially lose his eyesight.

“I was forbidden to speak to anyone inside the prison, and everyone else was forbidden to speak to me,” Saab added. “I have lost 25 kilos [55 pounds].”

Switzerland investigated Saab over allegations of money laundering through Swiss banks. But, after a two-year investigation, Swiss courts formally closed their investigation on March 25, 2021, determining there was no evidence that Saab committed any irregularity.

Soon after the Swiss statement, the US Treasury Department on March 31 withdrew the sanctions that President Trump had issued on a group of companies allegedly linked to Alex Saab.

While Cape Verdean authorities approved Saab’s extradition to the US, the court of justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) declared his detention illegal, stipulating that he could not be extradited.

The African Bar Association also ruled that the Venezuelan diplomatic envoy should not be incarcerated. Nevertheless, the US government, continuing the Trump administration’s policy under President Joe Biden, has demanded that Cape Verde keep Saab under house arrest, pending extradition.

The case of North Korean businessman Mun Chol Myong

For the first time in history, a North Korean businessman was extradited to the United States from Malaysia on March 20, 2021. Mun Chol Myong faces charges of “money laundering,” “conspiracy,” and supplying goods to North Korea in violation of US law.

Mun was arrested in Malaysia in May 2019 shortly after a Washington, DC federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest. He spent nearly two years fighting extradition, arguing that his case was politically motivated and was being used as leverage in possible nuclear negotiations between the US and North Korea.

His actual crime, in the eyes of the US government, was supplying needed goods to North Korea in a manner that circumvented Washington’s sanctions and US-instigated UN sanctions. US government authorities, as of March 22, 2021, had not indicated what goods Mun is said to have exported to North Korea.

An indictment by the US District Court for the District of Columbia alleges that Mun and his unnamed “co-conspirators” used “front” companies and bank accounts registered to false names on behalf of North Korean entities that were barred from SWIFT. According to the FBI, by concealing transactions that benefitted North Korea, Mun deceived US financial institutions into processing more than $1.5 million in transactions which they would have otherwise not processed.

The US assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, John C. Demers, claimed Mun “is the first North Korean intelligence operative – and the second ever foreign intelligence operative – to have been extradited to the United States for violation of our laws.” Ignoring international law, Washington considers North Korean diplomats and international businesspeople to be “intelligence operatives.”

In other words, the US Justice Department is openly arguing that foreign nationals who have never been to or done work in the United States can be extradited there for violating “our laws.”

Demers went on to baselessly claim that Mun’s export of goods to North Korea was a national security threat to the American people, insisting, “We will continue to use the long reach of our laws to protect the American people from sanctions evasion and other national security threats.”

In the Justice Department’s press release, the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, Alan E. Kohler Jr., added ominously, ”We hope he will be the first of many.”

The US government has enforced sanctions, amounting to a de facto blockade, against North Korea since 1950, at the start of the US war on Korea. These sanctions have been designed to cut the country off from international trade and cripple its economic and social development.

The United States claims present-day sanctions were enacted because of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, which is a legal program run by a country threatened by Washington’s own nuclear weapons.

North Korea’s charge d’affaires in Malaysia, Kim Yu Song, condemned Mun’s extradition as an “unpardonable crime,” declaring that it was the product of a US-led sanction program “which seeks to deprive our state of its sovereignty, peaceful existence and development,” and is “isolating and suffocating” the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

The DPRK protested the extradition of its citizen by suspending official diplomatic ties with Malaysia.

China Huawei Meng Wanzhou US sanctions

Chinese Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, arrested by Canada and faced extradition to the US for violating unilateral sanctions

The case of Chinese Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou

The most infamous of these three extradition cases is that of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer and deputy chair of the board of the Chinese tech giant Huawei.

Meng faces charges of fraud for allegedly misleading HSBC, a British bank, about Huawei business dealings in Iran, causing the bank to break unilateral US sanctions against Iran.

On August 22, 2018, a US District Court in New York issued an arrest warrant for Meng. Canada’s RCMP then arrested her in Vancouver on December 1, 2018, at US request.

Meng has now been under house arrest for almost two and half years. The Chinese government has said the detention is “lawless, reasonless and ruthless, and it is extremely vicious.”

The Trump administration relied on two Reuters articles from 2012 and 2013 to accuse Huawei of violating unilateral US sanctions on Iran.

Washington imposed sanctions on Iran shortly after its 1979 revolution. The present US sanctions are claimed to be in response to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, even though there is no proof that the country has been developing nuclear weapons.

As with the North Korean case, it is noteworthy that the only country that has actually used nuclear weapons on a civilian population sanctions other countries for supposedly developing them.

All UN-approved coercive measures against Iran were ended with the international nuclear agreement, or JCPOA, of 2015, and the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Tehran was in compliance with the deal.

Unilateral US sanctions on Iran were imposed without any legal basis, and Washington’s justification for extraditing Meng thus violates international law, because the sanctions that the Huawei executive is alleged to have circumvented are illegal according to the UN Security Council.

In an article explaining the Meng Wanzhou extradition case, political analyst K J Noh provided further context:

Most people understand that Meng is not guilty of anything other than being the daughter of Ren Zeng Fei, the founder of Huawei.

Huawei, as a global technological powerhouse, represents Chinese power and Chinese technical prowess, which the United States is hell-bent on destroying. Meng has been kidnapped as a pawn, as a hostage to exert pressure on Huawei and the Chinese government, and to curb China’s development.

In a maneuver reminiscent of medieval or colonial warfare, the US has explicitly offered to release her if China capitulates on a trade deal –– making clear that she is being held hostage. This constitutes a violation of the UN Convention on Hostages.

In court, Meng’s defense has argued that the US government deliberately misstated evidence and withheld evidence from the Canadian Court. Her attorneys say the Trump administration was using her as a “bargaining chip.”

Meng’s defense denied Washington’s jurisdiction to indict a Chinese national for her activities outside of US soil. “There is no connection … None of [Meng’s] alleged conduct occurred either in whole or in part in the United States. Nor did they have any effect there,” her lawyers stated.

It is also highly unusual for Washington to pursue criminal charges for sanctions violations against an individual rather than an institution. Where an executive is carrying out corporate policy, one would expect individuals not to be charged, rather, the corporation would be fined.

As economist Jeffrey Sachs noted:

In 2011, for example, JP Morgan Chase paid $88.3 million in fines in 2011 for violating US sanctions against Cuba, Iran, and Sudan. Yet Jamie Dimon wasn’t grabbed off a plane and whisked into custody.

And JP Morgan Chase was hardly alone in violating US sanctions. Since 2010, the following major financial institutions paid fines for violating US sanctions: Banco do Brasil, Bank of America, Bank of Guam, Bank of Moscow, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Clearstream Banking, Commerzbank, Compass, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, JP Morgan Chase, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, National Bank of Pakistan, PayPal, RBS (ABN Amro), Société Générale, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Trans-Pacific National Bank (now known as Beacon Business Bank), Standard Chartered, and Wells Fargo.

None of the CEOs or CFOs of these sanction-busting banks was arrested and taken into custody for these violations. In all of these cases, the corporation – rather than an individual manager – was held accountable.

The likelihood is that Saab, Mun, or Meng would receive a heavily politicized trial as “fair” as that inflicted on the Cuban 5 or Simon Trinidad.

These are political cases, disguised as criminal cases. The “crime” is the violation of US sanctions – illegal according to the United Nations – by non-US citizens living outside the United States.

The US government is flaunting international law by charging these three individuals for legal business between nations that violates illegal US coercive measures. All three represent the interests of governments that Washington seeks to crush, and the detentions of all three is the equivalent of hostage taking.

These cases open the door for the United States to charge and extradite any person in the world on baseless allegations of “organized crime, money laundering, or financing of terrorism,” if they engage in perfectly legal international trade which the US government declares to violate its unilateral sanctions.

April 30, 2021 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Europe’s heavy industry unlikely to survive Net Zero

GWPF – 30/04/21

It is becoming ever more evident that much of Europe’s heavy industry is unlikely to survive the EU’s unilateral Net Zero policy.

The EU’s carbon price reached a new record high of 45 euros ($54) a tonne on Tuesday.

As the carbon price is expected to increase much further in the next few years, European industrial groups are desperately calling for the introduction of a carbon border tax, hoping that it will save them from international competitors that are able to produce much cheaper.

Even higher carbon prices are coming. BloombergNEF expects carbon prices to hit 100 euros by 2030.

They warn that rising energy and carbon costs will force energy-intensive manufacturing to shut down and relocate to countries with less stringent CO2 targets if the EU does not introduce protectionist carbon protection.

It is rather doubtful, however, whether the EU can afford to introduce a carbon border tax, knowing full well that China, India and much of the rest of the emerging and developing world would simply retaliate in return, threatening to tax European products out of Asian and African markets altogether.

European and American politicians should be reminded that we have been warning for years about this inevitable outcome of unilateral climate policies.

April 30, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Coming COVID Commission Is a Gates-Led Cover-Up

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 27, 2021

Having gone as far as he can with the World Health Organization’s cover-up, Bill Gates takes another bite at the apple with his corporate-funded investigation into the origins of COVID-19 to cleverly cover up this massive conspiracy with an “official” investigation.

While the so-called COVID Commission Planning Group — set up to create and support an investigative commission like that for 9/11 — is advertised as a nonpartisan effort, you really couldn’t come up with a more dangerously biased set of participants.

In short, individuals and organizations with some of the most egregious conflicts of interest, and everything to gain by being in charge of analyzing and writing the history of this pandemic, are leading and supporting this effort. This is a classic fox guarding the henhouse scenario.

According to the Miller Center, the planning group will lay out the plans for nine separate task forces, each focused on one of the following topics, to lay “the foundation for a future commission to investigate”:1

  • The origins of SARS-CoV-2 and its prevention
  • Threat assessment, including the creation of an international network for detection and warning, “biological intelligence” and other data collection
  • National readiness and a review of the initial response
  • At-risk communities and how to address gaps in public health capacities, worker safety and the responsibilities of private businesses
  • State and local readiness, containment and mitigation, including when and how to use lockdowns, mandates and school closings
  • Health care challenges surrounding patient care, including those with long-hauler syndrome
  • Diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, including the regulatory environment that might benefit or stifle innovation and/or global supply chains
  • Telling the stories of COVID-19 victims, frontline workers and public health officials (i.e., propaganda generation)
  • Solving data issues

Philip Zelikow — Chief Investigator for the Cabal

The chosen leader of this new planning group is Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission2 and a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel.3,4 While Gates may not be a physical member of this planning group, he’s certainly involved indirectly. Of that we can be virtually assured.

Zelikow, a former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, is also a current strategy group member of the Aspen Institute,5 a technocratic hub that has groomed and mentored executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization.

He also directed the Markle Foundation’s Task Force on National Security in the Information Age,6 the focus of which has been to make information relating to potential security threats discoverable and accessible to officials without breaking civil liberty laws.7 As reported by the University of Virginia:8

“The planning group hopes to prepare the way for a potential National COVID Commission set up to help America and the world learn from this pandemic and safeguard against future threats. ‘This is perhaps the greatest crisis suffered by America, if not the world, since 1945,’ said Zelikow … ‘It is vital to take stock, in a massive way, of what happened and why.

These sorts of civilizational challenges may become more common in the 21st century, and we need to learn from this crisis to strengthen our society … Scholars and journalists will do their jobs, but there is also a role for the kind of massive investigation and research effort that only a large-scale commission can provide.’”

Foundations Backing the COVID Commission

As reported by the Miller Center,9 the COVID Commission Planning Group includes more than two dozen virologists, public health personas and former government officials, and is backed by four charitable foundations — all of whom have histories revealing them to be part of the technocratic alliance that for years, in some cases decades, have been plotting and planning for the wealth redistribution and global power grab we’re now experiencing. These foundations include:

Schmidt Futures,10 founded by Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet Inc., which owns the greatest artificial intelligence (AI) team in the world.11

The Skoll Foundation, founded by Jeff Skoll, a former eBay president, to “pursue his vision of a sustainable world” by catalyzing “transformational social change.”12 It acts as a support organization to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Skoll has funded pandemic preparedness and prevention since 2009 through the Skoll Global Threats Fund, and his movie production company Participant Media produced the movie “Contagion” and Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”13

Stand Together Foundation, which is part of the Koch Network, founded by Charles Koch. Its primary focus is criminal justice and poverty issues, and it teaches Koch’s “market based management” philosophy to community leaders.14

The Rockefeller Foundation, which in April 2020 released the white paper,15 “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan,” laying out a strategic framework clearly intended to become part of a permanent surveillance and social control structure that severely limits personal liberty and freedom of choice. I wrote about this in “Rockefeller Foundation’s Plan to Track Americans.”

The tracking system it calls for is eerily similar to that already being used in China, where residents are required to enroll in a health condition registry. Once enrolled, they get a personal QR code, which they must then enter in order to gain access to grocery stores and other facilities.16 The plan also demands access to other medical data.

Operation Lockstep

The Rockefellers, like Gates, built an empire around health and medicine despite having no medical expertise whatsoever. Their influence is rooted in money, which is spent in self-serving ways. While Rockefeller and Gates are both known as philanthropists, their donations grow their wealth, as the money they spend on “charity” ultimately ends up benefiting their own investments and/or business interests.

In addition to the COVID-19 Action Plan document cited above — which doesn’t even try to hide its draconian overreach and intent to permanently alter life and society as we know it — the Rockefeller Foundation also published a 2010 report17 titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” in which they laid out their “Lockstep” scenario — a coordinated global response to a lethal pandemic.

While the name and origin of the virus differs, the scenario laid out in this document matches many of the details of our present. A deadly viral pandemic. A deadly effect on economies. International mobility coming to a screeching halt, debilitating industries, tourism and global supply chains. “Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers,” the document reads.

“In the absence of official containment protocols,” the virus spread like wildfire. In this narrative, the U.S. administration’s failure to place strict travel restrictions on its citizens proved to be a fatal flaw, as it allowed the virus to spread past its borders. China, on the other hand, fared particularly well due to its rapid imposition of universal quarantines of all citizens, which proved effective for curbing the spread of the virus.

Many other nations where leaders “flexed their authority” and imposed severe restrictions on their citizens — “from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries of communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets” — also fared well.

These and other reports spell out what the ultimate plan actually is. It’s to use bioterrorism to take control of the world’s resources, wealth and people. It’s to use coordinated pandemic response as a justification for wealth redistribution and the resetting of the global financial system.

What most fail to realize is that the wealth distribution they’re talking about is not distribution from the wealthy to the poor, even though that’s what they want you to believe. It’s to centralize wealth at the top and eliminate private property rights and private business ownership from the lower and middle classes. The “equitable” living standards they’re talking about is poverty for all but themselves. It’s really crucial to begin to grasp this reality now, before it’s too late.

Pieces of a Global Puzzle

The Rockefeller Foundation is also a founding sponsor of The Mojaloop Foundation, set up to “promote digital payments for people outside the financial system, with support from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”18

Right there we have Google, the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, all in one little nonprofit with a heart set on giving poor people access to digital banking using their cellphones. This is probably the three most dangerous nonprofits on the planet, as they are likely the most powerful and committed to global tyranny.

All-digital banking using a centralized digital currency is a key component of the Great Reset, so this project has little to do with honest philanthropy and everything to do with making sure everyone can be swept into the digital net, which will include round-the-clock surveillance and tracking of physical location and biological data, a digital ID, along with your health data (including but not limited to vaccination status), banking and, ultimately, a social credit system.

All of the pieces needed for the Great Reset are already in place; it’s just a matter of seeing how all the separate pieces fit together. For example, Gavi, the vaccine alliance, set up with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with the ID2020 Alliance to launch a digital identity program called ID2020.19

Gates also funded the creation of EarthNow, a project involving 500 satellites equipped with machine learning technology to surveil the entire planet with real-time video.20 As one would expect, AI — a Google specialty — is also a key component of this global surveillance plot.

COVID-19 — A Launch Pad for the Great Reset

Another key player in the COVID Commission Planning Group is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. As you may recall, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security co-hosted the pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus,” known as Event 201, in October 2019 along with the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum.

The event eerily predicted what would happen just 10 weeks later, when COVID-19 appeared. Gates and the World Economic Forum, in turn, are both partnered21 with the United Nations which, while keeping a relatively low profile, appears to be at the heart of the globalist takeover agenda.

The World Economic Forum, while a private organization, works as the social and economic branch of the U.N. and is a key driving force behind modern technocracy and the Great Reset agenda. Its founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, publicly declared the need for a global “reset” to restore order in June 2020.22

Technocratic rule, which is what the Great Reset will bring about, hinges on the use of technology — in particular artificial intelligence, digital surveillance and Big Data collection (which is what 5G is for) — and the digitization of industry, banking and government, which in turn allows for the automation of social engineering and social rule (although that part is never expressly stated).

Beyond pandemic preparedness and response, the justification for the implementation of the Great Reset agenda in its totality will be climate change. The Great Reset, sometimes referred to as the “build back better” plan, specifically calls for all nations to implement “green” regulations and “sustainable development goals”23,24 as part of the post-COVID recovery effort.

But the end goal is far from what the typical person envisions when they hear these plans. The end goal is to turn us into serfs without rights to privacy, private ownership or anything else. In short, the pandemic is being used to destroy the local economies around the world, which will then allow the World Economic Forum to come in and “rescue” debt-ridden countries. The price for this salvation is your liberty.

The Great Reset

While the New World Order was long derided as a “conspiracy theory” that you’d have to be crazy to believe, the Great Reset, which is simply a rebranding of the same old NWO plan that has been in circulation for well over a decade, is now public fact.

Many world leaders have spoken about it in an official capacity, and in June 2020, Zia Khan, senior vice president of innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation penned the article25 “Rebuilding Toward the Great Reset: Crisis, COVID-19, and the Sustainable Development Goals,” reviewing the “social crisis” necessitating the world’s acceptance of a new world order.

The article was co-written with John McArthur, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, which is one of several technocratic think-tanks. Keeping in mind what I’ve just said about what the Great Reset is really all about, and the justifications used to implement the theft of wealth and freedom, read how they posit these changes as being in your best interest:

“Upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity. Outdated or unjust norms can succumb to society’s pressing need for better approaches. For example, the need for massive and urgent government intervention has drawn fresh attention to social safety nets and the possibility of dramatic policy enhancements.

Tragic consequences of racial discrimination have catapulted awareness of systemic problems and triggered prospects for much-needed social reforms. Rapid environmental improvements linked to economic shutdown have rekindled consciousness of the profound interconnections between ecosystems, economies, and societies …

Rather than passively allowing norms to evolve through inertia or randomness, we can all pursue actions for Response and, soon enough, Recovery in a manner that improve the odds of a Reset toward better long-term outcomes.

Fortunately, we already have a strong starting point for what the world’s economic, social, and environmental outcomes should be. Five years ago, in 2015, all 193 UN member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common set of priorities to be achieved in all countries by 2030.”

Another article titled “The Great Reset,” written by Jimmy Chang, CFA, for the Rockefeller Capital Management blog, reads, in part:26

“Regarding the post-pandemic reconstruction effort, progressives, led by the so-called Davos elites (of the World Economic Forum fame), are advocating an urgent ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism to ensure equality and sustainability. They also call for harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., Big Tech) to address health and social challenges.

Their vision for the future could be gleaned from a 2016 article penned by a young Danish politician with the title ‘Welcome to 2030. I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life Has Never Been Better.’ This title was so controversial that its posting on the World Economic Forum website was changed to a bland ‘Here’s how life could change in my city by the year 2030.’

The pace of the Great Reset will in part depend on the final outcome of the U.S. election as it will determine whether Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Still, some resets will be unavoidable since COVID-19 has exacerbated some longstanding issues such as the world’s debt dependency and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.

There will be elevated levels of bankruptcy and debt restructuring. Governments may further increase their leverage to bail out the economy and placate electorates that demand more generous social contracts.

Riccardo Fraccaro, Italy’s Secretary of the Council of Ministers and a close aide of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, even floated a trial balloon on sovereign debt restructuring by suggesting that the European Central Bank consider ‘canceling sovereign bonds bought during the pandemic or perpetually extending their maturity.’

Businesses will also need to respond to lasting behavioral changes caused by the pandemic. In sum, there is no going back to the pre-COVID-19 world, and markets will need to adjust.”

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

The Great Reset is not some wild conspiracy theory but a publicly released agenda that is moving forward, whether we like it or not. I believe the only way to stop it is through our collective responses to the various pieces and parts of the plan that are being rolled out. They want you to believe that none of the things being introduced have anything to do with each other but, in fact, they are all pieces of the same puzzle.

The final image is the inside of a prison cell. It may not be a physical prison. It may be largely digital in nature. It may look like the four walls of your own home. But it’s a prison nonetheless.

I believe it would be a tragic mistake to trust Gates, Rockefeller, Google or any of the other players — including Zelikow — that are being brought before us as the saviors of the day. They’re all wolves in sheep’s clothing.

To learn more about the hidden power structure running this global reorganization toward authoritarian control, see “Bill Gates Wants to Realize Global Vision in His Lifetime,” “The Great Reset and Build Back Better,” “Technocracy and the Great Reset” and “Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?

Be Part of the Answer

The good news is, Americans now have a brand-new weapon in our fight for freedom. I recently interviewed Naomi Wolf about her new digital platform, Daily Clout, that will allow citizens to lobby bills to their legislators.

Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don’t have lawyers at their beck and call. Daily Clout has hired an attorney who is busy drafting turnkey bills that protect us against the continued erosion of freedom and reestablish rights and liberties. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that. As explained by Wolf:

“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we’ve been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’

It’s a fantastic intervention in the political process, restoring real democracy. It’s why we founded Daily Clout, but it’s beautiful to see hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life rushing to give us support and resources, to become members and give us donations, which we appreciate, so that we can keep our lawyer busy creating these draft bills. It’s not just for this issue.

Once we get our rights and freedoms back, whatever [citizens] want, we can draft a bill for you, and you can [call on your legislators to] pass it.”

To get involved, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign. Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator.

There’s a feature called BillCam, where you can see who your state legislator is by entering your zip code. Once you’re a subscriber or member, you’ll get regular updates about happenings around the U.S. and community events.

The Great Reset is at our doorstep, and your freedom, and that of future generations, hinges on you getting involved and fighting for it. The Daily Clout platform can be a major help in this regard, as using legislation to preserve and protect our rights and freedoms is far preferable to more violent alternatives or resigning ourselves to the fate prescribed by our globalist would-be “overlords.”

Sources and References

April 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

All of liquified natural gas from Russia’s Arctic for next 20 years sold in advance

RT | April 28, 2021

Russia’s energy giant Novatek said on Wednesday it has inked 20-year agreements with the shareholders of its Arctic LNG 2 project on the sale and purchase of the entire volume of liquified natural gas.

The LNG sales from the plant’s first liquefaction train are planned to commence in 2023, according to the company.

The agreements “provide for LNG supplies from Arctic LNG 2 on FOB Murmansk and FOB Kamchatka basis with pricing formulas linked to international oil and gas benchmarks. The LNG offtake volumes are set in proportion to the respective participants’ ownership stakes in the project,” Novatek said.

The company’s chairman of the management board, Leonid Mikhelson, said that “The long-term offtake agreements between Arctic LNG 2 and its participants ensure the future revenue stream from LNG sales and de-risks the project. This represents one of the most important milestones in attracting the project’s external financing that will be completed in 2021.”

Mikhelson said earlier that the Arctic LNG 2 plant is 39% complete and will be launched as planned.

Arctic LNG 2 envisages constructing three LNG liquefaction trains of 6.6 million tons per annum each, as well as cumulative gas condensate production capacity of 1.6 million tons per annum. The total LNG capacity of the three liquefaction trains will be 19.8 million tons. The first train of Arctic LNG 2 is 53% ready and is scheduled to start operations in two years.

Novatek owns the majority stake (60%) in the project, with minority stakes held by foreign companies. The list of foreign investors includes French oil and gas company Total (10%), Chinese firms CNPC (10%) and CNOOC (10%), and the Japanese consortium of Mitsui and JOGMEC (10%).

April 28, 2021 Posted by | Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

Has the new MI6 boss read the Paris Agreement?

Global Warming Policy Forum | April 26, 2021

Richard Moore, the new chief of the UK’s secret service, suggests countries such as China will be watched to ensure climate commitments are kept. What climate commitment? Has nobody at MI6 informed Mr Moore about the Paris Agreement?

After all, under international law, China, India, and all emerging and developing nations are exempt from any CO2 emission cuts until 2030 or later.

The Daily Telegraph – 26/04/21:

Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, described climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet”.

Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, described climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet” CREDIT: PA

MI6 is placing the climate emergency at the forefront of its international espionage with “green spying” on the world’s big polluters, its new chief has revealed.

Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, described climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet”.

It means the big industrial countries will be monitored by MI6 to ensure they are upholding their commitments to combating rising global temperatures.

Mr Moore, known as ‘C’, took charge of the intelligence agency in October and has become the first head of the service to ever give a broadcast interview.

He indicated that British spies will make China the focus of much of their climate-related espionage by pointing out that Beijing is “certainly the largest emitter” of carbon.

“Our job is to shine a light in places where people might not want it shone and so clearly we are going to support what is the foremost international foreign policy agenda item for this country and for the planet, which is around the climate emergency, and of course we have a role in that space,” he told Times Radio.

“Where people sign up to commitments on climate change, it is perhaps our job to make sure that what they are really doing reflects what they have signed up to.”

Full story (£)

April 26, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Should Unvaccinated and Obese Be Penalized by Government?

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 23, 2021

“Vaccine refusal will come at a cost — for all of us,” Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer for The Atlantic, proclaims in an April 10, 2021, political commentary.1 Unvaccinated individuals “will have higher health care costs,” he says, and the vaccinated will have to foot the bill, either through taxes or insurance premiums.

This argument could have been made for decades, and can still be made today, for any number of groups. Obese individuals have far higher health care costs than those of normal weight. Insulin resistant people and those with Type 2 diabetes end up costing the health care system enormous sums. Who pays for them?

Overall, healthy individuals — people who generally do what they can to take good care of themselves to prevent chronic conditions — have always paid for those who are less particular about their diets and lifestyle.

The Economic Costs of Vaccination Vs. Vaccine Refusal

Dovere predicts the economic costs of vaccine refusal will begin to feature heavily as we move forward. He quotes Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who told him,2 “You have a liberty right, and that unfortunately is imposing on everyone else and their liberty right not to have to pay for your stubbornness.” Not surprisingly, Dovere and Inslee both focus on just one side of what needs to be a two- if not four-sided equation.

When making public health policy, you have an obligation to analyze both the benefit and the cost of any given policy. In this case, what might be the cost of vaccine side effects, both in terms of health care costs and lives lost? As of April 1, 2021, VAERS had received 56,869 adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including 7,971 serious injuries and 2,342 deaths.3 By April 13, the had updated that death toll to 3,005.4

What might be the cost if the vaccines don’t work and you get sick anyway? As of April 15, 2021, some 5,800 Americans who had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 had been diagnosed with COVID-19 post-vaccination; 396 (7%) required hospitalization and 74 died.5 These cases are popping up all over the world.

The vaccines are not foolproof. In fact, so-called “breakthrough cases,” meaning cases in which a fully vaccinated individual is diagnosed with COVID-19 are to be expected. I’m not sure why anyone is surprised, seeing how the vaccine makers have acknowledged that the mRNA injections are not designed to actually make you immune to SARS-CoV-2.

You can still contract the virus and spread it to others. What the shots may do is lessen your symptoms if and when you get infected with SARS-CoV-2. So, of course people can still get sick, as they did before. Some will require hospitalization. Some will die — just like they did previously, before the vaccine.

Then there’s the question of whether vaccinated individuals end up being more susceptible to variants of the virus than unvaccinated individuals. Preliminary research6,7,8,9 found that people who had received both doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine were eight times more susceptible to contracting the South African variant of SARS-CoV-2, called B.1.351, (5.4% compared to 0.7%).

Unfortunately, the study was too small to glean any information about outcomes, so we don’t know whether they developed milder or more serious illness than unvaccinated people sickened by the same variant.

Either way, if vaccinated people are more susceptible to more dangerous variants (which they claim B.1351 is), why assume that unvaccinated people would incur higher health care costs? Variants are now cropping up all over the place, so maybe vaccinated people will end up being responsible for a greater share of medical expenses. Maybe, if they have milder illness and unvaccinated have more serious illness, the costs might end up about the same for each group.

May There Be Economic Benefits to Vaccine Refusal?

In my view, the notion that COVID-19 vaccines will end this pandemic is an illogical fallacy since these shots do not provide actual immunity. The fizz in Dovere’s argument starts going flat on that basis alone. But there’s much more.

To really determine what’s best for public health, you’d also want to do the benefit and cost analysis of not vaccinating and relying on naturally-acquired immunity in combination with immune-boosting strategies instead, such as improving vitamin D levels across the entire population, for example.

Only when you have made all of those calculations — the benefit and cost of vaccinating, and the benefit and cost of not vaccinating — can you compare the two and begin to make statements about how certain groups of people may incur higher health care costs, and which strategy is likely to save the most lives. As of right now, it’s pure guesswork as to who’s going to cost more in the long run.

For example, I don’t know of any actual data showing that the health of people who are planning to forgo the vaccine place them at increased risk of serious COVID-19. If I were to guess, and this is pure speculation, people who have decided not to get vaccinated may be doing so because a) they know they’re in a low-risk category and/or b) they are health-conscious people who feel confident that they can prevent and/or treat COVID-19 in other cost-effective ways, should they get sick.

There are a lot of data that need to be compiled and analyzed before we can start declaring the COVID-19 vaccination campaign a public health care success, let alone a cost-saving imperative.

Appeal to Illogical Reasoning

Dovere goes on to discuss some of the messaging campaigns employed to lure people out of their vaccine hesitancy:10

“Two appeals seem to work best: First, the vaccines are safe, and they’re more effective than the flu vaccine. Second, you deserve this, and getting vaccinated will help preserve your liberty and encourage the government to lift restrictions.

(That last idea is what Jerry Falwell Jr. focused on in the vaccination selfie he posted11 this week, captioned, ‘Please get vaccinated so our nutcase of a governor will have less reasons for mindless restrictions!’) Inslee hopes that emphasizing those points will persuade more Republican men to get their shots.”

Sometimes it can help to spell out a logical fallacy using different words. (Personally, I believe Falwell was simply trying to be funny, but Dovere and Inslee have apparently seized the “lift restrictions” angle as a social conditioning opportunity, so that’s really what I’m addressing here.)

One rewrite of Falwell’s plea could be: “Please ignore your current health status and potential vaccine risks and just obey so that our governor will have less reason to impose unconstitutional and unscientific limitations on our basic rights and freedoms.”

In my view, a more appropriate way to prevent “mindless restrictions” would be to peacefully disobey and/or take the governor to court, as has been done to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Supreme Court has ruled against him no less than six times, finding he abused his power, overstepped his authority and violated the Constitution with his pandemic restrictions on churches.12

Urging someone to take a vaccine to prevent an elected official — who can be unseated — from implementing unscientific and/or unconstitutional restrictions is hardly rational. Let’s not forget that cost-benefit analyses13 have actually been done for lockdowns — perhaps one of the most mindless of restrictions — and the cost is far greater than the benefit.

The cost of the lockdowns in the U.K., in terms of Wellbeing Years (WELLBY), is five times greater than might optimistically be saved, and may in reality be anywhere from 50 times to 87 times greater. The cost for lockdowns in Canada is at least 10 times greater than the benefit.

In Australia, the minimum cost is 6.6 times higher, and in the U.S., the cost is estimated to be at least 5.2 times higher than the benefit of lockdowns. A cost-benefit analysis performed for New Zealand, which looked at the cost of adding just five extra days of “COVID-19 alert level 4” found the cost in Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) was 94.9 times higher than the benefit.

Should We Penalize Obesity and Vitamin D Deficiency?

If it’s determined that unvaccinated individuals need to be penalized socially, financially or otherwise, then how can we not also penalize other choices that significantly add to the COVID-19 burden? We know, for example, that vitamin D deficiency significantly raises your risk of COVID-19. In one analysis,14 82.2% of COVID-19 patients were vitamin D deficient.

I published a scientific review15 on the impact of vitamin D in COVID-19 in October 2020, co-written with William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel. You can read the paper for free on the journal’s website.

Another major COVID-19 factor is obesity. As reported by CNN16 March 5, 2021, the COVID-19 death rates were more than 10 times higher in countries where more than half the adult population was overweight, compared to countries in which the obesity rate was below 50%. The COVID-19 death rates also rose in tandem with the prevalence of obesity, thereby strengthening the link, according to the report, released by the World Obesity Federation.

At the lowest end is Vietnam, which has an obesity rate of 18.3% and a COVID-19 death rate of 0.04 per 100,000. Toward the high end is the U.S., which has an obesity rate of 67.9% and a COVID-19 death rate of 152.49 per 100,000. (Of course, this report used COVID-19 mortality statistics that have been proven to be wildly exaggerated, as detailed in my interview with Dr. Henele.)

Making an already dire situation worse, recent data17 show 42% of U.S. adults have packed on unwanted pounds, with an average weight gain of 29 pounds, since the start of the pandemic. Only 18% report undesired weight loss, with an average weight loss of 26 pounds.

Government Has Ignored the Value of Healthy Population

According to the World Obesity Federation report, obesity was the second most important risk factor for hospitalization and death from COVID-19 — old age being the primary risk factor — and as noted by Johanna Ralston, CEO of the World Obesity Federation:18

“Old age is unavoidable, but the conditions that contribute to overweight and obesity can be highly avoidable if governments step up and we all join forces to reduce the impact of this disease. The failure to address the root causes of obesity over many decades is clearly responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.”

Lead author of the report, Dr. Tim Lobstein, added:19

“Governments have been negligent, and ignored the economic value of a healthy population at their peril. For the last decade they have failed to tackle obesity, despite setting themselves targets at United Nations meetings. COVID-19 is only the latest infection exacerbated by weight issues, but the warning signs were there. We have seen it in the past with MERS, H1N1 and other respiratory diseases.”

Let’s Not Accept Hypocrisy and Double Standards

Even WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus commented on the report saying it “must act as a wake-up call to governments globally,” as “The correlation between obesity and mortality rates from COVID-19 is clear and compelling.”

That said, let’s get back to Dovere’s argument that unvaccinated people are bound to incur higher health care costs due to COVID-19, and therefore there must be some way to penalize those people or force them into compliance.

Using that logic, what, then, do we need to do about obese individuals, whose risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 is anywhere from 40% to 113% greater, and their chances of requiring intensive care 74% higher,20 than that of their non-obese peers? What do we need to do about people who just refuse to get their vitamin D levels up, and end up taking up the lion’s share of hospital beds?

To be clear, I am NOT proposing we penalize people based on their weight, metabolic flexibility or vitamin D status. I do not support that any more than I support penalizing unvaccinated people — and that is the whole point. Most would agree that this would be completely ridiculous.

My point is, if you cannot fathom penalizing obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes or vitamin D deficiency — conditions known to significantly raise your risk of severe COVID-19 — then how could you possibly consider penalizing an unvaccinated person based on that single parameter alone?

The question is especially valid because, again, vaccinated persons can contract and spread SARS-CoV-2 like anyone else. It’s really unclear how vaccinated people are “safer” than unvaccinated ones, when the only person standing to gain from these shots is the person getting it (in the form of milder symptoms when sickened).

Are You ‘Pure’ Enough for Your Government?

I think it’s important to realize that the COVID-19 vaccine campaign is less about protecting public health and more about creating the infrastructure and psychological climate required for the implementation of global tyranny, which will likely begin with the introduction of vaccine passports that are very similar to the China social credit system.

As discussed in “Vaccines Are the New ‘Purity Test,’” it can almost be likened to a loyalty test. Or perhaps it could best be described as a totalitarian submission test?

Getting private companies to require these vaccine passports only makes sense if there is a strong vaccine push, and this is one of many clues as to what’s really behind the stated “need” for the whole world to get vaccinated.

We’re not all at risk for COVID-19. For a vast majority of individuals, the vaccines make little or no sense, as for young, healthy individuals, their risks outweigh the benefit. Now they are pushing to vaccinate children, whose risk of getting COVID-19 is well-established as being profoundly minuscule.

They are at exponentially higher risk from many other factors. There are currently fewer than 500 children who are reported to have died from COVID-19, even with the massively manipulated causes of death. Remember, if you had a positive COVID test and died from terminal cancer or a motorcycle accident, you were classified as a COVID-19 death.

As you can see from the graph below, there are 10 higher risks of death than COVID-19 for children. To be logically consistent, the government would need to be equally rigid about addressing all of these causes as aggressively as they are pursuing COVID-19 vaccination for children.

10 leading causes of child and adolescent death in the U.S.

But it’s not about simply getting a vaccine into your arm. Ultimately, it’s about getting you tied into the digital system being launched in the form of vaccine passports. As explained by former Clinton adviser and author Naomi Wolf (whom I will be interviewing shortly) in a March 28, 2021, interview with Fox News’ Steve Hilton:21,22

“‘Vaccine passport’ sounds like a fine thing if you don’t understand what those platforms can do. I’m [the] CEO of a tech company, I understand what these platforms can do. It is not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about your data.

Once this rolls out, you don’t have a choice about being part of the system. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all. It can be merged with your Paypal account, with your digital currency. Microsoft is already talking about merging it with payment plans.

Your network can be sucked up. It geolocates you everywhere you go. Your credit history can be included. All of your medical and health history can be included … It is absolutely so much more than a vaccine pass … I cannot stress enough that it has the power to turn off your life, or to turn on your life, to let you engage in society or be marginalized.”

Dangerous Curves Ahead

Wolf also points out the horrific history of IBM, which developed a sophisticated system of punch cards that allowed Nazi Germany to create a two-tier society and ultimately facilitated the rounding up of Jews for extermination. Fast-forward to today, and IBM is now a leader in the vaccine passport business. I wrote about this in “IBM Colluded With Hitler, Now Makes Vaccine Passports.”

In Nazi Germany, the obsession with purity — both in terms of hygiene and race theory — drove the genocide of Jews, the old, the handicapped and the mentally challenged.

In present day, the public narrative has eerily followed Nazi Germany’s playbook for genocide, starting with the scapegoating of healthy people, as the rapid spread of COVID-19 was blamed on asymptomatic individuals not properly masking, social distancing and self-isolating.

That then grew into the nurturing of prejudice against people who refuse to wear masks, and now we’re seeing the narrative building toward persecution of those who do not want to get the vaccine. It will start with discrimination, and already, we’re hearing talk of how only vaccinated people ought to have the right to partake in certain social activities. If that is tolerated, then outright persecution will be the inevitable next step.

This is why I reject and counter commentaries such as that by Dovere. These half-baked, one-sided, persecutory arguments must be challenged at every turn, because they only lead us one way. And unless you’re part of the technocratic elite, you — regardless of how you feel about vaccination right now — do not want to end up there.

 

Sources and References

April 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

As demand for natural gas skyrockets in booming China, Russia says it’s ready to meet Beijing’s needs

By Jonny Tickle | RT | April 21, 2021

China’s fast-growing economy has an insatiable need for natural gas, and Russia is ready to heavily ramp up its cross-border supplies. That’s according to Viktor Zubkov, the chairman of Russian energy giant Gazprom.

As things stand, gas is sent from Far-Eastern Yakutia to China through the Gazprom-operated Power of Siberia pipeline, which first became operational in December 2019. Its construction secured another economic partnership for Moscow, while its gas connections to Europe face increasing resistance.

On Wednesday, when speaking to Moscow news agency TASS, Zubkov revealed that China’s demand for gas increases every two years at the rate of the entire capacity of the Power of Siberia pipeline, which transports 38 billion cubic meters every year.

According to Zubkov, China has already become the largest importer and the third-biggest consumer of natural gas globally.

“It will remain the most promising gas market for the foreseeable future as well,” he said. “We are sure that China needs additional gas supplies from Russia, and Gazprom is ready to supply them.”

He also noted that Chinese gas consumption is growing at an accelerated, ‘double-digit’ rate and in the next 15 years could double from its current level.

In recent years, Russia and China started to move closer economically, with both countries sending a large volume of exports across their shared border. Beijing is now Moscow’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade exceeding $100 billion annually.

“Asia acts as a locomotive in the development of the global economy,” Zubkov concluded. “In 2020, the world economy faced its worst pandemic crisis in recent memory, and it was Asia, with its strong growth, that laid the foundation for a global recovery from the downturn.”

On April 13, Gazprom approved the analysis of a project to build the Soyuz Vostok gas pipeline through Mongolia to China, another route that would send more fuel to Asia.

April 21, 2021 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

What will we get for a multitrillion-dollar energy policy?

BY PETER Z. GROSSMAN – THE HILL – 04/14/21

President Biden has made no secret of his plans to spend trillions of dollars on climate policies, which in his case means substituting renewable energy (especially wind and solar) for fossil fuels.

But the question we should all be asking is: What will those trillions get us?

In reality, close to nothing. That is, the U.S. will expend enormous resources to replace one vast electric system with a different one, which will do nothing any better than the one we have now. Well, it will emit less carbon dioxide, but its effect on global temperatures will be negligible.

Moreover, there are other less costly and disruptive ways to reduce CO2 emissions besides erecting 60,000 wind turbines and 500 million solar panels, as Biden plans. Yet all that new energy technology will just provide light and heat that run our appliances and charge our electric automobiles — the same as the technology we have now.

Actually, the new technology will in many ways be worse because it will be prone to blackouts, kill endangered birds and bats, raise electric rates and deface farmlands and wilderness areas with gigantic wind turbines, newly carved access roads and thousands of miles of new high-voltage power lines strung across thousands of steel towers.

Of course, Biden and members of his administration would argue that the new system will give us the ultimate prize: life itself. Otherwise, because of climate change, we face an “existential crisis.” Or to put it bluntly: if we keep our current system, we’re all going to die — soon.

On that score, what’s several trillion dollars? Shouldn’t we spend all of our money to keep humanity alive?

Except are those really the stakes?

Forecasts of climate cataclysms have been around for many years. A recent article tracked 79 predictions of climate-related catastrophes. The first ones were made in the year of the inaugural Earth Day in 1970; some much more recently. But of those predictions, 48 have passed their prophesied date of calamity

They have all been wrong. The rest are pending but why should we believe them?

Expertise?

Many of the 48 failed forecasts were made by scientists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), regarded by many as the “gold standard” of scientific credibility on climate, authored several of the failed predictions.

For example, the United Nations agency announced in 2007 that if emissions had not started to fall by 2015 we would lose any chance to hold global temperatures below catastrophic levels. A few years later the deadline was extended to 2030. In the meantime, emissions have continued to rise while the rate of warming has not.

Other famously wrong predictions have been made by public figures, especially politicians. Al Gore gave the world 10 years in 2008 “to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution, lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” The way to do it? He said we needed to remake our entire energy system in those 10 years — lots of windmills and solar panels.

That date was extended to 2030 (or 2050) when, according to another politician, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

Fortunately, Gore was out of office and couldn’t spend the vast sums needed to, as he believed, save the world, and AOC was a relatively powerless new member of Congress.

Biden, on the other hand, can act and has shown he intends to. But his belief that life on Earth will vanish if we don’t act is at least as farfetched as any of the 48.

Most of the apocalyptic forecasts are based on a scenario called “Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP),” created for the IPCC, which was intended as a worst case, projecting a rise in average temperatures by about 5°C, which would be courting worldwide disaster. For some reason, RCP 8.5 became the business-as-usual scenario in much of the media, scholarship and political discourse on climate.

But it isn’t.

We are not on that pathway. Much more realistic assessments suggest that we are on track for Earth’s temperature to rise 1°C-3°C. At the higher end especially, there will be many problems for the world in the second half of this century. But extinction? It’s not plausible.

In that light, spending trillions on windmills and solar panels seems a waste of resources. In economics, we always ask what are the trade-offs. The trillions here could be used to directly help people to escape poverty. It could be used for better health care, improved educational opportunities, more research on fighting pandemics, adapting to climate change and so on.

Proponents of Biden’s energy policies claim that they will not only save life on Earth but will also have all sorts of social benefits.

April 19, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment