By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 5, 2022
A senior executive at the multinational banking and financial services company Rabobank has called for personalized carbon wallets that give individual citizens “emission rights” and allow wealthier citizens to buy emission rights from those who can’t afford to fly.
Barbara Baarsma, who is the CEO of Rabo Carbon Bank, a division of Rabobank that allows its customers to buy and sell CO2 credits, announced her proposal for personalized carbon wallets during an appearance on the Dutch radio station BNR Newsradio.
“What if we now have all the remaining rights we still have when it comes to the emission of CO2 equivalents, greenhouse gases?” Baarsma said. “If we just let everyone start the Netherlands distributing emission rights and that every household or every citizen and amount get emission rights until we have money.”
Baarsma continued by proposing that these emission rights could be managed via a personalized “carbon wallet” and noted that wealthier citizens who want to fly can buy emissions rights from citizens that don’t have the money to fly.
She added that these personalized carbon wallets represented an opportunity for those who can’t afford to fly to get “a little more money” and outlined other ways wealthier people could continue living elaborate lifestyles by buying carbon credits from citizens with less money.
“He lives in smaller rented houses and I live in a large house so I need more emission rights to heat my house and so people with a narrow wallet can also earn something from greening my number,” Baarsma said.
After the interview, Rabobank came out in support of Baarsma’s statements about personalized carbon wallets.
“We support this as a thought experiment,” a Rabobank spokeswoman said. “It’s not reality.”
Baarsma’s comments come just a few months after another high-ranking executive, J. Michael Evans, the President of Chinese multinational Alibaba Group, announced that his company is working on tech that tracks a person’s individual “carbon footprint.” Evans discussed the project at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting and boasted that the tech would monitor people’s travel, eating habits, and other consumption. Like Baarsma’s personal carbon wallet proposal, this Alibaba Group carbon tracker will also tie back to carbon credits where people can earn money for making “low carbon choices.”
These carbon tracking proposals are one of many invasive surveillance proposals being pushed by powerful institutions. Data-grabbing biometric health monitoring systems are being built into cars, biometrics are being associated with phone numbers, and there are even proposals for turning people’s heartbeats into a digital ID.
Samizdat – August 5, 2022
Beijing has cancelled a meeting between Chinese and US defense officials following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that Beijing has decided to cancel bilateral working meetings between US and Chinese defense officials and halt cooperation between the two countries on maritime safety.
The Foreign Ministry also said that China temporarily suspends cooperation with the United States on issues such as repatriation of illegal migrants, judicial assistance, transnational crime, and climate change.
On August 2, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan on a trip she claimed shows the US’ unwavering commitment to the island, as Reuters put it.
Pelosi’s visit, however, was met with outrage from China, as Beijing regards the island as an inalienable part of the country.
On August 4, shortly after Pelosi’s departure from the island, China launched live fire drills in several areas around Taiwan.
The United States officially supports Mainland China’s claim to the island.
Computing Forever | August 4, 2022
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By Igor Kuznetsov – Samizdat – 04.08.2022
The delay on the Tyra gas field, which before closure amid the so-called “Green switch” provided 90 percent of Denmark’s gas output, has appeared to cloud the Nordic country’s ambitions to help alleviate the current energy crisis.
Amid the dire situation on Europe’s energy market, record-high prices and uncertainty associated with future deliveries of Russian gas due to sanctions, Denmark has been pinning its hopes on the Tyra gas field in the North Sea to assure regular deliveries and relieve some of the economic pain.
However, TotalEnergies, which operates the Tyra field on behalf of the Danish Underground Consortium (DUC), said in a press release that the work on rebuilding the field will be delayed.
The delay means that gas from the Tyra field will only be delivered during the winter season 2023-24 at the earliest. So far, the expectation has been that the Tyra field could reopen in June next year.
COVID-19 has been blamed for the delay, as the pandemic made it more difficult to obtain manpower and materials for the shipyard in Batam in Indonesia, where the platform for the field is being built. Therefore, it won’t be completed in time.
“We take the current energy crisis in Denmark and Europe seriously. Therefore, we are mobilizing significant additional resources offshore so that we can whenever possible compensate for the delays that have occurred at the shipyard and get Tyra into operation”, Martin Rune Pedersen, director of TotalEnergies Denmark, told TV2.
Pedersen described the Tyra field as a “cornerstone of future Danish gas production”. Overall, oil and gas has been produced in the Danish part of the North Sea since 1972, creating workplaces both onshore and offshore. Before its closure in September 2019 for environmental reasons as part of the much-touted “Green switch”, the Tyra field accounted for 90 percent of the natural gas produced in Denmark.
When fully ready, Tyra II is expected to produce 2.8 billion cubic meters of gas per year.
Denmark’s total gas consumption in 2021 was 2.15 billion cubic meters, which corresponds to 0.4 percent of the EU’s total gas consumption.
Today, wholly 800,000 Danes in the country of 5.8 million live in homes powered by gas, which has cast doubt over the feasibility of the government’s plans to go fully green in a matter of years.
In June, the Danish Energy Agency issued an early warning due to uncertainty about the Nordic country’s gas supplies, calling on fellow Danes to save energy. In order to achieve energy self-sufficiency, Denmark plans a drastic expansion of wind and solar energy production. At the same time, it will also boost domestic production of gas, despite previous plans to halt it entirely.
Faced with the prospect of power outages and rationing in the coming winter, EU leaders have adopted a “voluntary” target to reduce gas usage by 15 percent through March 2023 in order to evade the looming crisis.
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | August 4, 2022
A shipping expert gives his views on the latest climate regulations for international shipping:
A new report found that more than 75% of ships will not meet the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) new Environmental social and corporate governance (ESG) index aimed at decarbonizing the industry. This means that many ship owners will be forced to slow ships down to reduce emissions but doing so could deepen the global food and energy crisis by reducing available ship capacity.
“IMO decarbonization targets will cause ships to slow down delaying food shipments and people will starve,” a global security analyst told gCaptain. “How many people will die as a result of the IMO’s ESG efforts is unknown at this time. I don’t think most shipowners even understand the severity of the EEXI threat but it could be millions of lives.”
IMO EEXI ESG INDEX
“Prior to any efficiency modifications, more than 75% of the fleet — including bulkers, tankers, and containerships — will not be compliant with the Energy Efficiency Existing Index (EEXI) that will enter into force next year,” said cargo analyst Joey Daly, in the new VesselsValue report.
The challenge of decarbonization will extend to all areas of shipping, and EEXI alone will present a myriad of challenges to owners, operators and financiers. Simon Hodgkinson, who heads loss prevention at West P&I, has suggested that the new rule could be one of the most significant new shipping regulations in years. He believes it has the potential to shift the entire industry.
The International Maritime Organization’s Energy Efficiency Existing Index is a voluntary, incentive-based system that encourages ships to improve their energy efficiency. The Index uses a vessel’s speed, cargo-carrying capacity, and other factors to calculate a numerical score. The higher the score, the more energy efficient the vessel. More specifically EEXI (Energy Efficiency Existing Ships Index) is a measure of a ship’s CO2 emissions per transport work. It is similar to the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI), which has been in force since 2013, but applies to existing ships rather than new ones.
The Index is designed to motivate shipowners and operators to invest in energy efficiency measures that will reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Ships have to attain EEXI approval once in a lifetime, by the first periodical survey in 2023 at the latest.
Slow Steaming
Ship owners can meet the target by building new eco-friendly ships, investing in new decarbonization technology, and upgrading existing ships to burn cleaner fuels like LNG, or by slow steaming.
Slow steaming is a technique used by shippers to reduce fuel consumption and emissions by slowing down vessels. The process involves sailing at a slower speed, typically around 50% of the vessel’s maximum speed. This can be done by reducing the revolutions per minute (RPM) of the propellers.
While older ships can be retrofitted with devices to lower emissions and meet EEXI requirements, analysts say the fix most ship owners will take is just to go slower, with a 10% drop in cruising speeds slashing fuel usage by almost 30%, according to marine sector lender Danish Ship Finance.
“They’re basically being told to either improve the ship or slow down,” said Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill Ocean Transportation, the freight division of commodities trading house Cargill, which leases more than 600 vessels to ferry mainly food and energy products around the world.
This strategy also reduces the amount of wear and tear on the vessel, which can help extend the life of the ship. But there is one ancillary effect: a potentially massive reduction in fleet capacity.
Full story here.
As I understand it, the new regulations are voluntary, so will likely be ignored by many countries. However, shipping lines ignoring the diktat may find themselves punished by banks and insurers, operating to strict ESG rules:
“As the IMO prepares to rate the energy efficiency of ships on a EEXI scale of A to E, shipping companies will come under increasing pressure to meet these targets not just from regulators but also from banks.
In 2019, a group of banks committed to efforts to cut carbon emissions when lending to shipping companies. This group of banks established the Poseidon Principles, a global framework that is consistent with IMO policies on environmental grounds. As of today, 28 banks have signed on to the Poseidon Principles.
The Poseidon Principles are fairly new but are already having a ripple effect on finance and insurance, as banks and other lenders begin to factor in a company’s carbon emissions when making lending decisions.
What this means for shipowners is that even if they find a way around the IMO’s ESG regulations, steaming at normal speeds could increase their carbon scores and have a negative effect on financing options and stock prices”
This demented obsession with decarbonisation brings a painful dilemma:
Slow steaming means in effect less global shipping capacity, leading to a potential bottleneck on supplies. As the article explains:
“Is a reduction of capacity really a troubling problem? Yes.
Nobody is calculating the price of a good ESG score in terms of human lives,” said one global security analyst who wished to stay anonymous. “The question is no longer if people will starve to death because of IMO decarbonization targets. The question is how many?”
The most troubling fact from our conversations with global security analysts was that millions could die before famine even sets in.“
And longer shipping times mean higher journey costs, despite the savings on fuel, adding to the cost of everything we import.
The alternative, of course, is to simply build more ships to bring shipping capacity back into equilibrium. The building of these ships will, of course, carry an enormous carbon footprint of its own, eliminating any potential savings from fuel efficiency for many years to come.
And China?
Any discussion about international shipping must take into account the role of China, who are believed to control the world’s second-largest shipping fleet by gross tons and constructed over a third of the world’s vessels in 2019.
Will they follow these rules?
One of the reasons for their global dominance of shipping lies in a complicated and opaque system of formal and informal state support that is unrivalled in size and scope, and which includes subsidised finance from state banks, who are unlikely to be concerned with ESG.
While China may pay lip service to these new regulations, given their total disregard for ESG in other industries, I would strongly suspect that they will just carry on building up their shipping industry, taking advantage of the West’s weakness.
And the West’s economic dependence on China will grow ever more dangerous.
Samizdat | August 3, 2022
The United Nations is in dire need of reform and the Security council must be “democratized” by expanding its representation, Russian foreign ministry official Alexey Drobinin has written in a keynote article published on Wednesday.
Drobinin, the Director of the Department of Foreign Policy Planning, commented on the current state of international relations and came to the conclusion that “more conscious effort and imagination is needed” to reform the UN.
He pointed out that the organization’s current agenda, which is primarily fueled by the West, is not necessarily in line with the interests of the majority of its international members.
Drobinin suggested that for most UN members the most important issues are things like access to cheap energy sources rather than the transition to “green” technologies, socio-economic development rather than human rights “in an ultra-liberal interpretation,” and security and sovereign equality rather than the artificial imposition of electoral democracy according to Western patterns.
He added that another topic that has once-again become relevant is the process of decolonization and ending the neo-colonial practices by transnational corporations in regards to the development of natural resources in developing countries.
However, international organizations such as the UN have essentially been “privatized” by the West, Drobinin points out. He suggests that the UN Secretariat and the offices of special envoys and special representatives of the Secretary General have all been saturated with the West’s own “tested” personnel, and that this also extended to non-UN organizations as well, such as the OPCW.
“The saddest thing is that this rust is eating away at the ‘holy of holies’ of the UN system – the Security Council,” Drobinin writes. “It devalues the meaning of the right of veto, which the founding fathers endowed to the permanent members of the Security Council with one single purpose: to prevent the interests of any of the great powers from being infringed, and thus save the world from a direct clash between them, which in the nuclear age is fraught with catastrophic consequences.”
While there are no “clear and simple recipes for correcting the situation here,” the diplomat continues, “clearly more conscious effort and imagination is needed when it comes to UN reform.” He goes on to suggest that the Security Council needs to be “democratized,” first of all by expanding the representation of African, Asian and Latin American countries.
Drobinin suggests that whatever the fate of international organizations such as the UN, WTO, IMF, World Bank or G20 is, the divisive policies of the West makes it “an absolute imperative for the coming years to form a new infrastructure of international relations.”
“After their frankly perfidious decisions and actions against Russia, its citizens and tangible assets, we simply cannot afford the luxury of not thinking about alternatives. Especially since many of our friends who have lost faith in Western benevolence and decency are thinking about the same thing,” the diplomat surmised.
By Robert Inlakesh | Samizdat | August 3, 2022
A Syrian-flagged ship named the Laodicea that docked in the Lebanese port of Tripoli was detained last Saturday, preventing desperately needed flour and barley from reaching people in the Middle East. The move came after Western threats against Beirut and unsubstantiated claims from Kiev that the cargo was stolen from Ukraine. The ship, which has been on a US blacklist since 2015 for allegedly carrying shipments from sanctioned Crimea, is now under investigation.
On Friday, allegations emerged in Western media, citing the Ukrainian embassy in Beirut, that “stolen” flour and barley had been transferred to the Lebanese port of Tripoli and that Kiev had warned the Lebanese government against buying the grain. The news was said to have sparked protests from Western governments “warning” Lebanon’s Foreign Minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, over the allegedly stolen cargo. It later turned out that Kiev possessed no evidence that the flour and barley aboard the ship was from Ukraine. Despite this, Lebanon has now seized the ship and will act according to legal proceedings on the issue, after reported Western pressure.
The Ukrainian embassy in Beirut told Reuters that “the ship has traveled from a Crimean port that is closed to international shipping, carrying 5,000 tonnes of barley and 5,000 tonnes of flour that we suspect was taken from Ukrainian stores,” without presenting evidence to support the claim. An official from a private firm responsible for the import of the grain, Loyal Agro Co LTD, based in Turkey, not only denied that the goods were Ukrainian, but also clarified that the ship was carrying 8,000 tonnes of flour and 1,700 tonnes of barley in total. The vessel was also said to have been seeking private buyers in Lebanon, not a sale to the Lebanese government, and was destined to travel on to Syria after its stop in Tripoli.
Additionally, the Russian embassy in Beirut said that it had “no information regarding the Syrian vessel or a cargo brought to Lebanon by a private company.” An official at the Lebanese port authority also stated that there was “nothing wrong” with the cargo aboard the ship. None of this however, was enough to prevent the issue being pursued and for Lebanon to be threatened.
What makes this issue troubling, is that – without evidence – Western nations and Kiev can openly pressure Lebanon to keep much needed supplies away from its people, in this case potentially forever and for at least 72 hours under detention. The country is currently suffering its worst ever economic collapse, enduring shortages in food, medicine, electricity and essential goods. According to some UN estimates, some 78% of the Lebanese population now live in poverty. The food shortage has led to long queues at bakeries, sometimes resulting in gunfire and brawls between people fighting over the limited supply of bread. The Ukraine crisis has made Lebanon’s predicament even tougher, with a lack of flow of supplies from Ukraine and difficulties bringing in Russian goods due to sanctions. The Western “Caesar Act” sanctions against Syria have also made the situation even worse, as Lebanon has historically benefited greatly from its bigger neighbor.
What Kiev is doing, by threatening the future of bilateral relations between Lebanon and Ukraine over this issue, could be interpreted as blackmail. Ukraine has 20 million tonnes of wheat that it still hasn’t exported and a severing of relations with Beirut would mean that Lebanon could potentially miss out on acquiring it during a food shortage. The Lebanese government is clearly in a weak position and Kiev, backed by the power of NATO, is now attempting to bully Beirut over unsubstantiated claims that are denied by all sides, notwithstanding that officials won’t even state the allegation with certainty.
Another issue here is the double-standard at play, whilst Western nations suffer economically themselves, there is no hesitation at sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine every other week. Yet when it comes to simply amending sanctions, after pledging to do so, in order to allow Egypt to send gas to ease the energy crisis in Lebanon, Washington still refuses to allow it, a year later.
Instead, based upon unsubstantiated claims, Lebanon is forced to suffer even more by having basic food supplies dangled over its head. Whilst the West acts holier-than-thou on the issue of unsubstantiated claims of Ukraine’s grain being sold by private firms in Lebanon, it seemingly forgets that the US illegally occupies neighboring Syria’s most fertile agricultural lands, in addition to the majority of its oil and gas fields.
America has repeatedly been accused of smuggling Syrian grain and oil into Iraq, resources which should belong to the Syrian government and could be part of the answer to Lebanon’s current shortage.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | July 28, 2022
If my posting has been a little light for the last month or so, it’s because I’ve been working on a big Report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the subject of energy storage as a means to back up electricity generation from wind and solar facilities. The Report is basically finished, and now going through an editing process. It will probably be published some time in September.
In doing the research for the Report, I have had occasion to look carefully into the plans of many countries and U.S. states that claim to be the “leaders” in climate virtue, specifically on the subject of how they intend to reach the goal of Net Zero carbon emissions from generation of electricity. These climate “leaders” include, in Europe, Germany and the UK, and in the U.S., California and New York. One would think that for any jurisdiction pursuing Net Zero ambitions, and seeking to abolish use of fossil fuels, it would be completely imperative that some energy storage solution absolutely must be found to provide back-up for the electricity system when the wind and sun are not producing. But what my research has shown is that every one of these jurisdictions seeking to be the leader toward Net Zero has given astoundingly insufficient consideration to the energy storage problem.
I previously have covered some of the more incredible deficiencies in the Net Zero planning of these places, for example in “Can California Really Achieve 85% Carbon-Free Electricity By 2030?” on May 16, and “And The Winner Is, Germany!” on June 29.
The single most astounding universal failure of all jurisdictions pursuing Net Zero is the failure to pursue any sort of working prototype or demonstration project of a Net Zero electricity system before committing the entire jurisdiction to the project on the basis of a blank check to be paid by the taxpayers and ratepayers. Who has ever heard of such a thing? in the 1880s, when Thomas Edison wanted to start building central station power plants to supply electricity for his new devices like incandescent lightbulbs, he began by building a prototype facility in London under the Holborn Viaduct, and followed that with a larger demonstration plant on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan that only supplied electricity to customers within a few square blocks. Only after those had been demonstrated as successful did a larger build-out begin. Similarly, the provision of nuclear power began with small government-funded prototypes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, followed by larger demonstration projects in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Only in the late 1960s, twenty years into the effort and after feasibility and cost had been demonstrated, were the first large-scale commercial nuclear reactors built. No competent person would take any other approach.
But somehow our politicians have now become so filled with hubris that they think they can just order up a functioning wind/solar electricity system and assume that backup energy storage devices will magically get invented and it will all work fine and not be financially ruinous, all by some arbitrarily-ordered date in the 2030s.
Today, all the mentioned jurisdictions and many more have embarked on ambitious Net Zero plans, and yet there does not exist anywhere in the world a functioning prototype or demonstration project that has actually achieved Net Zero in electricity generation, or anything even close. Indeed, it’s worse than that. There is a fairly substantial project that set out to achieve Net Zero (although they weren’t using the term at the time, which was 2014), and has fallen remarkably short. That project is on the island of El Hierro, one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. El Hierro installed a collection of wind turbines and a pumped storage/hydro reservoir as back-up to great fanfare, but it struggles to achieve 50% of the electricity from the wind/storage system over the course of a year. The rest comes from a diesel generator. The system operator puts out monthly statistics (with substantial lag), typically with excited verbiage about “tons of carbon emissions saved,” without ever admitting that the system has totally failed in its original goal of getting rid of the fossil fuel piece. Instead they now have three redundant systems for providing the electricity — wind turbines, hydro reservoir and turbines, and the diesel generator — all of which must be paid for, and all to provide the same electricity that the diesel generator was fully capable of providing on its own. The cost has been calculated at about 80 euro cents per KWh, roughly 7 to 8 times average U.S. consumer rates; but the cost is largely hidden from El Hierro ratepayers by subsidies from the EU and government of Spain.
My research also covered in depth the question of how much energy storage would be needed for various jurisdictions to fully back up a predominantly wind/solar generation system without any use of fossil fuels. Credible calculations previously discussed here have included the calculation of Roger Andrews, done in 2018, that either California or Germany would require at least about 25,000 GWh of energy storage to back up a fully wind/solar generation system for a year without use of fossil fuels; and a calculation by Ken Gregory done on very similar methodology in late 2021 showing that the full U.S. (lower 48 states) would require about 250,000 GWh of storage for the same purpose. These are truly huge numbers.
Facing such requirements to reach Net Zero and banish fossil fuels from the electricity system, the plans of these jurisdictions for acquisition of storage are quite shocking. The consultancy Wood Mackenzie reported on April 11, 2022 that Germany had announced plans to acquire all of 8.91 GWh of energy storage by 2031 — a ridiculously puny amount if Germany is actually serious about Net Zero. Utility Dive reported on April 12, 2022 that New York had plans to acquire all of 6 GW of storage (likely corresponding to about 24 GWh, since the batteries are to be of the lithium-ion type that generally have capacity for four hours of discharge at full capacity). This figure is only slightly less puny than Germany’s. Another piece from Utility Dive on April 6, 2022 reported that California’s regulators had ordered utilities to acquire what would be the equivalent of about 42 GWh of storage as part of the Net Zero plans of that jurisdiction. All of these storage acquisition plans are in the range of about 0.1% to 0.2% of the storage that would actually be needed to achieve the Net Zero goal.
So what will the future of energy usage actually look like in these places as fossil fuels get phased out and wind and solar take over, with woefully insufficient energy storage to cover the intermittencies? To get an idea, let’s take another look at the Report for California put out by consultancy Energy Innovations on May 9, with the title “Achieving an Equitable and Reliable 85 Percent Clean Electricity System by 2030 in California.” Note that this in not actually Net Zero, but only 85% of same. Here are a few tidbits. First, their graphic on the nature of the transition:
We’re going to have a “paradigm shift” in “RA,” which seems to mean “Resource Adequacy.” Check out that list on the right under “clean reliability resources” — “Energy availability depends on weather.” Are you starting to get the picture now?
Read through the report until you get into pages in the mid-30s, where the subject becomes what they euphemistically call “demand response.” It’s a lot of bafflegab to make it seem oh so pleasant. Excerpt:
Demand-side measures can substitute for supply-side resources and therefore contribute to resource diversity; their increased availability hedges against the risk of deploying new clean supply-side resources too slowly (including generators and storage). For example, the technical report finds that deploying Load Shift could reduce load by 1,500 MW in the early evening hours solar output falls, hedging against battery deployment challenges such as supply chain. . . . Demand-side measures also provide complementary reliability, resiliency, and public safety benefits to supply-side solutions or imports, as they lie closest to the affected load. While centralized generators provide the bulk of our power under most system conditions, they can be rendered less effective or useless under certain disaster conditions.
This is bureaucratese meaning “we’ll turn off your electricity at random times when we feel like it.” Get ready for this, California, Germany, et al. I guess New York is on the same path too, but I have my secret escape plans ready.
By Keean Bexte | The Counter Signal | July 29, 2022
The WEF is pushing for digital IDs to be sewn into people’s clothes to ‘save the planet’ by transitioning from buying to renting clothes to reduce waste.
“This start-up gives clothes digital IDs to help the planet. EON creates online digital passports for garments enabling brands to sell their clothing, again and again, creating more sustainable business models,” a video from the World Economic Forum begins.
The WEF continues, saying that companies will then be able to actively track the clothing they sell, which brings up innumerable privacy concerns not addressed by the Forum.
“The CircularID also lets rands follow garments over their entire life cycle from production to sale and resale, reuse, or recycling.”
The WEF says this is essential, as “fashion” is apparently “one of the world’s most polluting industries.” Thus, companies should be allowed to track their clothes and the wearers, presumably so they can conduct dumpster dives for thrown-out clothing or provide clothing repair and resale services.
“Textiles generate 10% of the world’s CO2 emissions — more than shipping and aviation combined,” the WEF continues.
They add that in the future, such technology will enable companies to transition from selling an ownable product to a rentable product, simultaneously reducing consumers from owners to renters. As the saying goes, “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.”
“57% of old clothes end up in a landfill. This is because brands depend on sales of new clothing. Once the product is sold, they no longer make any money. But digitally connected products open up new, greener ways of profiting, such as rental, repair, and styling, reducing the production of new garments,” explains the WEF.
“5 of the world’s top 20 brands are on board,” the WEF proclaims. “Working with Microsoft, EON aims to bring billions of garments online by 2025.”
By John Roberts | TCW Defending Freedom | July 30, 2022
LATELY I have been listening to interviews with Mattias Desmet, the Belgian psychologist who has popularised, if not invented, the term ‘mass formation’, a sort of mass hypnosis, a condition which he says often leads to tyranny. If I understand him correctly mass formation occurs when people feel estranged from each other and the world around them, they lack purpose and feel out of control. Fear is an important factor in this and frightened people are amongst the easiest to hypnotise since they will unquestionably follow an ‘authoritative’ voice. The door is open for someone to come along and offer them a place to belong, make them feel safe and give them a purpose. Thus the tyrant is born. Desmet contends that although this has happened throughout history it has become more common in modern times because we have become increasingly estranged from nature, and he attributes this to the invention of the clock.
As soon as reliable clocks were available, people in their everyday lives were less influenced by the sun and the seasons. Reliable clocks are a symbol of industrialisation, and this has led to movement of people into cities and consequently less in touch with nature. The mechanisation of agriculture gave us the ability to feed large numbers using very little labour. Cheap energy from oil and coal accelerated this industrialisation. Cities and towns have benefits: it’s easier to provide services including education and health, clean water, power and transport, and as someone who lives in a rural area I am well aware of the difference. This has happened in a very short space of time to a species which has evolved over millennia as part of the natural world. In truth we are as much a part of nature as trees, earthworms, bacteria and viruses (although it’s debatable whether or not the current coronavirus is natural).
There’s a wonderful grounding reality about the natural world. Gravity is all too real if you fall out of a window, and rain, wind and sunshine can make you feel wonderful or damage your health. Childbirth is both joyous and potentially fatal. Relationships can be enriching or toxic.
All this may sound obvious, but doesn’t seem to be for many of our fellow citizens who think that bad things shouldn’t and wouldn’t happen if the State took proper care of us which, of course, it promises to do: that voice of authority again.
This detachment from the real leads to living too much in the head. Your ideas, arguments, your emotions become the greater part of your reality. The constantly chattering voice in your brain becomes louder unless you can ground yourself. This is the default position for many and it can be dangerous. The signs are everywhere.
Climate change is one such situation. As we know all too well, this is the idea that a small increase in the atmosphere of a trace gas which is essential to life is responsible for rising global temperatures, storms, mass extinctions, diseases, and I could go on but you’ve heard it all before. Some say that this is proven to be true and the science is settled and isn’t science a really good way of connecting with the real world? Yes, when it isn’t manipulated for political purposes or carried out by people who think that computer models are the real world.
Talking of modelling takes us to Covid. Policy to deal with the virus was largely driven by models which chimed with certain political aims and gave rise to disastrous consequences. For many years the UK had a pandemic policy based on accumulated data and real-world results of public health interventions, yet this policy was thrown out and its proponents, people at the top of their field, were ignored, smeared or insulted and often all three. Vilification of ‘outsiders’ is another aspect of mass formation. The fact of natural immunity was debunked by people who could not admit to the existence of this wonderful example of the interrelationship between us and the rest of nature.
Now we come to woke, perhaps the most glaring example of living in your head instead of the real world. The hallmark of this is a belief in something that defies logic, history and science (the real thing, not the made-up stuff). No amount of education or reasoning permeates the world that is firmly embedded in the head. The transgender issue is an astonishing example. It wouldn’t be so bad if these ideas stayed inside the head but they escape into the real world where they can have serious consequences: men in female prisons and hospital wards, and male athletes competing in women’s sports events for example. I have heard of midwives saying that a man can have a cervix. I suppose the beings in your head can have any anatomy you want. I’m just waiting for the day when gravity is seen as a Western construct and people start walking off cliffs.
When challenged, those who live in their heads can react aggressively because you have challenged their very being. Perhaps the most frightening consequence of this detachment from reality and its subsequent mass formation is illustrated by the thoughts of Dr Yuval Noah Harari, adviser to everyone’s favourite human being, globalist Klaus Schwab. Harari believes that ‘science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design’. Not sure how the word ‘intelligent’ belongs in that sentence, but he seems to show a complete lack of understanding of the real world and the way everything in it is connected. Harari suggests that it will be possible to tweak human DNA in the way that we can alter computer coding. Very few processes in the body are controlled by one gene; physiological activity results from the interaction of many genes which may be on different chromosomes. Tinkering with a few genes is likely to have unforeseen consequences. Our DNA is intimately connected to the outside world. We express genes in response to outside stimuli, viruses incorporate themselves into our DNA and our body’s immune history is written in our genes. In short, our DNA is finely tuned to nature and to suggest that manipulating the various molecules in its strands will improve our lot is hubris beyond belief. Perhaps in Harari’s head we are all machines. Maybe he finds that comforting.
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American Goy | March 10, 2008
I am so tired of this old canard that “Israel had nothing to do with USA’s war with Iraq – in fact, it officially advised America against it”.
Bullshit. … continue
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