A political commentator says Green Party co-leader James Shaw was a “friend of the Pacific”.
Shaw, who was previously New Zealand’s climate change minister for six years, announced this week he will be stepping aside as party co-leader in March.
Political commentator Thomas Wynne told RNZ Pacific that Shaw was unashamedly focused on climate change.
“If one is realistic, one can do one job really, really well and Parliament can put you across a whole range of work and sometimes you don’t do at all well because your focus is somewhere else,” Wynne said.
“But James was really clear about what he wanted to do and what his focus was, I think his legacy around climate change will be long lasting.”
Wynne said Shaw supported Vanuatu seeking an advisory ruling from the International Court of Justice on climate change and human rights.
He said Shaw’s legacy around climate change would be long lasting in the Pacific.
“In the Pacific everything is around relationship and James had a good relationship with the nations in the Pacific.
“I think locally, our younger Pacific voter really leaned into the principles and values of the Green Party.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Emberson said her team has kept the essence of kava while introducing a fresh, modern twist.
She believes turning kava into a drink available for everyone at a local bar is the way to go to meet demands.
She told RNZ Pacific that the lockdowns during the 2020 covid-19 pandemic and the 15 January 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption and tsunami forced her and her team to look at options to keep their business operations afloat.
They had taken over Pacific Brewing in 2017 with the idea of creating beer in Tonga to tell the story of their Polynesian heritage.
Rebranded Pacific beer
They rebranded their beer using the names of Polynesian mythical gods, which she said “was sort of the trend and of the time”.
The “Sparkling Kava’ product is the result of two years of research and work, with the focus on making the drink available so they can also get the market’s feedback.
“During the covid pandemic it was a very tough time for everybody and we started looking at what other opportunities we could look into,” she said.
“Kava was one of the things that has gone through stages throughout the years where it’s been permitted in overseas countries, where it hasn’t been permitted in some countries.
“And because my background is in exports and knowing to make the business viable, I started looking at what we could do to export up from Tonga.”
Emberson owning Reload Bar provided a good opportunity for them to have the “sparkling kava” on tap for people to taste.
“It’s taken us a while because first of all we were researching the properties of kava and what can we do with kava,” she said.
“And now, through Reload Bar, we’re going to do the market research and we’re doing that because we want the opinions not only of the Tongans but also of foreigners to see if this is something they would drink.”
Longer-term plans She said that is the first step as they had more plans long-term.
“Of course we have a longer-term plan, where we would look at the viability of exporting,” she said.
“We are looking at flavoring, different flavorings, and also putting it into a bottle or a can.”
Emberson was born in Fiji and returned to Tonga in 1990 to invest in the fisheries sector, setting up Alatini Fisheries.
She said the poplularity of kava now around the globe was a factor they considered.
“The fact that although many tourists had in the past wanted to taste kava but was not able to do so because it was not readily available was another factor in them going the way they have.
“So that was the other reason why we looked at kava because I’ve been doing a lot of traveling through Indonesia I noticed that it was very easy for you to drink coconut or drink this or drink that . . . all the locally available drinks,” she said.
“And I know in Tonga, when you visit, as a tourist you say I’d like to taste kava and it’s not available, so that was one of the things we wanted to meet, the need that is there.”
She added customer feedback and the result of their research on the product now available would form the basis of their next step.
“It’s been good so far,” she revealed when asked how people are responding.
Not enough support Meanwhile, Emberson said small island countries in the Pacific, like Tonga, needed more support for the private sector.
She revealed this was something she had witnessed over the years since her family started their business operations in 1990.
They have had to shut down their fisheries business because of the high costs of operations and are working hard on keeping their Pacific Brewing and Reload Bar operations going by looking at product options like the sparkling kava and flavoured kava.
“There hasn’t been, as far as I’ve seen, the support of the private sector,” she said.
“I think Fiji is a little bit bit better. But in some of the smaller Pacific islands that support for the private sector is not there.
“That’s been my game since 1990 as an entrepreneur, private enterprise, looking and seeing what I can do to help the country, and it is just difficult.
“I’ve been in Australia and it’s amazing to see the difference in the support of small businesses.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Speaking after today’s announcement, co-leader Marama Davidson refused to guarantee she too would not step down before the election but said she would stay on for at least the next 12 months.
Numbering 15 MPs, the team is its largest ever but also largely inexperienced. Among the mix in the co-leadership possibilities is the party’s first MP with a Pasifika whakapapa — Teanau Tuiono.
“It has been the privilege of my lifetime to serve as New Zealand’s Climate Change Minister for the last six years and as Green Party co-leader for nearly nine,” Shaw said in a statement.
“I’m very proud of what the Green Party has achieved over the last eight years.”
He said he would remain in Parliament to support his Members Bill, which would insert a new clause into the Bill of Rights Act stating that everyone has a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
The bill was introduced to Parliament in December and is yet to have its first reading.
He said the Greens had become party of government, with ministers, for the first time and had made political history by increasing its support at the end of each of our two terms — “a feat no other government support partner had achieved”.
Following Shaw’s exit from Parliament, two-thirds will be fresh-faced first-timers and just Davidson and Julie Anne Genter will have any experience of sitting in opposition.
So who are some potential contenders for the leadership?
Top Green Party leadership contenders . . . Chlöe Swarbrick (from left), Teanau Tuiono and Julie Anne Genter. Images: RNZ/Angus Dreaver, Samuel Rillstone, VNP/Johnny Blades
Chlöe Swarbrick (Auckland Central MP):
Ranked third on the party list, the Auckland Central MP appears to be the popular choice.
After losing the mayoral race in 2016, she joined the Green Party.
Winning the Auckland Central seat in 2020 and becoming the country’s youngest MP in 42 years, she has proven her popularity from early on.
She is the first Green MP ever to hold on to a seat for more than one term after winning again in the 2023 elections.
Swarbrick denied leadership ambitions in 2022, when more than 25 percent of delegates at the party’s annual general meeting voted to reopen Shaw’s position.
Still, she commands the highest profile of all Green MPs, regularly registering in preferred prime minister polls ahead of the party’s co-leaders.
If selected for the co-leadership, the 29-year-old would also become the youngest to co-lead the party.
Teanau Tuiono (List MP):
Teanau Tuiono (Ngāpuhi and Ngāi Takoto) moved to the fifth ranking on the party’s list after Jan Logie and Eugenie Sage retired in the 2023 elections.
As the party’s candidate Palmerston North, he became a list Member of Parliament — the party’s first MP with Pasifika whakapapa – in the 2020 general elections. And again was re-elected as a list MP in 2023.
Last year, his Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill was introduced in Parliament. The bill would restore the right to New Zealand citizenship for people from Western Samoa who were born between 1924 and 1949 — a right promised to them and found owed them by New Zealand’s then highest court.
In December, Tuiono was appointed as the third assistant speaker — the first Green Party MP to become a member on the speaker team.
He recently expressed concern over the lack of Pasifika voices in the government.
Julie Anne Genter (Rongotai MP): The MP for Rongotai currently stands in the fourth rank on the list. Since 2011, she has been elected to each Parliament while on the party’s list.
In 2017, Genter put her name forward for the Mount Albert byelection, but she came in second after Jacinda Ardern.
Genter served as the minister for women, associate minister for health and associate minister for transport from 2017 to 2020.
The Ombudsman twice investigated a letter she sent to then Transport Minister Phil Twyford during pre-consultation on the Let’s Get Wellington Moving indicative package draft Cabinet paper.
National had accused her of convincing Twyford to push back construction of a second Mount Victoria tunnel for at least a decade.
After the next transport minister released the letter in full, Genter said she stood by her comments and that the contents clearly reflected the Green party’s position.
Rules and voting Nominations will open on 31 January and close on 14 February.
Members will attend local meetings and vote, with a new co-leader to be announced on March 10.
Each branch is entitled to a certain number of votes proportionate to the number of members who live in that electorate.
The party’s rules were changed in 2022, removing the requirement for a male co-leader. Instead, members voted to mandate one female leader and one leader of any gender. One leader must also be Māori.
As Davidson meets both the female and Māori criteria, the vacancy can be filled by any Green member, in or out of Parliament.
Green Party co-leaders Marama Davidson and James Shaw . . . . political history in Aotearoa New Zealand. Image: Niva Chittock/RNZ News
For the U.S. to meet its clean energy goals by 2050, the Department of Energy projects that the country needs more than 10 million acres of solar development. Most of that is expected to be built in rural areas. Surveys show that the vast majority of Americans support renewable energy development, but projects planned in rural areas are meeting major resistance.
Reveal’s Jonathan Jones travels to Copake, New York, in the Hudson River Valley. It’s the site of one of the most contentious fights over a proposed large-scale solar project in the United States. Jones looks at what’s driving support and opposition to the project, Shepherd’s Run.
He starts with Bill and Nancy Rasweiler, the owners of land where the project is slated. For years, the Rasweilers have leased their land to local farmers to help offset the costs of maintaining it, but it’s not enough. So they signed a lease with Chicago-based solar developer Hecate Energy. When they brought their plan to the rest of the town in 2017, they met resistance from other residents. During the same meeting, Copake’s town board passed a new law to severely restrict the size of solar development. Jones finds that these kinds of local restrictions are being passed in rural communities across the country.
Jones learns about the community concerns over the project: that it’s too big, takes over prime farmland and negatively affects the environment and nearby homeowners. Residents who support the project say some concerns are a product of misinformation and Shepherd’s Run is one of the many solar projects that has to happen to slow climate change. With the future of the project in question, Jones hears about a working group – a coalition of supporters and opponents of the project that came together to try to influence its design. Jones follows the group’s efforts and how they landed with Hecate.
Finally, Jones looks at ways agricultural communities are trying to make solar work on their land. This takes him to the Corn Belt, where he looks at how the U.S. is already using millions of acres of farmland to produce a less efficient clean energy source: ethanol. Jones also looks at a landmark agreement between the solar industry and environmental groups convened by Stanford University, which calls for advancing large-scale solar development while championing land conservation and local community interests.
When they were invented in the ’90s, renewable energy certificates were meant to stimulate the green energy market. Back then, building wind and solar farms was way more expensive than it is today. The idea was that renewable energy producers could sell certificates that represented the “greenness” of the energy they made. Anyone buying those certificates, or RECs, could claim that green power and also claim they were helping the environment.
For years, corporations have bought RECs as a low-commitment way to claim they’re “going green” – all while using the same old fossil fuel-powered electricity.
So how exactly do RECs help the climate crisis? This week, Reveal investigates RECs and finds that the federal government uses them to pad its environmental stats.
Reveal’s Will Evans starts with Auden Schendler, the man in charge of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Co. Schendler initially convinced his company to buy RECs to go green, then realized he made a mistake. But even after he spoke out and evidence piled up showing that RECs were ineffective, other companies kept buying them – and the federal government did, too. Evans and Reveal’s Melissa Lewis determined that since 2010, more than half of what the government has claimed as renewable energy was just cheap RECs.
Next, Reveal’s Najib Aminy takes us to Palm Beach County, Florida, to find out where some RECs are made: in a trash incinerator. Amid all the sounds and smells of burning garbage, Aminy looks into whether buying RECs actually helps the environment and where the money goes. He meets Andrew Byrd, who lives nearby and worries about the fumes. It turns out that federal agencies bought RECs from this incinerator in order to meet renewable energy mandates.
Finally, we explore another place where the government buys RECs: two biomass plants in Georgia, where residents complained of toxic pollution. Evans looks into where the government’s modest environmental goals come from and why federal agencies buy RECs in the first place. He also talks to a REC industry veteran and examines how a plan from the Biden administration could change things.
The National-led government intends to reopen Aotearoa waters to oil and gas exploration, despite a commitment to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
Pacific leaders are poised to hold what they describe as “perpetrators of climate chaos” to account.
While the new Climate Change Minister Simon Watts was not expecting criticism over fossil fuels at the summit, Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr has served it up.
“What a backward position that an island that is part of the Pacific Island Forum that should understand the challenges that we’re facing,” Whipps Jr said.
NZ ‘should take lead’
“New Zealand as a Pacific Island and a member of the forum should take a leadership role and should be active in doing all they can to transition away from fossil fuels. That’s what they should be working on,” he said.
“They shouldn’t be going out and exploring more gas and oil.”
President Surangel Whipps Jr of Palau in Rarotonga . . . “What a backward position” taken by New Zealand. Image: RNZ Pacific/ Lydia Lewis
The Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) has also taken aim at the New Zealand government’s plans.
Regional coordinator Lavetanalagi Seru said it was not the time to be exploring and expanding the extraction of fossil fuel including gas.
“At a time when the Pacific and many climate frontline communities are grappling with the single greatest security threat of climate change, intensifying fossil fuel dependency, not only undermines collective efforts, but also sends a very strong sense of wrong market signals, neglecting broader environmental and social ramifications,” Seru said.
“It will undermine all our efforts to ensure climate resilience for communities, and this isn’t the time to be exploring and expanding the extraction of fossil fuels, including gas.”
Watts said the overturning of the ban did not weaken New Zealand’s climate position.
New NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (centre) flanked by ministers including Climate Change Minister Simon Watts (left) . . . plans to reopen Aotearoa waters to oil and gas exploration, despite a commitment to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Image: RNZ/Nathan McKinnon
‘We rely on NZ’
Tuvalu’s former prime minister and now opposition leader Enele Sopoaga has a reminder for the new government: “We rely on New Zealand to stand up strong with the island countries”.
Niue’s Minister for Natural Resources Mona Ainu’u will be drumming home the tangable impacts felt in the Pacific while in Dubai.
“We come to COP, without any commitment from a lot of these countries and these perpetrators of climate chaos, as I call them,” she said.
“It’s very difficult to hold them accountable. We continue to travel 1000s and 1000s of miles, because our people are suffering. People continue to find innovative ways to survive on this earth. From no fault of ours. But we need to hold these countries accountable.”
Ainu’u said there had been little to no movement on last year’s commitment by the world’s biggest emitters to contribute to costs caused by climate change.
This year, one of the main Pacific priorities is building up that loss and damage fund.
A delegate from Palau, Xavier Matsutaro said there was a lot to put into action.
“Let’s just put it this way, there’s a lot to prove on COP28, and every subsequent COP becomes more and more urgent because it narrows down that window that we need to do to wrap up in emission reduction,” he said.
“And that’s one of the things are the heart of this meeting. And one of the things that will spell out the level of success.”
‘Affect real lives’ A Pacific youth delegate, Metoyer Lohia who is also there, wants to remind the world of the reality of the situation:
“There’s a lot of that. I guess media and the Western world don’t really understand about the real problems and the real challenges that are faced by our communities and people on the ground,” Lohia explained.
“Because at the end of the day, although these are very high level discussions, they ultimately affect real people with real lives and as a Pacific.”
Palau President Surangel S. Whipps, Jr at the World Green Economy Summit in Dubai with Minister of Finance of the United Arab Emirates. Image: Palau Press Office/RNZ
Whipps Jr said US President Joe Biden was a noticeable absence from this year’s meeting.
“The United States needs to be active, it needs to show leadership. And of course, not having Biden here definitely weakens at least or gives us concern about our hope for the future,” he said.
“But there’s Australia, there’s China, there’s India, there’s the EU. I mean, everybody’s got to step it up.”
“As a Pacific island country. I believe that New Zealand should understand better than any other country in the world the challenges that Pacific islands have,” Whipps Jr said.
“We have Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, all their islands are less than two metres above water.
“I mean, if you’re a Pacific island nation, and you don’t understand that, I don’t know, I don’t know how, what else we can say.
“It’s just tragic to be hearing these kinds of actions by the New Zealand government.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A new legal framework to support climate-displaced people and guarantee their human rights is being served up ahead of COP28.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference opens tomorrow and is being held in the fossil fuel giant United Arab Emirates (UAE) from November 30 to December 12.
The human rights advocacy centre — the International Centre for Advocates Against Discrimination (ICAAD) — wants to ensure climate frontline communities will not be neglected.
The UN is estimating there could be 1.2 billion climate-displaced people by 2050.
ICAAD and partners are calling for climate mobility justice to feature on the agenda of COP28.
The Human Rights Centre wants discussions around how to expand protections for climate-displaced persons to ensure their dignity is upheld now and in the future.
ICAAD director and facilitator Erin Thomas said more than 40 indigenous and climate activists and researchers from eight Pacific Island countries were advocating for COP28.
‘Right to life of dignity’
“This is part of our right to life of dignity project which we have been working on over a number of years,” she said.
“But one of the thornier issues that the international community has yet to respond to effectively is protecting those who are displaced across borders.”
The group warned that climate change is already creating human rights abuses, especially for those already migrating without access to dignified migration pathways.
At the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) annual meeting in Rarotonga two weeks ago, regional leaders noted that more than 50,000 Pacific people were displaced due to climate and disaster related events annually.
The leaders endorsed a Pacific regional framework on climate mobility to “provide practical guidance to governments planning for and managing climate mobility”.
They also called on development partners to “provide substantially greateer levels of climate finance, technology and capacity to accelerate decarbonisation of the Blue Pacific”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A new legal framework to support climate-displaced people and guarantee their human rights is being served up ahead of COP28.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference opens tomorrow and is being held in the fossil fuel giant United Arab Emirates (UAE) from November 30 to December 12.
The human rights advocacy centre — the International Centre for Advocates Against Discrimination (ICAAD) — wants to ensure climate frontline communities will not be neglected.
The UN is estimating there could be 1.2 billion climate-displaced people by 2050.
ICAAD and partners are calling for climate mobility justice to feature on the agenda of COP28.
The Human Rights Centre wants discussions around how to expand protections for climate-displaced persons to ensure their dignity is upheld now and in the future.
ICAAD director and facilitator Erin Thomas said more than 40 indigenous and climate activists and researchers from eight Pacific Island countries were advocating for COP28.
‘Right to life of dignity’
“This is part of our right to life of dignity project which we have been working on over a number of years,” she said.
“But one of the thornier issues that the international community has yet to respond to effectively is protecting those who are displaced across borders.”
The group warned that climate change is already creating human rights abuses, especially for those already migrating without access to dignified migration pathways.
At the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) annual meeting in Rarotonga two weeks ago, regional leaders noted that more than 50,000 Pacific people were displaced due to climate and disaster related events annually.
The leaders endorsed a Pacific regional framework on climate mobility to “provide practical guidance to governments planning for and managing climate mobility”.
They also called on development partners to “provide substantially greateer levels of climate finance, technology and capacity to accelerate decarbonisation of the Blue Pacific”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
I went to the community meeting a few days ago. Around 25 people there, listening to two guests around a community bill of rights, for Lane County (Oregon). You know, the people, citizens, having the say on who and what can come into their communities.
‘…A say in what can and cannot be sprayed on their food, land, bodies, water, soil….’
I’ve done this before, and I’ll cut and paste an older old piece below, from Spokane on that town’s community rights.
But first, the angst:
Infanticide, first, in Gaza. Hell on Earth, not because this hasn’t happened before in history, but because we are here now, 2023, with Telegram and instant videos. We are supposedly ruled by the Chosen People of Israel and the Blinken-Nuland-Yellen-Garland-Kagan-Dirty-Hellion-Bargain.
Those dirty White House Thugs look like cancerous Homo Bellum. Rotting faces, slag for eyes, like a George Soros or Larry Fink or Larry Summers.
HELL on earth.
Oh, the Monster, the Oppen-Monster-Heimer:
“If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945.
For sure, there has been great difficulty in estimating the total casualties in the Japanese cities as a result of the atomic bombing. The extensive destruction of civil installations (hospitals, fire and police department, and government agencies) the state of utter confusion immediately following the explosion, as well as the uncertainty regarding the actual population before the bombing, contribute to the difficulty of making estimates of casualties. The Japanese periodic censuses are not complete. Finally, the great fires that raged in each city totally consumed many bodies.
The number of total casualties has been estimated at various times since the bombings with wide discrepancies.
The Manhattan Engineer District’s best available figures are:
TABLE A: Estimates of Casualties
Hiroshima …………………………. Nagasaki
(Pre-raid pop.): 255,000 ………. 195,000
Dead: 66,000 …………………….. 39,000
Injured: 69,000 ………………. 25,000
Total Casualties: 135,000 ….. 64,000
Hydrogen bombs, or just plain old Greek Fire!
Fire, whether from Jewish Whiskey Pete (white phosphorus) or U$A napalm, it kills kills civilians.
Katsumoto Saotome, 87, came to the door of his home in the outer reaches of Tokyo wearing a herringbone blazer, a black wool scarf tucked neatly into a vest and a black beret that he reckons makes him look like Che Guevara, the guerrilla leader in the Cuban Revolution. Saotome has practiced radicalism of a much quieter kind, insisting on preserving memories that many may prefer to forget.
Seventy-eight years ago, less than 10 miles from where he now lives alone in a low-lying neighborhood known for its moderate rents, Saotome (pronounced SAH-oh-toe-meh) survived the brutally effective American firebombing of Tokyo. Over the course of nearly three hours, an attack by the United States Army Air Forces killed as many as 100,000 people — more than some estimates of the number killed the day of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. But while the Japanese public — and the world — rightly remember Hiroshima as a living symbol of the horrors of nuclear war, the Tokyo firebombing is generally regarded as a footnote in any accounting of the war in Japan.
*****
I am sick to my stomach, but I soldier on: because the corporations, their lawyers, their hitmen, their PR spinners, their pimped-out politicians and lawmakers, all the Eichmann’s and Faustian Bargain Basement Mother Fuckers, they kill us with 10,000,000 cuts daily. We are firebombed by their sanctions, rules, fines, tickets, evictions, eminent domain, fees, taxes, interest rates, non-disclosure agreements, contracts, code enforcements, bust, arrests, bonds, bails, foreclosures.
Read closely how death is measured deploying better cancerous living through chemistry (outside of the implosions in Gaza).
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), one of the most common chronic metabolic diseases, involves a complex interaction among genetic, epigenetic, and environmental risk factors. The incidence and prevalence of T2DM are rapidly increasing globally. In recent years, increasing body of evidences from both human and animal studies have displayed an association between exposure to early unfavorable life factors such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and the prevalence of T2DM in later life. The exogenous EDCs can lead to disadvantageous metabolic consequences because they interfere with the synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, and metabolism of endogenous hormones. EDCs also have long-term adverse effects on newborns, children, and adolescents by causing increased susceptibility to T2DM in adults. This review summarizes the most recent advances in this field, including diabetes-related EDCs (bisphenol A, phthalates, chlordane compounds, parabens, pesticides, and other diabetes-related EDCs), EDC exposure and gestational diabetes mellitus, prenatal and perinatal EDC exposures and T2DM, adult EDC exposure and T2DM, transgenerational effects of EDCs on T2DM as well as the possible diabetogenic mechanisms.
So in my tiny neck of the woods, where a Danish guy with 260 acres which he just clear-cut, is shooting for helicopter spraying of poison on the land so the weeds go bye-bye and the Scotch Broom, et al go bye-bye. And the timber industry lies, gets tax abatements, and has a propaganda wing here paid for by Oregon taxpayers!
But lets talk about another part of the world: For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure due to unclear causes, also known as CKDu. Similar incidences of mysterious kidney diseases have emerged in tropical farming communities around the world.
A massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit — glyphosate, the active compound in Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world. (source)
It’s global, the instant death and slow death and disease by 10,000,000 cuts, as Gaza burns and the UkroNazi’s burn burn burn.
Progress has been made in recent years, but much remains to be done. Here are some examples of incremental advances in the fight to end herbicide use in Oregon forestry under the recent Private Forest Accord:
In early 2022, the EPA banned use of chlorpyrifos on food and feed crops, and starting Jan. 1, 2024, new Oregon Department of Agriculture rules will disallow most uses of the insecticide, including spraying on forestlands.
In 2020, then-Governor Kate Brown helped catalyze the Private Forest Accord between some environmental groups and the timber industry. Later that year, that negotiation resulted in the Oregon Legislature passing Senate Bill 1602, which increased buffers for streams and improved the system for electronic reporting and notification of neighbors within a mile of areas to be sprayed by helicopters.
But those new rules did not require any reductions in the frequency or amounts of pesticides sprayed. Environmentalists and impacted communities want the practice significantly reduced or banned altogether, and the Oregon Chapter Sierra Club will continue to work for that change. (source)
*****
More slogging on. Here, before the actual piece on the community meeting I attended here in Waldport, Oregon, my piece a long time ago about community bill of rights movement in Spokane when I had one of a dozen gigs surviving:
The right to community
Envisioning a new Spokane puts ‘business as usual’ on chopping block
[Photo: Local farmer Brian Estes, foreground, stands with Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1 at Estes’ Vinegar Flats garden. (Paul K. Haeder / Down to Earth NW Correspodent)]
Here’s one credo that scares guys like Frank Schaeffer, son of evangelist Francis Schaeffer and author of “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.”
“God’s Word gives women respect and respectability which they had never enjoyed in any other culture, and we must do what we can to preserve biblical standards. But it establishes the man as the head of the house.”
Now replace the word “man” with “corporation” and you have what amounts to what many in the world – not just the U.S. – see as the dictum of the 21st century: Corporations are the head of our house.
Many are fighting back this imbalance of power and justice, including grassroots groups. Via Campesino, the Transition Cities movements, even foodies are fighting the corporate “infection” to preserve rights to safe, non-genetically modified, animal-cruelty free food.
One local impetus to give people more say in how neighborhoods form and evolve is on Spokane’s November ballot. Envision Spokane, which gained 25 percent of the yea votes in 2010, is returning.
Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1, cites several past movements in the U.S. to gain citizen rights – like abolishing slavery and giving full citizenship to people of color. He references a quote from Abigail Adams, urging her husband John in 1776 to treat women as equals in the Declaration of Independence:
“We are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
A second quote,
“I saw clearly that the power to make the laws was the right through which all other rights could be secured” came in 1884 when 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton – joined by Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth – spoke at a women’s rally to gain the constitutional right to vote.
Huschke compares U.S. women getting the vote in 1920 after dozens of defeats to the heavy lifting he and his supporters must do to get a community bill of rights approved.
“Many would say that what we have today is a corporate state,” Huschke said. “Living within the corporate state there are no remedies to protecting safety, health, and welfare of communities. Adopting amendments to the Spokane’s home rule charter puts in place remedies to protect and nourish neighborhoods, river and workplaces. These amendments acknowledge our protections and that the power is with the people where it comes to significant impacts to neighborhoods and river.”
The 10 amendments to the 2009 bill of rights were defeated, Huschke said, by corporate bucks to the tune of $400,000 from Spokane Home Builder’s Association, Associated Builders and Contractors and other unlimited pro-growth groups.
Recently, the local GOP’s executive committee voted to oppose the 2011 proposition. That doesn’t faze Kai.
“The rhetoric will get turned up as the powerful, monied interests make claims about property rights being under attack and costs if the Community Bill of Rights is adopted. The same stuff was said in 2009,” he said.
“I’ve talked to people who voted against it in 2009, who said once they took the time to read it they would’ve voted yes. If I have to ask anything of Spokane voters, it’s to cover your ears and read what’s being proposed.”
When you have the Greater Spokane Incorporated throwing weight and money behind an anti-Community Bill of Rights movement, it’s easy to see the greater good.
“Spokane is long overdue in recognizing the value of our neighborhoods, our river, and workplaces,” Kai said. “We have a golden opportunity to show how to build a sustainable community. By honoring and protecting our assets we put ourselves in a position advocating for health and welfare over profit for profit sake, that other communities aren’t even close to considering.”
The history of communities gaining power back from outside agitators, carpetbaggers or corporate conglomerates is tied to public health and safety, centered around bad corporate behavior like factory farms’ waste ponds causing human and animal health issues; coal companies’ slurry lakes leaking millions of gallons of waste into rivers; quarry works that foul water; or energy companies that pollute the air along the Houston to Baton Rouge corridor where asthma and cancers are sky-high, according to CDC studies.
A community movement similar to Envision Spokane recently rose up against the energy lobby to put brakes on exploitation of shale deposits. The process known as hydraulic fracturing to get at natural gas fouls the water and has been implicated in earthquakes. Arkansas has temporarily stopped this process.
The Spokane Community Bill of Rights has its roots in a larger, more holistic frame – the Rights of Nature, something that sticks in the craws of GOP party loyalists, Chambers of Commerce and business interests.
Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth was enacted by President Evo Morales January 2011. It addresses that country’s natural resources as “blessings” and grants Earth rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.
Bolivia has established a Ministry of Mother Earth, a sort of global ombudsman whose job is to listen to nature’s complaints voiced by activists and others, including the state.
“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) with rights are humans or companies, how can you reach balance?” says Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. “But if you recognize nature has rights, and (if you provide) legal forums to protect and preserve those rights, you can achieve balance.”
Kai understands the power of people bicycling safely in Spokane with engineering and land use changes guided by citizens. He sees the power of community gardens and programs like Riverfront Farm putting disadvantaged youth to work in farming and landscaping experiential learning experiences. He sees corporations destroying community-based tools to fight their shock doctrine of financial wizards, disturbances created by climate change, or volatility of food and energy.
Communities under the current regulatory system are poorly suited to manage under the current political system, Kai insists. It’s clear that even presidential aspirants like Mitt Romney can end up tongue-tied when a citizen at a rally asked about the power and rights of corporations: “Corporations are people, my friends.”
For Envision Spokane’s backers this line of logic is a slap in the face of our own bill of rights and democratic institutions tied to a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Kai said this effort is a vital one.
“The assault on public workers from corporate interests has been daunting. There is no reason not to believe that this attack won’t carry into the private sector. In the spring the Spokane City Council passed a resolution supporting collective bargaining for city employees. The Community Bill of Rights would protect that right with binding law for all unionized city workers. There is a power grab happening across the country, and Spokane needs to make sure it protects its workers.”
Photo: Kai Huschke is building a straw bale house in the Vinegar Flats area near the Vinegar Flats community garden area. (Paul K. Haeder / Down to Earth NW Correspondent)
(The previous column is the opinion of columnist Paul K. Haeder and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Down to EarthNW, The Spokesman-Review or the Cowles Company.)
*****
That was 2011!! Twelve fucking years ago. Today?
*****
Community Rights, Agency Capture, Corporations as People?
I’m at the Waldport Central Oregon Coast Fire and Rescue (10/15) with twenty-two other residents listening to Holman and David Tvedt discuss the work of Lane County Community Rights.
It is a room full of gray-haired men and women, anxious to hear from these two gray panthers on their work to codify a bill of rights for Lane County citizens to write laws.
I’ve been in this rodeo before – El Paso, Seattle and Spokane, where I covered the work of Envision Spokane, a bill that would’ve enshrined on voters the right o determine the community’s health, safety and welfare.
I was hosting a radio show focused on sustainability, social justice, and environmental stewardship. I had two regular news columns – in the weekly and a monthly magazine. I was sustainability coordinator for the community college.
It was a lot of work getting people out to participate in events around clean water, clean air, food, transportation and ecosystems.
My biggest goal after codifying guest authors, film festivals, teach-ins, and Earth Day festivals was to get the so-called “younger generation” involved. It was somewhat easy since I taught at Gonzaga and SFCC, and had cohorts at Whitworth and WSU and Eastern Washington University.
Even so, I had to solicit help from local musicians, local restaurants, and merchants for entertainment, food, swill and swag.
Here, today, years later, I am in a room with older folk who are concerned to aerial spraying of herbicides on a clear cut along Beaver Creek. Tvelt has been working on forest issues since 1970. His degree in forestry informs his fight to galvanize common sense into forest management and logging.
For many in the audience they learned about the value of forests– mixed species of trees, shrubs and even weeds – as a way to help with water flows.
Hard logging reduces water flow because organic matter, downed trees and other forest dynamics are eradicated by timber companies. Tvelt recalled taking a chain saw on a four-foot downed log for a clearway on a path near Sweethome whereupon the cut produced “a full-blast flow of water . . . like a water spigot was turned on.” It lasted for two minutes.
Wells and springs are drying up in summers and in many cases year round. Pressure on watersheds can be located directly to the growth of human populations. Additionally, clear cutting and other heavy logging practices reduce the natural flow of things. This is not rocket science, and the memo on this was written decades ago.
The community meeting centered around spraying of chemicals. The News Times has run stories, letters to the editor and editorials debating acreage along Beaver Creek scheduled for helicopter herbicide application.
It’s no secret that our state’s timber industry’s practice of spraying herbicides — all of them dangerous to humans, fish and animals — has been highly controversial for decades. Studies show that up to 40 percent of the pesticides sprayed onto forestland by helicopters is blown off course from its targets (drift).
These toxic sprays — used by the timber industry to kill insects, weeds and vegetation in areas that have been clear cut — drift onto land on or near homes, farms, streams and lakes.
While many of the inert ingredients and specialized mixes are industry secrets, the main pesticides include triclopyr, chlorpyrifos, Diuron and 2,4-D (one of the so-called “Agent Orange” chemicals).
Study after study has show all of these singularly or synergistically are linked to diseases and health issues, including respiratory problems, liver and kidney damage, miscarriages, and cancer.
Regulating how much poison should be allowed in food, air and water is antithetical to Michele Holman’s ethos. She’s lived 47 years in the Coast Range, tossing out the activist script of going to the state capitol to beg for redress on any range of environmental concerns.
“I got tired of the retort, ‘It’s legal . . . well settled in law.’ Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s just.”
Agency capture, lobbying influence, campaign meddling/contributions, and propaganda on a massive scale work in favor of rich corporations, whether it is Boeing and planes or Weyerhaeuser and logging.
A recent push is for a community rights movement to catch like wildfire throughout the state. Protect Lane County Watersheds is spearheading the Rights of Nature law (supported by CELDF, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund) to protect drinking water and watersheds throughout the county.
The old adage, ‘you can’t fight city hall,’ has dangerously morphed into: “Corporations are considered people, so you can’t stop them from doing business as usual because they have equal rights . . . and then some.”
I’ve been studying these chemicals for decades. Rosemary Mason from England is an amazing researcher who does on the ground work as well as collates hundreds of scientific field studies on that infamous weed killer used on clear-cut’s – glyphosate. You can read a journal article like this one, “The Effects of Clearcutting and Glyphosate Herbicide Use on Parasitic Wasps in Maine Forests.”
Or, a recent Duke University report, “Roundup Ingredient Connected to Epidemic Levels of Chronic Kidney Disease.” You can spend years digging through the science that never gets in front of mainstream media’s unwatchful eye.
Citizens involved in Stop the Spray at Beaver Creek are concerned for their health, as well as the health of children, grandchildren and the entire life web of our ecosystem.
Countless studies which are looking at pesticides and herbicides produce chilling findings: “For the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of people living in rural Sri Lanka have been devastated by kidney failure.”
This massive field study of the wells supplying drinking water to the Sri Lankan communities, conducted by researchers at Duke University, has identified a possible culprit — glyphosate.
When it’s in your backyard, the alarm goed off. Chilling: November 14 is World Diabetes Day. Here we go again, more reading: “Exposure to Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Later Life.”
Community Rights Fight-State and Federal Preemption
“One of the first things an elected official does upon taking office is to swear an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately for local communities and the environment, the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states …” is an integral part of that constitution. According to the Cornell School of Law, “Congress has often used the Commerce Clause to justify exercising legislative power over the activities of states and their citizens, leading to significant and ongoing controversy regarding the balance of power between the federal government and the states. The Commerce Clause has historically been viewed as both a grant of congressional authority and as a restriction on the regulatory authority of the States.”
Imploring Oregon Governor Kate Brown to say “NO” the aerial spraying or to Jordan Cove’s LNG project is literally asking her to violate her oath of office and assumes she has plenary authority (or the balls) to stand up to federal preemption. She does not.
The Community Doesn’t Have the Legal Authority to Say “No”!
The existing structure of law ensures that people are blocked from advancing their rights, governing their own communities and acting as stewards of the environment, while protecting corporate “rights” and interests over those of communities and nature.
Community Rights work is a paradigm shift. It movesaway from unsustainable practices that harm communities by moving towards local self-government.
Today, policy-makers have told communities across the country that they don’t have the right to make critical decisions for themselves. They’re told they cannot say “no” to GMOs or aerial spraying. They’re told they cannot say “yes” to sustainable food or energy systems.
Through the Community Rights Movement, communities are working with CELDF to create a structure of law and government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That structure recognizes and protects the inalienable rights of natural and human communities.
After 10 years of non-attendance, France turned up to this week’s French Polynesia sitting of the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation (C-24) — but the French delegate did not deliver the message that pro-independence French Polynesian groups wanted to hear.
French Polynesia was re-inscribed to the United Nations (UN) list of non-self-governing territories in 2013.
Pro-independence leader Moetai Brotherson, President of French Polynesia, came to power in May 2023.
Since then he has claimed he received assurances from French President Emmanuel Macron that France would end its “empty chair” policy regarding UN decolonisation sessions on French Polynesia.
President Macron apparently kept his promise, but the message that the French Ambassador to the UN, Nicolas De Rivière, delivered was unambiguous.
He declared French Polynesia “has no place” on the UN list of non-autonomous territories because “French Polynesia’s history is not the history of New Caledonia”.
The indigenous Kanak peoples of New Caledonia, the other French Pacific dependency currently on the UN list, have actively pursued a pathway to decolonisation through the Noumea Accord and are still deep in negotiations with Paris about their political future.
French public media Polynésie 1ère TV quoted the ambassador as saying: “No process between France and French Polynesia allows a role for the United Nations.”
French Ambassador to the UN Nicolas De Rivière . . . present this time but wants French Polynesia withdrawn from the UN decolonisation list. Image: RNZ Pacific
The ambassador also voiced France’s wish to have French Polynesia withdrawn from the UN list. At the end of his statement, the Ambassador left the room, leaving a junior agent to sit in his place.
This was just as more than 40 pro-independence petitioners were preparing to make their statements.
Tahiti’s President Moetai Brotherson . . . pro-independence but speaking on behalf of “all [French] Polynesians, including those who do not want independence today.” Image: Polynésie 1ère TV screenshot/APRThis is not an unfamiliar scene. Over the past 10 years, at similar UN sessions, when the agenda would reach the item of French Polynesia, the French delegation would leave the room.
The C-24 session started on Tuesday morning.
This week, French Polynesia’s 40-plus strong — mostly pro-independence delegation — of petitioners included the now-ruling Tavini Huiraatira party, members of the civil society, the local Māohi Protestant Church, and nuclear veterans associations and members of the local Parliament (the Territorial Assembly) and French Polynesian MPs sitting at the French National Assembly in Paris.
It also included President Moetai Brotherson from Tavini.
French position on decolonisation unchanged For the past 10 years, since it was re-inscribed on the UN list, French Polynesia has sent delegates to the meeting, with the most regular attendees being from the Tavini Huiraatira party:
“I was angry because the French ambassador left just before our petitioners were about to take the floor [. . . ] I perceived this as a sign of contempt on the part of France,” said Hinamoeura Cross, a petitioner and a pro-independence member of French Polynesia’s Territorial Assembly, reacting this week to the French envoy’s appearance then departure, Polynésie 1ère TV reports.
Since being elected to the top post in May 2023, President Brotherson has stressed that independence, although it remains a long-term goal, is not an immediate priority.
Days after his election, after meeting French President Macron for more than an hour, he said he was convinced there would be a change in France’s posture at the UN C-24 committee hearing and an end to the French “empty chair policy”.
“I think we should put those 10 years of misunderstanding, of denial of dialogue [on the part of France] behind us [. . .]. Everyone can see that since my election, the relations with France have been very good [. . . ]. President Macron and I have had a long discussion about what is happening [at the UN] and the way we see our relations with France evolve,” he told Tahiti Nui Télévision earlier this week from New York.
President ‘for all French Polynesians’ – Brotherson President Brotherson also stressed that this week, at the UN, he would speak as President of French Polynesia on behalf of “all [French] Polynesians, including those who do not want independence today”.
“So in my speech I will be very careful not to create confusion between me coming here [at the UN] to request the implementation of a self-determination process, and me coming here to demand independence which is beside the point,” he added in the same interview.
He conceded that at the same meeting, delegates from his own Tavini party were likely to deliver punchier, more “militant”, speeches “because this is Tavini’s goal”.
“But as for me, I speak as President of French Polynesia.”
Ahead of the meeting, Tavini Huiraatira pro-independence leader Oscar Temaru said that “It’s the first time a pro-independence President of French Polynesia will speak at the UN (C-24) tribune”.
Temaru, 78, was French Polynesia’s president in 2013 when it was reinscribed to the UN list.
Speaking of the different styles between him and his 54-year-old son-in-law — Moetai Brotherson is married to Temaru’s daughter — Temaru said this week: “He has his own strategy and I have mine and mine has not changed one bit [. . .] this country must absolutely become a sovereign state.
“Can you imagine? Overnight, we would own this country of five million sq km. Today, we have nothing.”
French Minister of Home Affairs and Overseas Gérald Darmanin wrote on the social media platform X, previously Twitter, earlier this week: “On this matter just like on other ones, [France] is working with elected representatives in a constructive spirit and in the respect of the territory’s autonomy and of France’s sovereignty.”
Darmanin has already attended the C-24 meeting when it considered New Caledonia.
The United Nations list of non-self-governing territories currently includes 17 territories world-wide and six of those are located in the Pacific — American Samoa, French Polynesia, Guam, New Caledonia, Pitcairn Island and Tokelau.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua (FRI-WP) and the Papuan Student Alliance (AMP) have denounced the Rome Agreement of 30 September 1962 as “illegal” during protest speeches marking the 61st anniversary last Saturday.
The groups gathered at several places throughout Indonesia to hold peaceful protests and speeches.
The protesters held a public discussion and protest in Yogyakarta, Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara, Ternate, East Java and North Maluku.
Some protesters were met by hardliner groups of Indonesians who claimed they were supported and protected by the Indonesian police.
The Facebook page of AMP reports that peaceful demonstrations were also scheduled for September 30 in Kupan city but were obstructed by Garuda reactionaries, known as ORMAS (Civic Organisation Group) and police officers.
Some conversations were extremely racist, indicating that both the police and state are still maintaining a policy of racism.
Protests such as these are not unusual. Papuan students and their Indonesian supporters do this annually in order to draw attention to Indonesia’s illegal occupation of West Papua, which violates international law and the UN Charters on self-determination and decolonisation.
This time, the protest was over the Rome Agreement.
In 2021, an attempt to stage a protest in front of the US Embassy in central Jakarta was also made, but 17 AMP Papuan students were arrested.
What the protests are against
These protests across Indonesia may be dismissed by mainstream media as insignificant. But for Papuans, they are actually most significant.
The theme is protesting against what Papuans see as the “genesis” of a betrayal with lies, deceit, and manipulation by powerful international actors that sealed Papua’s fate with Indonesia.
This set a stage of gross human rights violations and exploitation of West Papua’s natural resources, which has been going on since these agreements were signed.
They were treaties, agreements, discussions, and decisions concerning West Papua’s future made by state and multinational actors without Papuan input — ultimately leading to West Papua’s “destruction”.
According to the AMP, the agreement between the Netherlands, Indonesia, the United Nations (UN) and the United States was manipulated to gain control over Papua, reports Suara Kalbar.
The AMP Papuan students and their Indonesian solidarity groups stated that the September 1962 Rome Agreement, followed by the signing of the New York Agreement on August 15, 1962, was reached without the involvement of any representatives of the Papuan people.
The protesters’ highlighted these flaws of the Rome Agreement that:
The Act of Free Choice to be delayed or cancelled;
“Musyawarah” (a form of Indonesian consensus building) be used rather than one-person-one-vote;
The UN report to the UNGA be accepted without debate;
Indonesia would rule West Papua for 25 years after 1963;
The US could exploit natural resources in partnership with Indonesian state companies; and
The US would underwrite an Asian Development Bank grant for US$30 million and guarantee World Bank funds for a transmigration programme beginning in 1977.
The agreement signed by Indonesia, the Netherlands and the United States was a very controversial with 29 articles stipulating the New York agreement, which regulates 3 things, where articles 14-21 regulate self-determination based on the international practice of one person one vote; and articles 12 and 13 governing the transfer of the administration from the United Nations Temporary Executive (UNTEA) to Indonesia.
Thus, this agreement allowed Indonesia’s claim to the land of Papua, which had been carried out after the transfer of control of West Papua from Dutch to Indonesia through UNTEA on 1 May 1963.
West Papua ‘conditioned’
The student protesters argued that prior to 1963 Indonesia had already conditioned West Papua by conducting military operations and suppressing the pro-independence movement, reports Koran Kejora.
Ironically, the protesters say, even before the process of self-determination was carried out on 7 April 1967, Freeport, the state-owned “mining company of American imperialism”, had signed its first contract with Indonesia.
This meant that West Papua had already been claimed by Indonesia through Freeport’s first contract two years before the Act of Free Choice was conducted, reports Koran Kehora.
The Act of Free Choice itself “was a sham”, only 1025 out of 809,337 Papuans with the right to vote had been quarantined or voted, and only 175 of them voiced their opinion, protesters said.
Despite its undemocratic nature, terror, intimidation, manipulation, and gross human rights violations, with the implementation of the Act of Free Choice, Indonesia legitimised its illegal claim to West Papua.
Igin Kogoya, a coordinator for AMP and Indonesian supporters in Malang, said in a media release that Indonesia did not carry out the agreement in accordance with the New York Agreement, reports Jubi.
Instead, Indonesia uses a variety of military operations to condition the region and suppress the independence movement of West Papuans.
“Therefore, before the self-determination process was carried out in 1969, Freeport, the imperialist state-owned mining company of the United States, signed its first contract of work with the Indonesian government illegally on 7 April 1967.”
Early Freeport mine deal
Naldo Wasiage of AMP Lombok and Benjos of FRI-WP Lombok claimed colonial Indonesia had made claims to the West Papua region with Freeport’s first contract two years before the Act of Free Choice was passed.
Today, Indonesia’s reform, terror, intimidation, and incarceration, as well as the shootings and murders of Papuans, still occurring.
The human rights of the Papuan people are insignificant and hold no value for Indonesia.
The Military Operation Area was implemented throughout West Papua before and after the illegal Act of Free Choice. This clearly demonstrates that Indonesia’s desire to colonise West Papua until the present.
When asked about the Rome Agreement, Andrew Johnson, an Australian who has been researching international documents and treaties related to West Papua’s “betrayal”, said:
In order to invest billions of dollars in looting West Papua, Freeport would need assurances that Indonesia would be able to deliver access to the region. A Rome Agreement-type document would provide this assurance.
Victor Yeimo: Unveiling the atrocities
After being released from the Indonesian legal system and prison on 23 September 2023, Victor Yeimo addressed thousands of Papuans in Waena Jayapura by saying:
The Papuan people have long suffered under a dehumanising paradigm, which denies our inalienable rights to be human in our own land.
Yeimo said that the Papuan people in West Papua were systematically excluded from any decision-making processes that shaped their own future.
Jakarta’s oppressive control led to arbitrary policies and laws imposed on West Papuans, disregarding their voices and aspirations. This exclusion highlighted the colonisers’ desire to maintain control and dominance, he said.
The ratification of Special Autonomy, Volume II, serves as an example of Jakarta’s deception. The Papuan People’s Council (MRP), entrusted with representing the special autonomy law, was sidelined, rendering their role meaningless.
Jakarta’s military intervention further emphasised the denial of Papuan rights.
The expansion of five new autonomous provinces in West Papua deepens the marginalisation of indigenous Papuans. This move reinforces the grip of Indonesian colonialism, eroding the cultural identity of the Papuan people.
Jakarta’s tactics, supported by state intelligence and collaboration with local elites, legitimised its oppressive control, Yeimo said.
The state intelligence agency (BIN) in Jakarta manipulated conflict between Papuan groups and tribes to perpetuate hostility and division. By sowing seeds of discord, the colonisers sought to weaken the collective strength of the Papuan people and divert their attention away from their own oppressive actions.
Under Indonesian colonial rule, property, wealth and position held little significance for the Papuan people, Yeimo said.
Relying on hollow promises and pseudo-offers from the oppressors would never lead to justice, welfare, or peace. It was time to reject the deceptive allure of colonialism and focus on reclaiming autonomy and dignity, Yeimo told his people.
Embracing nationalistic ideals was crucial in the Papuan struggle for liberation. Indigenous Papuans must question their own participation in Indonesian colonialism.
Working for the colonisers as bureaucratic elites or bourgeois elites does not uphold their humanity or dignity. It is time to reclaim their autonomy and fight for their freedom.
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
The simple answer to this contradiction is that people vote against governments rather than for them and Labour are being punished for failure — a party in policy paralysis — unable to get out of its own way and get anything meaningful done.
Spelling this out is a recent poll conducted by Essential Research for the lobby group Better Taxes for a Better Future which shows the big majority of voters want a capital gains tax, a wealth tax, a windfall profits tax and want the wealthy to pay at least the same tax rates as the rest of us. (A survey conducted by IRD earlier this year found the uber rich pay less than half the tax rates the rest of us pay)
Here are the figures:
Support for a capital gains tax in New Zealand.Support for a windfall profits tax in New Zealand.
Support for the wealthy to pay a fairer share of tax in New Zealand. Image: Essential Research
Wealth tax A TVNZ poll released last week shows overwhelming support for a wealth tax in line with Green Party policy.
The poll asked eligible voters if they would support or oppose a wealth tax on the assets of New Zealanders with more than $2 million in assets if having the wealth tax meant everyone got free dental care.
A majority — 63 percent — said they would be in support of it, while 28 percent were opposed. The rest did not know or refused to say.
The polls show the ground has shifted dramatically in recent times and has opened the way for Labour’s traditional values (if they have any life left in them) to flourish. The electorate is wanting fairer taxes and have the free-loading rich pay much more.
But Labour under its current and former leaders has been looking the other way. It is out of touch and faces its heaviest electoral defeat in my lifetime.
National and ACT are doing well not because voters want them but because voters are voting against Labour.
The same thing happened in the 1990 election. After six years of brutal Labour policies under David Lange and Roger Douglas the electorate had had a gutsful. They wanted to stop featherbedding the rich at the expense of the rest of us.
National policies even worse
Labour was thrown out and National came in with policies that were even worse than those proposed by Labour.
The same thing will happen this election.
There is a pervasive belief among self-interested politicians that when they are interviewed for opinion polls people will say they are prepared to pay higher taxes but when they get into the ballot box they vote against tax increases.
But this argument can only apply when the individual voter faces paying more tax. In these recent polls the call is for the undertaxed rich to pay a much fairer share. These tax changes the electorate wants will not impact on the 99 percent of voters who go to the polls.
Even National and Act voters want these taxes — but the Labour leadership remain lost in the neoliberal wilderness. They haven’t got the message.
Labour’s failure means we will have to face three years of awful National/Act policies which will deepen the problems we face.
I haven’t kept count but I have personally heard from dozens of Labour members and voters who have told me they have left the party this year and won’t be voting Labour this year — disgust is the dominant theme.
Only hope is reshaped party
After this election Labour’s only hope is to reshape the party around the changed public attitudes to tax and find its roots once more. That is easier said than done for many reasons.
Labour’s activist base is irredeemably middle class and it only has tenuous links with organised workers (less than 10 percent of private sector workers are in unions) who are a small part of the voting public.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins has shown no sign he is capable of leading the rejuvenation policy, thrust and direction the party needs. He is still in the politics of the late 20th century.
All the indications are that the job of Labour renaissance is beyond him.
Hopefully there will be enough good people left in Labour to do what’s needed.
The Indonesia Art Movement has collaborated with the Monj Hen Wani Community and environmental advocates in Papua to organise the “Arumbay Tonotwiyat” — the Women’s Forest People’s Party.
The event took place beneath the lush canopy of Enggros village’s mangrove forest Abepura District, Jayapura City last weekend.
Arumbay Tonotwiyat was a multifaceted celebration that blended art, culture and environmental conservation.
This gathering was a tribute to nature and the preservation of cultural heritage.
It was also a commitment to fostering harmony between humanity and the natural world.
Rumah Bakau Jayapura, Kampung Dongeng Jayapura, Forum Indonesia Muda Jayapura, Sangga Uniyap, and representatives from Cenderawasih University and ISBI Tanah Papua, and Papua Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) supported the event.
The “forest party” engaged a wide range of participants, including children, teenagers, and adults.
Beach clean-up
The event started with a beach clean-up initiative at Cibery Beach, organised by Petronela.
This cleanup effort was a “demonstration of environmental love”, said the organisers.
It acknowledged the persistent issue of marine debris washing ashore during the rainy season.
Children who participated in the Arumbay Tonotwiyat cultural and environmental event in Jayapura. Image: Jubi News
Following the cleanup, participants were treated to a tour of Youtefa Bay, where they witnessed a performance by children from Tobati-Enggros village.
This performance depicted the story of a mangrove forest tainted by garbage and waste originating from Nafri Village, Hamadi Beach, and the Acai River.
Subsequently, the participants were guided to the Women’s Forest in Enggros, an area accessible only to women.
Here, women sought food sources to meet their household needs while also sharing their domestic concerns.
Women’s Forest ‘off-limits’
The Women’s Forest is off-limits to men and any breach of this custom incurs penalties, typically in the form of jewelry or other items.
Mama Ani — “Mother Ani” — explained that men were not permitted to enter the forest while women were foraging for food, as women in the forest swam naked.
Within the mangrove forest, women typically gathered clams, crabs, shrimps, and fish as sources of sustenance.
However, men can enter the forest in the absence of women, usually in search of dried mangrove wood for firewood.
Orgenes Meraudje, the former head of Enggros Village and a prominent community leader, said women also visited the Women’s Forest to share their domestic experiences.
However, these stories remained within the forest, not to be brought back home.
For the women of Enggros-Tobati beach, the forest holds sacred significance, and they foraged unclothed for their household necessities.
Protecting Women’s Forest
Yehuda Hamokwarong, a lecturer at Cenderawasih University who attended the event, stressed the importance of protecting the Women’s Forest.
“The forest served as an educational hub, imparting knowledge and survival skills to Enggros-Tobati women, encompassing practical skills, ethics, and morals,” she said.
“The Women’s Forest represented not only the lungs of the world but also a profound emblem of feminine identity.”
In addition to the Women’s Forest, there is a designated area called “para-para”, a sort of hall exclusive for men, and women were prohibited from entering.
Any woman entering this area would face customary fines.
To start with an anecdote of my personal intellectual history, I have to recall reading The Gulag Archipelago as a youth. There were two things that impressed me about this work although I later came to view much of the author’s assertions to be questionable and distorted. However, if one reads the entirety of Solzhenitsyn as literature there are still remarkable insights to be gleaned, even if the excessive attacks on the Soviet Union should be taken cum grano sale. The first point was formal— the use of footnotes in a literary text to comment on what had been written in the main narrative. The second observation, anticipating Foucault et al., was the function of ordinary criminals in a population of political prisoners.
Footnotes can have the formal function of lending an otherwise weak or absent authority to a text full of unsubstantiated or anecdotal assertions. They can also permit the shift of reader attention from a story to the underlying or derivative aspects of that story. They can also instigate a dialogue with the text by showing the reader how to expose the covert reading of the shadow text.
The role of ordinary crime in disciplining political prisoners was described in some detail in the hundreds of pages Solzhenitsyn devoted to his topic, what he called the archipelago of incarceration throughout the Soviet Union to which political prisoners under Soviet Union law could be sent. The form he chose was the literary version of the “docudrama“. Meanwhile less partisan authors and scholars have disputed the number of prisons and the actual number of prisoners suggested or claimed in Solzhenitsyn’s book. However, this does not invalidate one of his central observations, namely, the function of organized crime in the operation of an oppressive regime. To be clear about this, no matter what system creates and maintains prisons, prisons are instruments of oppression. Any discussion about theories of penitentiary organisation, correctional practice, punishment cannot erase this fundamental fact. Moreover any society that lacks oppressive/ repressive capacity cannot maintain stable commerce and social interaction. Therefore the question is not whether a society has oppressive or repressive instruments but what does any given society value and therefore support or repress in order to maintain such values?
No later than what I have claimed in an earlier essay is the shift from surplus appropriation to scarcity management in economic theory, modern political economy has been taught through mass education as a new religion— a secular form of the grace and sin regime established by the Latin and Reformed clerical elite in the reorganisation of sparsely settled sedentary populations in the Western peninsula of Eurasia into fodder for nomadic barbarians who would extend their empire over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. Until the political-economic apologists were faced with the abolition of slavery and the ascendency of an industrial proletariat, theory focused on how to allocate stolen wealth among the elite estates. With the abolition of slavery (around 1886), the principal occupation of political-economists and the school known now as Social Darwinism was to explain how to prevent the newly freed and the proletariat from claiming their share of the wealth their labour had generated over half a millennia. The explanation they developed was the theory of marginal utility and the redirection of economic management to administering newly discovered “scarcity.”
Introduction of scarcity as the underlying condition of political economy — perversely at times when capitalist crises of overproduction were recurrent — was a sleight of hand. Fast forward to the end of the War against the Soviet Union and Communism: in the US a Canadian Stanford (amazingly) economist named Lorie Tarshis published a textbook, TheElements of Economics (1947) An Introduction to the Theory of Price and Employment, that was recognized as the first textbook in the US based on the theories of Maynard Keynes. This book was quickly banned after a vicious letter-writing campaign led in part by archconservative and reputed CIA asset, William F. Buckley. When I say “banned”, I mean banned. In more than twenty years it has been impossible for me to find even second-hand editions of this book. It is available only in a very difficult to use e-book version in Internet Archive. That is the condition more than fifty years after it was first published. In its place was the Economics: An Introductory Analysis (1948) by Paul Samuelson. It is to the best of my knowledge the only introductory economics textbook in use in the English-speaking world.
Why is that important? What has that to do with Solzhenitsyn and organized crime in prisons, one might ask? Tarshis was far from being a communist as was insinuated at the time. Maynard Keynes was a liberal eugenics adherent and no friend of the working class or poor. However, Tarshis following Keynes included a very important chapter: on administered pricing and monopoly/ oligopoly. Samuelson’s contract as theoretical “hit man” was to expunge this critical element of political economy from the study and teaching of economics. He was also— thanks to the enormous academic-criminal enterprise of which many in his family have been a part, e.g. Lawrence Summers— able to reap accolades long before that ostensible bête noir of liberals, Milton Friedman, earned his fame as economic terrorist (especially as leading theorist of Chile’s economic destruction after 1973).
What is administered pricing? According to the fairy tale still propagated by the Samuelson catechism, all prices are derived from scarcity equations settled in the market by a tendency of supply and demand to reach equilibrium. The deceit— not unlike that propagated by climate hysteriacs- is that there is such a thing as “equilibrium,” never mind economic equilibrium. Tarshis distinguished quite clearly between real economies of scarcity or surplus and oligarchic/ monopolistic economies. For Samuelson et al. oligarchy and monopoly are merely “imperfect competition”. This is akin to calling something ugly, less beautiful.
According to the so-called “neo-classical synthesis”, only the horrible socialists try to set prices and make economic decisions according to plans. In the “free market” these decisions are the result of mathematical divination derived from the laws of economic nature. However, administered pricing, like administered energy policy, constitutes planning by invisible, publicly unaccountable actors in the private sector using such key performance indicators as return on investment (ROI) or simply how much profit can be obtained at any given price. Since vertically integrated cartels can manipulate input/ factor prices, also with the help of rigged taxation and accounting rules, the question is not at what price will a certain demand level be satisfied but at what price a certain rate of profit can be obtained. This is why such strategies as cross-subsidization or transfer pricing mechanisms can be used to obtain profits despite obvious price inflexibility at the end of the chain— the consumer. To the extent that this is discussed at all in Samuelson and his derivatives it is a pure aberration or distortion. Political power exercised to benefit these actors is concealed by the euphemism “externalities.”
How can a sane person say “distortion” when describing the impact of beneficial ownership of a media market where only five enterprises dominate the industry worldwide? When five oligarchical entities operate under such a regime that were there real, enforceable anti-trust law would be forbidden. Only ignorance or mendacity can call it an exception. It must be treated as the rule. That is point. Assuming that every single graduate that has passed through the Samuelson indoctrination continues either in academic or commercial economics, then we are talking about millions of people whose fundamental education ignores a central fact and operating principle of economics since the beginning of the 20th century. The anecdotal evidence of global ignorance/ mendacity ought to be sufficient to convince any sober thinking person that what we are told about the economy and the society it constitutes is at least twenty per cent nonsense. (I am being generous here.) The damage is actually much worse since the discipline is thus so detached from reality and bound by pseudo-scientific mathematical models that we cannot even begin to imagine another way of organizing resources. (Economist Michael Hudson has worked very hard to do this by returning to the original critical forms of political economic theory: Professor Hudson, who learned economics working in Business and not the Academy, also makes very clear that all modern economies are “planned,” Gosplan was responsible for the Soviet economy, while Wall Street—a closely held private financial cartel—plans the Western economy. See among others Hudson’s Superimperialism)
What does all this have to do with policing?
Since the declaration of the COVID-19 war in 2020 numerous business districts throughout the United States and other Western metropolises have experienced bizarre mass attacks mainly on the retail sector. These attacks often followed or were contemporaneous with mass demonstrations apparently organized and/ or supported by offshore NGOs like Black Lives Matter and Antifascist Action or groups demonstrably trained by the successor to OTPOR. The attacks included looting, vandalism, arson, and assault and battery. Millions of US dollars in property damage were recorded. Many businesses closed their doors or were forced to create expensive security barriers to customers. During this period policing was conspicuous by its absence.
Before continuing the term “offshore” should be explained. The construction of astro-turf organizations requires funding. Organizations are needed to obtain and pay for facilities used whenever masses of people are brought together for any purpose. A daylong event of any sort, especially in countries like the US with a low density of public conveniences, needs provision for basic things like toilets and drinking water. These are key logistical elements of any sustained mass activity and they cost money. A friend of mine from Leipzig who grew up there during the GDR era remarked often about the Monday demonstrations there: who paid for all the toilet facilities during those demonstrations? There was a US TV sitcom, All in the Family (a variant of the 1965-75 British satire Till Death Us Do Part) that was initially quite scandalous not only because of fluid bigoted language but also because the protagonist explicitly talked about and went to the toilet in prime time television. Perhaps American culture is so sanitized that no one can even imagine the necessity of a toilet in public life. Offshore NGOs are these conduits for cash and organizational resources whose actual beneficial owners are screened from public view. The National Endowment for Democracy directs funds for such entities beyond US borders. Other government agencies facilitate these cash and resource flows in the West.
Nevertheless it did not take long to find that massive amounts of money were funnelled to bank accounts of these AstroTurf agents, announced for use as bail bond, etc. At the same time banks on both sides of the great northern border were seizing donations for Canadian truckers protesting government policies. The spokespersons for these demonstrations claimed that they were being held to protest against police brutality and racism, ostensibly in official conduct and economic behaviour. These demonstrations received vast mass media and social media coverage. They were praised by public authorities at state and federal level and in rare instances also by local government officials. During these summers of discontent, much of the population was subject to house arrest; curfews and public assembly restrictions ordered in violation of all principles of due process under US law. In fact, demonstrations attempted to protest the violations of constitutional rights to free speech, due process and freedom of assembly were strictly suppressed by police at all levels while these peculiar demonstrations against police brutality and racism were unobstructed. It became clear that many demonstrators at these events had been bussed in from other locations around the country. Hence local residents were an insignificant part of the action.
As argued in an earlier article, there is an ideology and a strategy at work here. The religious component is a missionary strategy based on and organized through a “purity” cult. However, the social transformation or re-engineering which is the long-term plan has a serious economic component, too. That economic component is rooted in the theories of eugenics and marginal utility or marginalism. Both of these theories arise with a fundamental ideological change that matured in the Manhattan Project.
Prior to 1942, the prevailing – by that I mean also in popular culture—model of humans and nature was mechanical. Nature was a machine and humans, including their cerebral –corporeal interfaces, were mechanical. The culmination of this human model can be found in Frederick Taylor’s time-motion studies, explained in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911). There was a critique of this model among the Romantics but this minority was itself marginalized in favour of the apparently modern “systems” theories. Romantic criticism of the emerging industrial society was complex and contradictory since, unlike the Enlightenment, Romanticism was not a concept of social coherence but an attempt to deal with the inherent incoherence of society and human personality. In any event by 1942, the Romantic approaches to humanism were thoroughly marginalized (to use this metaphor again) in favour of systems theory together with an analogue and then digital-calculation model human nature. When the first artificial intelligence (AI) claims were being asserted at US research universities, one of the leading developers of the underlying programming, Joseph Weizenbaum, denounced the cause in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). In a talk he gave in the late-1990s in his native Germany, he reiterated that the so-called Information Society was fraudulent. Compulsive computation, as he called it, not only erroneously equated data with information. It also substituted calculation for judgment.
Thus it also followed that the mathematical, compulsive model of the world prevented the judgment that would have condemned the Manhattan Project as the quest for the world’s most nihilistic weapons. Today the computer model of man, the “hackable animal”, whose every act is described and defined on the basis of mathematical modelling, includes the negation of judgment (and of values). Instead this mathematical model of man, merely an aerobic program medium with disposable parts, forms the basis for re-engineering of a society that will be “sustainable and robust”. However, there is a grand deception in this language developed through the appropriation of opposition language in the 1970s and its propagation as reconstituted liberation product—political-economic Velveeta. If the economy is driven by calculation of utility and economic man is governed by this rule, then he—yes, he—must by nature be a calculator and governed by the “laws” of mathematics. From this follows the anti-humanism of Norbert Weiner (Cybernetics, 1948) and Yuval Noah Harari. It is crucial to recall that atomic weaponry and genetic engineering were developed contemporaneously and have continued parallel to this day as elements of a unified weapons suite.
The so-called UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ought to be judged first of all by their source. The source of all international policy from the United Nations and its agencies was and remains the executive suite of the world’s largest multinational corporations and the governments they own. The flowery language aside—and one must see it for what it is, marketing (propaganda)—this is the agenda of institutions that have all been sworn to the worldview for which the Manhattan Project stands—atomic domination or annihilation of humanity. From this standpoint the human computer and the digital economy are a continuous fabric with the ARPA Net, now called the Internet, which was designed as sustainable communications in the wake of the two atomic strikes the then US Strategic Air Command had planned to destroy the USSR. That is the immoral foundation of this still proprietary technology that billions have been persuaded is the public sphere and governed by liberal freedoms like speech and assembly.
While there have been legal and commercial challenges to create some kind of public sphere out of this technological space—something akin to squatting and the doctrine of adverse possession—we have seen that the real owners of the Internet regularly assert their ownership, either through state agencies or corporate entities. We have yet to establish a doctrine that the electrical and communications grids upon which the theory of Internet liberty is premised can actually be articulated, let alone aggressively defended. Instead we are debating as to why private owners and their state agents do not respect archaic and naïve ideas about human liberty. Is this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness?
There is no enforceable legal regime because there is also no comprehensive economic regime that includes the human as someone more than a computer or machine with legs. There is no biological or moral regime because the argument has been accepted that humans are not animals like the rest of life on the planet and hence no more enemies of Nature than rabbits, fish, birds or fruit trees. Instead the psychopaths of compulsive calculation swoop around the planet to gather, catalogue, patent, digitalize and synthesize everything that could enable their sustainability. Those who fanatically argue for population reduction never appear on the assisted-suicide rosters. Could it be that they don’t mean a reduction of all the population?
Seemingly parallel—but actually at deniable arm’s length—the CIA sponsored World Economic Forum has not only taken the mantle sewn with SDGs, it has also turned them into the loincloth for the not yet unsustainable to wear called “Diversity – Inclusion – Equity”—DIE, for short. (Their marketing departments certainly advised a different order of wording to avoid the obvious connotation.) The principal sponsors of this exclusive club and cutout for the “sustainable class” coincides with those whose wealth derives from the exact opposite of those terms, if one understands them naively. In fact, the WEF and the wholly owned United Nations apparatus are all beneficiaries of the atomic extortion system created by the Manhattan Project. What D-I-E means is literally what Stanley Kubrick so effectively depicted in Doctor Strangelove. It is the world depicted in Soylent Green. It includes the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Outbreak. This Hollywood propaganda product has been called “predictive”. It is part of creating the psychological conditions for re-engineering.
So amid the Woke Crusade, the legally protected vandalism of vast majorities by “pure” fanatics, two phenomena have emerged to coincide with the worldwide counter-insurgency by force of arms (aka the War on Terror and now the war against Russia). These have been a) mass migration from the countries that the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals have been plundering and pillaging since 1975 almost without meaningful opposition at home or abroad and b) abject failure of even the most rudimentary public safety and policing mechanisms to function.
The rampages since 2020 mainly in the US and the mass illegal migration, in the US and EU but also in countries unfortunate enough to border the imperial plunder and pillage operations everywhere except perhaps Russia and China, are destroying the economic order in which the vast majority of people live their lives. Officially this disruption is a struggle for social justice. However, justice is not a natural condition but one created within definable social contexts. Precisely these contexts, until now, defined by nation-state legal and moral regimes, are under universal attack. The assailants are not secret. The attack on definable social contexts in which local communities can establish and maintain social justice is being organized and conducted at the strategic level by those who own the United Nations and compose the World Economic Forum. The sustainable development goals they pursue are those which clearly permit them to sustain their position and power amidst the destruction of every other social structure that could in any way deviate from the digital-computational vision of life (let us not call it humanity) they have been raised to promote and impose.
It is clear testimony to the effectiveness of the psychological weapons used that while so much has been scrubbed from the Internet (or blocked by available search engines), one can still find a notorious 60-Minutes interview in which George Schwartz (Soros) unabashedly admits that since the age of 14 (!) he has unrepentantly participated in the deportation of people (also to slavery or death) in order to profit from confiscation of their goods and property. This man has been able to promote himself as a philanthropist while enriching himself for some 79 years by the same methods. His Open Society foundations, in addition to acting as conduits for other government agencies, have served as cadre schools and organizational support to thousands whose business model is the destruction of the citizen framework that has historically guaranteed social justice or any kind of organized cultural and economic life—for power and profit. He is demonstrably one of the major funders of the AstroTurf NGOs that wage the war for “purity” (DIE) throughout the world. Mr Soros is just the most prominent and unabashed of the atomic war elite. The dissolution of the legal and social context for communities, historical nations or states, is being pursued to create a world of statelessness in which no institutions are available to protect human beings, especially from those who are like Soros.
The removal of policing, whether of borders or city streets, is elemental to this policy. The destruction of the SME sector, one of the COVID-19 objectives, was accelerated by the armed propaganda tactics of the offshore AstroTurf NGOs. There is a complex of weaponry deployed and the US itself has finally become the target of the strategy its owners have pursued for decades in every corner of the empire. Mass migration will flood the labour market in a country already deindustrialised. It will replace furloughed and mRNA poisoned workers and their families with raw muscle from abroad. At the same time the US will be subjected to unique tactics.
While the EU comprises populations long accustomed to national registration, social management and lack of lethal force among the citizens, the US is a society with a notoriously well-armed population. Moreover its most traditional elements include police, fire brigades, and military veterans indoctrinated with even more patriotism than the average person outside the US can imagine. This poses a threat—mirrored in the regime’s fanatical attempts to prevent Donald Trump from standing in the next POTUS election. The ruling oligarchy has surely been asking itself, especially after growing barracks unrest following the forced mRNA injections, whether its uniformed security forces are sufficiently loyal. Therefore it is very likely that among these “military-aged” illegal immigrant males there are cohorts of trained paramilitary infiltrated into the country, like in Libya or Syria. All this can lead to a major reorganization of the economy based on new forms of forced labour and political repression. Without the SME sector the US population becomes even more dependent upon the oligarchs that own corporations like Amazon. At the same time the barriers between licit and illicit economy are being dissolved/ demolished. When ordinary business has to pay protection only armies will be able to do business.
The digital war, launched against humans and nature in 1945 with the obliteration of two Japanese cities, opened a new era, the era of global nihilism whose lingua franca is mathematics and whose form of reality is the mathematical model in which humans are mere computational factors. There are cultures on this planet still that resist this compulsive computation and its practice of natural and human degradation. They cannot be reduced to digits or some factor or marginal utility. They are not enemies of Nature but integral elements of Nature. It is necessary to remember that. Those who bombard us with lies about sustainability are only the descendants of the Strangeloves, the Tellers, von Neumanns, Oppenheimers and the psychopathic misanthropes who paid them for creating the means by which they may sustain themselves (they believe) at the expense of annihilating the rest of us. The Sustainable Development Goals and DIE are the immoral basis by which sustainable atomic, biological and chemical war can be waged against Nature and its human members.
The top 5 percent of New Zealanders own roughly 50 percent of New Zealand’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of New Zealanders own a miserable 5 percent.
IRD proved NZ capitalism is rigged for the rich and business columnist Bernard Hickey calculates that if we had had a basic capital gains tax in place over the last decade, we would have earned $200 billion in tax revenue.
$200 billion would have ensured our public infrastructure wouldn’t be in such an underfunded ruin right now.
There are 14 billionaires in NZ plus 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals with more than $50 million each. Why not start start with them, then move onto the banks, then the property speculators, the climate change polluters and big industry to pay their fair share before making workers pay more tax.
Culture War fights make all the noise, but poor people aren’t sitting around the kitchen table cancelling people for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills.
‘Bread and butter’ pressures
“Bread and butter” cost of living pressures are what the New Zealand electorate wants answers to, and that’s where the Left need to step up and push universal policy that lifts that cost from the people.
The Commerce Commission is clear that the supermarket duopoly should be broken up and the state should step in and provide that competition.
We need year long maternity leave.
We need a nationalised Early Education sector that provides free childcare for children under 5.
We need free public transport.
We need free breakfast and lunches in schools.
We need free dental care.
We need 50,000 new state houses.
We need more hospitals, more schools and a teacher’s aid in every class room.
We need climate change adaptation and a resilient rebuilt infrastructure.
Funded by taxing the rich
We need all these things and we need to fund them by taxing the rich who the IRD clearly showed were rigging the system.
That requires political courage but there is none.
No one is willing to fight for tomorrow, they merely want to pacify the present!
Just promise me one thing.
Don’t. You. Dare. Vote. Early. In. 2023!
I can not urge this enough from you all comrades.
Don’t vote early in the 2023 election.
The major electoral issues facing New Zealanders in 2023 . . . inflation, followed by housing and crime. Climate is in fifth position, behind health. Image: The Daily Blog/IPSOS
Secrecy of the ballot box
I’m not going to tell you who to vote for because this is a liberal progressive democracy and your right to chose who you want in the secrecy of that ballot box is a sacred privilege and is your right as a citizen.
But what I will beg of you, is to not vote early in 2023.
Comrades, on our horizon is inflation in double figures, geopolitical shockwave after geopolitical shockwave and a global economic depression exacerbated by catastrophic climate change.
As a nation we will face some of the toughest choices and decision making outside of war time and that means you must press those bloody MPs to respond to real policy solutions and make them promise to change things and you can’t do that if you hand your vote over before the election.
Keep demanding concessions and promises for your vote right up until midnight before election day AND THEN cast your vote!
We only get 1 chance every 3 years to hold these politicians’ feet to the fire and they only care before the election, so force real concessions out of them before you elect them.
This election is going to be too important to just let politicians waltz into Parliament without being blistered by our scrutiny.
Demand real concessions from them and THEN vote on Election Day, October 14.
Civil society groups wanting to see an end to destructive logging practices by foreign companies in Papua New Guinea, say these companies are being given forest clearance authorities and then misusing them.
The PNG advocacy group, Act Now!, and Jubilee Australia said the forest clearance authorities (FCAs) are intended to allow limited pockets of forest to be cleared for agricultural or other use.
Eddie Tanago of Act Now! said a case study they conducted into West Sepik’s Wammy Rural Development Project, which is run by Malaysian logging company Global Elite Ltd, was meant to result in the planting of palm oil and rubber trees.
“Instead, it used it as a front. And we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of round logs being exported. Now, this particular operation has been going on for almost 10 years, and this company has sold more than US$31 million worth of round logs,” he said.
Tanago said there was no sign of any attempt to rehabilitate the land for other use.
ACT Now! said the Wammy project was also breaking other laws because the land was subject to the SABL (Special Agricultural Business Leases) Commission of Inquiry in 2013 and it was evident then that the landowners’ free, prior and informed consent had never been given, so there should not have been any logging on it.
Tanago said Wammy was just one of about 24 logging operations making use of an FCA licence, resulting in huge quantities of logs being exported.
“Together this activity exploiting FCAs covers about 61,800 hectares of forest, and that’s equivalent to about 11,000 football fields. So that’s really, really massive,” he said.
Act Now is “calling on the Forest Board and the PNG Forest Authority to extend the current moratorium on the new FCAs”.
“There was one that was announced in the beginning of this year that says that they were not going to issue any new FCAs. We want that to extend. We want logging in all the existing FCAs to be also suspended. And there should be a comprehensive public review of these projects.”
The PNG government has previously stated it wanted to end round log exports by 2025, but Act Now! points out that in the first six months of the current year exports have totalled 1.1 million cubic metres.
“The export log volumes now are currently very high. And the PNG Forest Authority is really failing to meet the reduction targets as set down in the medium term plan,” he sid.
“This is in breach of the targets that are set out by the government, plus, all the promises that we’ve seen, like the recent one bill made by Prime Minister [James] Marape when the French President was around.”
On the visit to PNG, President Emmanuel Macron and Marape visited a lookout in the Varirata National Park picnic area, renaming it the Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron lookout point.
The Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) reports that the walk through the lush national park was underlined by the signing of a new environment initiative — backed by French and European Union financing — that will reward countries that preserve their rainforests.
Marape said the country’s rainforest was the third largest and undisturbed tropical rainforest in the world and preserving its integrity was of the utmost importance.
Act Now! would agree, saying PNG has to be looking to preserve the rainforest and reduce deforestation, but the current signs are not good.
RNZ Pacific contacted Global Elite Ltd for comment on this story but there was no response.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.The audio was first broadcast on Friday, 15 September 2023.
Harvested logs in Papua New Guinea. Image: RNZI/Johnny Blades
Aotearoa New Zealand’s public television broadcaster TVNZ is planning significant cuts to content production, programmes and operational spending in response to commercial clients’ reduced spending on advertising.
Future projects are under review and pay rises for executives and top-earning staff have also been scrapped at the state-owned broadcaster.
Staff were informed of the changes in a memo and video address today from acting chief executive Brent McAnulty.
The memo says senior executives have identified “all the possible cost savings opportunities we have” in recent weeks.
“Content budgets have been reduced, both for local production and international content. Remuneration reviews have been cancelled for our exec team and our other highest-earning employees,” it said.
“There have been some really tough calls to make here, but we need to live within our means,” McAnulty told staff.
“All projects are being reviewed to decide whether they should continue, be paused, or be cancelled for this financial year,” the memo said.
Digital technology overhaul
TVNZ currently has a tender out for a major overhaul of its digital technology and internet infrastructure.
“We’re also putting tighter controls on capital expenditure and we’re looking at how we can reduce casual and contractor labour costs,” the memo said.
“The TV advertising market is tough right now, and as the biggest player we are being impacted,” McAnulty told staff in today’s memo.
“Local businesses have been reducing their advertising spend because of the economic conditions, and uncertainty in the lead up to the election,” it said.
The memo urges staff to use up their leave this year.
Recruitment for vacant roles is “paused until 2024” and TVNZ is “choosing not to fill some other vacant roles” and will defer the starting dates for some roles.
TVNZ has more than 750 staff. More than 300 of them earn more than $100,000 a year.
Annual allowance dropped
An annual allowance of $350 paid to all staff — which was effectively a covid-19 relief initiative — will not be paid this year.
TVNZ has “paused” all travel for 2024 except “business-critical travel related to newsgathering, commercial clients and content negotiations”.
TVNZ will also spend less on social media and online marketing and promotion and market research, according to the memo.
“We’re pausing all internal events — though we’re still hopeful that we’ll have Christmas celebrations in our three main offices,” the memo said.
TVNZ reported revenue of $180.3 million in the six months to December 2022, but forecast a loss of $15.6m in the 2023/24 financial year.
The broadcaster has previously signalled that it may need to respond to financial difficulties in the near future.
A ‘dynamic approach’
“We’ll adopt a dynamic approach to the allocation of business resources between investing to sustain our core TV business and accelerating the growth of our future online business. The stronger the commercial performance of our core business, the more actively we’ll be able to invest in shaping our future,” the document says.
Brent McAnulty assured TVNZ staff in today’s memo that TVNZ still had a strong share of television audience and revenue and its online platform TVNZ+ had an “impressive growth trajectory.”
Previous CEO Kevin Kenrick persuaded the government in 2019 to allow TVNZ to effectively forgo dividends to the Crown to allow it to invest in programmes and digital services.
This angered rival commercial media rivals who could expect no such backstop, while also competing with offshore-owned streaming services as well other broadcasters for audience and revenue.
TVNZ has invested heavily in TVNZ+ and recently launched live sport on the platform after securing rights held by Spark Sport until it ceased in July.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Last year Joelle Holland invested all of the money she had saved for a home deposit and put it into a baby product business called Hawaiiki Pēpi.
The sole focus of Hawaiiki Pēpi is to teach Māori children to be proud of their culture and language.
Hawaiiki Pēpi has already reached more than $100,000 in sales, but most importantly for its owner, it has delivered on its promise to encourage and normalise all things Māori.
“I don’t have any experience in business at all. But what I do have is a passion for my culture and the revitalisation of our language,” she says.
“This venture was a way for me to express that and show people how beautiful Māori can be.”
Holland (Tainui, Tūhoe, Ngāti Whātua) came up with the idea after giving birth to her children Ivy-āio, three, and Ryda Hawaiiki, one.
The online business that Holland manages and runs from her home, creates Māori-designed products such as blankets for babies.
Proud to be Māori
“When my eldest child was in my puku, I was trying to find baby products that showed that we were proud to be Māori. There weren’t any at the time. That’s how the idea of Hawaiiki Pēpi came about,” she says.
With the support of her partner Tayllis, Holland decided to take a risk and enter the competitive baby industry.
To prepare for her very first start up, Holland took business courses, conducted her own research and did 18 months of development before launching Hawaiiki Pēpi at the end of last year.
“The aim is to enhance identity, te reo Māori and whakapapa. We are hoping to wrap our pēpi in their culture from birth so they can gain a sense of who they are, creating strong, confident and unapologetically proud Māori.”
Holland grew up in Auckland and went to kohanga reo and kura kaupapa before spending her high school years boarding at St Joseph’s Māori Girls College in Napier.
She says that language is the key connection to one’s culture. It was through learning te reo Māori from birth that instilled in her a strong sense of cultural identity. It has motivated her in all of the important life decisions that she has made.
‘Struggled through teenage years’
“I struggled throughout my teenage years. I was trying to find my purpose. I was searching for who I was, where I came from and where I belonged.
“I realised that the strong connection I had to my tupuna and my people was through the language. Everything has reverted back to te reo Māori and it has always been an anchor in my life.”
Holland went to Masey University to qualify to teach Māori in schools, juggling study, with taking care of two children under three, and starting a new business.
This year, she completed her degree in the Bachelor of Teaching and Learning Kura Kaupapa Māori programme. The qualification has allowed Holland to add another powerful tool in her life that nurtures Māoritanga in the younger generation and contributes to the revitalisation of te reo Māori.
“I loved my studies. Every aspect of the degree was immersed in te reo Māori, from our essays, presentations to our speeches. Although I grew up speaking Māori, I realised there is still so much more to learn,” she says.
For now, Holland will be focusing on growing her business and raising her children before embarking on a career as a teacher.
“My end goal is to encourage all tamariki to be proud of their Māoritanga, encourage them to speak their language and stand tall.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Fiji owes the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China about $374.9 million, states the Ministry of Finance’s government debt report for the third quarter of 2022/2023.
This comes as China has drawn a spate of criticism regarding the motivations behind its assistance to Pacific island countries.
The Chinese Embassy in Fiji says all assistance provided has been based on the requests of Pacific Island countries aimed to make people’s lives better.
Fiji’s total debt stands at $9.6 billion, and Fiji’s debt to China amounts to about 3.8 percent of total debt, and 10.5 percent of external debt.
In response to the claims, the Chinese Embassy in Fiji issued a statement saying China was committed to providing all possible assistance to other developing countries within the framework of South-South co-operation.
The statement also said the country never attached any “political strings” and fully respected the wishes and needs of recipient countries.
“Since the 1980s, China has been assisting Fiji in many areas on the basis of the Fijian government requests, including building roads, bridges, jetties, schools, hospitals, stadiums, hydropower stations and many other facilities,” the statement read.
“China often takes into account the debt-paying ability and solvency of recipient countries, so avoiding creating too high a debt burden to recipient countries.”
The embassy also stated all relevant projects were conducted with careful feasibility studies and market research to ensure they delivered the desired economic and social benefits.
“It’s clear that China’s foreign loans is reasonable and helpful, not the cause of the debt crisis of any other countries.”
Shayal Devi is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
The battle to stop the destruction in Australia of critical koala habitats in state forests in Northern NSW has escalated in recent weeks. Wendy Bacon reports on the campaign from daring lock-ons and vigils in the depth of forests to rallies, parliament and courts in Sydney which has led to a halt to logging in Newry State Forest.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Wendy Bacon
Back in Feburary this year, campaigners celebrated as the then shadow Environmental Minister Penny Sharpe announced Labor’s support for a Great Koala National Park (GKNP), stretching along the Mid-North coast from Kempsey to Coffs Harbour.
The purpose of the park, which was first proposed more than a decade ago, is to protect critical habit for the koala and other threatened species.
Koala numbers in NSW plummeted by more than half between 2000 and 2020 due to logging, land clearing, drought and devastating bushfires. A NSW Parliamentary Inquiry in 2020 heard scientific evidence that koalas could be extinct by 2050 unless there are dramatic changes.
NSW is the only mainland state not to have a plan to stop logging of native forests, essential koala habitats.
Hopes raised by Labor’s narrow election win in March this year were quickly dashed. Hope has now turned to anger with 200 people marching in protest in the mid-north NSW city of Coffs Harbour earlier this month and nation-wide rallies.
NSW Forestry Corporation steps up logging When she received a petition calling for a moratorium on logging within the GKNP in June, Minister for Environment Penny Sharpe reiterated her commitment to the Park but confirmed that logging would not stop.
Instead the government-owned, NSW Forestry Corporation (NSWFC) has stepped up its logging inside the proposed GKNP, including in areas containing long-lasting koala hubs, carting off huge tree trunks and leaving devastated land in its wake. These operations are losing millions each year.
The campaign consists of a network of local community groups, such as the Friends of Orara East Forest, some of which conduct weekly vigils; the Belligen Activist Network and the Knitting Nannas, as well as larger environmental groups such as the National Parks Association.
It is supported by the NSW Greens, Animal Justice and some Independent MPs including MP for Sydney Alex Greenwich. Further north, the North East Forest Alliance has taken legal action to stop the NSWFC logging 77 percent of the Braemar forest, part of the proposed Sandy Creek National Park where koalas survive despite long standing koala communities being reduced by 70 percent in the 2019/2020 bush fires.
On June 28, a broad-based group of MPs and NGOS advocating for the park held a press conference calling on politicians across all parties to support a moratorium on the ongoing destruction of the GKNP and immediately start to work on transition plans for timber workers and development of the Park, including with local First Nations people.
But Minister Sharpe reiterated her intention to allow logging to continue.
A few days later, logging began in the Orara East and Boambee Forests, both of which are inside the Great Koala National Park. Vigils and petitions were clearly not working.
Civil disobedience begins On July 7, three HSC students on school holidays locked on to heavy machinery and a full barrel of cement in Orara East Forest. At the same time in Boambee Forest, two Knitting Nannas locked onto heavy machinery. Another protester occupied a tree. In all, logging was delayed by 10 hours.
Seventeen-year-old Mason said: “I’m here on behalf of myself and my 14-year-old brother. The rate at which our government is auctioning off natural forests is frightening, and I feel powerless to do anything about it.
“We’ve tried protesting, and we can’t vote, which is why we feel driven to take this action against these machines ripping our trees down. The government can stop this and we just need them to take notice.”
The three students were arrested but released from custody with cautions and no charges laid.
On the same day, two Knitting Nannas Christine Degan and Susan Doyle were arrested in the Boambee State Park. Both are veterans of vigils and protests aimed at stopping logging and for action on climate change.
“Shame … shame … shame” banners in Orara State Forest. Image: Chris Deagan/CityHub
In desperation, they took a further step. They slept overnight in a home near the perimeter of the State Park.
Before day break, Degan and Doyle and supporters walked up a steep hill, using torches to find their way through the bush to the logging camp. There they were met by an angry security guard who burst into an aggressive tirade, accusing them of being terrorists.
While two supporters calmed him down, the two women were locked onto equipment. There they sat in two small beach chairs in drizzling rain and cold for eight hours until the NSW police arrived and arrested them.
A bulldozer in Orara State Forest. Image: Chris Deagan/CityHub
The two friends were released on condition that they did not contact each other, except through a lawyer, or go near any forests were logging was underway.
Earlier this month, they were each fined a total of $500 for entering and refusing to leave a forest.
Battle moves to Newry Forest A vigil camp is now in its third week in the Upper reaches of the Kalang River where other sites have recently been made “active” for logging.
Nearer the coast, the the battle front has moved to the Newry Forest near Belligen. For nine months in 2021, the community had joined the local Gumbaynggir elders in a blockade that successfully delay logging operations.
Although Newry is a core part of the GKNP, the NSWFC approved 2500 hectares of the forest for logging in May this year. In July, the listing went from “approved” to “active,” leading the Bellingen action group to organise a workshop to upgrade their direct action tactics.
On July 31, local Gumbaynggirr Elders, Traditional Custodians and supporters established a peaceful protest camp on sacred land within the forest. They were met with armed police and steel gates preventing the public from entering the forest.
A Gumbarnggirr spokesperson told the National Indigenous Times that the NSW Forestry Corporation (NSWFC) was endangering koala and possum gliders that are their totem animals.
“The values of Newry to the Gumbaynggirr people are precious, priceless and absolutely irreplaceable. …There is a desperate need for these appalling industrial logging operations to be stopped or we simply won’t have koalas left and priceless and irreplaceable Gumbaynggirr values and cultural heritage will be destroyed.”
“Hands off country” . . . protesters locked on in Newry Forest. Image: CityHub
Gumbaynggirr elder arrested after locking on
On the second day of logging, two younger protesters locked onto machinery. On the third day, Wilkarr Kurikuta, a Ngemba, Wangan and Jangalingou man, locked-on to a harvester.
“I’m here for my old people and my sister, a proud Gumbaynggirr woman, to exercise my sovereign right to protect country,” he said.
He told the NSW government that it should expect resistance until an end is put to the destruction of his people’s land and waters. He was violently removed, charged and held overnight in a cell.
The next day, two more young people locked onto industrial logging machinery in Newry Forest, again halting logging. They were arrested, charged and released. Logging had so far been disrupted on six days.
On August 2, Greens MP Sue Higginson moved a motion in the NSW Legislative Council to confirm the NSW government’s intention to protect critical koala habitat, noting that the Newry State Forest was “identified for protection in 2017 as having three koala hubs” and that a three-day survey had found five threatened plant species, evidence of koalas and high quality habitat for threatened koalas, the Glossy Black Cockatoo and Greater Glider.
She described the “industrial scale logging operation” as happening under “martial law”.
First Nations elders were integral to the protest at Newry Forest. Image: Bellingen Activist Network/Facebook/CityHub
“The community on the front line are not doing this because it is fun or because they want to, or because they dislike forestry workers or police,” she told Parliament.
“They are doing it as an act of hope in the democratic process in which they believe — the genuine hope that they will be seen and heard and that their actions will lead to political outcomes that protect this forest, which the government has promised to protect but is currently destroying.”
Labor opposed the motion with the Minister for the Environment Sharpe moving amendments which removed any reference to the factual core of the motion described above. Her amendments were passed with Liberal National Party support.
A reduced anodyne motion recording commitment to protect the koala was then passed.
In her response Penny Sharpe referred to “internal work” being done to proceed with the Park. She said she was working closely with the Minister for Forestry Tara Moriarty.
This will further concern forest campaigners because in Moriarty’s speech in support of Sharpe’s amendments, she supported the current logging operations as being done in line with sustainable ecologically sound forest management, with the NSW Environmental Protection Authority ensuring compliance with all policies.
This is the very issue that is being contested by the movement to save the forests. It suggests that Moriarty may not accept the findings of a recent NSW Auditor-General’s report which found that both the NSW Forest Corporation and the NSW Environmental Protection Authority were insufficiently resourced, trained and empowered to enforce compliance and that NSWFC’s voluntary efforts did not extend to satisfactorily ensuring contractors do not breach regulations and policies.
This issue is already before the courts. The North Eastern Alliance, which has previously taken successful court actions during the 34 year period it has been campaigning to protect forests, is arguing that the NSW Land and Environment Court should set aside approvals to log sections of the Braemar and Myrtle Forests further north at the Sandy Creek State Park which is also a proposed national park in the Richmond Valley.
The NSWFC has agreed to halt logging in these forests which are home to koalas and more than 23 threatened species, until the case is decided. The Alliance will be represented by the Environmental Defenders’ Office.
Alliance President Dailan Pugh, who has 44 years experience in protecting forests, said that “Myrtle and Braemar State forests are both identified as Nationally Important Koala Areas that were badly burnt in the 2019/20 wildfires, killing many of their resident koalas.
“Despite this, recent surveys have proved that most patches of preferred koala feed trees are still being utilised by Koalas. Logging of more than 75% of the larger feed trees … that koalas need to rebuild their numbers will be devastating for populations already severely impacted by the fires.”
Protesters hold a banner on cleared ground. Image: Bellingen Activist Network/Facebook/CityHub
The Environmental Defenders’ Office is arguing that the logging operations are unlawful for several reasons: because the operations are not ecologically sustainable, because Forestry Corp failed to consider whether they would be ecologically sustainable, and because the proposed use of “voluntary conditions” is in breach of the logging rules.
NEFA is asking the court to declare the logging approvals invalid and to restrain NSWFC from conducting the operations.
Pugh said: “We have been asking the NSW Government for independent pre-logging surveys on State forests to identify and protect core Koala habitat and climate change refugia, and protection of Preferred Koala Feed Trees (select species >30 cm diameter) in linking habitat. Our requests are falling on deaf ears, we hope this will make them listen.”
While Labor politicians insist that the logging is consistent with protecting biodiversity, the situation looks different to campaigners on the ground. Degan describes seeing crushed casuarinas which provide habitat for the Glossy Black Cockatoo when she visited the Newry Forest for the first time in four weeks.
“It’s just a vast area with trash that’s a metre deep, that no footed animal can get across. I couldn’t get across and I’d break an ankle or shoulder falling over. There’s no way that animals on foot could traverse that debris that’s left behind. It may be regrowth native forest but after 50 years it provides substantial decent habitat.”
Down in Hobart, another forest activist Collette Hamson is spending three months in prison because she broke conditions of a suspended sentence. Before she went to prison she said:
“The reason I commit these offences [is] because I am terrified of the worsening climate crisis. I am not a menace to society, yet here I am facing a jail term . . . I am not giving a finger to the entire judicial system, I am standing up for the forests, for takayna, a safer planet and if that makes me a dangerous criminal then I think we are going to need bigger prisons.”
Labor plans lengthy consultation While the Minister for Environment Penny Sharpe may be able to remove any mention of protests in a parliamentary motion, it is another thing to deal with the wave of civil disobedience that is likely to continue until native forest logging is halted. Sharpe says that A$80 million has been set aside for GKNP and planning is underway.
City Hub asked the Department of Environment to confirm that no consultation was yet underway and on what date one consultation would begin.
A National Parks and Wildlife Service spokesperson replied, stating that development of the park “will be informed by expert scientific advice, an independent economic assessment of impacts on jobs and the local community, and an inclusive consultation process with stakeholdes . . .
“Consultation with stakeholders will occur in the future, with specific timings still to be determined.”
This lengthy process could take most of NSW Labor’s term in government ending in 2027. Unless logging is halted while planning occurs, the proposed National Park along with threatened species it is supposed to protect could be decimated before it arrives.
Wendy Bacon was previously professor of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and supported the Greens in this year’s NSW election. This article was first published by CityHub on August 15 and is republished with permission. Wendy Bacon’s investigative journalism blog.
The Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) is disappointed with the Fiji government and Pacific Islands Forum’s endorsement of the Japanese government’s plans to dump 1.3 million tonnes of nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean at the end of this month.
Nuclear justice campaigner Epeli Lesuma of PANG said this was a “blatant disregard” of the expert opinion of a panel of scientists commissioned by the Forum.
“It’s disappointing because Pacific leaders appointed this panel of experts so ideally our trust should be with them and the recommendations they have provided to us,” Lesuma said.
“These are not just random scientists. These are esteemed and respected professionals engaged to provide us with this advice.”
Last week, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said he was satisfied with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report that stated Japan’s plans to release treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean had met relevant international standards.
“I have made it my business as a Pacific Island leader to carefully study the information and data on the matter…I am satisfied that Japan has demonstrated commitment to satisfy the wishes of the Pacific Island states, as conveyed to Japan by the Pacific Island Forum chair,” Rabuka said in a video on the Fiji government’s official Facebook page.
“I am satisfied that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report is reassuring enough to dispel any fears of any untoward degradation of the ocean environment that would adversely affect lives and ecosystems in our precious blue Pacific,” he said.
‘Convinced’ of IAEA’s seriousness
“I am convinced of the seriousness of the IAEA to continuously monitor this process in Japan.”
The controversial plan by Japan continues to spark anger and concern across many communities, environmental activists, non-government and civil society organisations.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s statement. Video: Fiji govt
Sharing Rabuka’s sentiments was the PIF chair and Cook Islands Prime Minister, Mark Brown, who said the IAEA was the world’s foremost authority on nuclear safety.
“We have received the comments, and the report from our scientific panel and the IAEA and [we are] taking a measured response.
“I’d have to say that as the IAEA is responsible for assessment and for anything to do with the safety of reactors around the world, their findings and credibility need to be upheld.”
Nuclear justice campaigner Epeli Lesuma expresses disappointment over Fiji PM Rabuka’s endorsement of Japan’s controversial plan to release 1.3 million tonnes of nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean at the end of this month. Image: Aralai Vosayaco/Wansolwara
For Lesuma and other concerned members of Pacific communities, the fight was more than just the Pacific being used as a dumping ground.
He maintains that the two Pacific Island leaders’ support for the IAEA report discredited the PIF-commissioned panel’s decision and credibility.
“They are contradicting themselves because they have appointed this group of experts to advise them. Yet they do not believe their recommendations.
‘Now we are backtracking’
“It’s disappointing that this panel was appointed during Fiji’s term as Forum chair. Here we were as head of this regional body but now we are backtracking and saying we don’t believe you.”
Lesuma said civil society groups would continue to back the opinions and recommendations of PIF’s independent panel of scientific experts.
“Their opinions were formulated by science and with the Pacific people and the care of the ocean at its centre,” he said.
PIF’s independent panel of experts remains adamant that there is insufficient data to deem the discharge of nuclear waste safe for release into the Pacific Ocean.
In a June statement this year, PIF General Secretary Henry Puna said the Forum remained committed to addressing strong concerns for the significance of the potential threat of nuclear contamination to the health and security of the Blue Pacific, its people, and prospects.
“Even before Japan announced its decision in April 2021, Pacific states, meeting for the first time in December 2020 as States Parties to the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty (Treaty of Rarotonga), recalled concerns about the environmental impact of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor accident in 2011 and urged Japan to take all steps necessary to address any potential harm to the Pacific,” he said.
“They ‘called on states to take all appropriate measures within their territory, jurisdiction or control to prevent significant transboundary harm to the territory of another state, as required under international law’.
International legal rules
“These important statements stem from key international legal rules and principles, including the unique obligation placed by the Rarotonga Treaty on Pacific states to ‘Prevent Dumping’ (Article 7), in view of our nuclear testing legacy and its permanent impacts on our peoples’ health, environment and human rights.”
Puna said Pacific states therefore had a legal obligation “to prevent the dumping of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter by anyone” and “not to take any action to assist or encourage the dumping by anyone of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter at sea anywhere within the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone”.
Specific concerns by the Forum on nuclear contamination issues were not new, Puna added, and that for many years, the Forum had to deal with attempts by other states to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific.
“Leaders have urged Japan and other shipping states to store or dump their nuclear waste in their home countries rather than storing or dumping them in the Pacific.
“In 1985, the Forum welcomed the Japan PM’s statement that ‘Japan had no intention of dumping radioactive waste in the Pacific Ocean in disregard of the concern expressed by the communities of the region’.”
Against this regional context, he said the Forum’s engagement on the present unprecedented issue signify that for the Blue Pacific, this was not merely a nuclear safety issue.
“It is rather a nuclear legacy issue, an ocean, fisheries, environment, biodiversity, climate change, and health issue with the future of our children and future generations at stake.
Pacific people ‘have nothing to gain’
“Our people do not have anything to gain from Japan’s plan but have much at risk for generations to come,” Puna had said.
The Pacific Ocean contains the greatest biomass of organisms of ecological, economic, and cultural value, including 70 percent of the world’s fisheries. It is the largest continuous body of water on the planet.
The health of all the world’s ocean ecosystems is in documented decline due to a variety of stressors, including climate change, over-exploitation of resources, and pollution, a Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) report highlighted.
The PINA news report cited a paper by the US National Association of Marine Laboratories (NAML), an organisation of more than 100 member laboratories, that stated the proposed release of the contaminated water was a transboundary and transgenerational issue of concern for the health of marine ecosystems and those whose lives and livelihoods depend on them.
Japan aims to gradually release 1.3 million tonnes of treated nuclear wastewater from the defunct Fukushima power plant over a period of 30-40 years.
Aralai Vosayaco is a final-year student journalist at The University of the South Pacific. She is also the 2023 news editor (national) of Wansolwara, USP Journalism’s student training newspaper and online publication. Asia Pacific Report and Wansolwara collaborate.
The announcement of a partnership between the New Zealand government and the world’s biggest investment manager BlackRock in a NZ$2 billion climate infrastructure fund suggests the company is expecting renewable energy in New Zealand to increase its own profitability.
The new fund is the first country-specific renewable investment BlackRock has made, following its 2022 acquisition of New Zealand company SolarZero, which produces solar battery storage and other energy services.
The initiative also underpins the government’s aspirational goal of having 100 percent of electricity generated by renewable sources by 2035.
The purpose of this fund is to accelerate investment from Crown companies and agencies to speed up decarbonisation. But will it cut costs to consumers?
New Zealand is isolated and relies on shipping and air travel, which makes it vulnerable to carbon pricing. Image: Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
Given New Zealand’s isolation and reliance on exports and tourism, the country remains vulnerable to climate change impacts and carbon pricing designed to help cut emissions.
Aside from storm and drought damage from climate change that disrupts food production, both imports and exports are likely to increase in price, and carbon-based tariffs may adversely affect New Zealand’s economy.
To address climate change threats in New Zealand will require more than mobilising private investment with a focus on renewable energy. It will need a comprehensive and collaborative approach that acknowledges dependencies on shipping and air travel, which continue to depend on fossil fuels.
Here are ten broad areas that must be considered when tackling the specific and sometimes unique challenges New Zealand faces in the years ahead:
Because wind and solar power are intermittent, they must be integrated with hydro power. Image: Shutterstock/Dmitry Pichugin
1. Maximising renewable energy Most of New Zealand’s electricity comes from hydro power as well as wind and solar power. It is already over 80 percent renewable, but the grid is topped up by coal.
Promoting renewable electricity is essential but likely not enough. Energy for industrial processes (heating, drying, steel production) still relies on fossil fuels, and we need to make more use of abundant solar and wind resources.
Because these resources are intermittent, they must be integrated with hydro power to serve as a “battery” by storing water behind a dam. This requires a national, publicly owned entity whose goal is to maximise renewable energy production (not profits in private companies).
2. Rethinking travel New Zealand has a growing fleet of electric vehicles, but the transport system still largely runs on fossil fuels. It is one of the country’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for 17 percent of gross emissions.
Apart from improving public transport and promoting cycling and walking, simply avoiding unnecessary travel becomes essential. The covid pandemic has shown the way with teleconferencing and virtual meetings.
3. Reduce shipping emissions If shipping were a country, it would be sixth in total emissions. Last month, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), a UN agency that regulates global shipping, agreed to a new climate strategy to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions “close to 2050”.
Already, penalties are being implemented to prevent use of high-sulphur oil. A carbon tax or levy is likely, starting in the European Union in 2024. Biofuels, methanol and perhaps even wind power may help shipping.
4. Trains versus planes For international air travel, development of sustainable aviation fuels is progressing. Further optimising air traffic and flight routes and promoting the use of fuel-efficient aircraft and technologies is essential.
It seems likely carbon offsets may be required, and these could be expensive. For domestic travel, trains may become more viable.
5. Prepare for tourism declines Ecotourism is likely to grow, and operators will have to abide by sustainability certifications and limits to fragile ecosystems areas. Off-peak and new, dispersed destinations seem likely.
Offsetting carbon may become mandatory and the cost is likely to go up, with adverse effects on New Zealand’s economy.
6. Better carbon offsets The need for quality offsets for fossil fuel use is likely to increase. The main potential is wood in trees, since plants take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
However, trees have a finite lifetime and this can only be a temporary fix. Indigenous trees grow more slowly and can lock up carbon for more than a century. But considerable care is needed to avoid forest fires and disease, or the offset value diminishes rapidly.
7. Strategic forestry Protecting and restoring existing native forests helps conserve biodiversity. It also helps limit runoff and erosion. Large-scale afforestation and reforestation efforts to expand forest cover should continue, as strategic planting of native trees will enhance carbon sequestration and restore ecosystem balance.
Implementation of sustainable forest management practices, emphasising selective logging and reforestation after harvesting, will ensure a continuous carbon sink, preserve biodiversity and protect sensitive ecosystems.
8. Greener cities and towns Urban forestry can counteract urban heat island effects and enhance air quality. Planting trees in public spaces and along streets in residential areas can reduce energy consumption for cooling and improve people’s wellbeing.
9. Biofuel development As well as using wood to temporarily sequester carbon, it can be used as a biofuel. Torrefaction is a thermal process that involves heating biomass in the absence of oxygen to produce a more energy-dense and stable material.
This process can be applied to various types of biomass, including wood chips, slash, agricultural residues and other organic materials. The resulting torrefied biomass has several advantages, including improved grindability, increased energy density and reduced moisture content.
It is currently used at the Huntly power station in place of coal but the torrefied wood chips are imported. Instead, this could be an important fuel and an export, given the shortages in Europe arising from the Ukraine war.
10. Incentives for better land use Regenerative farming, agroforestry and silvopasture techniques integrate trees with agricultural practices. This enhances carbon sequestration, improves soil health and provides additional income streams for farmers.
New Zealand should implement financial incentives and regulations to encourage private landowners to participate in tree planting and sustainable forest management. Tax incentives, carbon offset programmes and grants can drive private investment in climate-friendly practices.
A more self-sufficient future Addressing climate change threats in New Zealand requires acknowledgement of the dependencies on shipping, air travel and tourism. Planning for the consequences of climate change and building resilience are both essential.
New Zealand needs to become a lot more self-sufficient and reduce volumes of exports by increasing domestic processing and manufacture. These changes may be hastened by international tariffs on trade based on carbon content.
By transitioning to green shipping, transforming air travel and fostering sustainable tourism, New Zealand can mitigate its carbon footprint, protect natural ecosystems and ensure long-term socioeconomic prosperity. Public-private partnerships and robust policy implementation are crucial.
Between 1991 and 2016, the population of Delhi and its suburbs increased from 9.4 million to 25 million. In 2023, the World Population Review website estimates Delhi’s population to be 32.9 million.
Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities. The paper states that this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.
Africa and Asia will together bear 80% of the projected cropland loss due to rising urbanisation. The disappearance of this productive land will impact staple crops such as maize, rice, soya beans and wheat, which are cornerstones of global food security.
In South Asia, farmland can’t simply spread elsewhere because fertile land is already running out.
One of the paper’s authors, Felix Creutzig (currently, Professor of Sustainability Economics at the Technical University of Berlin), said at the time that, as cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers will be displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries and are key to global food security.
However, what Creutzig says is not inevitable. Far from it. Urbanisation is being encouraged and facilitated by design.
According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of its loans in the history of the institution. On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the early 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture: India was to embark on a massive rural depopulation/urbanisation project.
In addition, in return for up to more than $120 billion (accounting for inflation, this would be $269 billion in 2023) in loans, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions, facilitate the entry of global players and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The details of this plan appear in a January 2021 article by the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE). In effect, it constitutes a massive urbanisation project and the opening of India’s agriculture sector to foreign agribusiness corporations.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Felix Creutzig predicted the following:
As peri-urban land is converted, smallholders will lose their land. The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.
The RUPE says that the opening of India’s agriculture and food economy to foreign investors and global agribusinesses has been a longstanding project of the imperialist countries.
Industrial-scale agriculture is key to the plan. And integral to this model of farming is genetically engineered food crops – whether first generation genetically modified (GM) crops based on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or newer techniques involving the likes of gene editing.
Glyphosate/GM crop approval
According to a recent report in the Chennai-based New Indian Express (NIE), the Indian government is likely to allow the cultivation of herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops. These crops have not been legalised but have been growing in India for some years.
The government is creating a pool of more than 4,000 ‘progressive farmers’ and ‘rural educated youths’ who can help farmers spray glyphosate on GM crops that have been genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide. These pest control officers are to spray glyphosate on behalf of farmers.
Glyphosate is carcinogenic and, in India, its use is officially restricted to tea crops and non-cropping areas like barren land and roadsides. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.
The NIE quotes a source who implies that the drive to spray glyphosate on agricultural land seems like a precursor of legalising HT GM cotton (I would add – and HT GM food crops eventually).
At this time, only one GM crop – Bt (insecticidal) cotton – is legalised in India.
The legalisation of HT GM cotton would be a key step towards opening a multi-billion-dollar market for global agritech-agrochemicals firms which have a range of HT GM food crops waiting in the pipeline.
Much has been written on the devastating effects that glyphosate has on health and the environment. Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH)s formulas affect the gut microbiome and are associated with a global metabolic health crisis. They also cause epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear.
These toxic chemicals have entered the food chain and human bodies at harmful levels and are even in a range of popular children’s cereals.
An April 2023 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute measured glyphosate levels in the urine of farmers and other study participants and determined that high levels of the pesticide were associated with signs of a reaction in the body called oxidative stress, a condition that causes damage to DNA and a cancer biomarker.
The study findings appeared after the US Centers for Disease Control reported in 2022 that more than 80% of urine samples drawn from children and adults contained glyphosate. Similar figures are found in the EU. GBHs are the world’s most widely used agricultural weedkiller.
There are dozens of academic studies that indicate the deleterious and disturbing effects of GBHs on human health. Rather than presenting them here, for the sake of brevity, many are listed in the online article Bathed In Pesticides: The Narrative Of Deception (2022).
Attorney Robert F Kennedy Jr and current presidential candidate has been involved with some of the ongoing court cases in the US that have been brought against Bayer regarding the human health damage of Monsanto’s Roundup GBH (Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018).
Kennedy concludes that there is cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney and inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.
He adds that strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.
Researchers peg glyphosate as a potent endocrine disruptor, which interferes with sexual development in children. It is also a chelator that removes important minerals from the body and disrupts the microbiome, destroying beneficial bacteria in the human gut and triggering brain inflammation and other ill effects.
US Roundup litigation began in 2015 after the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Internal Monsanto documents dating back decades show that the company was aware of scientific research linking its weed killer to cancer but instead of warning consumers, the company worked to suppress the information and manipulate scientific literature.
Over the years, Monsanto mounted a deceitful defence of its health- and environment-damaging Roundup and its GM crops and orchestrated toxic smear campaigns against anyone – scientist or campaigner – who threatened its interests.
In 2016, campaigner Rosemary Mason wrote an open letter to European Chemicals Agency Executive Director Geert Dancet. It can be accessed on the academia.edu site.
In it, she sets out how current EU legislation was originally set up to protect the pesticides industry and how Monsanto and other agrochemical corporations helped the EU design the regulatory systems for their own products.
There is much at stake for the industry. According to Phillips McDougall’s Annual Agriservice Reports, herbicides made up 43% of the global pesticide market in 2019 by value. Much of the increase in glyphosate use is due to the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize and cotton seeds in the US, Brazil and Argentina.
GBHs are a multi-billion-dollar money-spinning venture for the manufacturers. But this latest development in India is as much about the legalisation of a wide range of proprietary HT GM seeds and crops as it is about glyphosate because both are joined at the hip.
Regulatory delinquency
In India, five high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops: the Jairam Ramesh Report (2010); the Sopory Committee Report (2012); the Parliamentary Standing Committee Report (2012); the Technical Expert Committee Final Report (2013); and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment and Forests (2017).
This high-level advice also derives, in part, from GM ‘regulation’ in India being dogged by blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight.
The ‘Technical Expert Committee Final Report’ was scathing about India’s prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies and serious inherent conflicts of interest. As we have seen with the push to get GM mustard commercialised, the problems described by the TEC persist.
The drive to get GM crops commercialised has been relentless, not least GM mustard. The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), the country’s apex regulatory body for GMOs, has pushed ahead by giving this crop the nod. However, the case of GM mustard remains stuck in the Supreme Court due to a public interest litigation lodged by environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues.
This crop is also HT, which is wholly inappropriate for a country like India with its small biodiverse farms that could be affected by its application on nearby fields.
However, despite the ban on GM crops, in 2005, biologist Pushpa Bhargava noted that unapproved varieties of several GM crops were being sold to farmers. In 2008, Arun Shrivasatava wrote that illegal GM okra had been planted in India and poor farmers had been offered lucrative deals to plant “special seed” of all sorts of vegetables.
In 2013, a group of scientists and NGOs protested in India against the introduction of transgenic brinjal in Bangladesh – a centre for origin and diversity of the vegetable – as it would give rise to contamination of the crop in India. In 2014, the West Bengal government said it had received information regarding “infiltration” of commercial seeds of GM Bt brinjal from Bangladesh.
In 2017, the illegal cultivation of an HT GM soybean was reported in Gujarat. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), a national farmers organisation, claimed that Gujarat farmers had been cultivating the HT crop.
This is a cynical attempt to place farmers on corporate seed and chemical (glyphosate) treadmills.
The authors write:
Although India’s cotton sector has been penetrated by various input- and capital-intensive methods, penetration by herbicide has been largely stymied. In Telangana State, the main obstacle has been the practice of ‘double-lining’, in which cotton plants are spaced widely to allow weeding by ox-plow… double-lining is an example of an advantageous path for cash-poor farmers. However, it is being actively undermined by parties intent on expanding herbicide markets and opening a niche for next-generation genetically modified cotton.
Stone and Flachs note the potential market for herbicide growth alone in India is huge. Writing in 2017, the authors note that sales could soon reach USD 800 million with scope for even greater expansion. Indeed, enormous expansion if HT GM crops become legal.
Friends in high places
Global agritech firms are salivating at the prospect of India being prised open for the introduction of GM crops. The industry has always had high-level supporters in India and abroad. And this leads back to what was stated earlier in the article – the plan to industrialise Indian agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and foreign agribusiness and the manoeuvring into position of compliant officials.
PM Modi proclaimed in 2014 that GM represents a good business-investment opportunity. Renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva has highlighted the arm twisting that has gone on in an attempt to force through GMOs into India, with various politicians having been pushed aside until the dotted line for GMO open field-testing approval was signed on.
Seventeen or more secret applications had been made to India’s GMO regulators for trials and release of GM crops, including rice, wheat, chickpeas, brinjal and mustard. In a violation of the law, regulators had released no information about the applications, raising fears that India’s first GMOs will be released with no health, safety or environmental testing.
It is not surprising then that calls have been made for probes into the workings of the GEAC and other official bodies, who seem to have been asleep at the wheel or deliberately looking the other way as illegal GM crop cultivation has taken place.
India’s first GM crop cultivation – Bt cotton – was discovered in 2001 growing on thousands of hectares in Gujarat, spread surreptitiously and illegally. Campaigner Kavitha Kuruganti said the GEAC was caught off-guard when news about large-scale illegal cultivation of Bt cotton emerged, even as field trials that were to decide whether India would opt for this GM crop were still underway.
In March 2002, the GEAC ended up approving Bt cotton for commercial cultivation in India. To this day, no liability has been fixed for the illegal spread. We could well be witnessing a rerun of this scenario for HT cotton and HT food crops.
The tactic of contaminate first then legalise has benefited industry players before. Aside from Bt cotton in India, in 2016, the US Department of Agriculture granted marketing approval of GM Liberty Link 601 (Bayer CropScience) rice variety following its illegal contamination of the food supply and rice exports. The USDA effectively sanctioned an ‘approval-by-contamination’ policy.
The writing could be on the wall for India.
Does India need GM?
A common claim is that GMOs are essential to agriculture if we are to feed an ever-growing global population. Supporters of GM crops argue that by increasing productivity and yields, this technology will also help boost farmers’ incomes and lift many out of poverty.
In a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, eminent scientists P C Kesavan and M S Swaminathan (regarded as the ‘father of the Green Revolution’ in India) questioned the efficacy of and the need for GMOs in agriculture.
The performance of GM crops has been a hotly contested issue and, as highlighted in Kesavan and Swaminathan’s piece and by many others, there is sufficient evidence to question their efficacy, especially that of HT crops and their shocking, devastating impact in places like Argentina.
Kesavan and Swaminathan argue that GM is supplementary and must be need based. In more than 99% of cases, they say that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient. Too often, however, conventional options and innovations that outperform GM are sidelined in a rush by powerful interests to facilitate the introduction of GM crops.
Although India fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food available to feed its entire population. It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables and fruit.
People are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food. Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, including inadequate food distribution, (gender) inequality and poverty; in fact, the country continues to export food while millions remain hungry. It’s a case of ‘scarcity’ amid abundance.
Where farmers’ livelihoods are concerned, the pro-GMO lobby says that GM will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income. Again, this is misleading: it ignores crucial political and economic contexts. Even with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress.
India’s farmers are not experiencing financial hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling from the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace most of them at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations.
But pro-GMO supporters, both outside of India and within, along with the neoliberal think tanks many of them are associated with, have wasted no time in wrenching the issues of hunger and poverty from their political contexts to use notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of their promotional strategy.
The knowledge and many of the traditional practices of India’s small farmers are now recognised as sophisticated and appropriate for high-productive, sustainable agriculture. It is no surprise therefore that a 2019 FAO high-level report has called for agroecology and smallholder farmers to be prioritised and invested in to achieve global sustainable food security. It argues that scaling up agroecology offers potential solutions to many of the world’s most pressing problems, whether, for instance, climate resilience, carbon storage, soil degradation, water shortages, unemployment or food security.
Available evidence suggests that (non-GMO) smallholder farming using low-input methods is more productive in total output than large-scale industrial farms and can be more profitable.
It is for good reason that the FAO high-level report referred to earlier along with the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Professor Hilal Elver and numerous other papers and reports advocate agroecology call for investment in this type of agriculture. Despite the pressures, including the fact that globally industrial agriculture grabs 80% of subsidies and 90% of research funds, smallholder agriculture plays a major role in feeding the world.
In the introduction to a recent article, I wrote that the prevailing globalised agrifood model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness, the undermining and destruction of local communities and the eradication of biodiversity.
Do Indian citizens want a GM/glyphosate-drenched, industrial food system that brings with it all of the above?
I also wrote that the model relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency.
The solution lies in a paradigm shift that abandons the notion that urbanisation equates with ‘progress’. A shift that prioritises rural communities, small independent retail enterprises (instead of global giants like Walmart-Flipkart and Amazon) and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient-dense diets and food sovereignty.
A shift that rejects the ecomodernist techno-dystopia of hyper-urbanisation, genetically engineered crops, biosynthetic food and farmerless farms and a ‘food transition’ all under the control of a big data-agritech cartel that wraps all of the above in a veneer of fake green.
There are alternative visions, potential outcomes and resistance that can challenge the ecomodernist agenda.
Instead of their eradication, creating land markets to amalgamate their land for industrial-scale mono-cropping or using vital cropland to build on, smallholder farmers and rural communities should be placed at the centre of development policies. Moreover, inspiration can be taken from the worldviews of indigenous peoples and, as anthropology professor Arturo Escobar says, the concept of Buen Viver: promoting ways of living that stress the collective well being of humans and nature and recognising the inseparability and interdependence of both.
For instance, India’s indigenous peoples’ low-energy, low-consumption tribal cultures are the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation, and their knowledge and value systems promote genuine sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature.
This entails a fundamental transformation in values, priorities and outlooks and a shift away from predation, imperialism, domination, anthropocentrism and plunder.
That’s what a genuine ‘food transition’ and Buen Viver would really mean.
• Many of the issues mentioned in the article above are discussed in the author’s free-to-read e-book.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.
Conservation expert Professor Kerrie Wilson has been named Queensland’s new chief scientist after an almost year-long search by the state government. Professor Wilson, who is currently the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) pro vice-chancellor (sustainability and research integrity), will begin the role in November. She replaces interim chief scientist and agriculture, environmental systems monitoring and…
Around the world, today – July 26 — is commemorated as the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem.
In 2015, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) during its General Conference proclaimed the day, also known as the World Mangrove Day.
Mangrove forest conservation is crucial for global strategies on climate change mitigation as it is one of the most carbon-rich ecosystems in the world today.
According to the Department of Forestry, Fiji has more than 46,600 ha of mangrove forests which is approximately 4 percent of Fiji’s forest cover.
The ecosystem goods and services provided by mangroves include the provision of firewood, saltwater resistant building materials, traditional medicines and natural dyes.
Mangrove forests are productive fishing grounds and fulfil an important role as nurseries and habitat for a wide range of fish and invertebrate species which is crucial for food security and coastal livelihoods.
From masi to erosion defence
From the use of mangrove as a main ingredient for masi printing dyes to its role as a defence against soil erosion, mangroves are indeed plants with multiple benefits and their significance goes beyond just carbon storage.
However, despite the many benefits of the mangrove ecosystem, it continues to encounter challenges, including new infrastructure and development, pollution, and over-use.
In her Mangrove Day address, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay warned that mangroves were in danger.
“Mangroves are in danger — it has been estimated that more than three quarters of mangroves in the world are now threatened and with them all the aquatic and terrestrial organisms that depend on them,” she said.
“In the face of the climate emergency, we must go even further, for mangroves also serve as key carbon sinks that we cannot allow to disappear.
“Beyond protection and restoration, we also need global awareness. This means educating and alerting the public, not only in schools, but wherever possible.”
Around the Pacific, the project on the Management of Blue Carbon Ecosystems (MACBLUE project) focusing on conservation and management of mangrove ecosystems and seagrass meadows is being implemented in four countries: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
Close collaboration
“The project is implemented by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ Pacific) together with the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and the Pacific Community (SPC) as regional partners.
The project in close collaboration with the four governments will utilize remote sensing approaches to map the extent of seagrass and mangrove ecosystems, assess if the areas in the partner countries are increasing or decreasing, and model related carbon storage capacity and ecosystem services.
The resulting data will support government partners in their efforts to strategically develop and implement conservation, management, and rehabilitation efforts.
The integration of traditional use and ownership rights in national blue economy and ocean governance approaches is seen as a key priority.
MACBLUE Project director Raphael Linzatti said the implementation of the project would see support provided towards the four countries with mangrove conservation and management.
“The support will follow a demand-driven approach and tailored to address the needs and priorities of each partner country,” Linzatti said.
“The MACBLUE project will also allow for closer regional and international collaboration and building regional capacity through training activities and knowledge exchange, supporting long-term expertise within the region.”
The project will be implemented until December 2025 and is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection under its International Climate Initiative.
Joeli Bili works for the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ Pacific). The views expressed are the author’s alone.
Three small designers have levied a lawsuit against Shein, alleging that the fast fashion brand uses an algorithm to identify trends, then sells exact copies of designs. They also claim that Shein has a purposefully complex organizational structure to avoid legal accountability. This is not the first time Shein has been sued by designers for allegedly stealing designs, and the controversy with the…
Every day, thousands of tons of trash – rotten food, takeout containers, diapers, old shoes, construction debris, tires, plastic bags, soiled carpet and lawn clippings – burst into flame and turn to ash and energy at an incinerator in Palm Beach County, Florida.
“Right there is probably about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Ray Schauer, the facility operations director, looking at the incinerator’s combustion chamber during a tour in May. “Most people say, ‘If I could see hell, this is what it would look like.’ ”
As the trash burns, the municipal incinerator produces enough electricity to power about 45,000 homes and businesses. It also pumps out some of the same kinds of greenhouse gases and other pollutants as power plants that use fossil fuels. But because there’s always more garbage to feed the plant, the electricity it produces can be considered renewable.
The combustion chamber at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County’s trash incinerator in West Palm Beach, Fla. Credit: Najib Aminy/Reveal
That means the incinerator can also sell something more theoretical: renewable energy certificates, or RECs.
A REC represents a megawatt hour of renewable energy – enough electricity to power the average U.S. home for a little over a month. But the energy itself isn’t what’s being bought and sold. Instead, REC purchasers – usually companies – buy the right to take credit for green power they’re not actually using. As a result, they lower their carbon emissions – at least on paper – and can keep using the same old fossil fuel-powered electricity.
In 2021, a New York City-based REC seller named Joe Barclay offered to buy the trash incinerator’s certificates for about 30 cents each.
Companies showcasing their green credentials usually wanted to buy Green-e certified RECs from wind turbines, which generate power without emissions, and could cost up to 20 times as much. But the trash incinerator RECs don’t meet any certification standard, Barclay told Schauer in an email, and hardly anyone wanted to buy them.
Barclay happened to know some buyers who would accept incinerator RECs, “and they are the only buyers that I’m aware of that can,” he wrote.
It wasn’t much, but it was easy money, so the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, which runs the incinerator, took the deal, and Barclay bought the RECs in bulk. Last year, he sold them for four times the original cost to his willing buyer: the United States government.
As the world teeters on the edge of climate calamity, this is how the federal government – thebiggest energy consumer in the country – has been meeting its mandate to move away from fossil fuels.
Under the green veneer of the government’s renewable energy claims lie controversial, polluting power generators that expose the flaws and folly of the government’s reliance on RECs to pad its environmental stats.
Despite years of mounting evidence that RECs don’t help fight climate change, federal agencies have kept buying their way into compliance without changing the way they get the vast majority of their electricity.
As the Florida incinerator RECs demonstrate, it looks on paper like a win-win. Federal agencies can say they’ve gotten greener, and renewable energy producers get a bit of extra money for energy they were already producing. But with no change to the amount of greenhouse gases warming the Earth, the only loser in the transaction is the climate.
Modest goals met with questionable RECs
The federal government has enough buying power that it could lead the way to a broader, national transition to clean energy.
Instead, it has been leaning on RECs to meet modest environmental goals since a 2005 law signed by President George W. Bush required federal agencies to use 3% renewable energy. That figure rose to 7.5% in 2013 and hasn’t changed since. Any renewable electricity produced on federal land counts twice, as an incentive. But the law doesn’t mandate that agencies actually use renewable energy directly. So the government has relied for more than a decade on cheaper “unbundled” RECs that are sold separately from the electricity.
An activist holds a sign beneath “The Climate Clock” in New York City in July 2022. The clock shows how much time is left to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Credit: Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via Associated Press
The Department of Energy said that in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, the federal government outperformed the law, with 10% renewable electricity. But that number has little to do with how government buildings were actually powered.
Take out RECs, and that number goes down to 6%. And without the double-counting bonus, the total shrinks even more.
The actual renewable electricity the government bought or generated that year amounted to just 3%.
In fact, RECs accounted for more than half of all the renewable energy the government claimed from 2010 to 2021, federal data shows. The government wouldn’t have met its mandate without RECs in any single year.
While most were from wind power, more than a quarter of RECs purchased came from biomass – energy produced by burning natural materials like wood and mulch, which can pollute the air in nearby communities. Another 2% came from trash incinerators. Fewer than 1% were from solar energy.
By filing dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests with federal agencies, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained many of the certificates the government uses to make its renewable energy claims, with details about the facilities where the RECs were produced.
In recent years, numerous federal agencies bought RECs from wood-burning biomass plants in rural Georgia communities, where residents complained of toxic pollution. They also bought RECs from a mill run by International Paper in Campti, Louisiana, that burns its own industrial byproduct to power the mill – in effect, subsidizing one of the world’s largest paper companies for something it was doing anyway.
But it was in 2022 that agencies invested more heavily in incinerator RECs, which are less reputable than even controversial biomass RECs and are considered too dirty by the Environmental Protection Agency to be “green power.” The EPA spurns them in a program to encourage green initiatives at private companies because of the environmental impacts of burning non-natural materials like plastics.
At the trash incinerator in Palm Beach County, Fla., claws grab garbage from a giant pit and transfer it to boilers, where it will be burned to generate electricity. Credit: Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County
Reveal requested detailed information from every federal agency that bought at least 10,000 RECs in 2021, including how much the RECs cost and where they came from. We received price details for a quarter of the government’s REC purchases, showing an average cost of just under $2 per REC. At that price, it would cost about $22 to cover the annual power use from the average U.S. home.
President Joe Biden has ordered a dramatic change to how the government buys power, mandating 100% clean electricity by 2030 and making it harder for agencies to meet the target without meaningfully changing their practices. But as a far-off goal without congressional approval, it could fall apart if Biden is not reelected next year.
Crucially, the government would have to break its longstanding, frequent habit of choosing the cheapest way to look good on paper. That hasn’t happened yet. In fall 2022, nine months after Biden laid out his carbon-pollution-free plan, the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Energy, as well as NASA, the U.S. Air Force and the National Institutes of Health, spent at least $372,000 on hundreds of thousands of incinerator RECs.
The NIH spent almost $100,000 on RECS to call its North Carolina environmental health laboratory a “net-zero energy” campus, to show its “long-standing commitment to promote the health of the community and the planet.” More than two-thirds came from the paper mill and incinerator.
A spokesperson said the agency complies with government mandates and does not choose what kind of REC to purchase, though records show it had a variety of choices.
Representatives for the Department of Agriculture and NASA told Reveal their purchases met government standards. The U.S. Air Force says it purchases “the most cost-effective RECs.” A Department of Energy spokesperson said RECs purchased before Biden’s order were chosen under an old policy that’s “no longer operative,” but wouldn’t comment on why it bought incinerator RECs after the order. The Department of Commerce didn’t answer questions.
Market to incentivize renewable energy doesn’t live up to promise
Tradable renewable energy certificates were first invented in the 1990s to put a price tag on greenness. Compared to fossil fuels, it was more expensive and less profitable for energy companies to build new wind and solar projects then. Selling certificates would bring in an extra revenue stream.
Plus, for other companies that wanted to go green, buying certificates was a much easier, more accessible way to get renewable energy. Corporate buyers could cut their carbon footprints without changing how they got electricity.
So in theory, the REC market would fund energy producers, signal demand for green power and incentivize the creation of more renewable energy.
The Environmental Protection Agency boosted the REC market by giving it the government’s stamp of approval and lavishing positive publicity and awards on companies that bought lots of RECs. The EPA even bought enough RECs in 2006 to call itself “the first federal agency to be powered 100% green.”
“At EPA, we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk,” said then-Administrator Stephen Johnson.
The idea behind RECs, though, was deflated years ago. The sales of cheap, unbundled RECs weren’t enough to stimulate investment in new renewable energy. Newsstories and academics blasted the concept as ineffective, creating a misleading sense of progress in cutting emissions and potentially distracting from more effective measures to fight climate change.
Major corporations like Google and Walmart decided against purchasing them. “RECs were cheap, and I think the adage ‘you get what you pay for’ applied,” Bill Weihl, the former green energy czar at Google, said in an email.
And yet despite the burgeoning noise of critics, the EPA remained a strong proponent of RECs, and federal agencies kept gobbling them up.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency promotes renewable energy certificates.
Meanwhile, scientists have been warning that the world is running out of time to avoid the worst ravages of climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut nearly in half by 2030 in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Every fraction of a degree above that brings increasingly severe suffering: worsening heatwaves, fires, floods, storms, drought and hunger.
Government-purchased RECs tied to pollution, community uproar
In Florida, the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County brought its new $672 million incinerator online in 2015, over the objections of some residents, who worried about toxic pollution, and local environmentalists, who argued against burning trash at all.
Andrew Byrd of Riviera Beach, Fla., says he worries about the fumes from burning garbage. Credit: Najib Aminy/Reveal
Andrew Byrd lives nearby in Riviera Beach, a historically Black city in Palm Beach County. He said he remembers sand dunes there when he was in elementary school. Now, there’s an industrial park, a power plant and, a short drive away, the incinerator. He worries about the fumes from burning garbage.
“It’s affecting the health of everyone,” Byrd said. “I could tell you a thousand ways you could have generated the same amount of power (other) than burning trash.”
He thinks the government buying RECs from the incinerator isn’t helping the environment.
“The notion of selling RECs is a false economy,” Byrd said.
The Palm Beach incinerator emits hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide a year, and the synthetic materials in the trash alone release carbon at a similar rate to the national electric grid. Its rate of releasing other harmful gases – nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide – is even worse than an average gas-fueled power plant, though the waste agency argues this isn’t a fair comparison.
The incinerator was the latest, but not the only controversial plant where the federal government bought renewable energy certificates. In 2021, a half-dozen agencies purchased RECs from a pair of biomass plants owned by Georgia Renewable Power in neighboring rural counties in northeastern Georgia. The plants produced energy by burning wood chips, construction debris and, for a while, old railroad ties laced with the toxic chemical creosote.
After the plants started up in 2019, neighbors complained of stinging eyes, burning lungs and the noxious smell of chemical fumes. Officials in Franklin County called it a public health emergency.
Georgia Renewable Power denied causing any harm.
“We’re not emitting anything into the atmosphere that harms anyone,” President and Chief Operating Officer Steve Dailey told a local TV station in 2020.
But state environmental regulators fined the company in 2020 for air pollution violations in Madison and Franklin counties and a toxic runoff into Indian Creek that potentially killed thousands of fish by one state estimate.
A stormwater retention pond outlet at the biomass plant in Franklin County, Ga., releases “black effluent” into a tributary of Indian Creek in 2019, according to state regulators. Credit: Georgia Department of Natural Resources
Federal agencies, including many that bought incinerator certificates, spent more than $700,000 on more than 400,000 of these RECs in 2021. They were generated in 2020, the same year local residents mounted a campaign that eventually won a state ban on burning railroad ties treated with creosote, which has been linked to cancer.
RECs from burning creosote-contaminated wood couldn’t be certified. Sonny Murphy, CEO of Sterling Planet, the company that sold the RECs, said the plants made assurances that the certificates were not tainted by creosote, but by then, they were too old to be certified. Luckily, the government didn’t mind.
“Most everybody would require certified,” Murphy said, “but the government does not.”
Another popular source of government-purchased RECs is called “black liquor,” a toxic byproduct of papermaking that mills have burned for decades to power their own operations. In 2020, federal agencies bought nearly 258,000 paper mill RECs – 15% of all RECs for that year.
The agencies received certificates noting that for each black liquor REC, the facility produced about 4 pounds of smog-producing nitrogen oxide gas – a higher rate than an average coal plant. An International Paper spokesperson said in an email that the number on its certificates is an upper limit and its actual emissions are lower.
Biden plan more strict, less certain
As scientists raisealarms that drastic action is necessary to avoid widespread climate disaster, Congress hasn’t raised the Bush-era requirement that federal agencies use 7.5% renewable energy.
Over the years, though, the government’s overall energy use has declined and direct renewable energy use has increased, including from solar arrays on military bases. Governmentwide, from 2010 to 2021, direct renewable use increased from 1% to 3% of the government’s electricity demands.
Biden campaigned on a vow to eventually eliminate carbon emissions from the country’s power grid. But one of his most powerful proposals to do so – rewarding utilities if they phased out fossil fuels and penalizing them if they didn’t – died in Congress.
Democrats eventually pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, which uses billions of dollars in tax incentives to stimulate green energy and is expected to dramatically cut emissions over time. But it won’t be enough by itself to meet Biden’s pledge under the Paris Agreement to cut U.S. emissions in half by 2030.
President Joe Biden signs the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ landmark climate change and health care bill, at the White House in August 2022. From left are Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.; Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.; and Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla. Credit: Susan Walsh/Associated Press
Biden bypassed Congress when it came to the government’s own emissions with his 2021 executive order that federal agencies must use 100% carbon-free electricity by 2030.
Agencies will still be able to use RECs, but under new restrictions. The order doesn’t include trash incinerators or biomass plants in its definition of carbon-pollution-free electricity. Half of the clean energy is supposed to be produced at the same time of day the federal government uses it – a strategy to push the grid to run cleanly at all hours. And the RECs have to come from the same region as the government agencies using electricity.
“This new requirement has accelerated the need for purchasing additional RECs,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture, adding that it will buy wind and solar RECs now.
There are some signs of progress. The Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, which purchased the cheapest RECs available in past years, is planning to install a solar array at one of its sites and expects to hit the 100% clean energy mark early, without RECs, according to a spokesperson.
Andrew Mayock, Biden’s chief federal sustainability officer, is in charge of implementing the plan. In an interview, Mayock acknowledged that changes to the government’s renewable energy approach were necessary.
“We’ve made a number of pivots from a policy perspective from what was done under previous administrations, so that the federal government gets to a place of legitimately running on clean energy not solely from an accounting perspective,” he said. “The world was in a different place at that time as to the urgency and the need to get to carbon-free electricity.”
As for his progress, Mayock’s office pointed to a few agreements with utilities, to work on providing the required clean energy eventually.
“The shift to 100% carbon pollution-free electricity is already underway, and will continue to advance incrementally over the coming years through 2030,” his office said in a statement.
But a year and a half since the order was issued, the Biden administration hasn’t yet required agencies to set annual targets. Mayock’s office said it is working closely with agencies to help them develop plans.
U.S. Rep. Julia Brownley, D-Calif., is pushing a bill that would codify a requirement for federal agencies to use 100% renewable energy, but not until 2050 – 20 years after Biden’s target. The 7.5% target in existing law is antiquated, and legislation is needed so that future presidents “do not backslide on this critical issue,” Brownley said in a statement.
Her bill, which has failed to advance in previous years, directs the government to use renewable energy produced on-site as much as possible. But it still allows agencies to rely on buying even more of the same kinds of cheap RECs.
“The government has a responsibility to the taxpayer to use federal funds wisely, but we also have responsibilities to future generations to fully and immediately address the climate impacts of our energy usage,” Brownley said.
Government REC purchases highlight market’s flaws
Government agencies acknowledged often opting for whatever is cheapest.
The Defense Logistics Agency, which facilitates buying RECs for many federal agencies, picks contractors based on “Lowest Price Technically Acceptable,” according to a spokesperson. Federal agencies then chose that contractor’s cheapest option in 90% of the purchases coordinated by the logistics agency last year.
The Indian Health Service told Reveal that it purchases the cheapest RECs – including Georgia biomass and Louisiana paper mill RECs – to minimize the cost. Still, an agency spokesperson said: “The purchase of RECs incentivizes private industry to strive to create renewable/clean forms of electricity which is beneficial for the Earth’s environment.”
Some renewable energy certificates can come with laudatory titles like “Certificate of Environmental Leadership.” Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Some agencies – such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – do prefer slightly costlier, certified RECs from solar energy or, more commonly, wind farms. Those certificates can come with laudatory titles like “Certificate of Environmental Leadership” or “Carbon Champion.” But compared to tax incentives and the revenue that energy companies get from selling the actual electricity, those RECs are also generally too cheap to have an impact, said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, who has published multiple studies critical of RECs.
In that sense, Gillenwater said, it doesn’t matter whether the REC comes from a wind farm or a trash incinerator.
“It’s hard to have less effect than no effect,” he said.
Murphy, who runs Sterling Planet, the company that sold the Georgia biomass RECs to the government, said a more sophisticated way to support renewable energy is to invest early in a specific project to help it get off the ground. Buying whatever RECs are available on the open market, like the government does, is “easier to critique,” he said.
Alden Hathaway, a consultant and former executive for Sterling Planet, maintains that all RECs are beneficial, but in terms of creating new renewable energy, he said they “never made a huge difference.”
“We’ve always been talking about the value of the REC as something like the icing on the cake,” he said.
Buying the Florida incinerator RECs didn’t end up mattering muchfor the environment or the plant that produced them.
Ray Schauer is the director of facility operations at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, Fla. Credit: Najib Aminy/Reveal
The Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County had been going about its business, turning garbage into energy for years without bothering with RECs. It only started selling them last year after being approached by REC sellers.
So far, the waste agency is bringing in about $175,000 per year in extra revenue from the certificates. That amounts to less than 1% of the operating budget for the incinerator, said Schauer, the director of facility contract operations.
The money federal agencies spent on the incinerator RECs isn’t going to bankroll any new renewable energy. Most of it went to a middleman, the REC seller. What’s left helps make the trash bills a tiny bit cheaper for county residents.
By Schauer’s calculation, that $175,000 in revenue could save each homeowner about 18 cents on a nearly $180 annual trash bill. “It’s better than nothing,” he said.
When they were invented in the ’90s, renewable energy certificates were meant to stimulate the green energy market. Back then, building wind and solar farms was way more expensive than it is today. The idea was that renewable energy producers could sell certificates that represented the “greenness” of the energy they made. Anyone buying those certificates, or RECs, could claim that green power and also claim they were helping the environment.
For years, corporations have bought RECs as a low-commitment way to claim they’re “going green” – all while using the same old fossil fuel-powered electricity.
So how exactly do RECs help the climate crisis? This week, Reveal investigates RECs and finds that the federal government uses them to pad its environmental stats.
Reveal’s Will Evans starts with Auden Schendler, the man in charge of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Co. Schendler initially convinced his company to buy RECs to go green, then realized he made a mistake. But even after he spoke out and evidence piled up showing that RECs were ineffective, other companies kept buying them – and the federal government did, too. Evans and Reveal’s Melissa Lewis determined that since 2010, more than half of what the government has claimed as renewable energy was just cheap RECs.
Next, Reveal’s Najib Aminy takes us to Palm Beach County, Florida, to find out where some RECs are made: in a trash incinerator. Amid all the sounds and smells of burning garbage, Aminy looks into whether buying RECs actually helps the environment and where the money goes. He meets Andrew Byrd, who lives nearby and worries about the fumes. It turns out that federal agencies bought RECs from this incinerator in order to meet renewable energy mandates.
Finally, we explore another place where the government buys RECs: two biomass plants in Georgia, where residents complained of toxic pollution. Evans looks into where the government’s modest environmental goals come from and why federal agencies buy RECs in the first place. He also talks to a REC industry veteran and examines how a plan from the Biden administration could change things.
Auckland Council ended its meeting yesterday without a decision on the annual budget.
The long-debated budget will attempt to close a $325 million deficit, exacerbated by a further $40 million in storm-related costs.
Councillors arrived in good cheer, cracking jokes about the lengthy session ahead of them, which included a debate over the council’s sale of its 18 percent stake in Auckland International Airport Ltd.
The mayor said the meeting would take as long as it needed to.
“This is a difficult process. It may take more time than expected, that’s fine,” Mayor Wayne Brown said. “We may have to come back next week, we’re not rushing this process.”
Three councillors declared a stake in the airport ahead of the meeting.
Airport shares declared
Just a few hours before, Albany Ward councillor Wayne Walker admitted to owning $3 million in shares through a trust. His neighbour at the table, Maurice Williamson, poked fun at Walker on his way into the chamber.
Chris Darby and Julie Fairey also declared airport shares in the days leading up to the meeting, prompting questions of whether they could vote on the sale.
All three said they had received advice from the auditor-general.
“In their view, my situation does not represent a conflict of interest,” Fairey said.
“Their advice was that I do not have a financial interest in the share sale,” Darby said.
“Same advice, and so I can participate in today’s decisions,” Walker said.
Just three councillors — Andy Baker, Maurice Williamson and Desley Simpson — unambiguously declared their support for a full sale.
After hearing the positions of his fellow councillors, Brown offered a partial sale of 8 percent, meaning the council would hold onto a 10 percent stake.
“I’m now proposing that we sell 8.09 percent of our 18.09 percent shareholding,” Brown said as councillors returned from their lunch breaks.
“This means that we have to find another $32 million in operating savings or rates to balance the budget. I’m proposing we fill this gap with a general rates increase of 7.7 percent.”
The issue of selling the shares was contentious, leaving councillors divided. Manukau Ward’s Lotu Fuli opposed the sale, declaring the shares had value.
“This is a high-performing asset, it is an asset that we ought to keep,” she said. “And yes, we should consider our underperforming assets, but that’s a discussion to have at the long-term plan.”
Council would regret sale
Fuli said the council would regret letting go of the shares.
“Let’s not be rash, let’s not sell off these shares, $2.3 billion worth of shares, in order to plug a $325 million hole,” she said. “Let’s not make the mistake that past councils have made.”
Waitematā and Gulf Ward councillor Mike Lee agreed the shares had value.
“This is a real asset, folks,” he said. “This is an earning asset, just like the Ports of Auckland. Not only does it earn us money, but it earns us capital gains on our balance sheet. Any decent accountant will tell you that.”
Councillors Chris Darby (left) and Richard Hills . . . “It [council] isn’t a nice place at the moment and I think the city knows that. Image: RNZ News
North Shore Councillor Richard Hills said the months of debate around the budget had soured its culture.
“This has been the hardest six months of my career, it hasn’t been nice,” he said.
“It hasn’t just been about things you’ve said, mayor, there’s been a lot of other discussions around this table that I’ve been appalled at around staff, each other. It isn’t a nice place at the moment and I think the city knows that.”
He said the council needed to be careful about repeating the same mistakes next year.
“I want to work with the majority here, because we will break our staff and our city if we make them do this again next year,” he said. “I think we need to be really clear about that — we’ll do that again if we don’t make a hard decision today.”
Few in support Albany Ward councillor Wayne Walker said the council needed to adjust its spending habits if it wanted to fix the issue.
“We’re not addressing the underlying financial issues, and that is that we are spending beyond our means. We’ve been doing it for successive years, and that has to stop,” he said.
“Fortunately, we have a mayor that’s committed to turning that around.”
He said there was time enough to make large decisions like selling the shares.
“We have a very, very good situation to go forward and not have to make decisions immediately in this long term plan that may be counter-productive.”
Some councillors, like Maurice Williamson, strongly favoured a full sale. He said the assets were not making enough money.
“I’m very much in favour of selling any asset that’s costing us more to keep than it’s returning to us. There’s a good old Tremeloes song, ‘Even The Bad Times Are Good’ — well, even the good times are bad.”
Williamson warned other councillors against accepting more debt.
“There’s so much more coming down the pipe at us,” he said. “The CRL, god knows what’s coming, I’ve been told the final figure is going to be $7.25 [billion], we’re going to have to borrow debt to fund that, and that debt ratio is already near the ceiling.
“So please, please look at trying to bring that back down.”
Auckland Mayor’s revised proposals:
Mayor Wayne Brown is now pushing for the sale of 8 percent of the council’s shareholding in Auckland Airport, instead of the full 18 percent of shares
Brown has also proposed $4 million of reductions to local board funding, and $5 million of unallocated to chief executive, Jim Stabback
An average general rates increase of 11 percent has been proposed, with adjustments that will result in an overall rates increase of 7.7 percent for average households
Plans to establish a political working group on the council’s investments has been set out, which aims to oversee assets like the remaining council shares in Auckland airport, and make recommendations to the governing body on long-term investment in other funds
Even Brown’s deputy, Desley Simpson, cautioned members. She said the final form of the budget needed to be balanced.
Deputy mayor Desley Simpson . . . Image: Dan Cook/RNZ News
“We’ve talked this through so much, and it’s going to be a hard task to balance a budget that is fair for Aucklanders and meets the needs and desires of all those around the table.”
Brown’s new proposal included the establishment of a working group to oversee council investments, as well as a $4 million reduction to local board funding.
Questions about the updated proposal brought the meeting to a close at 5pm, with no time left to debate or cast votes.
Mayor Brown said the council would reconvene at 10am today.
The signing of the memorandum of understanding between the University of the South Pacific’s vice-chancellor and president, Professor Pal Ahluwalia, and the Indian government’s National Centre for Coastal Research, Ministry of Earth Sciences, in March for the setting up of a Sustainable Coastal and Ocean Research Institute (SCORI) has raised serious questions about leadership at USP.
Critics have been asking how this project poses significant risk to the credibility of the institution as well as the security of ocean resources and knowledge sovereignty of the region.
The partnership was formally launched last week by India’s High Commissioner to Fiji, Palaniswamy Subramanyan Karthigeyan, but the questions remain.
Regional resource security threat
Article 8 of the MOU regarding the issue of intellectual property and commercialisation
states:
“In case research is carried out solely and separately by the Party or the research results are obtained through sole and separate efforts of either Party, The Party concerned alone will apply for grant of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) and once granted, the IPR will be solely owned by the concerned Party.”
This is a red flag provision which gives the Indian government unlimited access to scientific data, coastal indigenous knowledge and other forms of marine biodiversity within the 200 exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and territorial waters of sovereign countries in the Pacific.
More than that, through the granting of IPR, it will claim ownership of all the data and indigenous knowledge generated. This has potential for biopiracy, especially the theft of
local knowledge for commercial purposes by a foreign power.
No doubt this will be a serious breach of the sovereignty of Pacific Island States whose
ocean resources have been subjected to predatory practices by external powers over the
years.
The coastal indigenous knowledge of Pacific communities have been passed down
over generations and the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organisations (WIPO) has developed protocols to protect indigenous knowledge to ensure sustainability and survival
of vulnerable groups.
The MOU not only undermines the spirit of WIPO, it also threatens the knowledge sovereignty of Pacific people and this directly contravenes the UN Convention of Biodiversity which attempts to protect the knowledge of biodiversity of indigenous
communities.
In this regard, it also goes against the protective intent of the UN Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which protects resources of marginalised groups.
This threat is heightened by the fact that the Access Benefit and Sharing protocol under the Nagoya Convention has not been developed in most of the Pacific Island Countries. Fiji has developed a draft but it still needs to be refined and finalised and key government departments are made aware of it.
Traditional knowledge of coastal eco-systems of Pacific people are critical in mitigation and adaptation to the increasing threat of climate change as well as a means of collective survival.
For Indian government scientists (who will run the institute), masquerading as USP
academics, claiming ownership of data generated from these knowledge systems will pose
serious issues of being unethical, culturally insensitive, predatory and outright illegal in
relation to the laws of the sovereign states of the Pacific as well as in terms of international
conventions noted above.
Furthermore, India, which is a growing economic power, would be interested in Pacific
Ocean resources such as seabed mining of rare metals for its electrification projects as well
as reef marine life for medicinal or cosmetic use and deep sea fishing.
The setting up of SCORI will enable the Indian government to facilitate these interests using USP’s regional status as a Trojan horse to carry out its agenda in accessing our sea resources across the vast Pacific Ocean.
India is also part of the QUAD Indo-Pacific strategic alliance which also includes the US, Australia and Japan.
There is a danger that SCORI will, in implicit ways, act as India’s strategic maritime connection in the Pacific thus contributing to the already escalating regional geo-political contestation between China and the “Western” powers.
This is an affront to the Pacific people who have been crying out for a peaceful and harmonious region.
The 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, signed by the leaders of the Pacific, tries to guard against all these. Just a few months after the strategy was signed, USP, a regional
institution, has allowed a foreign power to access the resources of the Blue Pacific Continent without the consent and even knowledge of the Pacific people.
So in short, USP’s VCP, Professor Pal Ahluwalia, has endorsed the potential capture of the sovereign ownership of our oceanic heritage and opening the window for unrestricted exploitation of oceanic data and coastal indigenous knowledge of the Pacific.
This latest saga puts Professor Ahluwalia squarely in the category of security risk to the region and regional governments should quickly do something about it before it is too late, especially when the MOU had already been signed and the plan is now a reality.
Together with Professor Sushil Kumar (Director of Research) and Professor Surendra Prasad (Head of the School of Agriculture, Geography, Ocean and Natural Sciences), both of whom are Indian nationals, he has to be answerable to the leaders and people of the region.
Usurpation of state protocol
The second major issue relates to why the Fiji government was not part of the agreement,
especially because a foreign government is setting up an institute on Fiji’s territory.
This is different from the regular aid from Australia, New Zealand and even China where state donors maintain a “hands-off” approach out of respect for the sovereignty of Fiji as well as the independence of USP as a regional institution.
In this case a foreign power is actually setting up an entity in Fiji’s national realm in a regional institution.
As a matter of protocol, was the Fiji government aware of the MOU? Why was there no
relevant provision relating to the participation of the Fiji government in the process?
This is a serious breach of political protocol which Professor Ahluwalia has to be accountable for.
Transparency and consultation
For such a major undertaking which deals with Pacific Ocean resources, coastal people’s
livelihood and coastal environment and their potential exploitation, there should have been
a more transparent, honest and extensive consultation involving governments, regional
organisations, civil society and communities who are going to be directly affected.
This was never done and as a result the project lacks credibility and legitimacy. The MOU itself provided nothing on participation of and benefits to the regional governments, regional organisations and communities.
In addition, the MOU was signed on the basis of a concept note rather than a detailed plan
of SCORI. At that point no one really knew what the detailed aims, rationale, structure,
functions, outputs and operational details of the institute was going to be.
There is a lot of secrecy and manoeuvrings by Professor Ahluwalia and academics from mainland India who are part of a patronage system which excludes regional Pacific and Indo-Fijian scholars.
Undermining of regional expertise
Regional experts on ocean, sustainability and climate at USP were never consulted, although some may have heard of rumours swirling around the coconut wireless. Worse still, USP’s leading ocean expert, an award-winning regional scholar of note, was sidelined and had to resign from USP out of frustration.
The MOU is very clear about SCORI being run by “experts” from India, which sounds more like a takeover of an important regional area of research by foreign researchers.
These India-based researchers have no understanding of the Pacific islands, cultures, maritime and coastal environment and work being done in the area of marine studies in the Pacific. The sidelining of regional staff has worsened under the current VCP’s term.
Another critical question is why the Indian government did not provide funding for the
existing Institute of Marine Resources (IMR) which has been serving the region well for
many years. Not only will SCORI duplicate the work of IMR, it will also overshadow its operation and undermine regional expertise and the interests of regional countries.
Wake up to resources capture
The people of the Pacific must wake up to this attempt at resources capture by a big foreign power under the guise of academic research.
Our ocean and intellectual resources have been unscrupulously extracted, exploited and stolen by corporations and big powers in the past. SCORI is just another attempt to continue this predatory and neo-colonial practice.
The lack of consultation and near secrecy in which this was carried out speaks volume about a conspiratorial intent which is being cunningly concealed from us.
SCORI poses a serious threat to our resource sovereignty, undermines Fiji’s political protocol, lacks transparency and good governance and undermines regional expertise. This
is a very serious abuse of power with unimaginable consequences to USP and indeed the
resources, people and governments of our beloved Pacific region.
This has never been done by a USP VC and has never been done in the history of the Pacific.
The lack of consultation in this case is reflective of a much deeper problem. It also manifests ethical corruption in the form of lack of transparency, denial of support for regional staff, egoistic paranoia and authoritarian management as USP staff will testify.
This has led to unprecedented toxicity in the work environment, irretrievable breakdown of basic university services and record low morale of staff. All these have rendered the university dysfunctional while progressively imploding at the core.
If we are not careful, our guardianship of “Our Sea of Islands,” a term coined by the
intellectually immortal Professor Epeli Hau’ofa, will continue to be threatened. No doubt Professor Hau’ofa will be wriggling around restlessly in his Wainadoi grave if he hears about this latest saga.
This article has been contributed to Asia Pacific Report by researchers seeking to widen debate about the issues at stake with the new SCORI initiative.