Archives

Written by
WATCH: Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire [2008]

WATCH: Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire [2008]

Published April 11, 2013

“This Globalisation Lecture entitled “The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire” was given by Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood, Professor Emerita of Political Science at York University (Toronto, Canada) on 29 October 2008 at SOAS, University of London.

Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood is the author of many major books on the history of political thought and the history of capitalism. Her most recent works include: Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2008); Empire of Capital (2005); and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002)” [Source]

 

 

[“Ellen Meiksins Wood was born in New York City in 1942. Her parents were Latvian Jews and active Bundists, who had left their home in dramatic circumstances in the late 1930s. After her parents’ divorce and the end of the war, she went to Germany with her mother, who, on assignment from the Jewish Labor Committee in New York, was working with displaced persons. Her earliest experiences were thus coloured by both the leftist commitments of her family and the Left’s response to the tragedies wrought by fascism and the war.”][Source: A Political Marxist: Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1942-2016]

Before Collapse, Credit Suisse Quietly Conquered an Obscure Debt Market – Debt-for-nature Swaps

Bloomberg

March 21, 2023

WATCH: Next Floor (A Short Film by Denis Villeneuve)

WATCH: Next Floor (A Short Film by Denis Villeneuve)

Prix Canal + for best short film, Semaine de la Critique, Cannes Film Festival 2008

“This Canadian short film, directed by Denis Villeneuve and produced by the Phi Group, creates an absurd and grotesque world of carnivorous opulence that oscillates between fear and humor to tackle the inertia of consumerism, the normalization of decadence and unsustainability. Impeccable and excessive, the film is a banquet that saturates the senses to give food for thought.” [Backroom, Caracas, Venezuela: Screening of David Villeneuve’s short film, IN-SITU TEXT]

 

WATCH: How American Imperialism Works [in 5 Minutes]

WATCH: How American Imperialism Works [in 5 Minutes]

 

[Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (Editions 1968, 2003, 2021), ‘and forgive them their debts’ (2018), J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others.]

 

Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

 

 

Fear makes thinking harder, yet there is an urgent need to think and to question every aspect of our current situation. The philosopher, which Agamben truly embodies, is a figure that must be heeded.

 

— Nina Power, Roehampton University

 

Agamben’s book title emphasizes a vital but all too often unappreciated question. By way of answer, he worries that we are collectively and individually in a very dangerous place that, contrary to popular opinion, has little to do with a virus or pandemic.

 

— T. Allan Hillman, University of South Alabama

 

Renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben presents his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal commentaries regarding the 2020 health emergency as it played out in Italy and across the world.

Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy—together with its rights, institutions, and constitutions—is surrendering everywhere to a new despotism where citizens accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms.

The push to accept this new normal leads to the urgency of the volume’s title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?”

 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538157602/Where-Are-We-Now-The-Epidemic-as-Politics

 

[Giorgio Agamben is one of the leading figures in Italian and contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare LifeRemnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the ArchiveProfanationsThe Signature of All Things: On Method, and other books. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s he treated a wide range of topics, including aesthetics, literature, language, ontology, nihilism, and radical political thought.]

Liberalism in India – a Beast that Devours By Way of Shapeshifting

February 8, 2023

By Varun Mathur

 

Mahishasura by Tyeb Mehta, 1997. [Mahishasura is a bovine asura in Hinduism. He is depicted in literature to be a deceitful demon who pursued his evil ways by shape-shifting]

I In India, with this very deep socialist ideal of equality and justice for the working class, for labour, what has happened since the 90s has birthed a new kind of beast. Liberalism has inculcated a sense of entitlement in terms of indulgent material progress, while simultaneously meting out highly compromised education on one hand. Agents of equality and progress pose the liberal identity as the ultimate emancipation. On the other hand, with the state providing vocational specialised training for heavy-machine work for example, a sense of change and development is fostered. Access to the liberal economy has replaced any real sense of justice or change in the imperial and feudal structure. The rulers are now not in some palace in the district, but sitting in board rooms in far-away places. An example where I am (India), is that the population has been forced into a destructive kind of entrepreneurship like setting up badly built theme parks / adventure parks or bnbs, selling or leasing out farming land. The idea of freedom is being able to watch reels on Instagram on a smart phone, spend money at malls and pick and choose what to watch on Netflix or something similar.

Progress and development directly mean how much money one has and can spend within the liberal economic model. And identity, and freedom, are then dependent on WHAT one spends money on. The step into the cult of manufactured personalities is complete. Even though there is some collective retention of let’s say old world philosophy, like the mystics’ poems, or even of some religious aspects of relationality, (with self/other/nature) the veneer of liberalisation, of capital and access to capital as paramount, as a means for emancipation, has degraded whatever little historical cultural trajectory one of the oldest cultures of the world possessed. Or, could have possibly been restored, even after centuries of rule by a private corporation under the banner of imperial England. There has been a very deliberate disruption of what could have been an organic trajectory of culture. Instead of ironing out the kinks in the diversity – the problems within the caste hierarchy for example, or even the in-fighting between multiple religions – the capitalist homogenisation project has forcibly fractured the collective psyche where people live unbelievably unequal lives, but seem to believe there is an escape through this homogenisation project into an equal and just way of living. So on the one hand is this great ideal, a sense of entitlement is fostered, but without the requisite integration of the individual into what is touted as a just society. Even within the liberal, culture-destroying homogenisation project, which holds its ground based on ‘giving access to better living’, the class hierarchy is itself continuously reimposed and reiterated, but under capital instead of religion, while pretending to uplift the working class and neutralise the abuse and injustice.

Only one realization is truly needed to begin the process of dismantling this kind of a system, whether in India, or anywhere else. Participation in this ‘global liberal economy’ perpetuates modern slavery in the world in absolutely unforgivable conditions. For example – a desire to have the latest phone is directly related to children working in mines, as well as the growing heaps of electronic waste littering continental coastlines and landlocked ecologies around metropolitan centres. The working class in India, who might even fight for their rights to a decent living perhaps when their survival cycles give them some respite, are forced to contend with this ‘new technological age’ by being forced to buy phones. Or ‘be left out’. Inadvertently fueling the supply chains which put to work children in mines in countries in Africa. Glorified middlemen have nothing and own nothing – they make billions from running international supply chains just like these. What is the underlying narrative? ‘Bringing the world to your doorstep’? What do we imagine is going on behind that process for every single object we desire to own? Quite literally, billions of lives are directly involved in running the mines, manufacturing and assembly plants, transportation, and retail for each object that any one person may desire to have. And that to have for a limited span of time, given how pervasive ‘changing trends’ are, and how deep the manufactured obsolescence is embedded. These kinds of supply-chains do not end when we discard an object. They continue till the unseen lands where children sift through waste, scavenging whatever they can sell, so they might be able to eat that one meal on the day. The world at my doorstep is not just that neatly packaged brand new cellphone ordered and paid for online. The world at my doorstep is also the hungry stomachs of those children in the mines and in the wastelands, it is the frail limbs of the aged who can no longer work their small farms, and their children who would rather work in call centres. So they can afford the next phone, and go to the mall. You know, develop a taste for ‘real progress’.

The dream of the single mother of two, selling vegetables in the blistering heat and freezing cold on the streets of Delhi is that her children can have access to a better life than she has had. She will do anything to get them through the education system. One that will provide them second-hand knowledge posing as experience, and eventually teach them that billionaires and celebrities are the demigods of this planet. Slums like the one where she lives will be flooded with aspirational marketing campaigns through, amazingly, freely available channels. A deluge of mind-altering propaganda. Seeding aspirations to strive to become fully part of this global project. They will become slaves to the dreams of others – those who relentless want to increase profits by any means, competing rabidly by selling the old repackaged as something new. The only thing new is always just the shiny advertising campaign. We become slaves for each other, and continue to perpetuate the cycle of neoliberal capitalism through our aspirations, where hyper-consumption is equated with abundance.

This collective delusion, of hyper-consumption and ‘all-access’ ideology being equated to abundance, must be destroyed. The root of this is the imperialised desire of the individual. The individual has no control over what it desires in modern industrial civilisation. It is indoctrinated into what it should desire. It lives a life of spiritual and financial debt and invalidation at the hands of this system. As it strives to gain the validation of the system, and perhaps even rises on that proverbial class ladder, it will continue to perpetuate slavery for itself, and for others in unseen and unknown places.

While this hunger for this kind of material abundance of single-use/throwaway culture, short life span objects continues to spread relentlessly in younger populations, the establishment has us all glued to their ‘on and off’ switch. Through the last decade the swine flu, the avian flu, dengue, and now cv19 have been normalized. The establishment can now trigger a reaction in the public at any time by printing/relaying any unsubstantiated statistic on mass media. This has been a long few years of entrainment of a new psychological imprint. Retail is therapy in times of high-stress. Indulge yourself. The world is your oyster. Consume what you can, because you will die soon. And so on, and on. And on. One must fight to get that life back before 2020 hit us all.

The result of such narratives is quite stunning and very dangerous. The abating of the pervasive fear continuously peddled over the last decades, and especially the last three years, is just a faint hope. The immense propaganda is a thick layer which will have to be negotiated to live a life anywhere close to calm or peaceful. People will make their compromises, to try and get a taste of normalcy. That ‘old normal’. One that was already pathologically abnormal and abusive.

 

[Varun Mathur has worked as Cameraman, Field Producer, and Writer/Director primarily in documentary film for multiple national and international productions since 2004. He has travelled extensively for film projects in India, western Africa, Europe, and South Africa. These projects have spanned all kinds of situations; including prisons and red-light districts in Western and Southern Africa, the upper Himalayas, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in north-eastern India, and countless indigenous tribal regions of India. His qualifications and interests are centred on critical theory, cultural theory, indigenous belief systems, mythologies, and narrative building. He is a musician and an artist in his spare time. He lives between Naukuchiataal in the state of Uttarakhand, and New Delhi, India.]

Briefing: SDG 13 & the Carbon Capture Boom

Briefing: SDG 13 & the Carbon Capture Boom

How climate activism and ‘climate action’ were made to suit the business as usual/sustainable development agenda.

February 2023

By Michael Swifte

 

Ahmad Al Khowaiter, Chief Technology Officer, Saudi Aramco, [Image credit: Aaron M. Sprecher / Bloomberg] – Quotes transcribed from the video ‘Decarbonization of oil and gas – 2019 Global Energy Forum’

 

“What we think of as a waste product can actually become a very valuable product.”

 

“CO2 is a valuable feed stock, we should not forget that.”

 

[Source: Atlantic Council, Decarbonization of oil and gas – 2019 Global Energy Forum, January 13, 2019]

 

CONTENTS

Part 1. Questions and Answers

Introduction

The Goal

Defining ‘Action’

A diabolical concession to carbon capture and storage

Part 2. Strategic Failure

Public failures

Strategic climate justice failure – a timeline

Part 3. Industry Readiness

Value adding CO2 as a waste product

Pipelines and storage deliver transition

Evidence of a CCUS boom

Part 4. Thinking Properly

Boondoggles do damage

Fast moving and dangerous

Conclusions

Part 1. Questions and Answers

Introduction

This briefing represents 10 years of research and activism starting with the fracking boom impacting my home state. A few years into the fracking boom I experienced the take-over of environmental/anti-fossil fuel activism by climate NGOs funded primarily through US based philanthropies working with Australian philanthropists.

I vowed to learn every possible lesson from the fracking boom and employ those lessons against the next phase of fossil fuel extractivism. I have always seen fossil fuel extraction as a dirty and destructive industry and a pillar of globalist hegemony. Like fracking, CO2 enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) had been practiced/developed for decades before appearing as a ‘solution’ in the energy market place. Like fracking, efforts to advance carbon capture and storage for CO2-EOR have received weak resistance in legislatures as new subsidies and other industry development supports have been established.

It is lamentable that the many technical experts, pundits and spokespeople who offer positions on climate and energy refuse to speak about the political will. As a generalist and an independent activist and researcher, I don’t have the credentials or the backing of any institutions to give me a veneer of credibility. What I do have is a working understanding of critical theory, psywar and the networked nature of modern power.

As a generalist I can comprehend enough organic chemistry to feel confident that my statements about industry readiness for a carbon capture and storage (CCS) boom are substantive. I offer this briefing with the expectation that anyone who disagrees with my assertions will take the time to critique my work in good faith. It is most likely that this briefing will be met with silence by the climate campaigners who ought to care that the establishment is once again ensuring that business as usual continues. It is the silence of climate campaigners that I contend is the most dire outcome stemming from their reliance on billionaire philanthropists and their agents. It is in the space created by the shared silences of industry, government, media and non government organizations (NGO) that the forces engineering business as usual operate.

The Goal

Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

Climate change presents the single biggest threat to development, and its widespread, unprecedented effects disproportionately burden the poorest and the most vulnerable. Goal 13 calls for urgent action not only to combat climate change and its impacts, but also to build resilience in responding to climate-related hazards and natural disasters.

[Further reading] https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2016/goal-13/

Defining ‘ACTION’

Q. What is ‘climate action’?

A. It is primarily/ostensibly about reducing emissions but it also includes adaptation plans.

Some defined actions:

  • -avoided emissions from aforestation
  • -carbon offsets purchased in the marketplace
  • -reduced emissions from renewables
  • -phasing out ‘unabated’ (without CCS) fossil fuels
  • -carbon removal and carbon capture utilization and storage
  • -biomass with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)

 

Q. Are fossil fuels being phased out?

A. No. The only commitments being made are for phasing out ‘unabated’ fossil fuels. Much of the phase out action involves the replacement of retired energy generation. Conventional coal fired power has been a particular focus of phase-out commitments.

[Further reading] https://wesuspectsilence.wordpress.com/2022/07/04/when-thinking-about-fossil-fuel-phase-outs-the-key-word-is-unabated/

Q. What have climate negotiations delivered?

A. Treaties, agreements and shared commitments, none of which specify phasing out of fossil fuels. All the measures were developed for mitigation and management of emissions. Carbon accounting is a primary emissions management tool.

Consensus Mechanisms

  • -The 1992 Earth Summit intoduced climate change as an active theme in environmental consensus building.
  • -The Kyoto Protocol provided 3 mechanisms which are all carbon accounting formulations: Clean development mechanism (CDM), Joint implementation, (JI) Emissions trading (ET). CCS was included as an eligible technology under the CDM in 2011 (Article 6).
  • -The Paris Agreement is a binding international treaty providing frameworks and mechanisms for finance and carbon accounting. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are the central carbon accounting framework in the Paris Agreement. NDCs do not compel or necessarily encourage any country or state to phase out fossil fuels. NDCs are about emissions reductions on a ledger.
  • -COP 26 produced commitments to phase out ‘unabated’ fossil fuels.

 

[Further reading] https://unfccc.int/process/the-kyoto-protocol/mechanisms

[Further reading] file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/20220317-CSUs_under_Article_6_Mar_2022_vf.pdf

A diabolical concession to carbon capture and storage

Q. How did ‘they’ turn climate activism into an ineffective force for the environment?

A. At Wrong Kind of Green we contend that an expansive network of philanthropies/NGOs and their connections in government, corporations and the media work under prescribed narratives and talking points defined by funders and in so doing become useful idiots for the global governance agenda. We call this networked formation the ‘non profit industrial complex’. We call the process by which networks are exploited and messaging shaped to control global consensus mechanisms and manufacture the consent of the general public, ‘networked hegemony’.

[Further reading] https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2017/07/27/avaaz-the-globes-largest-most-powerful-behavioural-change-network-part-i/

Q. What is the Design to Win plan?

A. The Design to Win plan was produced in 2007 for a collection of philanthropic foundations to further their ‘climate’ ambitions. It contains positions in support of “unavoidable” fossil fuels and the deployment of carbon capture and storage. The Design to Win plan launched John Podesta’s ClimateWorks Foundation which became his vehicle for establishing a vast network of NGOs of varying types including re-granting NGOs which disseminated the prescribed narratives and talking points to smaller NGOs. The media helped to reinforce prescribed narratives through amplifying selected NGOs and spokespeople, and participated in considerable silences regarding the growing political will for carbon capture and storage.

The 2007 report Design To Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming would serve to shape the future of the climate movement. The result of a commissioned study funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Oak Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Design To Win “served as a catalyst for an unprecedented outpouring of funding on energy and climate issues. Implicit to the report was the idea that the ‘market knows best’ and that the role of regulators is to create the right conditions and send the right signals for a transition to a low-carbon economy.

[SOURCE] https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/09/11/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-volume-ii-act-i-a-design-to-win-a-multi-billion-dollar-investment/

[Further reading] https://www.climateworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/Design-to-Win.pdf

Q. What is ‘net zero’?

A. Net Zero is an accounting outcome derived through the mitigation and management of emissions. Because it is based on results that appear on a ledger where actual emissions and various instruments representing offsets or avoided emissions are turned into numbers. Net Zero and other emissions mitigation and management schemes can and are being gamed.

[Further reading] https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/fossil-fuels-net-zero-carbon-emissions-scam-is-something-humanity-doesnt-have-time-for/

[Further reading] https://medium.com/@kim.hill/unpacking-extinction-rebellion-part-i-net-zero-emissions-5a5eed68d9ce

Q. What is BECCS?

A. The use of biomass as an industrial feed stock with carbon capture and storage applied. When biomass pellets produced from agroforestry trimmings, whole trees or timber industry waste is deemed carbon neutral, it provides a negative value on Net Zero ledger when CCS is applied. Biomass is widely reported as “renewable” when used in place of coal in conventional power plants.

The idea behind BECCS, Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, is in part quite similar to CCS, Carbon Capture and Storage. However where BECCS goes a step beyond CCS is that Drax and other biomass burning companies proposing to use the technology argue that if they can capture the emitted CO2, burning biomass can become carbon negative and a climate solution! (This is based on the false premise that burning wood is carbon neutral) In 2019, Drax announced its ambition to become a “carbon-negative” company by 2030. Drax proposes that it will continue burning biomass and that with BECCS technology it will be able to capture up to 16 million tonnes of the CO2 it emits through its wood burning per year.

[SOURCE] [Download link] https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2022/beccs-factsheet/

[Further reading] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/10/why-burning-biomass-not-zero-carbon

Q. Why is Farhana Yamin a pivotal figure in climate action?

A. Because she spent decades working as a policy wonk for the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) and for the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, one of the key funders of Extinction Rebellion (XR). Shortly before joining XR with the sustainable development goals (SDG) tucked under her arm, Yamin’s think tank Track 0 produced the perfect articulation of the concession position engendered in global climate activism by John Podesta, and a range of billionaire donor advised funders and impact philanthropists.

The concession position, formulated in the mid 2000s and carried forward in the IPCC modelling, is to allow a little BECCS in exchange for a renewables revolution. The Track 0 rationale explains that to implement BECCS will require the implementation of CCS. The concession to BECCS is thus tethered to accepting some CCS. Because the BECCS concession is never included in any climate campaigner talking points and does not suit the prescribed narrative that asserts that there is political will to phase out fossil fuels, it is almost entirely excluded from discussion. It is as if the work of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative which is supported by the National Grid, the North Sea Transition Authority, and the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy doesn’t exist. The collective narrative driven silence creates a false reality as the context for XR and Just Stop Oil (founded by XR founder Roger Hallam) activism.

Bioenergy production can be integrated with existing CCS technologies relatively simply and there are no technical implications of capturing a CO2 stream from biomass (Gough and Upham, 2010; Muratori et al., 2016). BECCS could complement the current expansion of the use of biomass as fuel (Rhodes and Keith, 2008). However, the success of BECCS is dependent on upcoming developments in CCS, where there are significant uncertainties surrounding CO2 transport networks, storage capacities, legality, social acceptability and technology incentives (McGlashen, Shah and Workman, 2010).

[SOURCE] https://climatenetwork.org/resource/a-compendium-of-solutions-for-achieving-the-sustainable-development-goals-and-staying-below-2ac-or-1-5aoc/

Q. How does the work of Biden administration senior advisor for ‘clean energy’ John Podesta intersect with the work of billionaire hedge fund manager Chris Hohn?

A. Both provide funding to Bellona Europa which has been creating opportunities for BECCS for at least 2 decades. Both have extensive interests in climate activism and steering industry toward greater emissions reductions using CCS and BECCS.

Bellona Europa works primarily on industrial decarbonisation, energy systems, circularity, sustainable finance, and negative emissions (carbon dioxide removal).

To back and support our work, our funders are mainly European and International philantropies: CIFF (Children’s investment fund), ECF (European Climate Foundation) and Climateworks. We also receive grants at the EU level (EU Horizon 2020 project, “European Negative Emissions Projects” ) and at the national level (Norwegian, Nordic & EEA grants for research).

[SOURCE] https://bellona.org/about-bellona

“Industrial sectors such as cement and steel production are responsible for nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. We need the right regulatory, policy and financial frameworks to bring industry emissions down. We focus on things like carbon performance regulation, heating and cooling legislation, innovation, carbon capture and storage technologies and enforcement through carbon disclosure and shifting investor behaviour. We want to ensure that Europe leads the way in industrial decarbonisation and accelerate industrial decarbonisation at a global scale.”

[SOURCE] https://ciff.org/priorities/climate-change/

‘An Industry’s Guide to Climate Action, CHAPTER 3 summary: The Dawn of a New Industry’ (Funded by the Childrens Investment Fund Foundation)

As the transformation of the energy system continues and new technology options are developed and brought to maturity, measures that can provide effective and deep emission reductions to industry processes are needed today. • The capturing of CO2 emissions from industrial clusters and their transport and permanent offshore storage in deep geological formations (CCS) constitutes an essential part of the solution

CCS buys humanity time and industry a functional climate transition.

[SOURCE] https://bellona.org/publication/an-industrys-guide-to-climate-change

[Further reading] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/09/02/president-biden-announces-senior-clean-energy-and-climate-team/

[Further reading] https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/01/06/a_british_billionaires_big_investments_in_us_environmental_politics_121359.html

[Video] ‘Sir Chris Hohn: The Full Interview’ https://youtu.be/xqP6091Wf9o

Q. Why is biomass with CCS (BECCS) so crucial to net zero accounting?

A. Because BECCS is the combination of the biomass double counting scam and the near zero emissions projections for CCS. BECCS has erroneously been labeled a ‘negative emissions technology’.

BECCS employs biomass as a feed stock, and the ‘technology’ is collectively known as carbon capture and storage. The biomass accounting scam labels trimmings from agroforestry including whole trees that, in theory, are permanently sequestering CO2 as ‘carbon neutral’. This means that when biomass is used as a feed stock, the emissions created by this ‘carbon neutral’ product acquire a negative value on the Net Zero ledger. The logic goes that with BECCS as the crucial supplier of negative net zero accounting value, variously derived carbon offsets, mitigation of fugitive emissions, and the assumption that CO2 storage works effectively, the net zero ledger can be brought to zero.

[Further reading] https://www.drax.com/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy/ipcc-on-biomass-power-generation-carbon-accounting/

[Further reading] https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sasha-stashwick/how-biomass-industry-sent-sustainability-smoke

Part 2. Strategic Failure

Public Failures

Tzeporah Berman

Above: The Climate Group, July 7, 2016, “Bold New Climate Policy In Canada’s Oil Sands – Business & Climate Summit 2016”. The panel discussion featured Steve Williams, President and CEO of Suncor, Nigel Topping, CEO of We Mean Business, and Tzep Berman, “environmentalist”. On July 19, 2016, Berman would announce her new appointment as co-chair of the newly formed Alberta Governments Oil Sands Advisory Group. Two years later, The Climate Group (a co-founder of We Mean Business) and Callum Grieve (The Climate Group, We Mean Business) would play a quiet yet pivotal role in the “discovery” and rise of Greta Thunberg.

Tzeporah Berman heads up the campaign for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, she has a long history as a well connected environmental campaigner. In 2016 Berman joined UK High Level Climate Action Champion for COP 26, Nigel Topping (We Mean Business, Grantham Institute, UK Infrastructure Bank) and Suncor CEO Steve Williams to develop a ‘groundbreaking’ deal on emissions caps on Canadian tar sands. In 2021 Suncor acquired a stake in carbon capture technology company Svante. Suncor is part of the Pathways Alliance which has plans to emulate the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line as the basis for new gas and tar sands decarbonisation hubs. Chevron recently bought a stake in Svante who have made long term investments in carbon capture technology. Svante have stated their technology is for “rapid deployment”.

[Further reading] https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2016/08/31/watch-albertas-environment-minister-commends-leap-manifestos-tzeporah-berman-for-helping-craft-the-tarsands-deal/

[Further reading] https://globalnews.ca/news/7705834/suncor-energy-svante-carbon-capture-investment/

[Further reading] https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/pathways-alliance-president-says-oil-industry-will-be-judged-on-climate-goals-1.6147569

[Further reading] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chevron-invests-carbon-capture-removal-213000800.html

[Further reading] https://esgtelegraph.com/environment/carbon-capture-tech-provider-svante-raises-over-300-million/

 

Screenshot: Tzeporah Berman joins Christiana Figueres Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson (co-founded the Carbon Disclosure Project which co-founded We Mean Business), for an episode of “Outrage & Optimism”. The initial funding for Global Optimism (rebranded to Outrage & Optimism) was provided by We Mean Business. In 2020, Figueres and Rivet-Carnac published The Future We Choose.

In 2019, the Climate Breakthrough Project awarded Tzeporah Berman with two million dollars. The Climate Breakthrough Project was launched in 2015 under the name the Climate Strategies Accelerator. It is an initiative of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in partnership with the Oak Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, the JPB Foundation, and the Good Energies Foundation.

Tzeporah Berman has never mentioned the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) let alone contributed to any effort to unpack the project and contribute to public understanding. The North West Refining, Sturgeon plant was already under construction when Berman met with Topping and Williams. The brains behind the project, Ian MacGregor had already explained the scale of the vertically integrated refinery-pipeline-storage project in a speech to the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers 33rd Consolidated Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. The ACTL has been called the “world’s largest CO2 pipeline”. With the Canadian government poised to introduce an American style tax credit for CCS, it seems like tar sands extraction and refining, gas extraction and CO2 enhanced oil recovery have a firm future in Alberta.

Recent statements from Alberta premier Danielle Smith make it very clear that the province is about to be subject to a CCUS boom.

“We are working with the federal government closely on technologies like carbon capture utilization and storage, hydrogen, critical minerals,”

[SOURCE] https://youtu.be/xE-hNQkX7CI

[Further reading] https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/opinion-us-climate-action-a-roadmap-for-canada-to-support-carbon-capture-and-storage/ar-AA122faE

[Further reading] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-premier-danielle-smith-sovereigty-act-just-transition-1.6709043

[Ian MacGregor and the ACTL] https://youtu.be/y4r1_4t_eiM

Julian Brave Noisecat

JB Noisecat left 350 dot org in early 2019 and joined Data for Progress, the progressive polling agency/think tank, taking on the role of Vice President of Policy & Strategy. As a member of Data for Progress, along with Sean McElwee, Noisecat advised the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force in advance of the Biden campaign’s final policy statements. He would go on to proclaim that Biden’s “build back better” plans “are a Green New Deal in all but name”. Data for Progress never had a problem with CCS, indeed they redefined “non-renewable clean energy” to include CCS, hydrogen and nuclear in their ‘scorecard’ on Jay Inslee’s policy agenda in June 2019. Noisecat went on to join the NDN Collective who are recipients of significant funding from the Bezos Earth Fund.

[Further reading] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/joe-biden-has-endorsed-the-green-new-deal-in-all-but-name

[Further reading] https://www.filesforprogress.org/reports/gnd_scorecards/Inslee.pdf

It could be argued that Data for Progress, with the help of the World Resources Institute, authored the original Green New Deal document in September 2018. The Green New Deal became an election vehicle for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and a campaign focus for the Sunrise Movement. AOC and Sunrise cofounder Varshini Prakash also helped CCS and nuclear pass the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force. If you follow the money and consider how First Nations and frontline communities were marginalised from the Green New Deal process, it’s hard not to see it as a cynical ploy to get another neoliberal Democrat president into place.

[Further reading] https://www.dataforprogress.org/green-new-deal-report

[John Washington to New Consensus] https://youtu.be/fEA_9iKtSTY

JB Noisecat seems to have helped keep “the door open” for CCS in his time since leaving the world’s most influential climate campaigning organisation (350 dot org). Any number of climate NGOs have signed open letters stating their opposition to CCS citing multiple concerns. Noisecat transformed from a climate campaigner, utterly opposed to new fossil fuel extraction, to the spokesperson for a kind of mute reformism. The passing of the Inflation Reduction Act with its “monumental enhancements” to the 45Q tax credit is testament to Noisecat’s failure.

[Further reading] https://popularresistance.org/part-i-the-unannounced-death-of-the-green-new-deal/

[Further reading] https://carboncapturecoalition.org/inflation-reduction-act-of-2022-makes-monumental-enhancements-to-the-foundational-45q-tax-credit/

Greta Thunberg

Above. January 2019: Greta arrives at Davos at the invitation of former U.N. Secretary Christiana Figueres (co-founder of Outrage & Optimism funded by We Mean Business). Here, a young Greta Thunberg will be introduced to the World during the Fourth Industrial Revolution Panel session led by Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce. In this photo, taken at the Arctic Basecamp, We Mean Business CEO Nigel Topping (UK High Level Climate Action Champion, COP26, Former Arctic Basecamp advisory board member), appears at the very right of the frame. To Thunberg’s right is Johan Rockstrom, chair of the Earth Commission (launched 2019) and steering committee member of the Global Commons Alliance.

Greta Thunberg is young and cannot be considered a failure, but a critical investigation of her messaging and content is always required. An important part of that critical view is consideration of Greta’s advisers and enablers. Cory Morningstar’s ‘The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg’ series, provides a compelling picture of a child with elite connections propelled into celebrity by philanthropically funded entities to direct the discourse away from the mitigation plans of the global climate consensus machine. While Greta has many minders, the only acknowledged adviser is Johan Rockstrom who wears a Sustainable Development Goals badge at public events and takes a position against degrowth.

It’s naive to say ‘Let’s go for de-growth, let’s completely divest, or let’s think of post-capitalist model and throw GDP in the waste bin’. We have to work with the economic machinery that we have in our engine room.

[SOURCE] https://today.rtl.lu/news/science-and-environment/a/1448687.html

[Further reading] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/29/johan-rockstrom-interview-breaking-boundaries-attenborough-biden

Greta has demonstrated a pattern of not speaking to the substance of mitigation plans relying on generalised statements that raise no questions about specific actors. Kevin Anderson who told me he is not an ‘adviser’ to Greta also acknowledged that she did not pay attention to the output of the IPCC Working Group 3 on mitigation when it was relevant to the discourse. I would argue that this inattention worked to protect the interests of those who would see enough fossil fuel CCS established to allow the implementation of CO2 storage for biomass with CCS. But, Greta is too young to know that she is enjoined to a long held compromise position held by organisations like the Bellona Foundation, WWF and the European Climate Foundation.

Climeworks: “On 10th March 2020 we had the honor of welcoming the inspiring Greta Thunberg to our direct air capture plant in Hinwil. The Swedish environmental activist was curious about our climate solution and wanted to learn more about it. She was accompanied by her father Svante as well as a BBC Studios film crew who, for a year, will be following Greta around the world to create a documentary.”

Michael Swifte @empathiser – July 24, 2019

What about the IPCC ‘pathways’ that never get discussed? They embed #BECCS and mask the political will for fossil fuel based #CCS ie hydrogen energy and industrial clusters linked to North Sea export hubs. #netzeroemissions

https://twitter.com/empathiser/status/1153941328431943682

Kevin Anderson @KevinClimate – July 24, 2019

Agree. Greta is principally focussing on the IPCC’s Working Group 1 (the physical science), much less on the ‘cost-optimised” procrastination that dominates Working Group 3 (on mitigation).

https://twitter.com/KevinClimate/status/1153942871080394752

[Further reading] https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/10/19/perfect-distractions-and-fantastical-mitigation-plans/

 

Above: April, 2019 newsletter, We Mean Business. The combined market cap of the We Mean Business Coalition partner initiatives exceeds US$25 trillion dollars – equivalent to almost one-quarter of global GDP. [Source: WE MEAN BUSINESS COALITION SUBMISSION TO THE GLOBAL STOCKTAKE, March 2022]

In her climate book in Chapter 4 Greta provides an essay called ‘We are not moving in the right direction’. In it Greta develops the linguistic conflation that she carried to her public interviews while promoting the book. The linguistic conflation goes like this: direct air capture (DAC) as practiced at the Orca facility in Iceland is carbon capture and storage, and therefore any mention of carbon capture and storage is a reference to direct air capture. This conflation has resulted in statements by Greta that either sound like an endorsement of large scale fossil fuel CCS (but are not), or statements about DAC as a form of CCS that can easily be refuted by the existence of facilities like the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line.

No respectable adult public figure could get away with such a gross conflation, and since Greta is young, it is not fair to contend that she is acting on behalf of some kind of self serving agenda. Looking at the extensive list of accomplished and well positioned expert contributors, and being mindful of the extensive editorial effort it takes to produce a non-fiction book, it’s reasonable to assume that there were many adults of professional standing who let Greta’s conflation make it into the book and into her collection of talking points for its promotion.

Interview with Samira Ahmed:

Greta Thunberg: The Climate Event | Southbank Centre – 31 October 2022

 

Samira Ahmed:

“I wonder if there are any technologies which have impressed you which you think are a legitmate part of the solution?”

 

Greta Thunberg:

“I mean, many. I mean, for example carbon capture and storage is something we must invest every possible resource in.”

[SOURCE] https://youtu.be/ropBOwPvmLM

Zoom call with Bjork:

“I haven’t met a politician ready to do what it takes”: Greta Thunberg and Björk in conversation

 

BG: In your book, you point out that if there were as many carbon capture storage (CCS) facilities in the world as there are oil refineries, you’d start to see some results. Every country needs to be doing them, and it’s one solution of thousands. The fact that there is one place in Iceland doing it now, unfortunately, is not going to change a lot.

 

GT: Yes, the largest carbon capture storage facility in the world is in Iceland. And I remember in Stockholm, there were big campaigns where energy companies posted pictures of that facility saying, “Yeah, this is the future.” It was greenwashing! That facility, if all goes according to plan, will be able to capture about three seconds’ worth of our annual carbon dioxide emissions, according to one climate scientist’s calculations. They are not only being used as a way of greenwashing and legitimising the bad things we are doing now, but we also fail to invest in them – which is very contradictory, to say the least!

[SOURCE] https://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2022/10/greta-thunberg-bjork-guomundsdottir-interview-climate-change

Catherine McKenna

January 19, 2017, Davos: Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum president, with Canadian ministers. Catherine McKenna stands left of Schwab. 

Catherine McKenna is the former environment minister of Canada, a Powering Past Coal Alliance leader, and the current chair of the United Nations – High-level Expert Group on the Net-zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities. McKenna was one of the earliest and most prolific users of the terms “unabated” and “traditional” regarding coal and other fossil fuels. Under her leadership Canada, and Alberta in particular, made huge strides towards large scale CCUS for tar sands and gas.

When visiting the SaskPower – Boundary Dam facility in 2016 McKenna articulated a position in favor of CCS/CCUS as a climate ‘solution’ that would benefit Canada.

So when you have carbon capture and storage, that’s certainly an innovative solution — a made-in-Canada solution

[SOURCE] https://leaderpost.com/business/energy/environment-minister-mckenna-says-carbon-capture-part-of-solution-to-climate-change

In June of 2021 the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) which has long held a position in favor of CCS/CCUS as part of their ‘2 degree solution’, joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance.

The PPCA is a coalition of national and sub-national governments, businesses and organizations working to advance the transition from unabated coal power generation to clean energy.

[SOURCE] https://www.wbcsd.org/eng/Programs/Climate-and-Energy/Energy/New-Energy-Solutions/News/WBCSD-joins-Powering-Past-Coal-Alliance-as-corporate-partner

[Further reading] https://www.un.org/tr/node/182407

[Further reading] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/mckenna-un-climate-change-panel-1.5934847

[Further reading] https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/news/2017/11/canada_calls_foraglobalalliancetophaseoutcoalelectricity.html

[Video] CCS: A 2 Degree Solution by WBCSD https://youtu.be/UeMfHXE_zsQ

Naomi Klein

Photo: “Naomi Klein speaks to the media before an event on December 12, 2019 in Berlin, Germany.” (Photo: Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

Naomi Klein writes non-linear prose, or what I like to call “project managed prose”. A journalist who is one of the sources for her book ‘This Changes Everything’ told me that she largely assembles the prose from research provided by assistants. Klein’s chapters are built around themes rather than developing a compelling thesis. Instead of framing the use of anthropogenic CO2 as a new “fossil fuel frontier”, Klein used her acknowledgement of the capacity of CO2-EOR (enhanced oil recovery) to vastly expand proven oil reserves as an opportunity to speak against “overall emissions” rather than the growing political will and the track record of the fossil fuel industry as exemplified by the fracking boom.

In the years following the release of Klein’s book, she has never returned to the subject of CO2-EOR in the US or Canada. In that time extensive efforts have been made in the US to furnish big oil, gas, coal and biomass with a tax credit that will operate as an effective subsidy. In Canada the largest CO2 pipeline on earth, the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, was built to supply CO2 captured from tar sands to a CO2-EOR project.

This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein, 2014

Chapter. ‘NO MESSIAHS: The Green Billionaires Won’t Save Us’.

We need to consider what is meant by “overall carbon footprint”. How can we include the emissions from oil that is sold on and its emissions created in another country. Klein’s book was written before the ‘scopes of emissions’ were well understood.

While more research is needed on the overall carbon footprint of EOR, one striking modeling study examined a similar proposal that would use CO2 captured not from the air but directly from coal plants. It found that the emissions benefit of sequestering CO2 would be more than canceled out by all that extra oil: on a system-wide basis, the process could still end up releasing about four times as much CO2 as it would save.52 Moreover, much of this is oil that is currently considered unrecoverable—i.e., not even counted in current proven reserves, which as we know already represents five times more than we can safely burn. Any technology that can quadruple proven reserves in the U.S. alone is a climate menace, not a climate solution.

pp 214

[Scopes of emissions] https://plana.earth/academy/what-are-scope-1-2-3-emissions

 

Above: Author Naomi Klein and World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab endorse “The Future We Choose“. Today’s liberal “activism” now flourishes alongside corporate “activism”. Following a full decade of the marketing campaign “Together”, this largely normalized alliance goes almost undetected by the citizenry and climate activists alike. 

Strategic climate justice failure – a timeline

2003

Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum launched with the help of the International Energy Agency

2005

European Union Carbon Capture and Storage Stakeholder Dialogue:

“We’ll never reach negative emissions without CCS.” Anonymous former Climate Action Network Europe representative.

2007

Design to Win plan completed.

2008

ClimateWorks Foundation and European Climate Foundation are created.

2010

Clean Energy Ministerial launched by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

2010

350.org sabotage of the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba.

2011

1 Sky and 350 merged with the help of the Clinton Global Initiative and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Sustainable Development Program.

2014

People’s Climate March demonstrates coordinated messaging strategy and the dominance of movement generation by philanthropy. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund – Sustainable Development program played a central role in establishing the ‘This Changes Everything’ project which went beyond the book and documentary establishing the concept of ‘Metrics as a proxy for social change’.

2015

Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ treated like a holy text within the climate justice movement.

2015

Paris Agreement produces Nationally Determined Contributions placing focus on emissions reduction and management.

2018

Greta and Extinction Rebellion arrive around the same time the IPCC released it’s AR5 report. While much focus was put on the dire warnings from IPCC Working Group 1 (‘the science’ and budgets), the output of Working Group 3 (mitigation) were almost entirely ignored.

2019

Greta Thunberg visits New York at the invitation of Antonio Guterres who sent his assistant to speak the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative the night before Greta’s big speech.

2021

Glasgow COP 26. All fossil fuel phase-out commitments contain the qualifier ‘unabated’. IEA modelling contains multiple uses of the qualifier ‘unabated’, but this fact is almost entirely ignored by the climate justice movement and their networks.

2022

CCUS boom begins. New projects announced on every continent. The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line and the Northern Endurance Partnership/East Coast Cluster are almost entirely ignored.

Part 3. Industry Readiness

Value adding CO2 as a waste product

Anthropogenic CO2 is seen as valuable for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a practice used to access the remnant oil in depleted oil fields. Liquefied CO2 is pumped into depleted wells along with water in a process called water alternating gas (WAG) miscible flooding. The CO2 is said to integrate with the rock matrix during the WAG process, thereby sequestering it.

The oil industry, especially in the US, has known for decades what could be achieved if they had access to anthropogenic CO2. Companies like Exxon have been tapping geological formations called CO2 domes for decades. The naturally occurring CO2 that accumulates in these domes is liquefied and used for EOR.

Public figures like Naomi Klein are more than aware of the potential increase in proven oil reserves if anthropogenic CO2 can be deployed for EOR. In her book ‘This Changes Everything’ Klein cites research asserting that CO2-EOR using anthropogenic CO2 could quadruple proven US oil reserves. It is clear that almost nobody, not even Klein herself, have acted to resist the efforts to develop financial instruments and effective subsidies for CO2-EOR, and the other forms of energy production that will produce captured CO2.

[Further reading] https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2020/12/14/why-energy-companies-are-drilling-for-a-greenhouse-gas-in-new-mexico/

[Video] ‘Exploiting science to increase oil recovery’ https://youtu.be/oSQt5tRVvAA

Refining technology needing only CO2 transport and storage infrastructure

Two crucial technological developments that are applied widely in fossil fuel refining and processing need to be understood in the context of the oil and gas industry’s plans for blue hydrogen production and the expanding deployment of biomass as a feed stock for decarbonisation.

It is important to understand that the energy and refining industries produce and use hydrogen routinely. Industry has the capability to direct CO2 streams that would otherwise be vented to the atmosphere into transport and storage infrastructure such as pipelines and export hubs.

Steam methane reforming

Steam methane reforming is the most common method for producing hydrogen from gas, biomass and derivatives from oil. Refiners use high pressure steam (H2O) with gas (CH4) to produce hydrogen (H2) and CO2. The CO2 is conventionally vented off (grey hydrogen), but can be captured for storage and other uses (blue hydrogen).

Cracking

Cracking is a key technology in the evolution of processing oil, gas, coal and biomass. Unlike fractional distillation which is the foundational technology used by the fossil fuel industry to separate various compounds found in extracted feed stocks (oil, gas, and coal), cracking separates feed stocks into their constituent molecules. These molecules can be reconstituted into synthetic fuels. Cracking is generally seen as a set of more efficient process for producing alkines (derivatives from refining).

Hydrocracking is used extensively in combination with catalytic cracking by refiners for conversion/purification of feed stocks. Industry leaders regard hydrogen as ‘indispensable’ to the refining industry, and for future transport and energy needs. The oil, gas, biomass and coal industries are well positioned to deploy blue hydrogen when access to CO2 transport and storage is made available because existing technology allows for minimal retooling to capture waste CO2.

[Further reading] https://www.frompollutiontosolution.org/hydrogen-from-smr-and-ccs

[Further reading] https://fsc432.dutton.psu.edu/2014/07/06/hydrocracking-vs-catalytic-cracking/

[Further reading] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/20100917_china_clean_energy_lunch_and_panel_3.pdf

Evidence of a CCUS boom

The CCUS boom has begun. This can be discerned by a dramatic increase in political support for approval and financing of CCS projects, and the number of new projects being announced. The most advanced projects rarely receive attention from climate campaigners, and their connections in the mainstream and liberal media.

USA

Navigator and Summit CO2 pipelines, Oxy Low Carbon DAC for CO2-EOR, Houston Ship Channel, monumental expansions to the 45Q tax credit and other support under the IRA

[Further reading] https://www.agweek.com/business/adm-partnering-on-carbon-pipeline-out-of-iowa

[Further reading] https://gcaptain.com/exxon-sets-sail-on-massive-houston-ship-channel-carbon-capture-project/

[Further reading] https://www.thebalancenewsletter.com/oxylowcarbonventuresdac

[Further reading] https://carboncapturecoalition.org/inflation-reduction-act-of-2022-makes-monumental-enhancements-to-the-foundational-45q-tax-credit/

Canada

Alberta Carbon Trunk Line and associated refining and extractive projects, Pathways Alliance plans to emulate the ACTL, CCS tax credit proposed

[Further reading] https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/opinion-us-climate-action-a-roadmap-for-canada-to-support-carbon-capture-and-storage/ar-AA122faE

[Further reading] https://www.ctvnews.ca/climate-and-environment/pathways-alliance-president-says-oil-industry-will-be-judged-on-climate-goals-1.6147569

[Further reading] https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/10/26/Industry-Carbon-Capture-Steamroller-Could-Crush-BC-First-Nations/

[Further reading] https://www.ogci.com/ogci-climate-investments-continues-to-back-svante-a-new-unicorn-in-latest-funding-round/

Middle East

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE blue hydrogen and blue ammonia projects

[Further reading] https://www.aramcolife.com/en/publications/the-arabian-sun/articles/2021/week-47-articles/ccus-efforts-day-to-day-effort-at-hawiyah-ngl-plant

[Further reading] https://www.jwnenergy.com/article/2022/9/1/qatar-to-tap-global-hydrogen-market-with-1-billion/

[Further reading] https://gulfbusiness.com/harnessing-the-power-of-hydrogen-in-the-uae/

Europe

Northern Endurance Partnership, East Coast Cluster, Porthos

[Further reading] https://www.business-live.co.uk/economic-development/chamber-backs-humber-2030-vision-25596678

[Further reading] https://www.business-live.co.uk/economic-development/east-coast-cluster-chief-latest-24770094

[Further reading] https://www.edie.net/government-unveils-ccus-project-shortlist-to-help-decarbonise-industrial-clusters/

[Further reading] https://www.equinor.com/news/uk/20220512-east-coast-cluster-carbon-storage-licences

[Further reading] https://carbonherald.com/eus-ccus-zero-emission-network-will-accelerate-carbon-capture-in-the-region/

[Further reading] https://www.porthosco2.nl/en/

[Further reading] https://www.gasworld.com/story/denmark-accelerates-development-of-ccs-chain/2119229.article/

Australia

Exploration acreage for Woodside, Total, Chevron and Santos, CCS decarbonisation hub proposed for Darwin

[Further reading] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220908006060/en/Chevron-Granted-Interest-in-Three-Permits-to-Assess-Carbon-Storage-Offshore-Australia

[Further reading] https://www.inpex.co.jp/english/news/assets/pdf/20220824.pdf

[Further reading] https://energyclubnt.com.au/news/12891148

[Further reading] https://stockhead.com.au/energy/pilot-on-the-fast-track-to-becoming-one-of-australias-first-offshore-ccs-operators/

[Further reading] https://www.santos.com/news/santos-announces-fid-on-moomba-carbon-capture-and-storage-project/

Asia

Japan and South Korea making deals for import of blue hydrogen and blue ammonia, Malaysia, Indonesia and China all pursuing CCS, CCUS and decarbonisation hubs.

[Further reading] https://www.hydrocarbononline.com/doc/inpex-takes-fid-on-kashiwazaki-clean-hydrogen-ammonia-project-in-niigata-prefecture-japan-0001

[Further reading] https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/adnoc-sells-first-blue-ammonia-cargo-to-japans-itochu-amid-clean-energy-push/

[Further reading] https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/08/419_333847.html

[Further reading] https://www.reuters.com/article/malaysia-petronas-idUSL1N32P0DJ

[Further reading] https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/pertamina-and-marubeni-to-develop-decarbonisation-projects-in-indonesia/2-1-1171212#:~:text=Pertamina%20and%20Marubeni%20to%20develop%20decarbonisation%20projects%20in%20Indonesia

[Further reading] https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/offshore-china-harbours-huge-carbon-capture-potential/2-1-1390955

Part 4. Thinking Properly

Boondoggles do damage

The fracking boom was a boondoggle. It did damage to nature and delivered throughput of resources for business as usual. Many critics point to fundamental signifiers of the boondoggle that is the fracking industry. David Wallace-Wells summed up the loss making mega-venture that has only recently begun turning a profit.

Perhaps the most striking fact about the American hydraulic-fracturing boom, though, is unknown to all but the most discriminating consumers of energy news: Fracking has been, for nearly all of its history, a money-losing boondoggle, profitable only recently, after being propped up by so much investment from venture capital and Wall Street that it resembled less an efficient-markets no-brainer and more a speculative empire of bubbles like Uber and WeWork.

[SOURCE] https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3784151/david-wallace-wells/hardly-anyone-talks-about-how-fracking-was-extraordinary

Countless commentators and members of the public have asserted to me that carbon capture and storage is a ‘boondoggle’ or words to that effect. Each of them has neglected to explain how CCS being a boondoggle obviates the need to be vigilant in monitoring the political will. In these discussions I raise the specter of a new fossil fuel extraction boom and point to the Halliburton Loophole that laid the crucial groundwork for fracking in the US, but commentators and members of the public generally refuse to join the dots.

In a recent explainer, Food and Water Watch asserted that CCS was a ‘boondoggle’, but laid most of the responsibility at the feet of “industry execs”. We know from the fracking boom that to build a boondoggle takes extensive and coordinated efforts over time. We know that efforts to establish the fracking boom required subversion of regulatory processes and protections. Why is it that Food and Water Watch can properly identify the threat, but seem unmotivated to unpack the political will?

Carbon Capture is a Multi-Purpose Boondoggle

There’s hardly a dirty energy that carbon capture doesn’t prop up. The fossil fuel industry plans to use it to revive dying coal and fracked gas plants. If allowed, they’ll attach it to hydrogen power generation derived from fracked gas.

[SOURCE] https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2022/09/09/carbon-capture-and-storage-explained/

Fast moving and dangerous

New developments are coming thick and fast as part of the CCUS boom. The recent announcement that the ADNOC CEO will be appointed to COP28 as president is of special significance. ADNOC are leading proponents of blue ammonia which is a stable carrier for hydrogen and a useful product for chemicals manufacturers who want to go net zero. They are also, along with Saudi Arabia, Canada and the US, leading proponents of CO2-EOR. The COP 28 team are reportedly sharing an office building with ADNOC.

The main COP28 team is using two stories of an 11-floor office building in Abu Dhabi also used by the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology located next to ADNOC’s headquarters.

[SOURCE] https://www.politico.eu/article/cop28-climate-team-uae-shares-offices-un-abu-dhabi-national-oil-company-ahmed-al-jaber/

[Further reading] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/12/cop28-uae-sparks-backlash-by-appointing-oil-chief-as-president.html

[Further reading] https://www.adnoc.ae/en/news-and-media/press-releases/2021/oil-and-gas-industry-to-play-an-important-role-in-providing-practical-solutions-to-climate-change

[Further reading] https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/adnoc-sells-first-blue-ammonia-cargo-to-japans-itochu-amid-clean-energy-push/

When a group of young climate campaigners, including Greta Thunberg, met with the IEA boss Fatih Birol in Davos recently, neither the young panelists, nor any of the assembled media took the opportunity to ask the long term supporter of fossil fuel CCS about his frequent statements in support of CCS or his organisation’s consistent work to forward CCS under the banner of ‘clean energy’.

[SOURCE] https://www.youtube.com/live/69p4-B2R4Ho?feature=share

[Further reading] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/a86b480e-2b03-4e25-bae1-da1395e0b620/EnergyTechnologyPerspectives2023.pdf

[Further reading] https://www.iea.org/news/iea-workshop-highlights-crucial-role-of-carbon-capture-technologies-for-clean-energy-transitions

The CO2 pipeline frenzy in the US mid west states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota and Nebraska appears to have accelerated after the Inflation Reduction Act delivered the long anticipated 45Q tax credit expansions. Land owners, including First Nations report aggressive tactics from pipeline and CO2 storage companies. Land owners in North Dakota recently provided testimony in support of a bill sponsored by a republican state senator. The bill would give greater negotiating rights to land owners against the might of pipeline and storage companies.

[Further reading] https://www.ndlegis.gov/assembly/68-2023/testimony/SNATRES-2228-20230127-16957-F-HAUPT_MICHAEL_L.pdf

[Further reading] https://www.ndlegis.gov/assembly/68-2023/testimony/SNATRES-2228-20230127-16679-A-DAHL_STACEY_A.pdf

[Further reading] https://www.inforum.com/news/north-dakota/bills-target-co2-pipelines-in-north-dakota-energy-industry-worries-about-impacts-to-oil-coal

[Further reading] https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/opinion/guebert-the-great-carbon-boondoggle-part-1

[Further reading] https://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/project-tundras-carbon-storage-plans-approved-by-north-dakota-regulators/article_7e9e473c-3657-55e1-a3ef-92b2502f5fed.html

[Further reading] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/north-dakota/articles/2022-04-20/officials-mark-start-of-co2-pipeline-used-for-oil-recovery

[Further reading] https://www.kfyrtv.com/2022/05/25/100-million-loan-approved-project-tundra/

[Further reading] https://americanpolicy.org/2022/08/08/carbon-capture-pipelines-environmental-idiocracy/

Behind all the discussion around ‘Exxon knew’ is the reality that oil companies in the US have been tapping naturally occurring CO2 domes to supply enhanced oil recovery projects for decades. It’s reasonable to assert that the oil industry has retained latent demand for anthropogenic CO2. It’s reasonable to assert that if Exxon knew, then they also knew that they can exploit the political and lobbying environment to engineer demand for CCS to supply anthropogenic CO2 for EOR. One of the benefits to Exxon from hiding their knowledge of the science of climate change is avoiding scrutiny of the methods used in CO2-EOR, the risks posed by the pipelines used to transport CO2, and the potential to massively expand proven reserves.

It’s clear that Exxon have a significant interest in CO2-EOR and CCS. Exxon are a partner in multiple CCS projects including Chevron’s Gorgon Gas Project and with Pertamina in a cooperation agreement on developing CCS and CCUS in South Sumatra, East Kalimantan, and West Java.

Carbon capture: a decarbonisation pipe dream | IEEFA

[Further reading] https://exxonknews.substack.com/p/explosive-new-documents-show-big

[Further reading] https://energyfactor.exxonmobil.com/reducing-emissions/carbon-capture-and-storage-baytown-blue-hydrogen-video/

[Further reading] https://www.pertamina.com/en/news-room/news-release/pertamina-cooperates-with-exxonmobil-to-study-ccus-technology-application-in-three-oil-and-gas-field-areas

[Further reading] https://www.mrt.com/business/energy/article/ExxonMobil-launches-EOR-project-in-its-Means-field-7438411.php

[Further reading] https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/-/media/Global/Files/energy-and-carbon-summary/Energy-and-Carbon-Summary.pdf

[Further reading] https://www.jwnenergy.com/article/2021/3/5/exxon-ceo-eyes-money-making-potential-of-low-carbo/

 

Conclusions

 

Climate campaigners find it extremely difficult to comprehend the contentions made by Wrong Kind of Green members that philanthropy, through setting the terms of funding, and through expansive networks, has effectively shaped climate campaigning through constraining the acceptable limits of discussion. Rather than attempting to falsify our contentions by looking at the networks, talking points and funding highlighted in our analyses, climate campaigners merely dismiss our arguments without investigation or ignore us completely. Climate campaigners need to realise that the ultimate objective of the powerful is always more business as usual which is what CCS, CCUS and BECCS provide.

The media, through silence and echoing supplied talking points, smooths the path for philanthropy to continue fostering the conflated logics and errant silences of climate campaigners. There are any number of media organs in thrall to the false narratives provided by captive thinkers working at the behest of climate NGOs. The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Intercept, and The Atlantic are prominent among the many captive agencies. The collective effect of narrative adherence is repetition which produces a sense that certain assertions of fact are true. This can be observed in the misreporting of the modelling produced by the International Energy Agency.

It is highly likely that governments have engaged nudge units to develop guides to framing issues to elicit public compliance with the net zero agenda. We know that the UK has engaged the Nudge Unit who developed ‘principles for successful behaviour change’ on behalf of the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. While corporate behaviour is heading very quickly toward installing significant decarbonisation infrastructure with the full support of governments, ordinary people are being encouraged to accept the impacts of net zero strategies. We should not assume that community consultations and public feedback will do anything to slow the long term plans for CCS, CCUS and BECCS, indeed it is likely the nudge units will adapt their messages to ensure compliance with the existing agenda to deliver business as usual, but with some CO2 abatement.

In order to shape the direct actions of activists, the statements of experts, and the language of the global consensus machine, networked power – constituted by the collective agenda of governments, corporations and philanthropy – appeals to self interest. Self censorship is an immediate response to the perceived risk of speaking outside the acceptable limits of discussion. The collective effect of self interest is the reinforcement of the power of the assigned/acceptable/prescribed talking points and the logical conflations embedded within them.

Decisive direct action that contributes to the public consciousness of what is really happening in the extractivist industries is what is necessary. If Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and other groups really wanted to confront the projects of the most wealthy oil, gas, coal and biomass proponents then they would be occupying and protesting the many new decarbonisation hubs in planning or under construction. If Just Stop Oil were intent on truly disrupting powerful oil and gas interests then they would be, for example, occupying sites in Hull and Middlesborough where BP and Equinor are developing new blue hydrogen projects. The UK Climate and Energy Minister, Graham Stuart has made it very clear that the political will is behind the decarbonisation plans of big oil, gas, coal and biomass. There is no excuse for not identifying the political will. It is right to ask why groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil will not acknowledge the projects being built at their back door.

Plans for large scale CCS are part of the big oil and gas long game. The burning of biomass as a feed stock with CCS is the crucial linchpin in the net zero plans. We know that billionaire philanthropists like Chris Hohn, their impact philanthropy agents like John Podesta, and their well funded re-granting NGOs like the European Climate Foundation headed up by Laurence Tubiana hold strongly to this position. These individuals know on a deep level that BECCS is part of the long game to value-add CO2 as a waste turning it into feed stock to perpetuate the stranglehold of big oil and gas.

If you want to understand why the COP 26 phase-out commitments specified “unabated” fossil fuels, why COP 27 was overloaded with oil and gas executives, and why COP 28 will be headed up by a proponent of blue ammonia and CO2 enhanced oil recovery, then I suggest watching the Atlantic Council video I linked at the start of this briefing:

 

[Michael Swifte is an Australian activist and a member of the Wrong Kind of Green critical thinking collective.]

A SYSTEM ON LIFE SUPPORT

The Philosophical Salon

September 5, 2022

By Fabio Vighi


Credit: Lona Mody

We have entered a global cycle of secular inflation that is unique in history. The cynical attempt to preserve a system based on the ontological assumption of permanent monetary injections now entails the controlled demolition of the real economy and the world it supports. Ever-expanding artificial liquidity can only destroy currencies. The immediate consequence of this implosive process, however, is not liberation from capitalism, but a new capitalist phase of ideological manipulation and authoritarian violence, which is now upon us. Each step in the global economic downfall will continue to be matched with emergency narratives of corresponding gravity. This is why any resistance to the new status quo in the making, whether motivated by the unsustainable rise of the cost of living or the increased discrimination over human life, will entail a struggle to define the cause of our predicament as systemic rather than exogenous.

The inflation genie

What sort of world do we live in? There is one answer that takes precedence over all others: our globalised world is a debt-based system of simulated financial growth that relies on the continuous expansion of liquidity, which is created “out of nothing” in the form of debt/credit. Our civilization is addicted to money printing and asset bubbles, a dependence that can hardly be broken. In a debt-soaked world like ours, nothing is more dangerous than interfering with the expansion of fake liquidity; nothing more threatening than a sudden “credit crunch”, a haemorrhage of freshly minted money. The cash-flow heading to the stock markets must continue to increase, whatever it takes. As I have argued in my previous pieces on this matter, COVID-19 was, in essence, an unprecedented attempt to restore the expansive capacity of artificial liquidity at a critical time in the history of casino-capitalism. By the end of 2019 the financial sector was, again, at risk of rapidly becoming illiquid as the Monopoly money was drying up – a predictable occurrence that had already triggered the Great Financial Crisis. However, in 2019 the stakes were much higher than in 2008, for the system’s monetary addiction had reached breaking point. Today, in seemingly post-pandemic times, we remain hostage to a Ponzi scheme where toxic liabilities act as collateral for other toxic liabilities, in what is an endless trail of insubstantial paper. Central Banks expand their balance sheets to purchase these liabilities merely to prevent their loss of paper value.

Putting an end to monetary expansion is like provoking a cardiac arrest. If the money supply curve declines or even flattens, our world experiences convulsions, withdrawal symptoms, and goes cold turkey. Eventually, it collapses. With a grotesquely over-leveraged financial industry like ours, the entire economy and social fabric is hanging on the edge of a cliff. The choice faced by most countries, including the affluent ones, will soon be either default or hyperinflation of the currency needed to repay the IOUs. This means that capital accumulation itself is now on life support, as its managers are caught in what can only be described as a lose-lose situation. On the one hand, they know that they must find reasons to pull more liquidity (debt) into the present by dint of what is conventionally known as “printing it.” On the other, they also know that this hardly original escamotage can only lead to runaway inflation, and then hyperinflation. What takes place today as a matter of monetary normality used to characterise wartime economies, namely direct financing via the money presses. While this can only result in depressing the real economy, simultaneously generating the highest wealth inequality on record, what should give us pause is the thought that a world hostage to bubble inflation inevitably “melts into thin air”, losing its social grounding as well as the language to articulate any form of resistance. Collapse is at once economic, socio-political, and cultural.

In August 2019, Blackrock (perhaps the most powerful single entity on the planet) issued a white paper unambiguously titled ‘Dealing with the Next Downturn: from Unconventional Monetary Policy to Unprecedented Policy Coordination.’ The paper warned against two strictly interrelated risks: first, that markets were becoming illiquid while the policy toolkit was empty (interest rates being already negative); second, that continued monetary expansion carried the risk of Zimbabwe-like hyperinflation. Betraying more than a hint of anxiety, Blackrock urged Central Banks (the Federal Reserve) to find ‘unconventional’ remedies to avoid the coming downturn. Specifically, they pushed an ‘unprecedented response’ described as ‘going direct’: ‘Going direct means the central bank finding ways to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders’, while making sure that such monetary behemoth does not trigger a potentially devastating inflation. A few months later, something truly unprecedented happened: COVID-19, followed by what continues to appear as an unstoppable stream of global emergencies. As I have argued in more detail elsewhere (here and here), Virus allowed the ‘going direct’ plan – the methadone-like injection of trillions in mouse-clicked cash – to be executed in safety mode. The hyperinflationary tsunami feared by Blackrock was postponed courtesy of, again, ‘unprecedented’ lockdowns, which prevented the liquidity-flooded economy from overheating. Unsurprisingly, however, after the first year of deflationary Covid hysteria the monster came out of the closet with a vengeance, reminding us of Blackrock’s existential dilemma: ‘how to get the inflation genie back in the bottle once it has been released.’

Keeping up appearances

The key to understanding our economic predicament is to realize that inflation – or more precisely the calamitous devaluation of the money-medium – is now structural, since the simulation of monetary growth has penetrated all forms of capital. Insubstantial financial liquidity has long colonised commodity production and consumption, making both hostage to the credit industry. The financial sector responds to what happens in bond markets, which are increasingly propped up artificially by Central Banks’ monetary inoculations. Bonds are issued to raise money, and pay regular fixed interest to the bondholder. However, bonds are also tradeable, which means they give returns called bond yields. When, in a critically stressed economic environment like ours, bond yields rise sharply and in seemingly uncontrolled fashion, it is usually a sign that bond prices are falling at a similarly dramatic pace. This suggests that investors are pulling out and, as a consequence, the bond market is tanking – which is bad news for the debt-doped stocks. In short, the cost of financing one’s debt surges rapidly, and the insolvency ghost rears its ugly head. Because debt-binging went through the roof after 2008, any turbulence in bond markets is now registered as a shock in stock markets. It is very much like clockwork: when bond yields rise fast, stocks get a hit, which normally prompts the Central Bank cavalry into action. The only way to keep bonds from deteriorating is for Central Banks to use their unlimited firepower and print more cash to buy the unloved debt securities; which is intrinsically inflationary, thus dealing yet another fatal blow to the purchasing power of fiat currencies.

Consider the benchmark yield on the 10-year US Treasury: when that yield spikes rapidly, it indicates that investors in US debt are running to the door, which spells doom for Wall Street’s credit-craving “creative finance”. So, what happens when investing in debt – the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism – loses its appeal? On June 13, 2022, the Italian bond yields breached 4% causing a “fragmentation” in the cost of borrowing across the EU. With lightning speed, the ECB (European Central Bank) ran to the rescue selling German and other Northern European bonds close to maturity to buy Italian and other Southern European bonds – a subterfuge that hardly thrilled the “frugal” northerners. Moreover, it instituted the TPI (Transmission Protection Instrument), also known as “anti-spread shield”, which allows for targeted and unlimited debt purchases – de facto, putting the countries who need TPI under external (ECB) administration. The point, however, is that any such Central Bank intervention continues to be inflationary, which brings us back to the original quandary of irreversible money debasement.

Despite first denying inflation, then calling it ‘transitory’, and eventually blaming it on Putin, our political leaders (the executors) and their central and not-so-central bankers (the enforcers) have recently had to admit that “we have an inflation problem.” So, when on August 10, 2022 President Biden prompt-read from his White House podium that in the month of July the US had been blessed with 0% inflation, adding that the US economy is in fact booming, we should of course smell a rat: the blatant distortion of reality is not only an electoral stunt in view of midterms, but would also seem to prepare the ground for a “Fed pivot”, i.e. a stop to rate hikes and a return to Quantitative Easing (easy money). This is because if rate hikes were to continue beyond the current cosmetic levels, and the cost of borrowing rise substantially, the debt-saturated markets would crash, along with currencies and everything else. A return to QE legitimized by a narrative of peak inflation (including oil prices) appears like a credible scenario for the near future. However, while QE would fulfil its task of keeping the markets liquid, it would nevertheless turn back the clock to 2019, with the system requiring even more ‘unconventional’ ways of dealing with the inflation monster. Such as (again) lockdowns.

Hot Autumn in Europe?

When looking at the ongoing energy crisis, which threatens to bring Europe to its knees no later than this Winter, lockdowns (or similar restrictions) cannot fail to appear as the most “practical” way of achieving large-scale energy savings. Social restrictions would not only tame inflation but also help us conscientious citizens to “do our bit” against climate change, feeding the noble illusion that a zero-net “Green New Deal” – supported of course by a massive programme of fiscal stimulus (i.e., more debt) – will unleash a new era of capitalist growth. Adopting lockdown policies may well be the only way for “green capitalism” to affirm itself, for the system needs to keep both the inflationary spiral and the impoverished masses under control. The key point here is that “sustainable growth” through green technology remains a pious illusion for a system that requires increasing levels of labour-intensive production to generate real economic value. Every leap in post-industrial technological innovation driven by capital, no matter how green or desirable, will cause unemployment and poverty to grow, together with the imposition of widespread repressive measures upon entire populations.

In this respect, a new pandemic wave starting this Autumn might provide further cover for the social and economic disaster in the making. In recent weeks virologists, health ministers, mainstream media, and the WHO have started “voicing concerns” about new and rapidly spreading Covid variants in the ‘European region’, which are expected to become dominant already in September. Germany, a country at high risk of energy rationing due to its dependence on Russian gas, has already approved a new package of pandemic restrictions, which will come into effect on 1 October and will last till 7 April of next year. These will include not only mandatory facemasks but also, where necessary, proof of vaccination and negative testing. In short, the corona spectre is still haunting Europe, suggesting that the unmanageable contradictions of contemporary capitalism will continue to be tackled in authoritarian ways, and by conning people into obedience.

As confirmed by Greta Thunberg’s disappearance from mainstream media (where she now appears to be berated) this is probably not the best time to preach the capitalist net-zero agenda – which is one of the underlying reasons for the energy shortages that the war in Ukraine has exacerbated (not caused). Europe, rather, is prepping for the coming energy-crunch scenario. Germany is planning public warm-up zones for those who cannot pay their energy bills. In France (and elsewhere) night illumination is being switched off, while Emmanuel Macron warns of the coming ‘end of abundance’, conveniently blaming it on the war in Ukraine and climate change – as if destitution was not already rampant. In the UK, thousands have joined a “Don’t Pay” campaign against the rising cost of energy bills. And the Vice President of the European Commission is encouraging people to fight Putin by not washing their clothes.

Will the wealthy technocrats manage to convince the impoverished, cold, and unwashed people heroically to form a united front against Russian gas in the name of the debt-creation programme also known as “green(washing) transition”? Will the people warm to their politicians’ patronising suggestions to “weatherize” their homes and shift to prohibitively expensive electric vehicles? Or will our leaders need a new “pandemic emergency” to conclusively persuade us? Whatever the outcome, the bottom line is that, no matter how many times Wikipedia changes the definition of “recession”, this Winter many Europeans and Americans will be forced to choose between putting food on the table and footing their energy bills. It will be a matter of heating or eating – an absurd alternative considering the technological and productive potential at our disposal. Needless to say, the problem is not technology per se, but its being tied to a declining and hence particularly virulent economic logic based on mass extraction of surplus-value from human labour. The world has more than enough human and technological capacity to satisfy the needs of all, but because this potential remains subject to the blind dynamics of capital, it cannot be utilized for the common good.

Remember the “lock step” scenario in the 2010 Rockefeller Foundation pamphlet, which predicted so accurately both a deadly zoonotic pandemic (‘the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit’) and the ensuing imposition of ‘airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets’? Which also foresaw that ‘the Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery’? And which moreover prophesized that ‘after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems—from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty—leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power’? What is spelt out in this remarkable piece of creative writing from the Rockefeller think-tank is, ultimately, the connection between Lockdowns and Poverty: ‘authoritarian control’ helps against ‘global problems’ like ‘rising poverty’. Is this authoritarian world not the world we already live in? Is the fiction not more real than reality itself? Those who believe that lockdowns are a thing of the past, had better think twice. The normalisation of repression and surveillance that began with 9/11 and continued with COVID-19 is now about to accelerate.

Two roads, one destination

In the meantime, the globalized West is engaged in a wacky race to the bottom. Europe is leading the way, thanks to the all-too-predictable backfiring of the sanctions against Russia. Having made itself dependent on Russian gas, Europe has scored the clumsiest of own-goals – intentionally? For how could European leaders who invoked and even engineered the draconian sanctions (while also hoping to continue to buy Russian gas on the sly) not see that these sanctions would boomerang to hit Europe on the head? It is either a case of extreme incompetence, blind submission to external (US) dictates, or deliberate self-immolation – perhaps a mix of all these. The likely outcome is that as soon as the recession is officially declared, and new social restrictions are in place, we are going to see Central Banks moving from hawkish (rate-hiking) to dovish (rate-lowering), i.e. the Fed & Co. will return to a policy of more inflationary large-scale asset purchases and cheap money.

The only other available option is running the markets to the ground through sustained and significant rate hikes. This scenario would be deflationary, but only at the cost of a sudden and devastating depression pulverising capitals both in the financial markets and on the ground, causing sweeping job losses, business closures, rioting, looting, and so on. If liquidity does dry up, we will hit the deflationary spiral, like drink-driving at full speed against a wall. Whatever can no longer be financed through credit will be brought to a standstill. Banks will refuse to lend and bank accounts could be frozen. Deflationary capital destruction through the meltdown of debt & stock markets would annihilate currencies and livelihoods. The least one can say is that for this to happen as a controlled accident, reliable (authoritarian) countermeasures aimed at controlling social unrest must already be in place.

For most of us, then, the future seems to offer a choice between structural stagflation (stagnant economy with high inflation) and an abrupt deflationary depression – like a choice between bleeding to death and suffering a heart attack. Either way, the divide between the super-rich and all the rest will increase further, with catastrophic consequences for humanity. It is no longer the classic swing between boom and bust, or a financial cycle ending in a “Minsky moment”, for we have reached the absolute limit to capitalist expansion. It is important to reiterate that we are facing systemic implosion, not a crisis engineered by evil bankers motivated by sadism and greed. While the latter are the main attributes of the capitalist drive as such – since capital is nothing but a perverse end in itself – the current implosion reflects the historical exhaustion of the value-creating substance of capital; the fact that the fundamental ingredient of value itself – labour – is vanishing irreversibly while automated (technological) productivity takes off. It should be enough to observe that in a healthy capitalist economy the price of labour would rise. Instead, labour has been devalued for decades, which dramatically confirms that any monetary boost to the economy is without value substance, and destined to cause further misery. It is therefore inevitable that, at some point soon, capitalist reproduction will be brought back to the ground through the severe contraction of insubstantial masses of money (“bubbles”). Fictitious liquidity, created without any basis in real production, will be violently debased.

From denial to sacrifice

What continues to be denied, then, is that the devaluation of the money-medium is the key symptom of the implosion of capitalism as a global commodity-producing work society mediated by the market and driven by the blind pursuit of profit as end in itself. What is most painful about this denial is that it has long conquered the heart and soul of (what still dares to call itself) the left. The political left is either opportunistically ignorant or caught in the neoliberal illusion that a virtualized type of financial capitalism is possible – perhaps even “with a human face”. As a result, hardly anyone on the left dares or is even able to connect the rapid deterioration of socio-economic conditions with the authoritarian turn of today’s “emergency capitalism” – already explicit in the brutally discriminatory treatment of “the unvaccinated”, or in the rising levels of our mainstream media’s propaganda. Is it not yet clear to the left that the political face of “breakdown capitalism” is fascism, albeit articulated in new and more sophisticated (progressive!) forms of violence and repression? The only way our comatose system can prolong its lifespan is by ditching its liberal façade and dramatically increase its inherent capacity for barbarism.

In capitalist terms, we are facing an ironic twist on Margaret Thatcher’s infamous TINA: there is no alternative. Whatever happens, we will continue to see a drastic devaluation of fiat currencies, and the rapid dissolution of the social bond. As I see it, the endgame involves two main strategies: 1. The manipulation of a continuous stream of fear-inducing global emergencies, whose ultimate function is to shift the blame for systemic implosion onto some external agent while ushering in 2. A novel social-credit system (or rating system) based on mass immiseration and CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies), which are now being tested in more than 100 countries.

The subject enslaved to capitalist dystopia “will have nothing, and yet be (convinced that they are) happy”, both through fear and, especially, the internalization of a new system of values based on collective guilt, responsibility, sacrifice, and obedience. In other words, we will not only have nothing, but most crucially we will be persuaded “to enjoy it.” The consumerist ideology that drives modern capitalism is already being replaced by the injunction to “enjoy (having) nothing.” Whether such conversion to a punishing form of capitalism will succeed, it remains to be seen. For sure, a paradigm shift of this calibre needs the support of a belief-system capable of transforming consumerist hubris into slave-like submissiveness. Humanity (particularly the middle classes) will need to commit to common causes that might justify their being deprived of the “gift” (even as a fantasy object) of boundless consumption – fear alone will not suffice. For the neo-feudal paradigm to succeed, the “work and enjoy” fantasy that keeps the modern consumer ticking must fade into the background and be replaced by a new ethics of sacrifice. As spelt out by Macron in his already mentioned “end of abundance” speech, we are at a point where ‘our system based on freedom… can demand sacrifices from its citizens’. Here is the ideological ruse of senile capitalism: riding an endless wave of “global emergencies” that might induce us to accept the loss of elementary freedoms in order to save the freedom of capital.

What changes here is the subject’s relation to nothingness: if in consumer capitalism “nothing” is disguised as “more” (since the capitalist logic of desire relies on never having enough of “it”), in neo-feudal capitalism “more” will be sold as “nothing”, that is to say, a quasi-religious attachment to renunciation. Harnessing human desire to a new social contract predicated on protecting us from global calamities will be crucial for the system’s capacity to reproduce itself. Emergencies are the new capitalist “gift”, and they keep on giving. The potential of this modern-day Leviathan could be unlocked by a new spirit of collective sacrifice, which is why contemporary capitalism is so eager to hijack the rhetoric of the left: it “knows” that only in the name of “progressive ideals” can the exploited masses accept new forms of domination disguised as necessary sacrifices. If that is the case, supposedly “progressive” and “humanitarian” narratives will translate into higher forms of conservatism and tyranny.

Today, this logic emerges clearly with the emotional blackmail concerning climate change: progressive individuals are supposed to take on drastic lifestyle changes (for the worse) through sharing guilt for causing harm to Mother Earth, while the planet continues to be exposed to the (re)productive, market-mediated dynamics of capital. This attitude can be recognized in the well-known phenomenon of “celebrity eco-warriors”, a spin-off of “philanthropic capitalism”. Leonardo DiCaprio, for instance, regularly tweets about the collective fight against climate change (e.g., ‘If we don’t act together, we will surely perish!’), but does so from his 315ft, helicopter-decked, 110-million-dollar superyacht, which by travelling only a couple of miles pollutes as much as your average car does in a year – hardly “acting together.” Precisely as an actor, however, he should know better, for he started with Titanic and we all know how that film ended. In other words, the devious elitist attempt to co-opt the leftist spirit of engagement to a collective cause might, at some point during the system’s downfall, backfire – which is probably the only hope we have.

 

[Fabio Vighi is Professor of Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff University, UK. His recent work includes Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism (Bloomsbury 2015, with Heiko Feldner) and Crisi di valore: Lacan, Marx e il crepuscolo della società del lavoro (Mimesis 2018).]

WATCH: The Betrayal by Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul

Produced by Rerun Productions

Amsterdam

1992

 

French sociologist and technology critique Jacques Ellul in his studio in Pessac, France. Photo taken as part of the filming of the documentary “The Betrayal by Technology” by ReRun Productions, Amsterdam, Netherlands. December 12, 1990

 

“This movement is invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience. … What is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant.”

 

— Jacques Ellul, Ce que je crois (1987) [What I Believe] translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (1989), p. 140

 

“Technology forces us to go faster and faster. One does not know where one goes. The only thing that matters is the speed.” French philosopher Jacques Ellul has analyzed modern Western society on basis of the premise that technology has become an autonomous, all-determining factor.

In 1950, Ellul finished his manuscript La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle (The Technological Society), his seminal analysis of the way technology shapes every aspect of society. As contemporary thinker, he was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard, Marx and Barth. After a life, in which he wrote close to fifty books, Ellul died in the summer of 1994, at the age of 82.

The team of ReRun Producties visited Ellul in 1990. During five subsequent days, long interview sessions were held with him in his old mansion in Pessac. The Betrayal by Technology is one of the very few existing filmed recordings of Jacques Ellul speaking.”

54 minutes

 

 

 

 

Forgive Us Our Debts

Quodlibet

September 28, 2022

By Giorgio Agamben

 

“Hope Dies Last”, Athens, Greece. Artist: WD (Wild Drawing)

The prayer par excellence – the one that Jesus himself dictated to us (“pray like this”) – contains a passage that our time strives to contradict at all costs and which it will therefore be good to remember, precisely today that everything seems to be reduced to the one fierce double-sided law: credit/debit. Dimitte nobis debita nostra… «forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors». The Greek original is even more peremptory: aphes emin ta opheilemata emon, «let go, remove our debts from us». Reflecting on these words in 1941, in the middle of the world war, a great Italian jurist, Francesco Carnelutti, observed that, if it is a truth of the physical world that what has happened cannot be erased, the same cannot be said for the moral world. which is defined precisely through the possibility of forgiveness and forgiveness.

First of all, it is necessary to dispel the prejudice that debt is a genuinely economic law. Even leaving aside the problem of what is meant when one speaks of an economic “law”, a summary genealogical investigation shows that the origin of the concept of debt is not economic, but juridical and religious – two dimensions that the more one goes back towards prehistory the more they tend to get confused. If, as Carl Schmitt has shown, the notion of Schuld , which in German means both debt and fault, is at the basis of the law edifice, no less convincing is the intuition of a great historian of religions, David Flüsser. While one day he was reflecting in a square in Athens on the meaning of the word pistis, which is the term that in the Gospels means “faith”, he saw in front of him the inscription trapeza tes pisteos in large letters . It didn’t take him long to realize that he was standing in front of a bank sign ( Banco di credito) and at the same time he understood that the meaning of the word he had been reflecting on for years had to do with credit – the credit we enjoy with God and which God enjoys with us, from the moment we believe in him. For these Paul can say in a famous definition that “faith is the substance of things hoped for”: it is what gives reality to what does not yet exist, but in which we believe and trust, in which we have staked our credit and our word. Something like a credit exists only to the extent that our faith manages to give it substance.

The world we live in today has appropriated this juridical and religious concept and transformed it into a lethal and implacable device, before which every human need must bow. This device, in which all our pistis, all our faith has been captured, is money, understood as the very form of credit/debit. The Bank – with its gray officials and experts – has taken the place of the Church and its priests and, governing credit, manipulates and manages the faith – the scarce, uncertain trust – that our time still has in itself. And it does so in the most irresponsible and unscrupulous way, trying to make money from the trust and hopes of human beings, establishing the credit that everyone can enjoy and the price he must pay for it (even the credit of states, who have meekly abdicated their sovereignty). In this way, by governing credit, it governs not only the world, but also the future of men, a future that the emergency wants ever shorter and with a maturity. And if today politics no longer seems possible, this is because the financial power has de facto confiscated all faith and all the future, all time and all expectations.

The so-called emergency we are going through – but what is called an emergency, this is by now clear, is just the normal way in which capitalism works today – began with an ill-advised series of credit operations, on credits that were discounted and resold dozens of times before they could be made. This means, in other words, that financial capitalism – and the banks which are its main organ – works by playing on credit – that is, on the faith – of men.

If today a government – in Italy as elsewhere – really wants to move in a different direction from the one that is being sought everywhere to impose, it is above all the money/credit/debt system that it must resolutely question as a system of government. Only in this way will a policy become possible again – a policy that does not accept being strangled by the false dogma – pseudo-religious and not economic – of the universal and irrevocable debt and restores to men the memory and faith in the words they so often recited as children : «forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors».

 

[Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher and writer. His work is translated and commented all over the world. With the Homo sacer project he marked a turning point in contemporary political thought. Among his works published by Quodlibet: Italian categories. Studies in poetics and literature (2021), Where are we? The epidemic as politics (2020), Intellect of love (with Jean-Baptiste Brenet, 2020), Homo sacer. Unabridged Edition (2018), What is Philosophy? (2016), Taste (2015), Idea of ??prose (new augmented edition, 2002-2013, 2020), The man without content (1994, 2013),Bartleby, the formula of creation (with Gilles Deleuze, 1993, 2012). For Quodlibet he curates the Ardilut series.]