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The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: Natural Climate Manipulations  [Volume II, Act VI]

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: Natural Climate Manipulations [Volume II, Act VI]

September 26, 2019

By Cory Morningstar

 

 

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

[Volume I: ACT IACT IIACT IIIACT IVACT VACT VIAddenda I] [Book form] [Volume II: An Object Lesson In SpectacleACT IACT IIACT IIIACT IVACT V • ACT VI] [ACTS VII & VIII forthcoming]

• A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story] [Oct 2 2019]

• The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline [Oct 6 2019]

 

 

“I’m convinced of my disagreement with the counterrevolution – imperialism – fascism – religions – stupidity – capitalism – and the whole gamut of bourgeois tricks – I wish to cooperate with the revolution in transforming the world into a classless one so that we can attain a better rhythm for the oppressed classes.”

 

— Frida Kahlo

 

“The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”

 

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

 

“Capitalism, a vicious system, does not merely seek to rip off our labor and resources but it seeks to confound our thinking. It seeks to make us think we’re thinking when in fact we’re not thinking but merely reacting to stimuli.”

 

Stokely Carmichael

 

September 20, 2019, Business for Nature, Twitter

September 20, 2019, Business for Nature, Twitter. Launched on July 2, 2019, the coalition founders are We Mean Business, the World Economic Forum, The Nature Conservancy, WWF, the Natural Capital Coalition, the World Resources Institute, the IUCN, The Food and Land Use Coalition, Confederation of Indian Industry, Entreprises pour l’Environnement (EpE), Tropical Forest Alliance, and the International Chamber of Commerce

 

Greta Thunberg’s video on natural climate solutions, done with George Monbiot, has reached more than 1 billion people in less than 24 hours.  More than a third of the events of Climate Week focus on nature-based solutions, demonstrating the huge amount of innovation and progress taking place on the ground.”

 

Nature4Climate, September 22, 2019

On September 19, 2019, a short film featuring Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot was launched in advance of the September 20 global climate strikes organized by GCCA NGOs. The film (trending and recommended on YouTube), emphasizing the urgency of funding “natural solutions”, was paid for by Conservation International and the *Food and Land Use Coalition, with “guidance” provided by Nature4Climate (The Nature Conservancy, We Mean Business, WWF, UN-REDD, et al.) and Natural Climate Solutions. [*Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill.]

 

YouthWashing

Here, Greta Thunberg becomes the official face for, and of, corporate capture. The rebranding of REDD (the UN “reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation” market mechanism), and the coming New Deal for Nature – under the auspices and brand of “natural climate solutions”.

To understand how this transpired, we need to step back in time to April 3, 2019.

 

Business For Nature co-founders

Business For Nature co-founders. Further reading: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: They Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV]

September 19, 2019, Callum Grieve, co-founder, We Mean Business, Twitter

September 19, 2019, Callum Grieve, co-founder, We Mean Business, Twitter. Further reading: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Behavioural Change Project “To Change Everything” [Volume II, Act V]

“It all sounds so simple and reassuring. No one needs to change anything. The airline industry can continue to expand. The oil industry can continue drilling. We can stop worrying and leave it to the experts. Just a few techno-fixes, and nature will solve climate change for us. Obviously, this is bullshit. It’s a form of climate denial – pretending that we can address climate breakdown without even talking about keeping fossil fuels in the ground.”

 

March 3, 2019, Chris Lang, The REDD Monitor, “Natural Climate Solutions: ‘It really is time that governments stopped trying to find more ways to offset their fossil fuel emissions'”

April 3, 2019 – The Launch

Illustration: Al Boardman

Illustration: Al Boardman

April 3, 2019. The launch of the Natural Climate Solutions project by George Monbiot and The Guardian

April 3, 2019. The launch of the Natural Climate Solutions project by George Monbiot and The Guardian

 

On April 3, 2019, The Guardian published an open letter entitled “A Natural Solution to the Climate Disaster – Climate and ecological crises can be tackled by restoring forests and other valuable ecosystems, say scientists and activists”.

The letter, written by The Guardian’s George Monbiot, is co-signed by establishment-endorsed eco-celebs Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and other “leaders”/celebrities associated with the liberal climate “movement”. The “movement” that evades all systemic drivers of climate change and ecological devastation (militarism, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, etc.).

The letter –  addressed to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), governments and NGOs – is republished on the Natural Climate Solutions website.

Launched on April 3, 2019 (coinciding with The Guardian coverage), the Natural Climate Solutions project was created “for the promotion of an important and exciting environmental initiative, led by journalist and author George Monbiot.” [Source]

The said mission of Natural Climate Solutions (website created March 15, 2019) is to “catalyse global enthusiasm for drawing down carbon by restoring ecosystems: the single most undervalued and underfunded tool for climate mitigation.”[Emphasis added]

In real life, this mission to “catalyse global enthusiasm” effectively serves the United Nations carbon market mechanism UN-REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation). In addition, it is a construct being created that will build the acquiescence required for the coming “New Deal For Nature” to be adopted in 2020. That is, the privatization, commodification, and objectification of nature, global in scale. That is, emerging markets and land acquisitions. That is, “payments for ecosystem services”. That is the financialization of nature, the corporate coup d’état of the commons that has finally come to wait on our doorstep.

Mark R. Tercek is the former president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy stepping down June 7, 2019. [A #MeToo scandal engulfs The Nature Conservancy]. He is co-author of the book Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature

Mark R. Tercek is the former president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy stepping down June 7, 2019. [A #MeToo scandal engulfs The Nature Conservancy]. He is co-author of the book Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature

[A #MeToo scandal engulfs The Nature Conservancy].

To be clear, as this research will demonstrate, the very same NGOs which set the Natural Capital agenda and protocols (via the Natural Capital Coalition, which has absorbed TEEB) – with the Nature Conservancy and We Mean Business at the helm, are also the architects of the term “natural climate solutions”.

Monbiot has consistently and publicly voiced disapproval for “putting a price on nature”. [One such example: May 15, 2018]. Yet, consider that Monbiot has never utilized his influential platform to oppose the coming “New Deal For Nature”.

The said purpose of Natural Climate Solutions is to “direct public attention towards this issue and champion the work of others.” [Emphasis added]

The “work of others” that Natural Climate Solutions seeks to direct the public’s attention to takes one to the “Our Allies” page:

There are several wonderful organisations already working hard to highlight and implement Natural Climate Solutions. Please follow these links and support their efforts.” [Emphasis added]

The allies (“wonderful organizations”) that Natural Climate Solution highlights [1], which it encourages people to follow and support, include many at the helm of the “New Deal For Nature” such as WWF, Conservation International, Avaaz, Greenpeace, Nature Needs Half, etc.

Photograph by Ron Poling

Photograph by Ron Poling

 

“Conservation: The Quiet Spread of Imperialism.”

 

— Mordecai Ogada

Here, we find perhaps the most grotesque aspect of the Monbiot/Guardian project of all. The deliberate endeavour to rally support for and redirect citizens to WWF. As both Monbiot and The Guardian are fully aware, WWF bears responsibility for decades of human rights violations including torture, rape and murder, a direct result of “conservation” schemes. In March 2019 in part 1 of an investigative series, BuzzFeed News revealed that WWF, “funds, equips, and works directly with anti-poaching forces that have beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted, and killed people living near wildlife parks across Asia and Africa.” Part 4 of the investigation (published July 11, 2019) reported that “WWF-Backed Guards Raped Pregnant Women And Tortured Villagers At A Wildlife Park Funded By The US Government.”

Such “conservation projects” have been consistently displacing Indigenous peoples under the guise of conservation while inflicting misery. This has been meticulously documented by Survival International and others. By presenting WWF as an “ally” amongst many “wonderful organizations” Monbiot demonstrates a complete disregard for the decades of work by conservationists such as Mordecai Ogada, Noga Shanee, Reclaim Conservation, and Stephen Corry, executive director of Survival International. By extension, Monbiot turns a willful blind eye to the plight of Indigenous peoples who have been separated from the land they defend. Whose lives and tribal communities have been completely destroyed by these very organizations to which Monbiot directs his followers.

 

 

[Watch: WWF – Silence of the Pandas, © Wilfried Huismann, Germany 2011] [Further reading: The Big Conservation Lie, The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya, John Mbaria & Mordecai Ogada, 2017]

 

Natural Climate Solutions allies

Natural Climate Solutions allies

 

“Guardian joins growing chorus for natural climate solutions –N4C is delighted that the Guardian and in particular George Monbiot has catalyzed so many diverse voices to champion the cause of natural climate solutions”

 

– Nature4Climate News, Guardian joins growing chorus for natural climate solutions, April 3, 2019

Upon its launch on April 3, 2019, the Natural Climate Solutions project had 29 allies (today it lists 48). The most important one to look at, to demonstrate the leveraging of market solutions via the branding and terminology of “natural climate solutions”, is the first ally listed: Nature4Climate, an initiative created by The Nature Conservancy.

Nature4Climate

April 3, 2019, "Guardian joins growing chorus for natural climate solutions." Promotion of Monbiot's "Natural Climate Solutions", by Natural Climate Solutions "ally" Nature4Climate. Prior to April 3, 2019, the branding of "natural climate solutions" was already well-established by institutions, corporations and NGOs. Demonstrating solidarity to Nature4Climate, this tweet was "liked" by Monbiot

April 3, 2019, “Guardian joins growing chorus for natural climate solutions.” Promotion of Monbiot’s “Natural Climate Solutions”, by Natural Climate Solutions “ally” Nature4Climate. Prior to April 3, 2019, the branding of “natural climate solutions” was already well-established by institutions, corporations and NGOs. Demonstrating solidarity to Nature4Climate, this tweet was “liked” by Monbiot

 

April 4, 2019, Conservation International (CI) expresses its support for "natural climate solutions".  Fast facts: 2018 revenues for CI were in access of 145 million USD (145,013,840.) Wes Bush, CEO of Northrup Grumman, one of the world's largest weapons manufacturers, serves on the board of Conservation International, while Rob Walton, from the Walmart empire, serves as chairman of the executive committee. [2018 Form 990]

April 4, 2019, Conservation International (CI) expresses its support for “natural climate solutions”.  Fast facts: 2018 revenues for CI were in access of 145 million USD (145,013,840.) Wes Bush, CEO of Northrup Grumman, one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, serves on the board of Conservation International, while Rob Walton, from the Walmart empire, serves as chairman of the executive committee. [2018 Form 990]

 

Conservation International, A New Deal for Nature: "Countries are in the process of negotiating a new global biodiversity framework through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has been called a “New Deal for Nature.” This pact, expected to be agreed in Beijing in late 2020, will lay out the global strategy for protecting nature through 2030." Identified in the Level 2 Actions for "mainstreaming biodiversity" is "incorporating the value of biodiversity into national accounting processes". [Source]

Conservation International, A New Deal for Nature: “Countries are in the process of negotiating a new global biodiversity framework through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has been called a “New Deal for Nature.” This pact, expected to be agreed in Beijing in late 2020, will lay out the global strategy for protecting nature through 2030.” Identified in the Level 2 Actions for “mainstreaming biodiversity” is “incorporating the value of biodiversity into national accounting processes”. [Source]

The Nature Conservancy’s Nature4Climate

Nature4Climate partners

Nature4Climate partners

 

Launched on June 20, 2018, (on the first day of the two-day Ministerial on Climate Action) as a five-year initiative, the Nature4Climate initiative was created as an instrument for strategic communications to escalate the “solutions” (i.e. market solutions) sought by the Nature Conservancy, WWF, We Mean Business et al:

“Nature4Climate (N4C) is a new campaigning vehicle which is supported by a multi-stakeholder coalition. Its purpose is to use strategic communications to drive action on natural climate solutions.”

“Nature4Climate (N4C) is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UN-REDD, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Woods Hole Research Center, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), World Resources Institute (WRI), We Mean Business (WMB) and WWF that aims to increase investment and action on natural climate solutions in support of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The N4C partners work together to catalyze partnerships between governments, civil society, business and investors that use nature-based solutions to climate change.” [Source]

Here, we can add that We Mean Business (co-founder of the Nature4Climate initiative as stated above) was formed with the assistance of both Greenpeace and Purpose, the public relations arm of Avaaz specializing in behavioural change. [Further reading: They Mean Business, Volume II, Act IV].

“We bring voices from governments, IGOs, NGOs, and business – underpinned by a steering group with communications and advocacy representation currently from CBD, CI, TNC, the UNDP, WHRC, WRI and WWF.”

The NGOs and institutions represented on the Nature4Climate steering committee include CBD (United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity), CI (Conservation International), TNC (The Nature Conservancy), the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), WHRC (Woods Hole Research Center), WRI (the World Resources Institute) and WWF (World Wildlife Foundation). All of the aforementioned are leading “natural capital” architects and advocates of the “New Deal For Nature” – that is, the financialization of nature, global in scale.

“Countries are in the process of negotiating a new global biodiversity framework through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has been called a “New Deal for Nature.” This pact, expected to be agreed in Beijing in late 2020, will lay out the global strategy for protecting nature through 2030. Conservation International will contribute our expertise to this process, to ensure the recognition of the value of nature for all aspects of human well-being.”

 

— DEAL FOR NATURE, Conservation International and the post-2020 global biodiversity framework [Source][Emphasis added]

Here again, we have the same high-level institutions, NGOs and individuals corralling millions of people toward a fourth industrial revolution sought by the ruling classes. A “New Climate Economy“, largely targeting the Global South. A new era of “green” colonialism, under the guise of saving the planet.

“It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can’t have capitalism without racism.”

 

Malcolm X, 1964, speech at the Militant Labor Forum Hall, New York City, May 29, 1964 [In response to the Harlem “Hate-Gang” scare]

Nature4Climate Voices, Paul Polman: served in senior leadership roles at both Nestlé and Procter & Gamble prior to becoming CEO of Unilever (2009-2018), B Team chair, chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, appointed to the U.N. Secretary General’s High-level Panel responsible for developing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), founding member of the World Business & Sustainable Development Commission, U.N.-appointed SDG Advocate, leading member of Financing Capitalism for the Long-Term (FCLT), the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and the Food and Land Use Coalition (which he chairs), counsellor and chair of the Global Advisory Board of One Young World (co-founded by “B Team expert” David Jones), named an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to business in 2018, a non-executive director of Dow since 2010. Stern also serves as commissioner to the Energy Transitions Commission and has been selected to serve as a One Planet Lab member, the aforementioned high-level advisory group steered by the French Government. [Further reading: The New Green Deal is the Trojan Horse for the Financialization of Nature, Volume I, Act V and A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment, Volume II, Act I]

Nature4Climate Voices, Paul Polman: served in senior leadership roles at both Nestlé and Procter & Gamble prior to becoming CEO of Unilever (2009-2018), B Team chair, chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, appointed to the U.N. Secretary General’s High-level Panel responsible for developing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), founding member of the World Business & Sustainable Development Commission, U.N.-appointed SDG Advocate, leading member of Financing Capitalism for the Long-Term (FCLT), the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and the Food and Land Use Coalition (which he chairs), counsellor and chair of the Global Advisory Board of One Young World (co-founded by “B Team expert” David Jones), named an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to business in 2018, a non-executive director of Dow since 2010. Stern also serves as commissioner to the Energy Transitions Commission and has been selected to serve as a One Planet Lab member, the aforementioned high-level advisory group steered by the French Government. [Further reading: The New Green Deal is the Trojan Horse for the Financialization of Nature, Volume I, Act V and A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment, Volume II, Act I]

Nature4Climate Voices, Christiana Figueres: former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) from 2010 to 2016, vice-chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, ClimateWorks Board Member, World Bank Climate Leader, B Team leader, leader of Mission2020, and board member of both the World Resources Institute and Unilever. Figueres is also identified as a “distinguished member” of Conservation International. [Further reading: To Plunder What Little Remains: It’s Going To Be Tremendous, Volume II, Act III]

Nature4Climate Voices, Christiana Figueres: former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) from 2010 to 2016, vice-chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, ClimateWorks Board Member, World Bank Climate Leader, B Team leader, leader of Mission2020, and board member of both the World Resources Institute and Unilever. Figueres is also identified as a “distinguished member” of Conservation International. [Further reading: To Plunder What Little Remains: It’s Going To Be Tremendous, Volume II, Act III]

Nature4Climate Voices, Nicolas Stern: international advisor to the Global CCS Institute, co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate overseeing The New Climate Economy, chair of SYSTEMIQ board of directors, former World Bank chief economist. [Further reading: A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment, Volume II, Act I]

Nature4Climate Voices, Nicolas Stern: international advisor to the Global CCS Institute, co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate overseeing The New Climate Economy, chair of SYSTEMIQ board of directors, former World Bank chief economist. [Further reading: A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment, Volume II, Act I]

Nature4Climate Voices, Achim Steiner: UNDP Administrator, and former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB - now the Natural Climate Coalition, i.e. the financialization of nature), voice for the 2009 Green New Deal [Further reading: They Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV]

Nature4Climate Voices, Achim Steiner: UNDP Administrator, and former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB – now the Natural Climate Coalition, i.e. the financialization of nature), voice for the 2009 Green New Deal [Further reading: They Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV]

 

April 3, 2019: Nature4Climate promoting Monbiot's project. Demonstrating solidarity, Monbiot "liked" the tweet

April 3, 2019: Nature4Climate promoting Monbiot’s project. Demonstrating solidarity, Monbiot “liked” the tweet

 

August 30, 2019: Delivering on the Paris Agreement. From the paper This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality authored by Clive L. Spash, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria: "Unfortunately, many environmental non-governmental organisations have bought into this illogical reasoning and justify their support as being pragmatic. Neoliberal language is rife across their reports and policy recommendations and their adoption of natural capital, ecosystems services, offsetting and market trading. These new environmental pragmatists believe, without justification, that the financialisation of Nature will help prevent its destruction."

August 30, 2019: Delivering on the Paris Agreement. From the paper This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality authored by Clive L. Spash, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria: “Unfortunately, many environmental non-governmental organisations have bought into this illogical reasoning and justify their support as being pragmatic. Neoliberal language is rife across their reports and policy recommendations and their adoption of natural capital, ecosystems services, offsetting and market trading. These new environmental pragmatists believe, without justification, that the financialisation of Nature will help prevent its destruction.”

 

April 3, 2019: Justin Adams promote Monbiot's project on the morning of its launch hashtag: #theforgottensolution

April 3, 2019: Justin Adams promote Monbiot’s project on the morning of its launch hashtag: #theforgottensolution

 

One of the first individuals to promote Monbiot’s Natural Climate Solutions on the day of its launch was Justin Adams. Adams joined The World Economic Forum to lead the Tropical Forest Alliance (TFA) [2] in November 2018. [Nature Conservancy, Our People: “Executive Director, Tropical Forest Alliance (Currently seconded to the TFA from The Nature Conservancy)]. Prior to the TFA, Adams spent five years as the Global Managing Director for Lands at the Nature Conservancy where he launched and led all the organisation’s work on Natural Climate Solutions and set up the nature4climate partnership.” Adams served as an advisor to the World Bank from 2012 to 2014 supporting the design and fundraising for the $300M BioCarbon Fund. [Source][Bio] The first initiative launched by TFA 2020 was the Africa Palm Oil initiative, currently ongoing, targeted at the development and implementation of regional principles for “responsible” palm oil development in West and Central Africa. [Source]

Here we must add that there is no such thing as “responsible palm oil” at industrial scale. Almost 20 years ago (2001), WWF and partners began designing the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). It launched in 2004. Yet, in the past 25 years as much as 76 million acres of forest in Indonesia alone has been cut down for palm oil plantations. In 2013, Mongabay cited the global deforestation accredited to palm oil at 136 million acres. Now it moves to encroach on and decimate Africa. RSPO is just one of many billion dollar certification schemes initiated by WWF. Certification is a means to pay to destroy – under the guise of sustainability. It is a lie. The global palm oil industry (production at scale) is not and can never be sustainable.

The Nature Conservancy, Nature 4Climate and “The Forgotten Solution”

February 17, 2016: "The Forgotten Climate Solution", "Natural Climate Solutions", The Nature Conservancy

February 17, 2016: “The Forgotten Climate Solution”, “Natural Climate Solutions”, The Nature Conservancy

 

In 2018, Nature4Climate launched the “The Forgotten Solution”(conceptualized in 2016, see image above) – a glossy advertising campaign featuring a Hollywood-esque movie trailer. Featuring its own newsroom, The Forgotten Solutions website utilizes the 350.org font that has proven to resonate with the public.

“THE FORGOTTEN SOLUTION (2018) – Official Trailer [HD] – Movietrailers” [Running time: 1m:18s]

Corporations, institutions and NGOs promoting “The Forgotten Solutions” include Connect4Climate (the World Bank), UN-REDD+, WBCSD, We Mean Business, UNREDD+, the Global Landscapes Forum, Shell, the Ford Foundation, and billionaire Richard Branson (The B Team, We Mean Business), to name but a few.

September 3, 2018, Global Landscapes Forum. During the closing remarks of the Global Landscapes Forum on December 9, 2018, at COP24, Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International stressed that in addition to shifting global focus from the oil and transportation sectors to land and forests, additional co-operation was required to reach consensus on the New Deal for Nature.[Further reading: The House is On Fire! & the 100 Trillion Dollar Rescue, Volume I, ACT VI] The GLF was formed in 2013 by the World Bank, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the United Nations Environment Programme

September 3, 2018, Global Landscapes Forum. During the closing remarks of the Global Landscapes Forum on December 9, 2018, at COP24, Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International stressed that in addition to shifting global focus from the oil and transportation sectors to land and forests, additional co-operation was required to reach consensus on the New Deal for Nature.[Further reading: The House is On Fire! & the 100 Trillion Dollar Rescue, Volume I, ACT VI] The GLF was formed in 2013 by the World Bank, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the United Nations Environment Programme

 

September 8, 2018, Connect4Climate (World Bank)

September 8, 2018, Connect4Climate (World Bank)

 

September 11, 2018, The Ford Foundation promoting both "natural climate solutions" and "the forgotten solution"

September 11, 2018, The Ford Foundation promoting both “natural climate solutions” and “the forgotten solution”

 

December 10, 2018, Achim Steiner promotes the "Forgotten Solutions". Steiner will appear this week at the Social Good Summit (founded and/or financed by the UN, Purpose, Gates Foundation, etc.) with Greta Thunberg and Christiana Figueres. Steiner, UNDP Administrator is a former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). TEEB, initiated in 2008, and officially launched in 2012, hosted by UNEP and backed by the European Commission and countries including Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom, has since been absorbed/rebranded into the Natural Capital Coalition. The Natural Capital Coalition is working with the world’s most powerful corporations and institutions for the implementation of the financialization of nature.]

December 10, 2018, Achim Steiner promotes the “Forgotten Solutions”. Steiner will appear this week at the Social Good Summit (founded and/or financed by the UN, Purpose, Gates Foundation, etc.) with Greta Thunberg and Christiana Figueres. Steiner, UNDP Administrator is a former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). TEEB, initiated in 2008, and officially launched in 2012, hosted by UNEP and backed by the European Commission and countries including Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom, has since been absorbed/rebranded into the Natural Capital Coalition. The Natural Capital Coalition is working with the world’s most powerful corporations and institutions for the implementation of the financialization of nature.]

 

December 11, 2018, We Mean Business, promoting We Mean Business co-founder, WBCSD: "Bring natural climate solutions into your business today" #TheForgottenSolution

December 11, 2018, We Mean Business, promoting We Mean Business co-founder, WBCSD: “Bring natural climate solutions into your business today” #TheForgottenSolution

 

December 11, 2018, Shell, WBCSD, "the forgotten solution" as promoted by We Mean Business

December 11, 2018, Shell, WBCSD, “the forgotten solution” as promoted by We Mean Business

 

December 11, 2018, Justin Adams for The Nature Conservancy, as promoted by We Mean Business

December 11, 2018, Justin Adams for The Nature Conservancy, as promoted by We Mean Business

 

December 12, 2018, UN-REDD+

December 12, 2018, UN-REDD+

 

June 28, 2019, Richard Branson promoting the celebrity-endorsed "Forgotten Solution". The utilization of celebrity, fetishized in the West, is a much-used tool as a means to expand capital, build brand recognition and break through market resistance

June 28, 2019, Richard Branson promoting the celebrity-endorsed “Forgotten Solution”. The utilization of celebrity, fetishized in the West, is a much-used tool as a means to expand capital, build brand recognition and break through market resistance

  • Nature4Climate partners

One of the first institutions to highlight Monbiot’s Natural Climate Solutions launch (April 3, 2019) was the Food and Land Use Coalition. This coalition was initiated under the Business and Sustainable Development Commission leadership led by Paul Polman, former Unilever CEO, and Mark Malloch-Brown, former UN Deputy Secretary-General and Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) who conceptualized the International Crisis Group in 1993 (with Mort Abramowitz), where he serves as chair. Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill. [Source][Board] [Further reading: Controlling the Narrative,Volume II, Act II]

The Food and Land Use Coalition is supported by partners, including the Business and Sustainable Development Commission (housed at SYSTEMIQ), the EAT Foundation, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and the New Climate Economy (housed at World Resources Institute). [Source] SYSTEMIQ, is advancing the blended finance vehicle (leveraging public funds for private investments into emerging markets) for the Climate Finance Partnership.

April 3, 2018, Food and Land Use Coalition promoting the freshly launched "Natural Climate Solutions" campaign and website. Tagged users included SYSTEMIQ, EAT, New Climate Economy, SDSN, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) WBCSD, IIASA, World Resources Institute, Unilever, and Yara International

April 3, 2018, Food and Land Use Coalition promoting the freshly launched “Natural Climate Solutions” campaign and website. Tagged users included SYSTEMIQ, EAT, New Climate Economy, SDSN, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) WBCSD, IIASA, World Resources Institute, Unilever, and Yara International

 

November 27, 2018, Food and Land Use Coalition congratulating We Mean Business co-founder, WBCSD, on winning an award for its film on "natural climate solutions"

November 27, 2018, Food and Land Use Coalition congratulating We Mean Business co-founder, WBCSD, on winning an award for its film on “natural climate solutions”

 

December 3, 2018: Food and Land Use Coalition promoting "natural climate solutions" and "The Forgotten Solution"

December 3, 2018: Food and Land Use Coalition promoting “natural climate solutions” and “The Forgotten Solution”

 

January 27, 2019, Food and Land Use Coalition promoting "natural climate solutions"

January 27, 2019, Food and Land Use Coalition promoting “natural climate solutions”

 

As the corporate social media accounts demonstrate, the branding of the term “natural climate solutions” was already well established prior to Monbiot’s project launched on April 3, 2019, with a surge in its promotion in December 2018 for COP24 (following the launch of Nature4Climate in June 2018). In fact, the term was being promoted by The Nature Conservancy in 2016 to highlight a parallel revenue stream generated from carbon offset permits.

In the 2016 video below by The Nature Conservancy, Justin Adams remarks:

In many other parts of the world you have forest dependent communities, you have indigenous communities, who know very well how to protect their natural environment. They see the natural world and their own world as much more integrated.”

The Nature Conservancy, February 8, 2016 [Running time: 4m:5s]:

The question here is why those in the Global South should be expected to retain their critical roles as protectors of the natural world, simply because the Western societies are too unaware, or too insatiable, to do so. The “other” – are expected to continue protecting their natural environment so the white man in the West can continue to pollute. We can also observe that these communities, in many parts of the world Adams speaks of, do not inflict war, displacement or any misery whatsoever on other communities in the world.

November 24, 2017, The term "natural climate solutions" in reference to the "Natural Climate Solutions" study, published on October 16, 2017 and introduced by The Nature Conservancy the same day. The study suggests that "nature's mitigation potential is estimated at 11.3 billion tons in 2030—the equivalent of stopping burning oil globally." Here holds the promise for corporate polluters: the continued burning of fossil fuels, coupled with land acquisition (theft) via carbon markets/offsets - all under the guise of stewardship

November 24, 2017, The term “natural climate solutions” in reference to the “Natural Climate Solutions” study, published on October 16, 2017 and introduced by The Nature Conservancy the same day. The study suggests that “nature’s mitigation potential is estimated at 11.3 billion tons in 2030—the equivalent of stopping burning oil globally.” Here holds the promise for corporate polluters: the continued burning of fossil fuels, coupled with land acquisition (theft) via carbon markets/offsets – all under the guise of stewardship

The Big Sell

The Monbiot Natural Climate Solutions “plan” (“by supporting the efforts of others, we want to help bring together two issues that have mostly been considered in isolation: climate breakdown and ecological breakdown”) lends itself as a vehicle for “herding cats”. This is an expression attributed by Forbes, to the efforts of the GCCA alliance in 2014. It was used in reference to the method in which GCCA mobilized the populace for 2014 the People’s Climate March. A march orchestrated to serve the interests of those that financed and organized it (the trial version of what we witnessed on September 20, 2019), with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund at the helm. The herding is essential in order to attain acquiescence and, even demand, for something so ugly it requires the utilization of extraordinarily beautiful imagery, holistic linguistics, coupled with celebrity power, Hollywood trailers, slick marketing and emotive imagery to bring it into policy. Natural Climate Solutions deliberately stays at arm’s length from any direct association with a “New Deal For Nature” (the financialization in nature to be implemented in 2020) and instead sends the new supporters it “herds” into the clutches of the big “conservation” NGOs that are privatizing nature. From the Natural Climate Solutions website:

Our plan is to generate the publicity and enthusiasm required to bring this issue to the front of people’s minds. In doing so, we hope to catalyse and accelerate the work of the excellent organisations already operating in this field.”

 

—Natural Climate Solutions website [Emphasis added]

Like magic, with the sleight of hand, the very corporate term “natural capital solutions”, is transformed into the benevolent “natural climate solutions”. In the transition from the corporate boardroom, into the public realm, the two terms are thus entwined and at once largely indistinguishable. What we have is a rebranding exercise. Thus we have George Monbiot, The World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the UN REDD Programme, The Nature Conservancy (via Nature4Climate), Conservation International, Natural Capital Partners, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), WWF – all sharing the identical branded term.

Here it is imperative to highlight the fact that Conservation International, WWF, IUCN, WBCSD, are all founding members of the Natural Capital Coalition. [Natural Capital Coalition founders]

The architects of the financialization of nature enjoy the penthouse suite of what constitutes a five-star de facto clearing house for institutions, corporations and “conservation” NGOs that serve capital.

 

July 29, 2019, World Economic Form (now partnered with the United Nations) promoting #NaturalClimateSolutions

July 29, 2019, World Economic Form (now partnered with the United Nations) promoting #NaturalClimateSolutions

 

September 18, 2019, World Economic Forum, partner to the United Nations and Voice For The Planet, promoting the #NewDealForNature (created by WEF and WWF)

September 18, 2019, World Economic Forum, partner to the United Nations and Voice For The Planet, promoting the #NewDealForNature (created by WEF and WWF)

 

September 8, 2018: James Lloyd promoting the People's Climate March in tandem with "The Forgotten Solution"

September 8, 2018: James Lloyd promoting the People’s Climate March in tandem with “The Forgotten Solution”

 

September 8, 2018, GCCA/TckTckTck promoting "The Forgotten Solution"

September 8, 2018, GCCA/TckTckTck promoting “The Forgotten Solution”

 

August 24, 2018: James Lloyd: "Scientists call on California governor to OK carbon credits ..."

August 24, 2018: James Lloyd: “Scientists call on California governor to OK carbon credits …”

 

James Lloyd , project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy, Twitter, April 3, 2019

James Lloyd , project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy, Twitter, April 3, 2019

 

September 19, 2019: James Lloyd , project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy, pinned Tweet

September 19, 2019: James Lloyd , project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy, pinned Tweet

 

April 18, 2019, Natural Climate Solutions, The Forgotten Solution

April 18, 2019, Natural Climate Solutions, The Forgotten Solution

 

The Art of Playing Obtuse

 

April 3, 2019, Twitter

April 3, 2019, Twitter

 

On the first day of the launch, Monbiot announces: “We’ve launched a website explaining #theforgottensolution and directing people to the wonderful organizations seeking to help nature to help stop #ClimateBreakdown.”

Yet nature doesn’t need man’s “help” to “help stop climate breakdown”, she simply needs to be left alone. Released from the corporate chokehold killing her. And she certainly does not need help from egregious “conservation” NGOs notorious for land acquisitions (in servitude to corporations and ruling classes), and displacement of Indigenous peoples which has been long documented.

April 3, 2019, Twitter

April 3, 2019, Twitter

 

April 3, 2019, Twitter

April 3, 2019, Twitter

 

Natural Climate Solutions google search – which is which?

Natural Climate Solutions google search – which is which?

 

Natural Climate Solutions google search – which is which?

Natural Climate Solutions google search – which is which?

 

Following the April 3, 2019 launch of “Natural Climate Solutions” Monbiot is challenged by a person who understands the intent behind the branding of “natural climate solutions” by institutions, corporations and “conservation” NGOs that serve capital. Monbiot, a recognized influencer with global reach, responds as follows: “Just because some people hijack this approach for their own ends does not invalidate it. It’s like saying that because David Cameron cynically promoted his Big Society as a substitute for government, all community projects “played into his hands”. Perspective please.”

The individual who challenged Monbiot responds: “Some people”? You’re evidently unaware that this concept has already been thoroughly co-opted by the WBCSD, Shell, Equinor, the International Emissions Trading Association, International Paper etc.”

Monbiot’s response? – “All the more reason to reclaim it from them.”

Monbiot’s weak defense does not hold water.

This would be akin to anti-imperialists “reclaiming” the term “responsibility to protect” – to protect citizens of targeted states. While at the same time, US-led NATO forces are preparing to annihilate a sovereign state for resources – building consent by using the identical term. If this were to take place, the said “anti-imperialists” repetition of this term would expose them as fraudulent, as individuals deliberately in servitude to empire.

“As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff points out, when you use the frames and language of your opponents, you don’t persuade them to adopt your point of view. Instead you adopt theirs, while strengthening their resistance to your objectives.”

 

George Monbiot, The UK government wants to put a price on nature – but that will destroy it, May 15, 2018

In the same article cited above, Monbiot writes: “…Tony Juniper – who in other respects is an admirable defender of the living world – says he will use his new post as head of campaigns at WWF to promote the natural capital agenda.”]

Today, Monbiot is essentially herding the populace to WWF. The most important campaign of both WWF and Conservation International is the “New Deal For Nature” (also marketed as “Voices or the Planet”). Finance, corporations, government, industry, institutions (UN, IPBES, CBD), and those at the helm of the non-profit industrial understands exactly what it is. Everyone that is, except the public.

Trondheim, Norway, 2 July, 2019WWF issued a rallying cry for an urgent New Deal for Nature and People for halting biodiversity loss by 2030 at conference for Biodiversity in Trondheim Norway which starts today. [Emphasis added]

Monbiot informs his audience that “new scientific studies reveal #rewilding has a much greater potential for carbon drawdown than almost anyone imaged” – yet Monbiot did not call his project “Rewilding the Earth” or “Rewilding for Climate” or any other name with the word rewilding.

“The Panda Bare”, on Twitter, further elucidates: “The vast majority of what is typically described as #NaturalClimateSolutions” has got nothing to do with rewilding – in fact massive areas of new plantation.”

April 3, 2019, Twitter

April 3, 2019, Twitter

 

As the launch day wears on, Monbiot again reiterates his desire for people to follow the groups he lists. He writes: “Usually writing and thinking about #ClimateBreakdown is pretty soul-destroying. But these new discoveries thrill and delight me. Please help us to spread the message, by RTing this thread, directing people to the site and encouraging them to support the group we list.” Tagged users include Greta Thunberg, Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, Michael Mann, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, RSPB, Tim Christopherson, and Nature4Climate.

September 13, 2019, Twitter: Tim Christophersen coordinates the work on forests and climate change at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), including UNEP’s role within the UN-REDD Programme, a collaborative initiative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UNEP

September 13, 2019, Twitter: Tim Christophersen coordinates the work on forests and climate change at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), including UNEP’s role within the UN-REDD Programme, a collaborative initiative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UNEP

 

April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

 

April 23, 2019, Natural Capital Solutions promoting "The Forgotten Solution"

April 23, 2019, Natural Capital Solutions promoting “The Forgotten Solution”

 

On social media (Twitter) Monbiot feigns aggravation that, despite a concerted effort working with a public relations firm, his campaign is being ignored by broadcast media. This is fairly ironic considering his access to and subsequent exposure from The Guardian alone. It also reveals the privilege and entitlement held by white liberal “activists” who have been deemed safe for public consumption by the establishment. Most legitimate grassroots groups are given zero exposure for new campaigns by mainstream media, let alone colossal exposure by The Guardian.

April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

 

April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

 

Other tweets accompanying the launch included one in which Monbiot tagged “some wonderful people whom I think will love this approach:” who could help spread the word. The tagged individuals (influencers) included Caroline Lucas, Chris Packham, Avaaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Mark Lynas, Russell Brand, and Ai Weiwei. If only we could all be as environmentally conscious as Leonardo DiCaprio, especially those in the Global South, perhaps then we could save the planet. [Further reading: The Age of Storytelling, Volume II, ACT II]

April 3, 2019: The tagged individuals (influencers) included Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, and Avaaz. Avaaz/ Purpose: utilizing the behavioural economics of hatred to wage wars on sovereign states in servitude to empire, while deploying emotive campaigns to "save the planet". The fact that war is a key driver of both ecological destruction and climate change appears to be lost on it's followers

April 3, 2019: The tagged individuals (influencers) included Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, and Avaaz. Avaaz/ Purpose: utilizing the behavioural economics of hatred to wage wars on sovereign states in servitude to empire, while deploying emotive campaigns to “save the planet”. The fact that war is a key driver of both ecological destruction and climate change appears to be lost on it’s followers

  • March 20, 2018: The Nature Conservancy "working hard on 'natural climate solutions'" with the McDonald's corporation

The Natural Climate Solutions Project

The first "follows" chosen by for the Natural Climate Solutions Twitter account

The first “follows” chosen by for the Natural Climate Solutions Twitter account

 

The first “follows” chosen by for the Natural Climate Solutions Twitter account are its three founders (inclusive of Monbiot who is #1). The next accounts chosen to follow are Wetlands International (#4), followed by Nature4Climate (#5) and the aforementioned James Lloyd (#6), the project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy. [“Working at the interface of strategic communications and external affairs for nature and climate change. [Nature4Climate Steering Committee] The fifth is Youth4Nature, which is partnered with Nature Conservancy.

May 3, 2019: Recruiting the youth. Partners: The Nature Conservancy & Nature4Climate

May 3, 2019: Recruiting the youth. Partners: The Nature Conservancy & Nature4Climate

 

Following the April 3, 2019 launch of Natural Climate Solutions, we see Extinction Rebellion, YouthStrike4Climate, and those flying under the “grassroots activism” banner, in unison with the most egregious corporations and “conservation” NGOs on the planet (which work in servitude to these very corporations) all sharing the same branding meme #naturalclimatesolutions.

This is yet another step forward in the engineered evolution of “together” – an orchestrated effort to bring corporations and civil society together as one. The employment of soft-power to give the illusion that class divisions no longer exist.

“It’s odd, to say the least, to hear a spokesperson for Shell promoting natural climate solutions, and to hear George Monbiot apparently promoting the same thing.”

 

Chris Lang, The REDD Monitor, April 5, 2019

In the same way that global “green new deals” are setting the stage for the “new deal for nature” which is slowly and cautiously being introduced to the public, “natural climate solutions” can help achieve public acceptance for the “new deal for nature”. These are the applications of behavioural change strategies as outlined by Avaaz/Purpose founder Jeremy Heimans. Akin to “killing green” to build the “green economy”, [“we’ll build the green economy, we just won’t talk about it and we won’t say that we’re doing it.”] today corporations, states and financial institutions intend to fully privatize and monetize every aspect of nature – to build the “new” capitalist economy. They just won’t talk about it and they won’t say that they’re doing it.

This is the new agenda.

September 16, 2019, The Financial Times, "Protect the future of free enterprise and wealth creation by pursuing profit with purpose. This is the new agenda."

September 16, 2019, The Financial Times, “Protect the future of free enterprise and wealth creation by pursuing profit with purpose. This is the new agenda.”

“However, while the critique of capitalism is the starting point, the analysis cannot simply stop there; it must confront the reality of generalized monopoly-finance capital now operating on a world scale and the deep, systematic division of the world into center and periphery, global North and global South—a division only worsened by climate change. It is in this larger imperialist context that capitalism exists as an actual historical system in the twenty-first century, and it is this that must be opposed.”

 

Imperialism in the Anthropocene, May 21, 2019

The methodology of marketing “natural climate solutions” is this: We will “kill market solutions – to save market solutions”. Here, it can be added that Purpose and Greenpeace assisted in the creation of Nature4Climate co-founder, We Mean Business.

The ruling classes have devised a marketing strategy to sell us the unthinkable (the monetizing of nature, global in scale) by not divulging what lies beneath the surface.

Patterns appear as branding to target youth broadens its scope. [Nature4Climate, YouthStrike4Climate, Fridays4future, Youth4Nature.]

Branding that appeals to corporations

Branding that appeals to corporations

 

Branding that appeals to corporations and governments

Branding that appeals to corporations and governments

 

Branding for an already established conservative audience

Branding for an already established conservative audience

 

Branding to reach a liberal and youth demographic

Branding to reach a liberal and youth demographic

 

Leads on the Natural Climate Solution project led by Monbiot include Charlie Latimer (Charotte Lattimer, Charlotte Martineau), consultant (clients include UNDP, UNICEF, UN OCHA and UNRWA), Patrick Sterling, former director of product for The Guardian, and Al Boardman, a graphics designer whose clients include “some of the most respected international brands, organisations and agencies in the world; the likes of Apple, Google, Twitter, IBM and BBC amongst them.”

Further, we have Sandrine Dixson-Declève, John Elkington, Paul Simpson, all identified as members of the advisory panel of Guardian Sustainable Business. Dixson-Declève served as the chief partnership officer for UN Agency Sustainable Energy for All. Prior to this position, she served as the director of the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (also referred to as EU Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, a corporate partner of GCCA/TckTckTck in 2009); vice chair, European Biofuels Technology Platform; board member, We Mean Business; and the advisory board of the oil and gas major Sasol. [Bio] Today Dixson-Declève serves as co-president of the Club of Rome. [Further reading: “Emerging From the emergency: Harnessing the momentum”]. Elkington is the founder of Volans, a B Team expert and Extinction Rebellion Business Signatory. Paul Simpson is the CEO of CDP, a co-founder of We Mean Business.

Here we can add that The Guardian’s Sustainable Business Leadership section is sponsored by Xynteo, a group that includes Shell, Woodside, and Statoil. Xynteo: “We are reinventing growth”. [Source]Dixson-Declève serves as special advisor to the Xynteo & Energy Transition Commission (ETC). [Source]

The Guardian Sustainable Business (GSB) Australia advisory council membership has included representatives of WWF, ClimateWorks, 350.org, and Greenpeace (2015) [Source] [An inquiry submitted on September 1, 2019, to The Guardian on members and status of Guardian Sustainable Business advisory panel/panels was unanswered.] Greenpeace International director Jennifer Morgan clearly supports the “new deal for nature” as demonstrated in ACT VI, Volume I of The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg for Consent series, while Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard has co-founded Earth Economics which aims at “identifying, monetizing, and valuing natural capital and ecosystem services”. All hands are on deck.

Earth Economics branding : "We Take Nature Into Account" - "What Is Your Planet Worth?"

Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard has co-founded Earth Economics which aims at “identifying, monetizing, and valuing natural capital and ecosystem services”. Earth Economics branding : “We Take Nature Into Account” – “What Is Your Planet Worth?”

 

The Natural Climate Solutions “call to action” page offers holistic proposals and states that it is opposed to offsets. Yet on April 8, 2019, the carbon certification corporation Verra (formerly the Verified Carbon Standard) was added to the list of allies on the Natural Climate Solutions website. Further, the REDD projects that Shell purchases carbon credits from are certified by Verra. [Source] The Natural Climate Solutions-Verra alliance was disclosed by the REDD Monitor on April 9, 2019. On May 21, 2019, Verra disappeared from the list of allies.

REDD+ (the UN’s program to “Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation”) was devised as a strategy to enable business as usual to continue in the face of irrefutable evidence of the role of fossil fuel emissions in driving climate change.

Rather than cut emissions at the source, forests and their ability to store carbon became the sole focus of the UN and the World Bank.  The REDD+ scheme allows corporations and states to buy the carbon stored in forests elsewhere to supposedly “offset” the fossil fuel emissions they are producing.  However, because the carbon stored in the forest has to be verifiably protected, anyone living in the forest – including those who historically protected it in the first place – have to be removed to ensure they do not use any of that carbon.  On the other end of the equation, people living around the polluting industry’s that have “offset” their emissions continue to suffer the health impacts of living in a toxic environment.  Finally, there is no legitimate scientific evidence that temporarily stored biological carbon, in the form of forests, can “offset” fossil carbon, which is a highly condensed permanent form of carbon that was previously locked underground for millions of years. [Learn more at the Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP). GJEP explores and exposes the intertwined root causes of social injustice, ecological destruction, and economic domination.]

What Natural Climate Solutions does not reference, or oppose, is the “new deal for nature”. In fact, this “new deal”, which is advancing quickly, is not opposed by any environmental “leaders” that have been placed at the vanguard of the spectacle by the ruling classes. This is the foundational structure of the system, functioning exactly as intended.

Consider that while earlier this year, over 100 NGOs publicly condemned Shell’s launch of a 300 million USD “natural climate solutions” carbon offsetting scheme, there is no dissent whatsoever over Shell’s major partnership in the Natural Capital Coalition. There is practically little to no dissent to the Natural Capital Coalition, its “conservation” partners, nor its plans to commodify the global commons. For the past decade; The Natural Capital Coalition (which absorbed TEEB, initiated in 2008) has been developing the tools and protocols for a new global system of finance where all nature will be assigned a monetary value. It is now time to present the unthinkable to the public in a manner in which it will not only be accepted, but demanded. This requires building global acceptance which will only be possible utilizing unprecedented global behavioural change strategies, methods and manipulations.

[Natural Capital Coalition advisory council][Natural Capital Coalition partners]
October 29, 2015: Dow Chemical, The Nature Conservancy, "Nature's Fortune"

October 29, 2015: Dow Chemical, The Nature Conservancy, “Nature’s Fortune”

 

The NGOs & institutions that developed the Natural Capital Protocol

The NGOs & institutions that developed the Natural Capital Protocol

Natural Capital Coalition organizations

Natural Capital Coalition organizations

Natural Capital Coalition promoting IPBES, 2019

Natural Capital Coalition promoting IPBES, 2019

 

Chris Lang of the REDD Monitor asks the question: “Natural Climate Solutions – in whose interest?” This is the fundamental question given that the massive advertising campaign behind this effort – and foundations (with investment portfolios in the billions) do not invest in any solutions other than market solutions, or solutions that serve to expand their influence and power (such as societal behaviour modification). “Natural climate solutions” must not be perceived as altruistic or holistic – it is a branding term to increase profits and land acquisitions for corporations.

Monbiot cites “three crucial opportunities over the next two years for ensuring that Natural Climate Solutions receive the global attention they deserve”. [1) The UN Climate Summit this month, 2) COP 15 of the Convention on Biodiversity in 2020, and 3) the UN COP 26 in 2020, at which countries are supposed to put forward their new Nationally Determined Contributions.] [Source]

Yet, as pointed out by the Redd Monitor, “Two-thirds of the countries who signed on to the Paris Agreement have already included Natural Climate Solutions in their Nationally Determined Contributions. More than 100 countries include natural solutions in their adaptation plans, and 27 countries include them in their mitigation plans. They are doing so in order to allow continued pollution from fossil fuels – either in their own country or elsewhere.” [Source]

This clearly demonstrates that the intent of the campaign is hardly to influence states, rather the purpose is to influence and shape public perception.

Monbiot, June 26, 2019, “Shell is not a green saviour. It’s a planetary death machine”:

“But the company’s strategy is working. A remarkable number of people who should be fighting Shell instead see it as a green alternative to Exxon, persuaded by what is, in comparison with the company’s filthy investments, a tiny sop. Shell has longstanding relationships with four “environmental partners”: the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, and Earthwatch. I believe it is just as wrong for these groups to take its money as it is for the RSC to take money from BP. It surprises me that there is not as much pressure on them to break their links as there has been, for example, on the British Museum, whose relationship with BP is becoming a national embarrassment.

Monbiot places quotation around “environmental partners” in reference to the NGOs – two of which are “allies” of his own project, and one, that being Nature Conservancy, which created Nature4Climate, led by The  Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy. The British Museum should be embarrassed, but Monbiot should be embarrassed even more.

The final paragraph:

“But naivety about Shell is not confined to its partners. Plenty of well-intentioned organisations and people, who share my enthusiasm for natural climate solutions, appear so desperate to clutch at any straws of hope that they are prepared to see this company as part of the solution. Shell is not our friend. It is an engine of planetary destruction.”

And here we can paint Monbiot’s “allies” with the identical brush. And so desperate are the citizenry, that they will clutch the “natural climate solutions” straw that has been produced for mass consumption.

  • In 2018, Nature4Climate launched the “The Forgotten Solution”(conceptualized in 2016) – a glossy advertising campaign featuring a Hollywood-esque movie trailer. Featuring its own newsroom, The Forgotten Solutions website utilizes the 350.org font that has proven to resonate with the public.

From Strategy to Implementation

The WWF-WEF campaign for the New Deal For Nature (Voice for the Planet) is supported by Nature4Climate.

The Voice For The Planet campaign is a vehicle to build public support for the "New Deal For Nature" in 2020. Created by WEF "Global Shapers" and WWF

The Voice For The Planet campaign is a vehicle to build public support for the “New Deal For Nature” in 2020. Created by WEF “Global Shapers” and WWF

 

The overlap between the New Deal For Nature public partners (Voice For the Planet) and the Natural Climate Solutions partners is as follows: WWF, Conservation International, International Union For The Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the United Nations Environment Programme, Nature4Climate, Royal Society For The Protection of Birds and Birdlife International.

And while The Nature Conservancy (Voice for the Planet partner) is not listed as an “ally” of Natural Climate Solutions, as demonstrated, it remains at arm’s length. A single degree of separation made possible by the creation of Nature4Climate, the primary ally of Natural Climate Solutions.

The research for this article was compiled on September 1, 2019. Since this time, we can observe how this branding strategy has been implemented, in real time.

Corporate Knights – The Voice for Clean Capitalism, April 20, 2015

September, 19, 2019, Climate Change and Nature-based Solutions: Top 30 Influencers and Brands:

“Onalytica have analysed an audience of 3.5k sustainability influencers to understand current perception and awareness of Nature-based solutions within the Climate Change debate and how organisations can leverage those influencers to drive policy change.”

Onalytica’s report opens with an introduction from Lloyd [“This conversation needs to be reflected in the real economy.”]It then identifies the top 100 influencers on the Twitter for “nature-based solutions”. The number one influencer identified is George Monbiot with an influencer score of 100%. Second to Monbiot is Greta Thunberg with an influencer score of 67.56%. Onalytica directs its readers to the nature4climate website for more information.

Chart: "This data was collected from our Influencer Relationship Management software (IRM). If you are interested in learning more about identifying, managing and engaging with influencers click below to request a demo!"

Chart: “This data was collected from our Influencer Relationship Management software (IRM). If you are interested in learning more about identifying, managing and engaging with influencers click below to request a demo!”

 

The top 30 “brands” identified by Onalytica in driving the most engagement on the “nature-based solutions conversation” include the World Resources Institute [Volume I, Act IV], The World Bank, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, WWF, C40 Cities and Extinction Rebellion. [Full list]

At this juncture we can recall the question imperative put forward by John Elkington, founder of Volans and initial signatory to Extinction Rebellion Business (which quickly disappeared after its public launch).

John Elkington, founder of Volans, B Team expert and Extinction Rebellion Business Signatory

John Elkington, founder of Volans, B Team expert and Extinction Rebellion Business Signatory

 

Global Strike

 

September 19, 2019: Conservation International Website

September 19, 2019: Conservation International Website

 

On September 19, 2019, the United Nations, the Government of Norway, Conservation International, Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy celebrated that the California Air Resources Board adopted the Tropical Forest Standard, a new vehicle for the expansion of carbon offsets into tropical forest regions. Prior to approval by California Air Resources Board (CARB) the standard was narrowly reviewed by a self selected group state legislators through an exclusive stakeholder process dominated by Conservation International, TNC and EDF. [“The purpose of the California Tropical Forest Standard is to establish robust criteria against which to assess jurisdictions seeking to link their sector-based crediting programs that reduce emissions from tropical deforestation with an emissions trading system (ETS), such as California’s Cap-and-Trade Program.”]

“Forest carbon offsets neither protect forests nor reduce emissions. Forest carbon offsets are an unjust false solution to climate change that enables business and pollution as usual, condemning forests and communities globally to its devastating impacts. If what is proposed as a solution to catastrophic climate change jeopardizes other people or ecosystems it cannot claim to be just or sustainable.” [Source]

 

The Thunberg-Monbiot film, emphasizing the urgency of funding “natural solutions”, was paid for by Conservation International and the aforementioned *Food and Land Use Coalition, with “guidance” provided by Nature4Climate (The Nature Conservancy, We Mean Business, WWF, UN-REDD, et al.) and Natural Climate Solutions. [*Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill.]

The Thunberg-Monbiot film, emphasizing the urgency of funding “natural solutions”, was paid for by Conservation International and the aforementioned *Food and Land Use Coalition, with “guidance” provided by Nature4Climate (The Nature Conservancy, We Mean Business, WWF, UN-REDD, et al.) and Natural Climate Solutions. [*Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill.]

 

September 20, 2019: The Nature Conservancy promoting the film with term "natural climate solutions". Tagged are Thunberg and Mobiot. Note the utilization of the "Spredfast" software

September 20, 2019: The Nature Conservancy promoting the film with term “natural climate solutions”. Tagged are Thunberg and Mobiot. Note the utilization of the “Spredfast” software

 

Spredfast: "Seamless interactions and a 360-customer view, now possible with our @salesforce Social Care integration."

Spredfast: “Seamless interactions and a 360-customer view, now possible with our @salesforce Social Care integration.”

 

Marc Benioff: Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, one of the fastest-growing cloud-based software corporation in the world. He is a member of the board of trustees, World Economic Forum and inaugural Chair, World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Marc Benioff: Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, one of the fastest-growing cloud-based software corporation in the world. He is a member of the board of trustees, World Economic Forum and inaugural Chair, World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

 

January 24, 2019: Marc Benioff: Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, WEF

January 24, 2019: Marc Benioff: Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, WEF

 

September 19, 2019: Conservation International promoting Thunberg-Monbiot film with #NaturalClimateSolutions hashtag

September 19, 2019: Conservation International promoting Thunberg-Monbiot film with #NaturalClimateSolutions hashtag

 

September 20, 2019: Billionaire Richard Branson, founder of The B Team, promoting Thunberg-Monbiot film. The B Team is a co-founder of We Mean Business - overseeing the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit with WEF

September 20, 2019: Billionaire Richard Branson, founder of The B Team, promoting Thunberg-Monbiot film. The B Team is a co-founder of We Mean Business – overseeing the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit with WEF

 

March 20, 2018: McDonald's corporation "working hard on #naturalclimatesolutions"

March 20, 2018: McDonald’s corporation “working hard on #naturalclimatesolutions”

 

September 18, 2019

On cue, We Mean Business co-founders – united with NGOs, global institutions, and media – coordinate their efforts in promoting the video, ensuring it will go viral. At once, We Mean Business co-founders – united with NGOs, global institutions – and the hundreds of corporations they represent, are now affiliated with Thunberg. The citizenry is encouraged to “love thy enemy”, “changing together” in order to save the power elite. [The Behavioural Change Project “To Change Everything”, Volume II, Act V]

At once, a united front is projected. Corporate power and society are united as one. Effectively erased is the dividing line between corporate “conservation” NGOs and the citizenry. The enemy is at once made friendly and wholesome by aligning itself with Thunberg and Monbiot, presented as icons for the environment by the establishment they serve. If Greta Thunberg trusts Conservation International, then you can too. This is no different from Thunberg doing an ad for a vegan menu at McDonalds – while it continues to participate in the cruel and grotesque livestock production industry that pollutes and destroys land, forests, and ecosystems.

September 19, 2019: Amazon announces partnership with The Nature Conservancy for the implementation of "natural climate solutions" initiatives

September 19, 2019: Amazon announces partnership with The Nature Conservancy for the implementation of “natural climate solutions” initiatives

 

September 20, 2019: The Nature Conservancy

September 20, 2019: The Nature Conservancy

 

Financial Times, September 16, 2019 launch: "CAPITALISM. TIME FOR A RESET. THIS IS THE NEW AGENDA. This is "the Financial Times' biggest campaign since the 2008 global recession."

Financial Times, September 16, 2019 launch: “CAPITALISM. TIME FOR A RESET. THIS IS THE NEW AGENDA. This is “the Financial Times’ biggest campaign since the 2008 global recession.”

 

In the same way that Hitler and Goebbels, in the 20th  century, utilized youthwashing as a means of psychological warfare in order to  carry out a genocide on a population they believed as inferior, today the ruling class, in conjunction with corporate power, have restored youthwashing for the 21st century as an effective means to continue an ongoing genocide of the natural world, and all life which she graciously sustains. Life, believed to be inferior, by those committing the atrocities. By those seeking societal consent to continue.

September 18, 2019: The Nature Conservancy promoting #GlobalClimateStrike in conjunction with the "New Deal For Nature and People"

September 18, 2019: The Nature Conservancy promoting #GlobalClimateStrike in conjunction with the “New Deal For Nature and People”

 

The “New Deal For Nature” is a scheme so grotesque that it can only be sold to the public by utilizing the most effective tools for cutting through market resistance – that being celebrity. The NGOs comprising the non-profit industrial complex, coupled with the deployment of celebrity, are literally banking on the successful manipulation of the citizenry.

A natural climate solution would be the end of the military industrial complex. The end of the relentless assault on our Earth, our brothers and sisters, and all life, waged by the US Pentagon. A natural climate solution would be discontinuing the production of all superfluous “goods“. A natural climate solution would be returning stolen lands to those from whom they were stolen.

Stokely Carmichael asked the pivotal question in 1966:

“And that’s the real question facing the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we’ve been into for the last hundreds of years?”

On September 20, 2019, millions of people went to the streets. Those walls could have been torn down. Instead they were propped up.

I quote Carmichael, as what constitutes mainstream activism in the West, has become nothing more than a parody. We must stop identifying with the ruling class. We are not part of it. And all the luxury consumer brands that one can buy on credit, will not make it any less so. Emulating the rich is a devised marketing stratagem that creates a false sense of belonging in a system designed and protected to serve the rich.

The question is, will we break away from the clutches of manufactured false demigods and align ourselves with revolutionary grassroots groups, or will we continue to uphold those that protect the very system destroying our natural world? Although the outlook looks bleak, the future is not yet written.

Clive Spash

Clive Spash

 

 

 

 

Further Reading:

[REDD Monitor: Offsetting fossil fuel emissions with tree planting and ‘natural climate solutions’: science, magical thinking, or pure PR?, July 4, 2019] [REDD Monitor: Shell and Natural Climate Solutions: US$300 million for carbon offsets, April 4, 2019] [REDD Monitor: Is the new Natural Climate Solutions campaign a distraction from the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground?, April 5, 2019]

End Notes:

[1]
  • NATURE4CLIMATE
  • ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF BIRDS
  • UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME*
  • REWILDING BRITAIN
  • FRIENDS OF THE EARTH
  • AVAAZ
  • GREENPEACE
  • LEONARDO DI CAPRIO FOUNDATION
  • NATURE NEEDS HALF
  • DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION
  • WILDERNESS SOCIETY
  • REWILDING EUROPE
  • WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY
  • EQUATOR INITIATIVE
  • FOUNDATION EARTH
  • CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL
  • TREESISTERS
  • CLIMATE LAND AMBITION AND RIGHTS ALLIANCE
  • THE GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP ON FOREST AND LANDSCAPE RESTORATION
  • GLOBAL LANDSCAPES FORUM
  • WILD FOR LIFE
  • WWF | WORLD WIDE FUND FOR NATURE
  • GLOBAL PEATLANDS INITIATIVE
  • SIERRA CLUB
  • NATURE BASED SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE
  • FERN
  • EU BIOMASS LEGAL CASE
  • HEALTH IN HARMONY
  • EUROPEAN OUTDOOR CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION
  • SANCTUARY ASIA
  • SCOTLAND: THE BIG PICTURE
  • PLAN VIVO
  • NORTHEAST WILDERNESS TRUST
  • WILD FOUNDATION
  • BIRDLIFE INTERNATIONAL
  • JOHN MUIR TRUST
  • IUCN | INTERNATIONAL UNION FOR THE CONSERVATIONS OF NATURE
  • WETLANDS INTERNATIONAL
  • URBAN BIODIVERSITY HUB
  • PUBLIC PASTURES – PUBLIC INTEREST
  • GO CONSCIOUS EARTH
  • OCEANSWELL
  • PLANT-FOR-THE-PLANET
  • ALLIANCE FOR FOOD SOVEREIGNTY IN AFRICA
  • AFRICAN CONSERVATION FOUNDATION
  • TRUE NATURE FOUNDATION
  • A ROCHA
  • THE EUROPEAN NATURE TRUST
[April 4, 2019][April 6, 2019][June 13, 2019]
[2] “The Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 was founded in 2012 at Rio+20 after the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) committed to zero net deforestation by 2020 for palm oil, soy, beef, and  paper and pulp supply chains in 2010. The CGF partnered with the US government to create the public-private alliance with the mission of mobilizing all actors to collaborate in reducing commodity-driven tropical deforestation.

In support of the commitments of TFA 2020 partners to reduce deforestation in tropical forest countries, TFA 2020 has throughout the years grown its partner members and continues to bring on board those key actors committed to tackling deforestation. Since June 2015, the Tropical Forest Alliance Secretariat is hosted at the World Economic Forum offices in Geneva, with financial support of the governments of the Norway and United Kingdom.” [Source]

Wildlife Conservationists need to Break out of their Stockholm Syndrome

Global Policy

August 30, 2016

by Margi Prideaux

 

Instead of fighting a destructive economic system, international conservation NGOs are bonding with its brutality.

staved-polar-bear

“A male polar bear starved to death as a consequence of climate change. This polar bear was last tracked by the Norwegian Polar Institute in April 2013 in southern Svalbard. Polar bears need sea ice to hunt seals, their main prey. The winter of 2012-2013 was one of the worst on record for sea ice extent. The western fjords on Svalbard that normally freeze in winter remained ice-free all season.” Ashley Cooper/Corbis [Source: Polar Bears on Thin Ice]

Conservationists like me want a world where wildlife has space, where wild places exist, and where we can connect with the wild things. Yet time after time, like captives suffering from Stockholm syndrome, wildlife conservation NGOs placate, please and emulate the very forces that are destroying the things they want to protect.

Despite our collective, decades-long, worldwide commitment to protect wildlife, few indicators are positive. The Red List that’s issued by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature now includes 22,784 species that are threatened with extinction. Habitat loss is the main problem for 85 per cent of species on the list.

The number of African rhinos killed by poachers, for example, has increased for the sixth year in a row. Pangolins are now the most heavily poached and trafficked mammals on the planet. One third of the world’s freshwater fish are at risk from new hydropower dams. Two hundred amphibians have already gone and polar bears are probably doomed. Human beings are simply taking too much from the world for its rich diversity to survive.

baby-pangs-face-detail-christian-boix

A close up of Katiti the Pangolin  ©Christian Boix

None of this is news to people in the conservation movement. The reality of devastation has been apparent for many years, which should prompt some soul-searching about why we are failing.

The main reason is that we are allowing the market to dictate conservation while ignoring the very people we should empower.

Communities everywhere know their non-human kin—the animals that live among them. We know the seasons we share, and what grows when and where. We know the ebb and flow of life in our shared places. For some, those vistas are forests. Others look out to the sea, and some on endless frozen horizons. These are not empty places. They are filled with wildlife with which human beings commune.

But if wildlife are local, the impacts of human activity on them are unquestionably global, and they require global management. Industrialized fishing, mining, forestry and mono-agriculture raze whole areas and replace diversity with a single focus. The illegal international trade in exotic species provides a path for the unethical to hunt, kill, package and commodify animals and plants. The market’s quest for resources and power floods, burns and devastates whole landscapes.

For the last two decades, the conservation movement of the global North has believed that little can be done to counterbalance the might of this vast economic system, so the reaction has been to bond with it and accept its brutality—to please it and copy its characteristics. In the process, organizations in this movement have developed the classic symptoms of psychological capture and dependence through which victims develop a bond with, and sympathy for, their captors.

I’m being deliberately provocative here by evoking Stockholm syndrome because it clarifies the crucial point I want to make: I believe that the conservation movement’s unhealthy relationship with the global economic system exacerbates harm to both people and wildlife.

NGOs in Europe and North America raise money from philanthropists, corporations and other donors to arrange or establish protected areas that extend over large, pristine and fragile lands in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The public in the global North flock to their ambition, hoping it will lock precious places away from harm and raising even more money in the process. But this support turns a blind eye to the inconvenient fact that these areas exclude local communities—people who have lived for millennia beside flamingos and tigers, orangutans and turtles and who are just as wronged by big business and globalization as are wildlife.

These agencies also court the market by selling ‘adoption products’ and ‘travel experiences’ to these protected areas. They smooth out the ripples from their messages so that their supporters’ sensibilities are not offended. They deflect attention away from harmful corporations. They expand their marketing departments and shut down their conservation teams. They adopt the posture and attributes of the very things—capitalism, consumerism and the market—that destroy what they seek to protect.

Hence, their capture-bond is informing how they see the world. In their efforts to please and emulate the market they fail to look for the broader, systemic causes of elephant poaching or killing sharks for their fins. They trade stands of forests for agreements with corporations and international agencies not to campaign against dams that will flood whole valleys. They defend sport hunting by wealthy western tourists as legitimate ‘conservation’.

For example, the Gonds and the Baigas—tribal peoples in India—have been evicted from their ancestral homelands to make way for tiger conservation. Tourist vehicles now drive through their lands searching for tigers, and new hotels have been built in the same zones from which they were evicted.

Or take Indonesia, where massive illegal deforestation has burned and destroyed huge areas of precious rainforest. Even though a court order and a national commission have compelled the government to hand ownership of the forests back to the people who live there, the corporate sector is resisting. At times they hide behind their NGO partners through the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a global, multi-stakeholder initiative that includes many conservation NGOs as members.

International NGOs have scuppered efforts to control polar bear trophy hunting in the Arctic while they benefit from lucrative corporate partnerships for other areas of polar bear conservation. A major project run by Conservation International in the Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor of Madagascar has restricted villagers’ use of their traditional forests for food harvesting in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and NRG Energy are all members of the organisation’s Business & Sustainability Council.

Even worse is the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), which stands accused of breaches of OECD Guidelines on the Conduct of Multinational Enterprises and of the UN Declaration on Human Rights. The complaint in question alleges that WWF has financed and supported ecoguards that have brutally displaced the Baka tribespeople who have traditionally lived in the area now declared as a national park in Cameroon, while turning a blind eye to the destruction of the Baka’s way of life through logging, mining and the trafficking of wildlife.

wwf

Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International (which in this case is blowing the whistle on another NGO), has this to say:

“WWF knows that the men its supporters fund for conservation work repeatedly abuse, and even torture, the Baka, whose land has been stolen for conservation zones. It hasn’t stopped them, and it treats criticism as something to be countered with yet more public relations.”

Writing on openDemocracy, Gordon Bennett argues that NGOs might avoid toxic situations like this if they undertook proper investigations before committing to new parks and protected areas. I agree, but I also believe that WWF should have supported the Baka people to propose their own solutions to conserving their forests instead of assuming that a park and ecoguards were the answer.

These depressing examples are being replicated around the world. The situation will only get worse as human populations increase. Local communities and wildlife are bound to lose out.

The world is changing, however, and local civil society is on the rise. International conservation NGOs therefore need to think long and hard about their relevance as local groups grow stronger. As more communities gain access to international politics, they will be trampled on less easily by agendas from afar. The challenge is to ensure that they become empowered to look after their own land and the wildlife around them.

If the conservation movement is brave enough to transform the ways in which it works, it can support this process of empowerment and the radical changes that come with it. It can connect with local civil society groups as a partner and not as a decision maker. It can devolve its grip on how conservation is conceived and respond to community ideas and wisdom about protecting the wildlife with which they live.

In this task the conservation movement has a lot to offer. International NGOs are skilled and experienced, and they have access to international processes of negotiation and decision making. If they free themselves from corporate pressures and transform themselves into supporters of local civil society, together everyone is stronger. NGOs can help to project the unpasteurised voices of local communities into the halls of the United Nations.

To do any of these things, however, they must remember who they were before they were captured. It’s time to break free from Stockholm syndrome.

 

 

[Dr Margi Prideaux is an international wildlife policy writer, negotiator and academic. She has worked within the conservation movement for 25 years. Her forthcoming book Birdsong After the Storm: Global Environmental Governance, Civil Society and Wildlife will be released in early 2017.  She writes at www.wildpolitics.co and you can follow her on twitter @WildPolitics.]

 

FURTHER READING:

Fundacion Pachamama is Dead – Long Live ALBA [Part VII of an Investigative Report]

NGO’s Are Bad Mkay

consciousness activism

July 10, 2016

by Jay Taber

 

Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations are funded by profit-driven corporations that destroy the planet and the lives of poor and indigenous peoples.

The United Nations likewise cannot be trusted because they also cooperate with multinational mega-corporations that perpetrate systemic violence in the name of predatory capitalism.

A) True

B) False

UNITED-NATIONS-4

 

Who Shapes the United Nations Agenda?

“The global institutional machinery of the so-called United Nations is designed to destroy the sovereign will of the peoples. That is where a bureaucracy works in the service of capital and imperialism. We, the peoples of the world, do not accept that international organizations should appropriate to themselves the right of invasion and intervention. The UN has no morality to impose. We, the peoples of the world, do not accept this elitist institutionality of the bureaucrats of the empire.

 

It was in the bowels of the UN that the privatizing green economy originated, which we understand as the black economy of death; from those entrails originate the recipes for privatization and interventionism. The UN seems to be the Organization for the Rich and Powerful Countries; perhaps it should be named the INO, Imperialist Nations Organization. That UN we do not want, we disown it.

 

That neoliberal bureaucracy, the bureaucracy of the green economy and privatization, the bureaucracy that promotes structural adjustments, those functionaries of capital and ideologists of domination and poverty, act with the patriarchal and colonial conviction that the peoples and developing countries are incapable and stupid and that to emerge from poverty we must faithfully follow their development recipes.” — Evo Morales’ historic speech at the Isla del Sol

***

First Phase Digital

“Premier of the Republic of the Congo at Press Conference Premier Patrice Lumumba, of the Republic of the Congo, photographed at a press conference he held at U.N. Headquarters earlier today. Conferring briefly with the Premier is Ambassador Mongi Slim, of Tunisia.” 25 July 1960, United Nations, New York (UN Archives)

Aachen/Berlin/Bonn/New York, November 2015

Excerpts from the paper Philanthropic Power and Development – Who shapes the agenda? by authors Jens Martens and Karolin Seitz

Final Phase Digital

Photo:”President Salvador Allende of Chile paid an official visit to United Nations Headquarters and addressed the General Assembly. He conferred with the Assembly President and the Secretary-General, and also held a press conference. Here, President Allende is seen at his press conference. Seated next to him are Colodomiro Almeyda (left), Minister for Foreign Affairs of Chile, and Genichi Akatani (right), Assistant Secretary-General, UN Office of Public Information. 04 December 1972, United Nations, New York (UN Archives)

“On 5 June 2013 a remarkable event took place in the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations (UN) in New York City. Over 150 invited guests met for the second annual Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit. The event was opened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, attended by celebrated philanthropists, such as Bill Gates, Bono and Warren Buffett, and sponsored by Credit Suisse. According to Forbes magazine the attendees, who represented “close to half a trillion of the world’s wealth, discussed how they can use their wealth, fame and entrepreneurial talent to eradicate poverty.” As follow up to this summit Forbes released a Special Philanthropy Issue under the headline “Entrepreneurs can save the world.” The event at UN Headquarters was a symbol for the rapidly growing role of philanthropists and their foundations in global development policy and practice.”

UNITED NATIONS PAPER 1
“A large share of the UN Foundation’s revenues from other donors came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Between 1999 and 2014 Gates gave US$231 million in grants to the UN Foundation, mainly for projects in the areas of health and agriculture.”

UNITED NATIONS GATES

In order to broaden its funding base, the UN Foundation has actively explored ways to raise funds directly from governments.In the last decade the UN Foundation received direct funding from a number of governments or governmental agencies, inter alia the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Department for International Development of the Government of the UK (DFID), the European Commission, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

UNITED NATIONS 5

In addition to individual governments, the UN Foundation is now actively exploring opportunities for building so-called “anchor partnerships” with multinational corporations and corporate philanthropic foundations as an important element of its longterm sustainability strategy. This intention caused concerns in some parts of the UN because of the potential reputation risk involved. The UN Foundation lists currently (July 2015) 23 corporate partners, such as Exxon Mobile, Shell, Goldman Sachs, and the Bank of America.

UNITED NATIONS 4
According to the UN Secretary-General the relationship agreement between the UN and the UN Foundation has been reviewed and amended to ensure that it reflects this evolution of the Foundation’s mission and approach. The new agreement was signed in October 2014. But instead of providing a solid basis for effective and transparent governance, the new agreement seems to reinforce the exclusivity of this relationship and the preferential treatment of the UN Foundation by the UN Secretariat. The drafting of the most recent agreement took place behind closed doors without any intergovernmental oversight or transparency, and in contrast to the two earlier agreements, has not been made public.

United Nations 3

 

 

 

The Collaborative Model Takes Root in Alberta’s Tar Sands

Pictured above (May, 2015) is Tzeporah Berman (first row, third from right). Berman is one of many who contributed to the text of the “Leap Manifesto”, an initiative founded by Naomi Klein‘s “This Changes Everything” project. It is critical to note the almost non-existence of non-anglos in positions of power and decision making (with the exception being photo ops) within the foundation financed “movements”. This institutionalized racism has become so normalized that it goes almost unnoticed unless it is pointed out (as in this instance). The one exception is the only group of people that the state still fears – that of Indigenous peoples. The undermining of Indigenous people by the non-profit industrial complex (350.org, etc.) is well documented. The 2009 COP15 and the 2010 People’s Agreement in Cochabamba, Bolivia, are just two examples of Indigenous undermining, so egregious, that they could easily be considered crimes against humanity.

+++

A friend sent me an email note two days ago, with the intro line “The NGO’s finally did it!” which caused a moment of terrorized confusion. I didn’t realize it would relate to this, but for the first time ever last November, the province of Alberta has instituted a potential cap on tar sands development. However, this is not the achievement my colleague was referencing. It was more a statement of alarm than laudatory glee.

The cap was alongside several other notable achievements, such as a fairly rapid phasing out of coal (that currently supplies the bulk of the electrical grid across the province) and several economic measures, such as a carbon tax that scares the Ezras right out of your average Levant. All of these things and more were rushed and cobbled together in the short time since Notley took office. Timing was clearly a factor in order to take these proposals to Paris as a triumphal delegation to the UN Climate talks. In the short term, many of these things may seem very hopeful. But it has also been leaked that there was another part of how the tar sands portions of the plan were drawn up.

There were secret talks that involved some of the perhaps expected Big Green players (ForestEthics, Environmental Defense, Equiterre and the Pembina Institute) meeting with Big Oil. The reason it was leaked? Some oil companies are upset that the other oil companies negotiated without them. Small world, I guess.

Wait a minute, everybody.

Are we not noticing something far more troubling than previous backroom negotiated deals? This time around the deal was not to be public at all. Ever. It stands to good reason that since this one was not to be released specifically, perhaps there are others as well.

The corporations involved are among the biggest players in all of the tar sands: Suncor, Cenovus, CNRL and Shell Canada. Suncor is the largest Canadian energy company and has been a major backer of (among other green groups) the Pembina Institute for many years. Shell, always trying to play the greenwash game, has been targeted by Greenpeace direct actions in the past, yet collaborates with the WWF elsewhere, and hired James Hoggan as a consultant, despite (or rather, because of) his leading role with the David Suzuki Foundation.

As far as those groups and individuals who were previously embarrassed by leaks over potential tar sands “fireside chats” and politically eviscerated over concerns about the now-defunct Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement announcement, rather than learn a lesson to not engage in backroom talks they have instead learned to not tell the public at all.

The Alberta NDP, in a slight twist to the usual narrative, claimed the bulk of the credit (“the win”) at the presser– but the Orange Crush still had no fizzle and were a non-entity on the margins of Alberta’s political landscape when the bulk of these discussions took place.

The head of Shell Canada, president Lorraine Mitchelmore, sheds some serious light on how these talks happened, both in what she says and in what she clearly does not: Interviewed in Macleans (Canada) Magazine, she was asked by Jason Markusoff:

Q: It’s been reported that this work started quite a while ago, with dinners between environmentalists and energy executives. Who was there?

A: I don’t want to say who was there. I want to say that it was some members of industry, and it was some members of the environmental groups, and it was really progressive members in both camps […]

Even after the public realization that the “change in narrative” has been a backroom exercise, she dutifully plays well with others in the corporate sandbox and maintains the Greens anonymity (as best she can), but she does let us realize Big Oil and Big Green began these talks multiple years ago, as “[t]his was happening long before Keystone, so [she] wouldn’t put Keystone as the catalyst for this,” but it has the effect of reducing grassroots activist visibility– and that, too, is the point. When asked what would have happened without this deal?

“Continued conflict. It was going nowhere. What was it going to achieve for Canada, continued conflict? I think that us being on the stage was something that was symbolic for Canadians. I believe that collaboration is something that Canadians do well.”

Leaving aside how “Canadian” it is, collaboration agreements are an expanding, growing industry that is learning from past mistakes. Without collaborative models, there would indeed be far more resistance (“conflict”), more visible community led actions, and a primacy placed on grassroots organizing.

So we now know the lessons learned for energy corporations and for Big Green are essentially the same when it comes to pointed questions about said discussions, fireside beer chats and long table dinners between well-paid foundation-directed environmentalists and oil company executives.

Tired of the backlash from anti-democratic deals being announced? Stop announcing them, but simply cut them in a way that makes the funders happy and let someone else announce an entirely separate result.

Then, allies from other eNGO’s (often people who have worked for ostensibly conflicting organizations) can celebrate what was negotiated secretly without even truly allowing the public to know that negotiations happened in the first place. Big Oil is very good already at guarding market secrets, discussions with Big Green can simply fall under the trade secrets mentality.

There is a history to this new approach, a minor victory of sorts in fact. In April of 2010, Dru Oja Jay was the first to report on attempts to hold private talks with tar sands producers in the Dominion:

Ten representatives each from tar sands operators and high-profile environmental groups were invited to the “informal, beer in hand” gathering. The David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence Canada, Forest Ethics, Pollution Probe and Tides Canada were among the invited environmental groups.

Merran Smith of ForestEthics was listed without affiliation, as was Tzeporah Berman, who worked to privatize BC’s rivers as director of PowerUp Canada, and who is slated to start work this month as Greenpeace International’s Climate Campaigner. Among invited oil companies were Shell, ConocoPhilips, Total and Statoil. Leading tar sands investor Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) was also on the guestlist.

The event would be, the invitation explained, “an opportunity for a few ENGOs and a few companies to share their thoughts on the current state of relations and explore ideas on how a deeper dialogue might occur.”

Three days later, Raynolds sent a second email, cancelling the gathering, owing to “the level of tension” between “a subset of companies and a subset of ENGOs.” The follow-up email specified a legal dispute. Sources in Albertan environmental circles suggested pressure to cancel came from threats to expose the meeting publicly. (emphasis added–MS)

“I personally believe we all need to find a way to create the space and conditions necessary for deeper and meaningful conversations to find some solutions,” wrote Raynolds, explaining the cancellation. “I do hope that in the coming months, we can work to create those conditions.”

…and create those conditions they did. In light of that prior result of such talks, it goes to further reason that these discussions have shown in part the expanding of the relationship in 2015 that began in 2010. Faced with the rejection and unpopularity of anti-democratic secret negotiations when announced, further secrecy was layered upon secret talks by these organizations. Sources from environmental struggles today allege a role played directly by Greenpeace in assessing these deals, to get a “victory” in Alberta.

We essentially now have reason to believe that modern capital-driven organizations will make concessions on issues as large as pipelines and caps and more without even telling the public that there was a process they were not involved in. ENGO’s acting with a distrust of the public that rivals the Harper administration.

ForestEthics itself began almost entirely as a vehicle to carve out such a collaborative agreement and lay the framework for this model in the Great Bear Rainforest of BC (accepting far less protection than grassroots groups and independent scientists wanted, shunting aside indigenous nations in the process and eliminating democratic oversight all in one fell swoop). One of the other signatories to the GBR deal and also apparently a non-signatory observer to the new tar sands deal was Greenpeace. The organization still has an official position calling for the “phasing out” of the tar sands and as such cannot publicly be seen to pledge no resistance to export (or any) pipelines, but in the days following the Alberta climate plan?

Mike Hudema of Greenpeace was talking up the plan thusly:

This announcement is a major victory for people and communities that have long raised concerns about growing tar sands emissions. With the announced cap the government has finally set a limit on tar sands extraction. The days of the infinite growth of the tar sands are over and investors should take note.

So what part of the deal are investors told to take note of, exactly? Well, we do know some of the points. Total tar sands development can add more than another one million barrels per day of tar sands gunk to the grid. Put in perspective, tar sands were pumping at around 1.2 million barrels a day before Greenpeace parachuted into Alberta in mid 2007.

Slightly less than 2 million barrels are extracted from the various deposits of bitumen in Alberta today, meaning that in the last 8 years– 8 years of development with:

*Massive economic backing, some of the largest investments in human history all pulled together

*Federal and Provincial governments that facilitated every single project that came forward

*Record high global prices of crude, alongside one of the strongest Canadian dollars in history

*The global attention of nearly every major energy company from China to the Middle East to the UK

*In these 8 years Tar sands projects– mining and in-situ– added some 3/4 of a million barrels (roughly the equivalent of three of the giant mines at full operating capacity) to the global grid.

Since that time of the tar sands gold rush we have seen:

Peak in oil prices brought down by financial collapse spreading around the globe and Saudi Arabian oil reserve dumps

Massive development of other technologies such as fracking to take alternative investment dollars,

The removal of the most outwardly pro-oil governments at all major levels in North America,

The gutting of the loonie.

At the current rate of expansion, and the current level of resistance to further sprawl based on tar sands, the idea of getting to 3 million barrels a day would need major subsidization to make it even partially practical. It is not, and in a reminiscence of the Protected Areas Strategy in the Arctic North, what is announced to be a limit is actually a promise to investors to make things economical and operate business as usual for possibly another pair of decades.

While it is certainly of the best news that the Notley plan also includes the removal of coal fired electrical generation across Alberta, this combined with further de facto unbridled expansion of the tar sands themselves will mean two giant changes to the physical landscape are set to come about:

One: There will now be a massive introduction planned of nuclear energy. Even with the reports of the ongoing melting of Japan into the sea (Fukushima is still destroying the largest ocean on earth, we just stopped paying attention to it as it is happening) multiple nuclear reactors discussed during the first tar sands boom times of 2002-2008 will be revisited and pushed. Just ask James Hansen, a brilliant scientist who is being asked to be a sociologist when it comes to solving the climate crisis. His take is the same as Big Green: Never mention powering down or reducing consumption, that is a non-starter for “modern” capitalist Canada.

Two: this is a spectacular means to allow BC to expand the growing fracking footprint that is in the Northeast of the province, for shipment to Alberta as a “cleaner” source of the power needed to build up tar sands operations. And to produce the fracking gas means that the giant Site C dam on BC’s Peace River will provide the energy to frack to provide the energy to mine for tar sands.

Perhaps the key point is that this will mean a better situation for the investors than exists currently. Their DNA is still made up of seeing any regulation as a restriction on profit, but they have been granted at least another decade of developments at the rate of acceleration we have been accustomed to over the last several years. The Athabasca river and the forested areas of all four major tar sands regions in Alberta will continue to get poisoned or disappeared outright.

The tar sands free for all will continue but with the caveat that many will think it is now regulated. But the earth knows no law but natural law and climate markers know no future endeavour announcements. There is no savings account for the climate.

The collaborative model of developers (corporations), “stakeholders” (in particular First Nations governments subject to the Indian Act), “environmentalists” (NGO’s who receive foundation-directed money to achieve funder-driven objectives) and governments (provincial and federal) has been in place in Canada for a couple of decades now. In point of historical fact the birth of ForestEthics essentially took place to create a situation that has since become almost a template for social control and political license given to developments that prior to the agreements were unpalatable and unpopular in the extreme.

While sidelining indigenous representation either in whole or in part, such collaborative models gain little and surrender the kitchen sink. More importantly than their horrible ecological impacts, however, are the wholesale anti-democratic means of coming into being, and their quite conscious role in subverting, blunting and silencing resistance that exists. The President of Shell just announced that was why she was involved– like a linesman at a hockey game, just trying to contain conflict.

There have been many watershed moments on the advancement of the collaborative model in the past, starting in the 1980’s in the US (heavily funded by the Pew Foundation and later, Pew Charitable Trusts, et al) and advancing to cover not only BC, Alberta and many Canadian provinces, but the Arctic as well setting up similar collaborative models to effectively give away the mostly undeveloped giant lands of what get called the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon.

Perhaps most disastrously, the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement was celebrated by 9 pro-development eNGO’s alongside multiple forestry companies, but was denounced as anti-democratic and an attack on sovereignty by most indigenous voices. It ultimately failed under its own weight.

At this late day when environmental discourse should be prominently louder and more uncompromising than ever, now collaboration is moving in to save capitalism from itself. And using silence to do so.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask Rachel Notley, Premier of Alberta.

“I’m hopeful that these policies, taken overall, will lead to a new collaborative conversation about Canada’s energy infrastructure on its merits, and to a significant de-escalation of conflict worldwide about the Alberta oilsands…”

Various tar sands pipelines, from Line 9 in Ontario to Kinder Morgan’s proposed expansion in greater Vancouver, have seen large grassroots opposition. With either fly-by-night, media grabbing appearances from Big Green with little to no support provided or the most deafening silence possible, people have gone to prison in many cases without seeing any help emerge from Big Green.

The NDP, once elected in Alberta, made achieving their climate deal one of the most important immediate goals. In order to go to Paris for UN COP discussions happening now– standing alongside the Federal Liberals saying “Canada is no longer obstructionist,” having a deal between greens and government as well as energy corporations in international venues is extremely important. For that, even with no tangible difference on the ground, Environmental Defence executive director Tim Gray (based in Toronto) explained their willingness to help: “We were more than happy to help them track toward something that could get support from elements of the environmental community as well as the business community, and that is what happened.”

But what else has happened? Tar sands operations elsewhere around the world must still be prevented from ever getting off of (or out of) the ground as well.

Operations of other tar sands projects around the planet will once again have the great example of “responsible tar sands developments” apparently requested by Notley. Some of the international projects have stalled and been shelved but nowhere have they yet been killed.

The shroud of secrecy around Ottawa has changed, even if that is mostly a public relations exercise that will lose the shine very quickly. Falsely or not, people hold a belief that far less secrecy is the order of the day. But in terms of the unaccountable results of foundation-directed eNGO’s, they have moved into new territory of deception, no longer telling after what used to only be hidden before.

And in this, a perfect refinement of the current administrations of progressiveness, done in time for Paris with Suncor hanging out with Environmental Defense to forge forward a brave new path—in France now are the signs of just what kind of administrations people living north of the 49th parallel on Turtle Island can expect: Of social control through farce, and democratic participation as a mass marketed phenomenon. With all the bells and whistles, but please turn off the lights on your way out.

[Macdonald Stainsby is an anti-tar sands and social justice activist, freelance writer and professional hitchhiker looking for a ride to the better world, currently based in Vancouver, Canada. He can be reached at mstainsby@resist.ca]

Fund-Raising as the World Burns: Shell Drills the Arctic, Takes a Timeout and Big Green Declares “Victory”

Counterpunch

September 29, 2015

by Michael Donnelly

 

“Michael Donnelly drops a dose of reality on the absurd orgy of self-congratulation from Gang Green over Shell’s market-driven decision to post-pone drilling in the Arctic until oil prices rise. In fact, any rational analysis of Shell’s decision would lead one to conclude that the battle is being lost, not won. The price of oil is low because so much oil has flooded the market, with more on the way thank’s to the lifting of the embargo on Iran. More oil at lower prices means less incentive to conserve and more carbon released into the atmosphere. By any standard, this is terrible news for the climate–and polar bears and the Arctic environment. Of course, Gang Green has never been a rational enterprise.” — Jeffrey St Clair

 

Arctic OffShore Drilling

“Activism is the antidote to despair.”

–Joan Baez

 

“Claiming false “victories” crushes activism and leads to more despair. ?Claiming false “victories” in order to fund raise is shameless and stupid.”

– The Donnelly Codicils

 

I awoke this morning to an in-box filled with bleats of “Victory” from all the usual “Climate Campaigner” suspects. The top news story on NPR began, “Environmentalists claim victory…”

“Big oil has sustained an unmitigated defeat. They had a budget of billions, we had a movement of millions. For three years we faced them down, and the people won.´­­”

— Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven

 

Royal Dutch Shell had announced it was suspending Arctic drilling operations after having found insufficient oil to recoup a profitable Return on Investment given today’s low oil prices. Green Central, in a slew of fund-raising missives capitalizing on Shell’s announcement, would have one believe that Shell saw the light due to the courageous actions of the “kayaktavists” who staged showy, excellent protests, yet failed to stop the deployment of the rigs that conducted the very drilling that has come up so empty.

As with George W. declaring Mission Accomplished in Iraq, the claims of victory emanating from Green Central are beyond premature, they are groundless. Neither Shell, nor the consortiums of other oil companies and governments that have their eye on the Arctic have withdrawn. The Obama Administration has not rescinded any drilling Leases and there is deafening silence from the “victors” on that. Obama’s “all-of-the-above/Drill, Baby Drill energy “plan” is very much alive and on-going. Again, the proximate cause of Shell’s pullback is economic and had nothing whatsoever to do with futile protests.

The Greens unanimously parrot talking point claims that “social pressure” from the fruitless protests caused a huge corporation like Shell to back off, while at the  same time giving Obama a free pass on his own resistance to their rather feeble, if present at all, “social pressure” over the approving the drilling Leases in the first place.

Nope. What we have here is akin to a time out called by one’s opponent for their own reasons – with every intent to resume play once the winter and the era of low oil prices are over and no change at all in a Administration Arctic Drilling Policy; not a “victory,” by any measure – other than fund-raising and self-congratulations … both  unwarranted.

The same Greens declared victory all over social media in June when the Shell icebreaker attempting to leave Portland backed off for a mere few hours after Greenpeace flew climbers in (on Wings of Tar Sands!) from around the planet to dangle off the St John’s Bridge. They claimed then that preventing the icebreaker SS Obama, err, Fennica from leaving port would prevent Shell from doing the exploratory drilling — when Shell was already drilling at the time!

The National Audubon Society, which had next to nothing to do with it, went so far as to immediately send out a fund-raising letter: “Shell didn’t find the oil and gas it expected to find this summer. But make no mistake: The public pressure you’ve helped apply is a key part of today’s victory for birds. Without intense public pressure to keep Arctic waters safe, Shell might have continued pressing ahead.

In spite of Shell’s herculean attempts to drill, you kept up the pressure. And birds won.” —- David Yarnold, President and CEO National Audubon Society

Yep. A major international corporation bowed to public pressure, but not Obama! Somewhat understandable, given the lack of pressure pointed in his direction.

Just as the sole victors in Bush’s Iraq adventure were his weapons manufacturer cronies, the sole “victors” here are the bottom line fund-raising efforts of the corporate Big Greens.

A History of Activist Malpractice

“All of our victories are temporary, and all of our defeats are permanent.

– David Brower

“And, some are far more temporary than others.”

– A Donnelly Codicil

The Environmental Movement is at least 45 years old in the US – the Non-Profit Complex gives the first Earth Day in 1970 as its birthday.  Since that origin, half the terrestrial species on the planet that were around then are now gone forever – extinct. Yet, groups like the panda cash machine World Wildlife Fund have metastasized with an annual budget of over $100 million, while species WWF purports to defend have disappeared across the board.

In that time, billions, yes – tens of billions – of dollars have been spent on environmental groups and issues. The Nature Conservancy alone holds assets worth over $20b. Hundreds have made their living as green professionals. Hundreds today are paid Climate Campaigners. Yet by every habitat-scale measurement, things have been on an increasingly downward spiral all along: every biome on the planet is currently dying. Lots of money raised and spent and little to show for it. By any Gaian-based measurement, it’s devastating failure all around, no matter how much “victory” spin the pros put on it.

Green Groudhog V-Day

We’ve seen this over and over. Over-stated “victories:” “Clinton saves the Ancient Forest” was blared repeatedly when Bill Clinton came to the Northwest and actually restarted Ancient Forest logging, after it was shut down completely by Injunction under Bush the Elder. Every group that peddled that spin was handsomely rewarded by the pro-Democrat foundations of the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGAd). Groups that pointed out the actual state of the emperor’s at the time were ostracized clothing – groups that had a hand in saving vast acreages .

Since then, Pacific Northwest Ancient Forests continue to be logged. Just the other day I saw a loaded log truck that was filled by just three logs. “Baby” old growth (mature and younger forests) is being logged at rapacious rates. The same “Green” professionals have been pimping  the ludicrous idea that “thinning the forests” will make them “less fire-prone” and that  burning the thinnings and other trees in steam boilers for electrons (Biomass – a process  1.5 times more polluting that coal!) instead of coal or gas – is somehow Green.

Already twenty-some years since Clinton “saved” them, the Ancient Forest-dependent Indicator species for the health of the Ancient Forest ecosystem – the Northern Spotted Owls – have declined by over 60% across their range, and continue to decline 2.9% per year, likely well below the point of no return.

Then, when Al Gore ran to succeed Clinton, the Big Greens pulled out the stops. Just prior to the election, we were regaled with the “Clinton saves 60 million acres” toothless Roadless Rule. Not a single tree or acre was set aside inviolate under the now-forgotten Roadless Rule election year scam.

We also had the great Seattle WTO protest “victory.” While it is grand that we can catch the oligarchy off-balance once in a generation like what happened at WTO, what was the follow-up? WTO runs along unimpeded and as rapacious as ever – when was the last time you even heard of it? We now have “Free Speech Zones” err, cages and unaccountable, gladiatorial cops defusing protests and even more Obama Administration infiltration, spying  and repression of activist circles. Seattle WTO is no longer viable in any sense.

The Mythical “Victory” over Coal

Then there is the recent, deadly example. All the time of late, one reads about the “Hard Times for Coal;” the end of Mountain-top Removal (MTR) and the bankruptcy of Big Coal. Yet the mountains of Appalachia continue to be blown up for coal extraction, poisoning the ecosystem and the local population. Coal extraction in Wyoming leads the world. Daily, hundred-car coal trains rumble from Wyoming and down through the Columbia Gorge on their way to the export docks in Washington.

In addition, coal is still the #1 source of the electricity in the grid. 40% of US electricity still comes from coal. Fracked Natural Gas provides 27% Nukes 19% and Hydro dams/dead salmon 6%. Solar is at 0.4% and wind at 4.4% despite billions in subsidies and massive PR campaigns – overstated victories and Democrats aren’t the only things Big Green consistently oversells.

It’s our Carbon Addiction – Big Carbon is merely the pusher. The pusher will always find a way to get the product to the addicts/consumers.

“The environmental movement needs shaming at this point.”

– Denise Boggs

Already, the Big Greens and the Democrats are fully on board with Biomass. In Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and the paid greens are pushing discredited plans to “thin” over 9 million acres of public forest; while, at the same time, arraigning government-backed loans for Biomass companies to build or convert power plants burn the “product.” Local Oregon green groups speak loudly to the need to keep lumber mills open in order to thin the forest, bringing them back to “health” using chainsaw surgery. The biggest timber sale in Southwest history was developed by The Center for Biological Diversity and their cronies!

Germany and Britain import ground-up trees (pellets) from the US southeast, the Amazon and British Columbia. They then burn them and claim Carbon Credits for doing so –said Credits are then used to off-set increased coal use – Yes Virginia, those constant memes about Germany’s “Clean Energy” are false. Germany does not get “all its energy from solar.” Germany has not reduced coal use, much less “Fazed out coal.” In fact, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and France have increased their coal burning by over 16% from 2009 -2013.

Things are just too desperate for such nonsense. The planet is at Stage Four and we are the cancer. It all boils down to Carbon, Biomass and Collapse.  Unless we drastically reduce consumption, we either burn that “leave it in the ground” carbon or like Europe, we simply switch to burning Nature and trash and calling it Green.

All these false claims from the top-down foundation-dependent “green movement” destroy any ability grassroots citizens may have to hold governments and corporations accountable. Again, Shell is on hiatus from drilling the Arctic for economic reasons. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the “kayatavist” protests – with “public pressure.”

In the past three years, “we’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.”

Barack Obama, April 17th, 2012

If Obama, the guy who gave the pushers the go-ahead even feels any (again, if there is any) public pressure from those now claiming victory, it certainly hasn’t been an effective strategy, i.e.: producing results. As long as organizations rely on false claim fund-raising – putting institutional and personal success above the successful survival of Gaian species – we will get nowhere positive in our efforts to save our own very life support system.

Whenever an artificial victory is claimed, the “troops” fold their tents and go home – confident that they won. It then becomes next to impossible to get the real activism soufflé to rise again.

The bottom line is: we could power the grid on unicorn farts; but if we keep on consuming at the same, or likely higher rates, we still eat the planet. Addressing and greatly lowering First World Consumption is key. There is no “Green energy” solution. There is only less use. As such, it is well beyond time for Greens themselves to walk the talk – no more gratuitous carbon use; no more enviro groups flying their entire staffs to South America for workshops/retreats, no more flying to conferences around the planet to decry carbon pollution, no more flying guys in polar bear costumes around for photo-ops (I half-expected to see him hugging the Pope), etc. Period. And, no more distractions and insufficient, at best, victories.  There is no time for it. They already have all the pipelines they need. The Methane Plumes are for real. As I noted; every single forest biome and the oceans are dying. Now!

[MICHAEL DONNELLY has been an environmental activist since before that first Earth Day. He was in the thick of the Pacific Northwest Ancient Forest Campaign; garnering some collective victories and lamenting numerous defeats. He can be reached at pahtoo@aol.com]

Digital Marginalisation and Obfuscation in the Messaging Sphere

We Suspect Silence

March 10, 2015

by empathiser

This morning I woke to discover that Bill McKibben @billmckibben had started to follow me on Twitter. How strange I thought. I’d been expecting to be blocked just like I was by @naomiaklein @bencaldecott @market_forces @350australia. I figured since I was blocked without breaching any kind of community standards it would only be a matter of time before Bill McKibben and @BobBurtonoz blocked me too.

screenshot.655

I’ve got a couple of theories about why I was blocked. I’ve been following the political will around carbon capture and storage (CCS), and highlighting the silence from the BigGreen NGOs and the well connected pundits and commentators. Some of my posts were getting noticed, they appear at the end of conversations, unacknowledged by the recipients. My posts stood out perhaps because they were talking about the silences and were returned with silence.

screenshot.667

This week The Guardian has rolled out the red carpet for Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein. Both were quoted and cited repeatedly in departing editor Alan Rusbridger’s “personal manifesto” introducing the thinking behind his series on the climate crisis that will dovetail perfectly into Naomi Klein’s ‘changes nothing’ tour at the end of the month. Already we have seen this series explain divestment, tackle divestment myths, and release excerpts from Naomi Klein’s most recent book.

screenshot.707

In my first conversation with Bill McKibben he wriggles out of providing an opinion on Shell’s plans for CCS, and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in the North Sea. I highlighted the fact that Shell’s Red Balls/Peterhead Gas CCS ad campaign was very public on the weekend he spoke at Chatham House and asked why he has never spoken about the threat posed by CCS and EOR in the North Sea.  His first response was to direct me to this article from Quartz reporting his appearance at Chatham House. Adam Epstein’s article doesn’t show that he spoke against the Peterhead CCS project that was being advertised in London on large billboards in tube stations using artwork produced by Carbon Visuals.  I suspect Bill McKibben was intimating that drilling for oil in the arctic is also a fossil fuel frontier. Who knows? It’s Naomi Klein’s talking point. For me new fossil energy frontiers are defined by dangerous new technology to combat scarcity, like fracking. Either way, Bill McKibben was right there in front of the people whose ads for an incomprehensibly dangerous nascent industry that stands to benefit from future trade in CO2 while providing demand for coal mining and an increased life span for oil extraction were plastered all over the city and he didn’t raise the issue, he never has.

screenshot.705

Like Ben Caldecott (Carbon Tracker, Green Alliance, Stranded Assets Project), Shell seem to be everywhere they want to be. Not only are they very well connected in the venerable home of silence, Chatham House, but they have their collaborators smoothing the path for them at The Guardian. The article that prompted me to remind Bill McKibben that he has yet to offer an opinion about Ed Davey’s plans for unabated coal appeared on Saturday, March 7 in The Guardian’s Sustainable Business Leadership section sponsored by Xynteo, a group with some heavy weight fossil fools like Shell, Woodside, and Statoil. Xynteo have an astounding motto  “We are reinventing growth”.  They certainly sound well positioned for the world that Ed Davey is envisaging.

<> on September 15, 2013 in Glasgow, Scotland.Ed Davey? You can find out what he thinks here.

Shell-Peterhead-CCS-project

The London ‘Red Balls’ ads by Carbon Visuals who also did work for the 350.org Do The Math tour and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development – ‘CCS a 2 Degree Solution’ video.

FLASHBACK | Conservation International: Privatizing Nature, Plundering Biodiversity

conservation-international

Seedling | Grain

October 2003

by Aziz Choudry

Conservation International’s corporate sponsor list reads like a list of the US’ top fifty transnational corporations. Biodiversity conservation is at the top of Conservation International’s list of goals. But as the list of Conservation International’s dubious ventures and questionable partners around the world grows, Aziz Choudry is starting to wonder if it is time to ‘out’ this ‘multinational conservation corporation’ and show its true colours.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C, with operations in over 30 countries on four continents, Conservation International claims to be an environmental NGO. Its mission is “to conserve the Earth’s living natural heritage, our global biodiversity, and to demonstrate that human societies are able to live harmoniously with nature.” [1] This all sounds very laudable and Conservation International has some very high profile fans. This year Colin Powell shared the podium with Conservation International President Russell Mittermeier at the launch of the Bush Administration’s “Initiative Against Illegal Logging” at the US State Department. In December 2001, Gordon Moore, who founded Intel Corporation, donated US $261 million to Conservation International, supposedly the largest grant ever to an environmental organisation. Moore is chairman of Conservation International’s executive committee. Conservation International has repaid Moore’s largesse by nam-ing an endangered Brazilian pygmy owl after him. [2]

FLASHBACK | The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction: Methane, Propaganda & the Architects of Genocide | Part I

WKOG editor: The first segment (Part I-below) of this investigative report was published on January 17, 2011. On December 13, 2011, it was quietly reported that:

 Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said….

“In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed,” Dr Semiletov said.

“We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some of the plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal,” he said.

Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Since this the quiet release of this report, the (essentially non-existent) media coverage on the destabilizing methane hydrates should be considered that of a heavily censored topic by corporate and foundation funded media.

+++

An investigative report.

By Cory Morningstar

January 17, 2011

Part I

World Marches to Methane Annihilation

 

“[T]he question is not will this methane be released, but when.” – Robert C. Hendricks, NASA, November 2007

 

The architects of death: The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction are the melting permafrost, the destabilizing methane hydrates and the corporations such as Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil and the banking and investment industry who, hand in hand with the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Defense, have been planning and waiting to exploit methane hydrates for decades. Methane hydrates are considered the ultimate in climate wealth opportunity because the control of these hydrocarbons could literally shift the balance of global power (US Department of Defense). It is clear that nothing has been done to prevent catastrophic climate change – and nothing will be done. Global emissions are set to continue skyrocketing. This article attempts to clearly articulate why, almost two decades after the first international climate change summit, the world governments have failed to protect us from dangerous atmospheric climate interference. As we are now living in a world that is beyond dangerous, society must be aware of, be able to critically analyze, and ultimately reject the new onslaught of misinformation that is being perpetuated by the corporate elite and the current power structures that support their agenda.WKOG editor: The first segment (Part I-below) of this investigative report was published on January 17, 2011. On December 13, 2011, it was quietly reported that:

 Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said….

“In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed,” Dr Semiletov said.

“We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some of the plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal,” he said.

Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Since this the quiet release of this report, the (essentially non-existent) media coverage on the destabilizing methane hydrates should be considered that of a heavily censored topic by corporate and foundation funded media.

+++

An investigative report.

By Cory Morningstar

January 17, 2011

Part I

World Marches to Methane Annihilation

“[T]he question is not will this methane be released, but when.” – Robert C. Hendricks, NASA, November 2007

The architects of death: The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction are the melting permafrost, the destabilizing methane hydrates and the corporations such as Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil and the banking and investment industry who, hand in hand with the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Defense, have been planning and waiting to exploit methane hydrates for decades. Methane hydrates are considered the ultimate in climate wealth opportunity because the control of these hydrocarbons could literally shift the balance of global power (US Department of Defense). It is clear that nothing has been done to prevent catastrophic climate change – and nothing will be done. Global emissions are set to continue skyrocketing. This article attempts to clearly articulate why, almost two decades after the first international climate change summit, the world governments have failed to protect us from dangerous atmospheric climate interference. As we are now living in a world that is beyond dangerous, society must be aware of, be able to critically analyze, and ultimately reject the new onslaught of misinformation that is being perpetuated by the corporate elite and the current power structures that support their agenda.WKOG editor: The first segment (Part I-below) of this investigative report was published on January 17, 2011. On December 13, 2011, it was quietly reported that:

 Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said….

“In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed,” Dr Semiletov said.

“We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some of the plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal,” he said.

Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Since this the quiet release of this report, the (essentially non-existent) media coverage on the destabilizing methane hydrates should be considered that of a heavily censored topic by corporate and foundation funded media.

+++

An investigative report.

By Cory Morningstar

January 17, 2011

Part I

World Marches to Methane Annihilation

 

“[T]he question is not will this methane be released, but when.” – Robert C. Hendricks, NASA, November 2007

 

The architects of death: The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction are the melting permafrost, the destabilizing methane hydrates and the corporations such as Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil and the banking and investment industry who, hand in hand with the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Defense, have been planning and waiting to exploit methane hydrates for decades. Methane hydrates are considered the ultimate in climate wealth opportunity because the control of these hydrocarbons could literally shift the balance of global power (US Department of Defense). It is clear that nothing has been done to prevent catastrophic climate change – and nothing will be done. Global emissions are set to continue skyrocketing. This article attempts to clearly articulate why, almost two decades after the first international climate change summit, the world governments have failed to protect us from dangerous atmospheric climate interference. As we are now living in a world that is beyond dangerous, society must be aware of, be able to critically analyze, and ultimately reject the new onslaught of misinformation that is being perpetuated by the corporate elite and the current power structures that support their agenda.

FLASHBACK: WWF’s Eco Imperialism

Corporate Power and Mining in Mongolia

November 03, 2008

Some of parts of the environmental movement have long presented a serious obstacle to the destruction wrought on life by the corporate powers that be and their imperial overseers. On the contrary, other influential and well publicized parts of the movement have also played a critical role in undermining the emancipatory potential of environmentalism in order to satisfy imperial interests. Environmental groups that fit comfortably within this latter category of “environmentalists” include those collectively referred to as the Big Green, or the Group of Ten, although only the work of one member of this elite group, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), will be examined in this article. (For a comprehensive overview of WWF’s capitalist-friendly agenda, see my recent article “The Philanthropic Roots of Corporate Environmentalism,” Swans, November 3, 2008.)

Recognition of the imperialist nature of many so-called green nongovernmental organizations has, paradoxically, been widely promoted by conservative commentators. Thus resident scholar at the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, Paul Driessen, recently published a controversial book titled Eco-Imperialism: Green Power Black Death (Merril Press, 2003). The introduction to Driessen’s book was penned by Niger Innis, the national spokesperson of the once progressive civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality – an organization which has now warped into a “fraudulent” corporate front group. In his introduction, Innis noted how:

“The ideological environmental movement is a powerful $4 billion-a-year US industry, an $8 billion-a-year international gorilla. Many of its members are intensely eco-centric, and place much higher value on wildlife and ecological values than on human progress or even human life. They have a deep fear and loathing of big business, technology, chemicals, plastics, fossil fuels and biotechnology – and they insist that the rest of world should acknowledge and live according to their fears and ideologies. They are masters at using junk science, scare tactics, intimidation, and bogus economic and health claims to gain even greater power.” (pdf)

Innis is correct in observing that the environmental movement is a multi-billion dollar industry, but like Driessen, he deliberately fails to highlight how the most powerful and well-funded environmental groups driving this industry work hand-in-hand with big business and imperial governments. On the other hand, those environmental organizations that seriously challenge corporate prerogatives receive little funding from the public or even for that matter from ostensibly progressive liberal foundations. Consequently I agree with Innis and Driessen that the best-funded parts of the environmental movement that are regularly talked-up in the mass media promote eco-imperialism, but this is not because they challenge powerful elite interests, but rather because they serve them so effectively. For instance, in 2007 WWF’s Global Networks income was US$0.8 billion; therefore, it should be no surprise that such groups that were founded by powerful corporate and political elites, and are presently funded by those same elites, should first and foremost promote capitalist interests under the cloak of environmentalism. For more on this see Elaine Dewar’s groundbreaking book Cloak of Green: The Links between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business (Lorimer, 1995).