CARBON OFFSETS

Mark Carney Barks at Africa, Demanding Green Colonialism

by Mark Bender

[Print version of this article]

May 19—Watching the former head of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, now the UN Climate Change Czar, at an April 22 forum on The African Transition to Net-Zero, telling Africans why, in his imperial view, African nations will henceforth have to give up the development of their resources, give up any dream of becoming a modern industrial nation, and even return existing farmland back to reforestation, is truly disgusting. It also invokes a vision of another kind of “carny.”

In the days of the travelling circus, the “carny” had a special job. He was the front man, the public side of a business which had a lot of not-so-public sides to it. The carny (abbreviated from “carnival”) wore the fancy clothes and was probably best-known for his vocal skills, which could cut through the din and over-stimulation of the senses of a circus crowd and reach each individual in the crowd personally. Ultimately, the carny had one job, that was to keep the suckers (and their money) coming.

The entire purpose of the Great Reset, or the Green New Deal, is to use the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to impose a centuries-old British dream of ending the industrial revolution, returning to a lower level of energy production which would be capable of supporting only a small percentage of the current population of the world. In the eyes of City of London financiers and their Wall Street tag-alongs, what has been shut down by the pandemic—trade, global transport and shipping, power consumption, the processing of meat and other foods—none of this is slated to return to pre-pandemic levels, let alone the level needed to bring the developing sector nations out of poverty and into a modern industrial condition. The Great Reset is, at its heartless core, a genocidal program for population reduction.

There are, however, several exceptions to the Great Reset’s deadly denial of access to fossil fuels: first, those businesses which conform to, or those which can appear to conform to, “sustainable” constraints, and use only “renewable energy”; second, those businesses which the imperial forces deem necessary to the functioning of their modern empire, such as the military-industrial complex, producing weapons, ships, planes, rockets, and their feeder industries of resource mining and manufacturing; and third, those which the imperial 0.1% feel are necessary to maintain their own jet-setting lifestyle, especially air travel, but also connected service businesses such as hotels and the like.

Here is the quandary. Many of these are very “carbon intensive” industries, including steel and other metallurgical production, airline travel, to name a few. In order to both allow these industries to function, as well as to ease the “transition” away from an energy-intense economy of growth, the Great Reseters have a catch-all solution, the Carbon Market, including Carbon Offsets. Through this mechanism, they argue, both the carbon producers in the advanced sector and the non-carbon producers in the less developed nations of Africa and the Global South can “ease the burden” of cutting off carbon-producing fuels and industries.

In order to understand the imperial wizardry of carbon markets and carbon offsets, one must first be willing to jettison conventional notions of quaint business school concepts such as “markets,” “investments,” “collateral,” and “offset,” and enter a world no more real than the entire “carbon dioxide causes global warming” fabrication: the old concepts have simply been re-tooled to fit the new purpose.

This is the “business,” or “Green Finance,” side of the entire UN Climate Conference process, known collectively as the Conference of the Parties, or COP. While everyone in the (smoke free) front room is talking trees and flowers, the bankers in the back are plotting industrial shutdown, financial looting, and ultimately, genocide. The next meeting—COP26—is now (after having been cancelled last year because of the pandemic) scheduled to occur in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021. While the media centers on highly visible items such as coal power plants, pipelines and refineries, the bankers will be gathering in the background, conspiring to spread the pain, all the while disguising it as “gain.” One of their tools will be a mythical (not-yet-real) Carbon Market, with its ethereal Carbon Offsets.

Smoke and Mirrors

On April 22, the G30 group (of industrialized nations) sponsored “The Road to COP26: Opportunities, Challenges and the African Transition to Net-Zero,” a “feeder” event which featured four bankers, three of them from Africa, and Mark Carney—the “carny”—formerly the world’s most powerful banker as Governor of the Bank of England from 2013-2020, and currently the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. Carney’s job today is to corral the world’s leading financiers (and with them the public at large) into the Brave New World that is “Green Finance,” the heart of the Great Reset. As he said in his presentation, he already has $30 trillion-worth of private finance behind him (most significantly Larry Fink’s BlackRock, which manages $7 trillion), and his big job now is to “leverage” that $30 trillion to unleash 10 times that much in public capital, from governments (ultimately from taxpayers like you and me).

Carney’s act is one of balancing the different desires of rich and poor; carbon-producers and carbon-sequesterers; all seeking different things, which not all are going to benefit from. In this world, the concepts of just about everything are reversed: To be “carbon rich,” for example, a producer, is bad, whereas to be “carbon poor,” is a good thing.

You see, being carbon-poor doesn’t mean that you don’t have carbon, such as in the trees in the forests; it simply means that you don’t use it—at least not in the form of cutting them down, or worse, burning them for fuel or cooking charcoal—but rather keep them undisturbed, in which state they “consume” carbon, storing it in the form of more wood or in the ground as not-to-be-mined organic fossil deposits. For Africa, the fact that they have many trees but no development, is being sold to them as a positive. If they play their cards right, they could even get some infrastructure financing, as long as it’s green, by not developing.

Like a true carny, the former Bank of England head spoke in terms which he (and his back-room billionaire banker-friends) understood, knowing the true intent. Knowing his words would be parsed by skeptical Africans, he skillfully drew a picture of how the whole world was getting on the green caravan, and that those who didn’t were only going to miss out on the riches ahead.

Here is how the carny spun his web:

Ninety percent of demand from carbon offsets will come from advanced economies, and 90% of supply will come from the developing economies, including Africa. This is a market which could scale rapidly to $100 billion per annum.

Of course, said Carney, the “advanced economies” could not trust the wogs to live up to their promises, so a new kind of colonial overlord will be required. Said the carny:

Of course, there must be integrity around the offsets, and a degree of permanence of these offsets, with verification and monitoring of that permanence. This is a private market, so the offsets will be bought by private companies, like Microsoft. They are not going to make these commitments unless they know that in Rwanda or other places in Africa these offsets are permanent.

So much for Carney’s claim that the entire process will be “voluntary.”

Who, one may ask, will have the responsibility to “verify and monitor” that no African country breaks its agreement to not develop its resources or clear forests to build factories, farms, or new cities? The Green colonial masters will be more than willing to perform that important task.

The carny assured them that they would get rich—the (as yet non-existent) Carbon Offset market could conceivably grow as high as $3 trillion, he said—all could be within Africa’s reach if they just saw the world the way he did. “The scale of investment opportunities is enormous,” he said, “$3 trillion in Africa this decade alone.”

Of course, this is all in the future, and, as he admitted right up front, even the absolute “bedrock” for climate finance—a firm commitment of all developed, carbon-producing countries to collectively commit a total of $100 billion per year to transfer to developing countries—has yet to be acted on, despite its being “on the table” for the last 26 years (since the first COP climate conference in 1996). “Securing that commitment in action,” he said, “is top priority” for the UK COP-26 presidency in Glasgow. It has been promised at every COP.

Carney is also careful to say that the carbon market is “voluntary” in the industrial countries, where there is significant opposition, since businesses in the industrial countries (rightly) see that buying “carbon offsets” is a huge tax on industrial output, as well as its propensity for becoming a huge den of speculation and inflation. But it is Carney himself who is leading the campaign for banks to deny credit to industries or farms if they emit too much carbon—unless they purchase carbon offsets. There is nothing “voluntary” when the economic policy of nations is turned over to the private banks, as is increasingly the case in the entire trans-Atlantic region.

Babies Die in Blackouts

All this is also a delicate sell, especially for Africa, and many of the developing world nations, who see the whole thing from an entirely different respective. Africa produces less than 4% of the world’s carbon, and thus looks at the entire hype to cut carbon production from the standpoint of, “What do you mean, we?” Carney wants the Africans to see this as their chance to “catch up,” to the industrialized world, but to build only the “green infrastructure,” (called “building resilience” against heavy rains and sea level rise which they claim will be caused by climate change, for example), and to achieve an improved standard of living, which they rightly deserve.

As the perceived intent of Climate Czar Carney’s “green stick” was beginning to settle into the flesh of the developing world, voices of dissent have started to be raised. In addition to notable statements from China and India, voices of Africans are also beginning to be heard. On March 4, W. Gyude Moore, a former Minister of Public Works in Liberia, now a Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development, wrote an opinion article in the widely-read U.S. publication The Hill, titled “Economic Growth in Africa Will Not Be Achieved by a Blanket Ban on Fossil Fuels.”

As Moore explained the African view to the U.S. tree huggers:

Africa has many of the poorest people in the world. For most African countries, the priority is economic growth—first in agriculture, where much of the population still works, and then in industry and services. Worries of an increased carbon footprint generated from economic growth are second to worries that growth may not happen at all... Africa’s first priority is to grow more food, composting and recycling can only go so far…. Large-scale, energy-intensive water control projects that rely on fossil fuels must be in the mix—just as they are in wealthy countries. [Emphasis added.]

Expanding on that theme Moore later told Quartz Africa, on March 12:

There’s this idea that because Africa is lacking in legacy infrastructure, it’s a good canvas to paint the energy future. But no African country has volunteered itself for that. [The continent] requires energy at a scale that renewables cannot meet. So, it seems immoral to restrict options for energy sources.

The Quartz article was titled, “Biden’s crusade against fossil fuels won’t work in Africa.”

On May 7, Ghana held a symposium on development, specifically focused on two of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, SDG-8, on economic growth; and SDG-9, on Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure. There, the Director-General of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC), Professor Benjamin Nyarko told the group (including many zero-growthers), that nuclear power would be a key factor in meeting not only the two stated SDG goals, but 9 of the 17 SDGs, including agriculture (food production and storage).

Industries drive the economy of every nation, and for industries to thrive, energy will be required, and not just any form of energy but a dense, stable, clean, and affordable energy, and that is where nuclear energy comes in. We are not saying other energy sources should be abandoned. What we are saying is that it should be an addition to Ghana’s energy mix just as South Korea and other developed countries have done and are enjoying the benefits.

In the days after Joe Biden’s Climate Summit on April 22-23, the imperial Atlantic Council held a “report-back” conference, featuring three speakers—Indian Jairam Ramesh, former chief negotiator at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, now a member of Parliament; Pakistani Dr. Syed Mohammed Ali, Adjunct Professor, Johns Hopkins University; and Nigerian Ayaan Adam, formerly with the UN’s Green Climate Fund, now Senior Director and CEO, AFC Capital—each of whom, despite the fact that they accepted the fake science that carbon drives climate-change, strongly objected to the intention of the Great Reset to force African countries to give up real development in obedience to the Green dictators. What they got was an earful of dissent. On the supposed “market-driven” transfer of wealth from developed countries to the developing world, both Ramesh and Ali voiced grave doubts. Former climate negotiator Ramesh:

I have been very suspicious of carbon markets, very skeptical of markets. I made this position very clear in Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun in 2010, and I have remained deeply suspicious of this.... I’m not even talking about the moral arguments involved [but] to expect that markets are going to generate the billions of dollars that are going to be required by countries [including in Africa]—to expect that the money for building resilience is going to come from the markets is, in my view, very, very grossly exaggerated.

This standpoint was later seconded by Pakistan’s Dr. Ali.

The third participant was Ayaan Adam, from the Nigerian African Finance Corp., a woman who, as she said in her presentation, had left her position at the Green Climate Fund over this very issue. She clarified for the host that Africa should not be expected to give up anything in the Race to Zero:

We are not emitters. The question for Africa [is] how do we grow?... It means [for example] putting the right drainage systems in all the roads. [So,] we need to move the definition of resilience. [Africa can grow,] but the term “greening” is not 100% in line with the reality of Africa.... Africa does not need to green—you need to green, so give me the money for my infrastructure, give me the money to industrialize, give me the money to grow my economy. This is the narrative of Africa that we need to fight for. [all emphasis in original]

Perhaps making the point most explicitly was Murefu Barasa, Managing Partner at an energy consulting firm in Nairobi, Kenya, who told Quartz on March 12:

There’s a lot of pressure from development agencies to say something like “no more fossil fuel projects, [but] babies die in blackouts. So, the trade-off of connecting the millions of [Africans] who don’t have power, versus doubling emissions, is well worthwhile.