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Leaked documents reveal the fossil fuel and meat producing countries lobbying against climate action

October 23, 2021

Leaked documents reveal the fossil fuel and meat producing countries lobbying against climate action

Files show how Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and OPEC have pressed to water down a key UN scientific report.

The revelations – which show how this small clutch of nations is attempting to water-down the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) major upcoming assessment of the world’s options for limiting global warming – come just days before the start of crucial international climate negotiations in Glasgow.

They come from a leak of tens of thousands of comments by governments, corporations, academics and others on the draft report of the IPCC’s ‘Working Group III’ – an international team of experts that is assessing humanity’s remaining options for curbing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or removing them from the atmosphere.

The documents passed to Unearthed show how fossil fuel producers including Australia, Saudi Arabia and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), are lobbying the IPCC – the world’s leading authority on climate change – to remove or weaken a key conclusion that the world needs to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.

In one comment seen by Unearthed, a senior Australian government official rejected the largely uncontroversial conclusion that one of the most important steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was to phase out coal-fired power stations.

Phrases like ‘the need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales’ should be eliminated

Meanwhile, Brazil and Argentina, two of the world’s biggest producers of beef and animal feed, have been pressing to delete messages about the climate benefits of promoting ‘plant-based’ diets and of curbing meat and dairy consumption.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Perfect Storm” – Global Energy Crisis Spreads To Brazil And India

October 4, 2021

“Perfect Storm” – Global Energy Crisis Spreads To Brazil And India

The global energy crisis plagues Europe and China and risks spreading to emerging market economies.

According to Bloomberg, severe droughts in Brazil have led to a collapse in hydroelectric generation and could force the South American country to ration power if power imports from Uruguay and Argentina aren’t increased.

Brazil is South America’s largest economy. It derives 60% of its power from hydroelectric sources, but La Nina has produced drought this year and dwindled water levels at reservoirs, making hydro less dependable.

Brazil, in many ways, has been ahead of the decarbonization of its power grid. When it comes to the energy transition, countries worldwide begin to embark on but discover that renewable power is not sustainable. Bear Traps Report’s Larry McDonald recently opinioned in his note to clients that the ESG push for power grids is contributing to the global energy crisis.

To mitigate a power grid collapse, the South American country is in the process of firing up natural gas generators to compensate for the loss of hydroelectric power. This would force the government to compete in a tight global natgas market that could raise prices higher.

“Brazil’s hydroelectric reservoirs in the southeast and central west, which represent almost three-fourths of the country’s installed capacity, have fallen to 17% amid the worst drought in 91 years,” Bloomberg said.

Earlier this year, the La Nina weather pattern brought drought to Brazil but plenty of water to north-eastern South America that filled up dams in Colombia to historically high levels. Another round of La Nina, which the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said has a 70% chance of forming this fall/winter, could delay the rainy season in Brazil and trigger power disruptions that would have drastic economic impacts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Frost Bites Brazilian Sugar Crop As Prices Zoom Higher

August 11, 2021

Frost Bites Brazilian Sugar Crop As Prices Zoom Higher

Brazil’s top producing regions for coffee, oranges, and sugar have been devastated by the worst weather in decades and could leave a lasting impact on prices, according to Bloomberg.

The South American country is one of the world’s leading coffee, sugar, and orange producers experienced a cold snap and drought this growing season in the Center-South area that has significantly damaged crops.

We have focused on coffee and orange markets and how prices are sloping higher after harvest output will likely come in well below average.

Now we’re setting our eyes on the sugar market, where losses in production, exacerbated by an already tight global supply, is fueling higher prices that may be sticking around for the next 18 months.

“We are getting into a boom cycle for the commodity prices,” said Pierre Santoul, chief executive officer in Brazil of France-based Tereos SCA. He said sugar prices are expected to remain elevated through early 2023.

Tereos’s sugar-cane crushing may fall to the lowest levels since the 2009-10 season, to 16.6 million metric tons, or about a 21% reduction from 20.9 million crushed in 2020-21. The nation’s sugar-cane industry group Unica said sugar content in cane fell in the country from a year ago, while cane yield dropped 18%.

Santoul said the extent of the devastation is still unknown. He said mills had increased harvesting to avoid further cane deterioration. He added that if the weather improves in October and rains relieve droughts, the dismal scenario may slightly improve.

Weather disruptions in Brazil mean higher prices for coffee, oranges, and or sugar. Since most of these farm goods are exported, and shipping costs are at record highs, it’s only a matter of time before US wholesalers pass along the costs to consumers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Resistance is Not Futile – Does Our Entire Way of Life Depends on It?

August 7, 2021

Resistance is Not Futile – Does Our Entire Way of Life Depends on It?

I find it amazing how stupid people can be. Those claiming if everyone just got vaccinated, we would all go back to normal. I know there were Jews in Germany who left early looking at the trend that was emerging and made it to the United States. They told me people were ridiculing them when they left saying it would all blow over and go back to normal. These types of people do not look at what is going on in any depth. They take whatever is said at face value and do not look at motives or connect the dots.

In Australia, the number of people is rising up. The police in Australia are still violating human rights and supporting the decline and fall of Australia as it descends into tyranny. The protest has erupted again in Melbourne and until the police stop enforcing orders that are inconsistent with international law, there is no hope for Australia. It continues to slide toward an economic apocalypse. They are 110% on board with the Great Reset and those behind the curtain view that if they can end mining and resources in Australia, they will save the planet and bring about the Great Reset.

The TWO primary countries they want to totally suppress are Australia and Brazil.

Worst Drought in 91 Years Turns Brazil Into Hot Spot for LNG

June 6, 2021

Worst Drought in 91 Years Turns Brazil Into Hot Spot for LNG

State-run oil company is seeking liquefied natural gas cargoes
Water crisis curbs hydropower supplies across South America

As hydropower output declines, South America’s most populous nation is turning to the super-chilled fuel to keep lights on for its 212 million people. Brazil has already imported a record number of LNG cargoes just from the U.S. this year while state-run oil company Petrobras SA is tapping the spot market for another four.

The drought comes as the nation — which boosted its ability to import LNG in 2014 to avoid blackouts during soccer’s World Cup — is facing declining gas production from major supplier Bolivia. The conditions are also affecting other countries in South America, with Chile seeking to buy LNG and traders speculating Argentina could be next.

Brazil's Thermal Power Rises as Hydro Slides

“South America is running out of hydropower because of dry weather, and I wouldn’t be surprised if buyers all across the region were buying more LNG,” said Henning Gloystein, global director of energy and natural resources at consultants Eurasia Group. “Besides Southeast Asia and India, South America is a growth area for gas demand.”

Hydropower currently accounts for about 70% of Brazil’s electricity mix, and the lack of rainfall has forced the country to import 34 U.S. LNG cargoes over the past six months to bridge the power-supply gap, shipping data compiled by Bloomberg show. That eclipses the 17 sent to Chile and four to Mexico, which has long been the top buyer of U.S. LNG in the Western Hemisphere. Brazilian imports are approaching levels typically seen only from buyers in Asia and Europe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

La Nina Turbocharges Drought In Brazil Putting World’s Coffee, Sugar, & Oranges At Risk

May 19, 2021

La Nina Turbocharges Drought In Brazil Putting World’s Coffee, Sugar, & Oranges At Risk

Global crop and food prices are skyrocketing to multi-year highs, and the culprit could be due to La Nina, a weather pattern characterized by the cooling of the equatorial Pacific and triggers atmospheric shifts that cause droughts in some regions of the world and wetter conditions in others. The prospect of a severe drought in the US has already be outlined in previous notes. Now it appears the worst drought in 20 years has struck agricultural rich Brazil.

Over the last month, Brazil has been faced with drought during its traditional rainy season.

“Soils are parched, and river levels are low in the nation’s Center-South region, a powerhouse of agricultural output. The drought is so severe that farmers are worried they’ll run out of the water reserves that help keep crops alive over the next several months, the country’s dry season,” said Bloomberg.

The cost of this year’s drought could severely impact coffee, sugar, and orange crop yields.

Coffee farmer Mauricio Pinheiro, 59, began irrigating his arabica-coffee crops in March, more than two months earlier than usual after his 131-acre farm received only half the rain it needed. He’s using so much water that his wells are running dry.

“My irrigation reservoir is drying up now — that usually happens in August,” said Pinheiro, who resides in Pedregulho in the Alta Mogiana region, in Sao Paulo state. “I’m concerned about running out of water in the coming months.”

One of the worst droughts to hit the country in decades is coming at a time when agricultural prices have rallied to multi-year highs, fanning fears of food inflation.

As much as the Federal Reserve is hoping for “transitory” inflation – La Nina altering weather patterns could exacerbate food inflation and make the problem global and last for years.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Spiking Inflation, Rate Hikes, and Debt Defaults in Latin America

May 16, 2021

Spiking Inflation, Rate Hikes, and Debt Defaults in Latin America

Mexico and Brazil, having seen the economic destruction that high inflation can wreak, don’t want to see it again.

Latin America will soon be hit by a wave of business bankruptcies and defaults, according to Jesús Urdangaray López, the CEO of CESCE, Spain’s biggest provider of export finance and insurance. CESCE insures companies, mainly from Spain, against the risk of their customers not paying due to bankruptcy or insolvency. It also manages export credit insurance on behalf of the Spanish State.

CESCE’s biggest clients are large Spanish companies with big operations in Latin America. For many of those companies, including Spain’s two largest banks, Grupo Santander and BBVA, Latin America is its biggest market. CESCE’s three biggest shareholders are the Spanish State and, yes, Spain’s two largest banks, Grupo Santander and BBVA.

BBVA, which is heavily invested in Argentina, warned about the worsening situation in the country. If Argentina’s economy continues its inflationary spiral, it could end up affecting BBVA’s overall performance and financial health, the Spanish bank said.

Argentina’s government is once again trying to restructure its foreign-currency debt with the IMF, having already defaulted on the debt once since the virus crisis began.

Ecuador was first to default on its foreign currency debt, followed by Argentina, then Surinam, Belize, and Surinam twice more — six sovereign defaults so far in 13 months.

Latin America has been hard hit by the virus crisis. But the region’s cash-strapped governments with weak currencies and surging inflation cannot afford to provide the sort of financial support programs being rolled out in more advanced economies. Fiscal response has added just 28 cents of extra deficit spending for every dollar of lost output…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unwelcome Inflation Heats Up in Mexico, Brazil, and as Always in Argentina

April 17, 2021

Unwelcome Inflation Heats Up in Mexico, Brazil, and as Always in Argentina

Brazil’s central bank struck back with shock-and-awe rate hike. Mexico’s central bank faces tough spot after big hit to economy. Argentina’s inflation exceeds 42%.

Around the world, there has been massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, an unprecedented growth in government-guaranteed lending, an explosion in the broad money supply, coupled with low inventories, supply chain shocks, rising shipping costs, and surging demand for certain commodities and consumer goods in developed countries, particularly the US. Companies are able to raise prices and pass on higher costs without triggering a buyers strike as the inflationary mindset has kicked in.

Many emerging economies are also having to contend with the additional inflationary impact of weaker domestic currencies. They include Mexico, where consumer prices rose to 4.7% in March — their highest level since December 2018. Prices are now firmly above the Bank of Mexico’s target inflation rate of 3%, with a one percentage point tolerance threshold above and below that level. In March alone, consumer prices grew 0.8%:

The items that saw the biggest month-on-month price increases were domestic LP gas (5.2%), low-octane gasoline (6%), and staple foods such as eggs (8%).

Surging commodities prices are being passed on to retail products. The price of corn reached $5.68 per bushel in March, up 74% from a year ago. Since last June, the price of this essential grain, for both human and livestock consumption, has risen every month. With consequences: The price of corn tortilla, Mexico’s most important staple food, rose by almost 3% in March from February.

Last year Mexico’s economy suffered its biggest contraction (8.5%) since the worst year of the Great Depression, 1932. It also appears to have contracted in the first quarter of 2021. But prices continue to rise, leaving the Bank of Mexico little choice but to abandon its plan to cut interest rates this month.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Empire’s War On Oppositional Journalism Continues To Escalate

January 24, 2020

The Empire’s War On Oppositional Journalism Continues To Escalate

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has been charged by the Bolsonaro government in Brazil with the same prosecutorial angle used by the US to target WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Per The New York Times:

Citing intercepted messages between Mr. Greenwald and the hackers, prosecutors say the journalist played a “clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime.”
For instance, prosecutors contend that Mr. Greenwald encouraged the hackers to delete archives that had already been shared with The Intercept Brasil, in order to cover their tracks.
Prosecutors also say that Mr. Greenwald was communicating with the hackers while they were actively monitoring private chats on Telegram, a messaging app. The complaint charged six other individuals, including four who were detained last year in connection with the cellphone hacking.

This argument is essentially indistinguishable from the argument currently being used by the Trump administration in charging Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. The US Department of Justice alleges that Assange attempted to provide Private Manning with advice and assistance in covering her tracks while leaking documents she already had access to, therefore making Assange party to a conspiracy against the United States.

It is not surprising that Brazil is advancing the same war on journalism we’ve been seeing in the US, UK, Australia and France. With the election of the overtly fascist Jair Bolsonaro in October 2018 (an election whose corrupt foundations were exposed by Greenwald’s reporting with The Intercept Brasil), the Brazilian government moved into full alignment with the the US-centralized empire, which was why his inauguration was enthusiastically celebrated by characters like Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Benjamin Netanyahu.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

he New Age of Protest

October 7, 2019

The New Age of Protest

Photograph Source: Marcus Coblyn – CC BY 2.0

Led by young people, climate strikers blocked traffic on two mornings at the end of last month in Washington, DC. On the first day, protestors chained themselves to a boat three blocks from the White House, and 32 activists were arrested. On the second day, activists targeted the EPA and Trump International Hotel. It was a not-so-subtle suggestion to commuters stuck in their cars on those mornings to think more favorably about public transportation or telecommuting. It was also a potent reminder, as Congress remains polarized on so many issues, that some paralysis is healthy in the nation’s capital.

The DC protests were part of a global climate strike that involved an estimated 6.6 million people. In New Zealand, 3.5 percent of the population participated. Melbourne, Berlin, and London each had rallies of 100,000 people. In Seattle, over a thousand workers walked out of Amazon headquarters, demanding that the company reduce its carbon emissions to zero.

It wasn’t just the children of the privileged in the industrialized world who were out on the streets. Protests took place in 125 countries and 1,600 cities, including 15 cities in the Philippines, throughout India, and all over Africa.

The global climate strike is just the latest mass protest this year. Demonstrations have roiled Hong Kong since the beginning of the summer. Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets in Moscow through the fall to protest restrictions on local elections. Thousands of Brazilians thronged major cities to condemn their president’s handling of the Amazon fires, and the same outrage prompted people to gather with placards in front of Brazilian embassies all over the world. Protests against Venezuela’s leadership that broke out on January 1 have recently dwindled even as demonstrations to remove Haiti’s president have heated up and security forces have cracked down on Iraqis protesting the corruption and inefficiency of their government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The open Amazon and its enemies: a call for action and optimism

August 31, 2019

The open Amazon and its enemies: a call for action and optimism

The Amazon, now on fire, has become the central political and geopolitical hot spot for humanity’s right to its own future. Optimism is the gasoline that must feed the fight.

Tree in the Brazilian rainforest | Photo: Pablo Albarenga, all rights reserved.

June and July have been the hottest months on record in the Western Hemisphere as the climate crisis escalates. This summer, the ice in Greenland has been melting at an unseen rate under an unprecedented heat wave. Droughts and wildfires are on the rise ravaging significant forest surfaces, and the role of the rainforest as a carbon dioxide absorber is being jeopardized by a substantial acceleration in deforestation efforts.

The Amazon basin, which contains 40% of the world’s rainforest, plays a very complex yet central role as a buffer of climate change. It functions as a cooler of the atmosphere through moisture evaporation and it produces its own rainfall in the dry season while also capturing carbon and acting as the Earth’s lungs.

Aerial view of the Amazon River near Manaus, Brazil, at dawn. | Photo: Pablo Albarenga. All Rights Reserved

But lately, the Amazon’s vulnerability has become apparent, as fires have been spreading at an unprecedented rate. As Leonardo DiCaprio put it to his 34 million Instagram followers in a post: “the lungs of the Earth are in flames.” Data released by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research shows that from January to July, 4.6 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon went ablaze, a 62 percent increase over last year. We are facing a full scale ecocide case here.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Amazon Inferno

August 30, 2019

The Amazon Inferno

*Fires burning the southern region of the Brazilian state of Para. INPE, Brazil, August 2019. Courtesy Wikipedia.*

One of the lasting highlights of my teaching at the University of New Orleans in 1991-1992 was my travel to Brazil in January 1992 for a conference on climate change. This was a rehearsal for the June 1992 Earth Summit on Climate Change in Rio.

My conference took place in Fortaleza, a beautiful town in the state of Ceara in the northeast of Brazil. The conference passed quickly with meaningless speeches while the conference was besieged by indigenous people pleading unsuccessfully for a hearing.

However, I enjoyed a tour of the semi-arid countryside of Ceara. I sensed more than dryness and desert. I saw fragments of the Brazilian Atlantic forest. These moist woodlands are full of golden tall trees, marshes teeming with life, bleeding streams carrying away the red soil. Yet perpetual danger follows the trees, plants and animals. The loggers who devastated the Atlantic forest for more than 500 years keep coming, leaving a trail of plunder after them.

The asphalt road of our tour sliced through a flat region of small trees, bushes, goats and cattle grazing ranchland, and immense cashew plantations, producing Ceara’s number one cash crop.

We stopped in Caninde, a rural town celebrating St Francis, the ecology saint of the Catholic Church. Once in the St. Francis Cathedral, my eyes were immediately glued to banners.

The message in these colorful cloth banners was not what one would see in a church in North America. Here the burning issue was not hell or paradise or the ten commandments but liberation—the liberation of peasants from oppression. One banner said that the organization of the workers was terribly important for their emancipation; and another proclaimed that the concentration of wealth was the root of evil.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rainforest on Fire

August 27, 2019

RAINFOREST ON FIRE

On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe

THE RIVER BASIN at the center of Latin America called the Amazon is roughly the size of Australia. Created at the beginning of the world by a smashing of tectonic plates, it was the cradle of inland seas and continental lakes. For the last several million years, it has been blanketed by a teeming tropical biome of 400 billion trees and vegetation so dense and heavy with water, it exhales a fifth of Earth’s oxygen, stores centuries of carbon, and deflects and consumes an unknown but significant amount of solar heat. Twenty percent of the world’s fresh water cycles through its rivers, plants, soils, and air. This moisture fuels and regulates multiple planet-scale systems, including the production of “rivers in the air” by evapotranspiration, a ceaseless churning flux in which the forest breathes its water into great hemispheric conveyer belts that carry it as far as the breadbaskets of Argentina and the American Midwest, where it is released as rain.

In the last half-century, about one-fifth of this forest, or some 300,000 square miles, has been cut and burned in Brazil, whose borders contain almost two-thirds of the Amazon basin. This is an area larger than Texas, the U.S. state that Brazil’s denuded lands most resemble, with their post-forest landscapes of silent sunbaked pasture, bean fields, and evangelical churches. This epochal deforestation — matched by harder to quantify but similar levels of forest degradation and fragmentation — has caused measurable disruptions to regional climates and rainfall. It has set loose so much stored carbon that it has negated the forest’s benefit as a carbon sink, the world’s largest after the oceans.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why I Remain Hopeful When Things Look Grim

October 31, 2018

Why I Remain Hopeful When Things Look Grim

Hi. I’m sorry to my regular readers for not writing any articles in the last couple of days; I’ve just been staring transfixed at the fallout from the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the words which normally come bubbling up on their own just haven’t been there for me.

Bolsonaro is a fascist. I mean that in a very real, literal and non-alarmist way. I’ve seen a lot of conservatives in both the US and Australia defending him as just another right wing nationalist like Donald Trump, which is partly due to the fact that he has been straightforwardly labeled the “Trump of the tropics” and the “Brazilian Donald Trump” by the English-speaking mass media, and partly due to the fact that the political left has been warning of the danger Bolsonaro poses using the exact same language they used to warn about Trump.

So in a way it’s understandable that the two men would be lumped into the same group in public perception. The right (the MAGA hat-wearing “Build the wall” right, not the tiki torch-waving “Pinochet did nothing wrong” right) would probably mostly object to Trump calling for a civil war in America in which tens of thousands of Americans would be rounded up and murdered, advocating the physical assault of homosexuals in the street, openly proclaiming that he wants America to be a dictatorship etc, but these are all things Bolsonaro has publicly spoken in favor of. But because they’ve been hearing him described using the exact same labels and dire warnings that were hyperbolically applied to Donald Trump, who minus the rhetoric and hysteria has turned out to be a fairly conventional Republican president, conservatives assume Bolsonaro is fine. All the most severe linguistic tools were used up against Trump, so there were none left in the toolbox for Bolsonaro.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Consequences of System Failure

October 30, 2018

The Consequences of System Failure

In short, every major political institution has been increasingly discredited as Brazil has spiraled deeper and deeper into a dark void. And from the abyss emerged a former army captain and six-term congressman from Rio de Janeiro, Jair Bolsonaro, with the slogan “Brazil above everything, God above everyone,” and promises to fix everything with hardline tactics.

– From today’s Intercept article: Jair Bolsonaro Is Elected President of Brazil. Read His Extremist, Far-Right Positions in His Own Words.

It’s been only a little over two years since the people of Great Britain surprised the world by voting to leave the European Union. Just a few months later, this nascent trend of political shock continued with the election of Donald Trump.

This tectonic shift toward political upheaval has continued to spread throughout much of the world, with Italy and Brazil being two more recent examples. That something very major and very global is happening is undeniable at this point, yet everyone seems to have their own pet reasons for why it’s occurring. I continue to stick to the same thesis I’ve had for nearly a decade, which is that the dominant global economic/financial paradigm led and managed by the U.S. has failed and is experiencing a slow, painful and dangerous death.

This reality was temporarily papered over by the shady and extremely corrupt financial bailouts of a decade ago. An event that focused all government resources on rescuing the already rich and powerful, while keeping bank executives out of prison.

They claim they “prevented another Great Depression.”
In reality, they just bailed themselves out and created the wild political environment we have today.

2:01 PM – Oct 29, 2018

Ten years ago, all of America’s resources were irresponsibly and aggressively marshaled toward the sole purpose of resuscitating a dead system and keeping it on life support.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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