It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Australia’s emissions climbed in Coalition’s final year as transport and fossil fuels wiped out gains during Covid
New data shows carbon pollution rose 0.8% in 2021 as manufacturing, agriculture and gas bounced back from pandemic lockdowns
Australia produced 488m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2021 as the country wound back Covid-19 lockdowns without taking significant steps to maintain a fall in carbon pollution recorded during the pandemic.
National emissions rose 0.8% – 4.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide – in the final full year of the federal Coalition government, according to government data released on Monday.
While pollution from electricity generation continued to drop due to an increase in renewable energy and reduction in coal power, this decrease was effectively cancelled out as emissions from transport, manufacturing and fossil fuel developments – notably the gas industry – bounced back. Greenhouse emissions from Australia’s coalmines could be twice as high as official figures say
Emissions were also up from agriculture as the recovery from drought continued.
Officials said compared with 2005 levels – the benchmark the Australian government uses in its international climate commitments under the Paris agreement – emissions were down 21.4%.
But nearly all of this cut was due to a dramatic drop in the emissions from what is known as “land use, land use change and forestry” between 2006 and 2016. Land use emissions were estimated to have fallen dramatically in that period due to changes in state land-clearing laws, a decline in native forestry and forest regeneration in some semi-arid areas.
If the change in land use and forestry emissions is excluded, pollution from the rest of the Australian economy – including the country’s substantial fossil fuel industries – has dipped by only 1.6% since 2005.
The Albanese government’s target of a 43% cut compared with 2005 levels by 2030 includes all parts of the economy, including land use and forestry.
Percentage change in emissions by sector.
The new climate change minister, Chris Bowen, said the latest quarterly data showed the Coalition had relied on Covid and drought to misleadingly claim emissions had reduced in recent years. He said the previous government had “caps off its record of denial and delay by increasing emissions on the way out”. “Their failure to deliver proper climate policy over a decade undermines the great strides in emissions reduction made through household solar, the renewable energy target and state-based renewable schemes in the electricity sector over recent years,” he said. “Good climate and energy policy is good economic policy – it doesn’t rely on recession and drought for short-term and temporary emissions reduction.”
Australia’s quarterly emissions by source.
The Coalition’s climate change spokesman, Ted O’Brien, was asked for his response.
The greenhouse gas inventory update for the December quarter shows:
Total national emissions for the year were estimated to be 488m tonnes.
The rise of solar power and a cut in coal generation helped push emissions from electricity down 4.2% (7m tonnes) compared with the previous year.
Pollution from transport was up by 4% (3.5m tonnes) as people spent less time in lockdowns and more time in their cars.
Other sectors to see emissions bounce back were heavy industry including manufacturing (3.3%, 3.3m tonnes), agriculture (4.2%, 3.1m tonnes) and fugitive emissions resulting from venting and flaring at oil and gas sites (1.8%, 0.9 m tonnes). Foetus fronts legal challenge over emissions in South Korea
Looking at the change since 2005, easily the biggest shift in emissions was from land use and forestry, which is estimated to be down more than 140%. Where the sector used to release 90m tonnes, it is now estimated to be a carbon sink, drawing down nearly 40m tonnes from the atmosphere.
This estimate is not universally accepted: an analysis of Queensland data suggested forests in that state were being cleared at almost twice the rate reflected in national greenhouse accounts.Remove changes in land use and forestry from the national greenhouse accounts and the overall change across the fossil fuel economy is small. Electricity emissions dropped nearly 19%, but pollution from other “stationary energy” facilities – essentially heavy industry – were up nearly 26%.
Percentage change in emissions by sector. Transport emissions were up 10% compared in 2005 last year, but were still below their peak due to Covid lockdowns and are likely to increase further in 2022. The same applies to fugitive emissions from fossil fuel mines, which were 18% higher than in 2005 but still not back at 2019 levels.Australia’s quarterly emissions by source.
Bowen said Labor’s 2030 target and commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050 would be underpinned by its “powering Australia” plan. It includes a $20bn fund to accelerate the rollout of renewable energy, a gradual reduction in industrial emissions using the Coalition’s “safeguard mechanism” and reducing taxes on electric vehicles.
Scientific estimates have suggested Australia should be cutting emissions by more than 50% by 2030 to play its part in meeting the goals of the Paris climate agreement.
Tim Baxter, from the Climate Council, said the country needed ambitious policy and concrete measures to reduce the burning of coal, oil and gas.
“Through late 2021 the best the former federal government could manage was bluff and bluster, so it’s hardly surprising emissions sprung back up as Covid lockdowns eased,” he said.
“We need to urgently, permanently and drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions to protect Australian lives, livelihoods and the places we cherish.”
Reporter’s Notebook: Women’s invisibility in climate stories erase their narratives. The result is bad policy
A woman farmer in Maharashtra harvests cotton in the field. (Photo/CR Shelare)
Ralegaon is a common stop for journalists reporting on India’s farmer suicide crisis. Rising temperatures and long droughts have hit this rural part of central India particularly hard, causing cotton crops — the lifeblood of the region — to fail, driving thousands of farmers in the region to death by suicide. Their deaths have become a major story in India and abroad.
When I met social worker and farmer Madhuri Khadse during my own reporting trip to Ralegaon last year, I asked if any journalists had come to write about women farmers before me.
“No,” she said. “But they should have. I have not seen any headlines about women farmers or their problems. There is nothing about them [in the news].”
Khadse runs the nonprofit Prerna Gram Vikas Sanstha, which works primarily with women farmers in the area — she knew that they too were being hit hard by the climate crisis. This should have been a no-brainer for us journalists as well: according to official government statistics, 75.7% of rural women in India are engaged in agriculture. But in article after article, farmers are often exclusively portrayed as men. With the changing climate hitting the agriculture sector hard, women’s invisibility in media coverage leaves their distress unacknowledged. That’s why it was a relief to see the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) state that women are especially vulnerable to climate change, and that it is urgent to integrate women’s perspectives in order to address the crisis.
We know that climate change affects women differently from men. One impact is an increase in invisible and unpaid labor such as care work. And in much of the developing world, the climate crisis is increasing internal migration.
“What we see is that often it is men who are moving, with women left to handle unproductive farms and livestock while also undertaking all care work from older parents or young children,” said Chandni Singh, a senior researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) and a lead author of the IPCC report. This increased burden, she said, is poorly captured in our solutions to climate change.
Excluding women’s voices leads to poor policy decisions: “Adaptation actions do not automatically have positive outcomes for gender equality,” saidAnjal Prakash, research director at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and another lead author of the IPCC report. A 2021 report commissioned by Internews, a media non-profit, found not only that fewer women than men appear in environmental stories in Asian media, but that when women did appear they tended to be reduced to victim status, rather than offering solutions.
This is why it’s so refreshing when journalists break the mold to present a feminist gaze on climate. “I’m really tired of seeing male experts, just giving solutions,” journalist and filmmaker Neelima Vallangi told me. One of the storylines in her documentary, The Weight of Water, tracks the impact of Himalayan springs drying up on local communities and sheds light on the rise of uterine prolapse among women who have to travel further and further to bring back heavy loads of water. The film is unassuming in its presentation of the female point of view, but I was deeply moved — it made me realize just how rare it is to see women at the center of climate narratives. This is exactly the type of work we need to see more of; it is exactly the type of work that we aspire to do at The Fuller Project. In the coming months, I’ll be putting out several stories which look at the impact of climate change on women. Stay tuned for a look at the hidden toll of India’s heatwaves on women.
As heat waves sweep South Asia, they take a hidden toll on women
South Asia has been suffering an unprecedented heat wave, with March 2022 the hottest on record in India.
There is growing evidence that rising heat is disproportionately affecting women — one study in India found they were significantly more likely than men to die in a heat wave.
Heat waves also increase women’s care burden: 60% of women home-based workers surveyed in low-income housing across Bangladesh, India and Nepal reported a rise in unpaid labor during heat waves and floods.
Aliya Shakir Sheikh works from her home in Mumbai’s Shivaji Nagar slum. This summer she was pregnant and the heat left her anxious and too drained to work on most days, she says. (Shankar Menon for The Fuller Project)
Each night, Aliya Shakir Sheikh keeps one eye fixed on her toddler and three-day-old baby. At the same time, she struggles to stay focused on work, painstakingly sticking tiny, shiny stones onto embroidered cloth by hand. Time is of the essence: the unbearable heat has already made her lose precious hours.
Sheikh makes 5 rupees, or 6 cents, for each piece of cloth. Before the summer, she was completing 50 on a good day and earning up to $3 a day, toiling away in a windowless one-room home in Shivaji Nagar, a slum area in Mumbai. Now, at the tail end of one of the hottest summers recorded in Indian history, she says she can barely muster the energy to finish four in a day — not enough to buy the food she needs.
By the time she breastfed her baby later that afternoon, Sheikh still hadn’t eaten all day.
“I’ve felt very anxious this summer, which is not something I’ve felt before,” she says.
Her experience is not an isolated one. A January 2022 report linked climate change to a decline in productivity among home-based women workers, like Sheikh, living in slums across South Asia. The report, produced by HomeNet South Asia, a regional network of home-based worker organizations, found that heat waves were the most significant factor behind 43% of the women surveyed reporting a loss of cash incomes, and 41% reporting reduced productivity.
The HomeNet report also found that the heat resulted in a daily increase of over two hours of caregiving and other household work for the women, which ate further into their work time. Meanwhile, a study of excess deaths during a 2010 heat wave in Ahmedabad found significantly more women than men had died.
This growing body of evidence challenges common preconceptions that men are affected worse by heat waves because they do more work outdoors.
Shalini Sinha, India representative for WIEGO, a global research network focused on improving conditions for women in the informal economy, says that not only do women work outdoors as street vendors, waste pickers, or brick-kiln workers, but that they are also uniquely vulnerable as home-based workers — isolated in pressure-cooker environments inside poorly-ventilated asbestos, tin, or concrete homes that trap heat and can be just as bad, or worse, than outdoor conditions.
“Climate change is still relatively new and home-based workers are invisible, so this conversation has only recently come together,” says Sinha, highlighting the need for more data-based research on the topic. “And at first it was an environmentally-led articulation of the problem, with climate change. Only recently have we seen livelihoods come into the equation, and even more recently that informal livelihoods are being factored in.” Double blow
The Asia-Pacific region is home to 65% of the world’s home-based workers. These are workers who cook from home, make clothes from home or do similar odd jobs. In South Asia, 24% of all female employment is home-based as opposed to 6% for men, according to HomeNet South Asia.
India alone is estimated to have around 42 million home-based workers, most of them women, but the real figures could be higher. Many of them juggle household chores and caring for children and older relatives and earning income. For them, heat waves have dealt a cruel double blow, affecting both their health and productivity.
As well as heat exhaustion and heat stroke, heat waves can also cause cramps, headaches, lethargy and weakness, severe dehydration and blood clots, according to the World Health Organization.
Najmunnisa Ali Hasan Ansari says she and her four children have struggled to sleep through the night this summer because of the record breaking heat. (Shankar Menon for The Fuller Project)
Cooking gas is too expensive, so Najmunnisa Ali Hasan Ansari cooks for her family over a wood fire, pushing the indoor temperature even higher. Like Sheikh, she too works from home, making ends meet performing small sewing jobs in a furnace-like room with no toilet or running water. When she goes outside, it’s often to carry back heavy loads of water to refill the large plastic drum that serves as her family’s water supply.
To escape the indoor heat, the 30-year-old and her four children gather near the large openings in their wall that serve as entrances and exits to their one-room home in Shivaji Nagar. But even this offers little relief from the sweltering conditions, exacerbated by Shivaji Nagar’s location next to Mumbai’s main garbage dump. The densely packed settlement is filled with the stench of the dump, which frequently catches fire, making the heat even worse.
Her productivity dips when the heat rises, she says. The loss of income during this heat wave is a major setback; the cooling monsoon rains that will follow will bring no relief, because her home will flood.
“I get very little work in the summers. When it starts raining, my home will leak. I won’t be able to work much then either. What will I eat? What will I feed my children?” Ansari asks.
Ansari and Sheikh both earn a living by working on embroidered pieces of cloth and sticking shiny stones on them to make them appear attractive. For this task that the entire family is involved in, they are paid around 6 cents per piece of cloth.
(Shankar Menon for The Fuller Project)
The Asia-Pacific region is home to 65% of the world’s home-based workers. These are workers who cook from home, make clothes from home or do similar odd jobs. In South Asia, 24% of all female employment is home-based as opposed to 6% for men, according to a HomeNet South Asia report.
India alone is estimated to have around 42 million home-based workers, most of them women, but the real figures could be higher. Many of them juggle household chores and caring for children and older relatives and earning income. For them, heat waves have dealt a cruel double blow, affecting both their health and productivity.
Gulrez Shah Azhar, a researcher involved with the Ahmedabad study who also helped draw up India’s first heat action plan, says the impact of indoor heat on women in particular is amplified by other factors, from the clothes they wear to a lack of access to sanitation facilities.
The best thing to do in a heat wave is to drink lots of water, says Azhar, but women with no access to an indoor toilet are often reluctant to do that. “And that is deadly in summers,” he says.
As well as heat exhaustion and heat stroke, heat waves can also cause cramps, headaches, lethargy and weakness, severe dehydration and blood clots, according to the World Health Organization. As climate change causes temperatures to rise, there is growing fear that regions like South Asia with high heat and high humidity could become unlivable.
This March was India’s hottest since the meteorological department began tracking temperatures 122 years ago. April brought another heat wave to large swathes of Pakistan, India and Nepal. Then May, the hottest summer month in the region, saw over three dozen cities and small towns across India record temperatures over 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) for several days.
Moetasim Ashfaq, a computational climate scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, says the evidence is clear that such events are set to become more intense and more frequent. Currently the planet is 1.1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than in the pre-industrial era. Another half a degree of warming would make deadly heat waves a routine phenomenon across South Asia.
“That is alarming for this region, because we expect this half a degree warming could happen within the next 20 years,” Ashfaq says.
“We keep moving in and out of the house when it gets too hot,” says Ansari. “But there is relief neither outside nor inside. This is how it is.”
A rise in unpaid labor
AAhmadi Faruqui has seen her workload increase as two of her four children fell ill during the heat wave this summer. (Shankar Menon for The Fuller Project)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the United Nations body set up to assess climate science — said in its latest report that factors like gender, ethnicity and poverty combine to worsen the impact of climate change. Women like Ansari and Sheikh, who live in Muslim communities like Shivaji Nagar that are among India’s poorest and most marginalized, will be among those hardest hit.
As home-based workers, Sheikh and Ansari belong to yet another marginalized category. The International Labor Organization estimates that 57% of the world’s 260 million home-based workers are women, with many of them also taking on more unpaid labor, such as caring for their families, than men do.
Ahmadi Faruqui, a mother of four who runs an informal nursery out of her home in Shivaji Nagar, was already looking after her husband and a daughter, both of whom suffer from chronic health conditions that require frequent visits to the doctor. Then two of her other children began suffering from heat rash.
Women like her, with caregiving responsibilities, are faced with a difficult choice: work into the night, or take a hit on their incomes.
“We work less in the summer,” she says. “We stop work in the afternoon and rest for 2-3 hours. We work again in the evenings when the temperature cools down. That affects our income.”
“The moment there is an illness in the family, the burden is definitely on the woman,” says Poornima Nair, director of health and disability at Apnalaya, a Mumbai-based non-profit which provides support to the urban poor and works with the community in Shivaji Nagar. Almost 60% of the women surveyed for the HomeNet report said their daily care workload had increased by more than two hours due to heat and flooding.
Dharmistha Chauhan, the lead researcher for the report, says that while many practitioners assume climate change will increase the care burden for women, there is little actionable data on the topic. “How the caregiving roles increase, in which areas it will increase more, which strata of women it will affect more, that kind of research and data is missing,” Chauhan says. “And because the data is missing, the action on that never happens.”
Azhar, the researcher involved in drawing up India’s heat action plan, says there needs to be immediate action on multiple levels: individual, city, national and international. From creating awareness on an individual level about drinking more water during a heat wave and building cities with more shade, to investing more in national public healthcare systems and pushing to reduce global carbon emissions, the response needs to be wide-ranging and ambitious.
In the absence of these solutions, the women of Shivaji Nagar are coping however they can. When asked what she compromises on when her income falls, Faruqui says she and her younger daughter go without milk.
“Instead of buying a liter (about two pints) of milk every day, we buy half a liter. We give milk to each of our children on alternate days, but mostly the girls get left behind,” she says. “We can’t compromise on the medicines, so we compromise on the milk.”
Additional reporting by Maher Sattar.
Why is a South Korean fringe group backing Japan's position on WWII 'comfort women'?
Lee Yong-soo, a former "comfort woman" looks at a statue that symbolises "comfort women" at the Seoul Comfort Women Memorial in Seoul, South Korea, on June 29, 2021.
Reuters
They have been accused of being traitors, found guilty of defamation by courts, threatened online countless times and even assaulted in the street, but a group of South Korean activists and academics refuse to give in to the mainstream belief in their homeland on the issue of "comfort women".
The group's position runs contrary to the UN Special Rapporteur's 1996 report on violence against women.
In that, Radhika Coomaraswamy defined the comfort women system as sexual slavery and urged the Japanese government — which has often called the women prostitutes, not sex slaves — to acknowledge its legal responsibility and to pay compensation to the victims, who were mainly Korean but were also from the Philippines, China and other East Asian countries.
Nevertheless, the End Comfort Women Fraud civic organisation has united several smaller groups that perceive Korea's history differently, including the Free Youth League, the Korean Society for Modern and Contemporary History and the National Enlightenment Movement Headquarters.
PHOTO: Reuters
Around 40 people make up the core of the organisation, drawn from academia, politics and activism.
And although the group is widely derided in domestic media as being ultra-rightist and revisionist, its members prefer to describe themselves as conservative.
Four of its campaigners are travelling from South Korea to Germany for weekend talks with Berlin city elders about a statue of a comfort woman unveiled in the Mitte district in September 2020.
They want to explain their view that information on a panel next to the statue is incorrect and perpetuates a one-sided interpretation they say is not supported by historic evidence, and they also want the statue removed.
However, an offer to meet representatives of Korea Verband, the civic group in Berlin that arranged for the statue to go on public display, has already been rebuffed, the group said, while German police have informed them they are likely to face a fierce reception in the city.
A man dressed as an imperial army soldier sits near the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo in August 2018, on the 73rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945. PHOTO: Reuters
Nevertheless, the activists insist that unless South Korea can move on from the colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula a century ago, then the nation's reputation and security are in jeopardy.
"The Mitte district originally approved a statue that would symbolise victims of war, in particular women who were victims of sexual violence in wartime, but when the statue was unveiled the inscription on a panel was very different," said Kim Byung-heon, director of the Korean History Textbook Research Institute.
The activists had opposed the original concept of erecting statues of comfort women.
They also say the description accompanying the statue changed from an earlier proposal for a broad condemnation of violence against women to a very specific condemnation of Japan.
"The inscription says the Japanese military abducted thousands of women and enslaved them as 'sex slaves'," he said.
That description of history is widely accepted in South Korea, the academics agree, but their own understanding of history is deeply unpopular in their homeland.
According to Kim, Dr Lee Woo-yeon, co-author of the bestselling Anti-Japanese Tribalism and a member of the Naksungdae Institute of Economic Research, Joo Oksoon, a former politician with the Liberty Korea Party, head of End Comfort Women Fraud and executive director of South Korea's Mothers Broadcasting Station, there is clear evidence of contracts being signed for women to work in brothels for the military during the years of Japan's colonial rule.
Lee Ok-sun, former South Korean "comfort woman", speaking during an interview with Reuters at the House of Sharing in Gwangju-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, on May 4, 2021. PHOTO: Reuters
Often the contracts were signed by a young woman's parents, something that Koreans do not like to think about, they said, with little evidence that women were dragooned into prostitution against their will, and they say the women were permitted to return home after they completed their contracts.
They were indeed sex workers, the academics agree, but the often-used term "sex slaves" is incorrect, in their view, as that suggests the women were coerced into working in brothels for the Japanese military.
The term "sex slaves," they insist, is deceptive because it is emotionally charged as well as being simply wrong; they say the women were actually contracted, paid and permitted to leave their places of work at the end of their contracts, which were for a minimum of six months but typically for a year.
Others have pointed out that poverty was endemic in rural parts of Japan-controlled Korea and brokers took advantage of that to recruit young women.
Kang Il-chul, former South Korean "comfort woman", speaking during an interview with Reuters at the House of Sharing in Gwangju-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, on May 4, 2021. PHOTO: Reuters
Still, the group has pointed out what it claims are discrepancies to the Mitte authorities in Berlin, Kim said, and requested changes to the panel, but the local Korean group lobbied hard and the statue remains, as does the original accompanying sign.
The academics are also disappointed that Berlin has extended the initial agreement for the statue to remain in place for a year, their concern being that it could become a permanent fixture and be used to support efforts to erect similar statues and plaques in other cities.
There are at least 30 comfort women statues around the world and Kim, Lee and Joo hope that getting the outcome they want in Berlin might help them convince other local authorities to remove their statues.
The group says the statues should go as they are widely described as representing a young girl forcibly taken to work in military brothels, which they insist is inaccurate.
A statue of a girl that represents the sexual victims by the Japanese military in front of Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea, on Dec 28, 2015.
"I wrote my book because there is fundamentally an anti-Japanese sentiment in Korean society, a tribalism rooted in nationalism, meaning that Korean people are reluctant to accept evidence of anything less than the Japanese being devils and all Koreans good," said Lee, who has been physically attacked twice and also pelted with eggs and flour for his beliefs.
"There is also the deep-rooted belief that Koreans are always the victims and the Japanese always the perpetrators, and that narrative has played a big part in shaping the national sentiment," he added.
Yet Kim says since September 2020 there has been a noticeable decline in physical and verbal attacks on anyone who puts forward alternative interpretations of the comfort women narrative.
At that time, South Korean prosecutors indicted a member of parliament and the head of an advocacy group on eight charges of fraud and embezzlement.
Yoon Mee-hyang resigned as head of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan after a prominent victim accused her of exploiting the comfort women to obtain public donations and government funds, much of which she was accused of spending on herself.
Yoon has denied the charges and the case continues, but the coverage has damaged the comfort women's campaign for justice.
"We saw a big change in public sentiment at that time," said Kim, pointing out that before Yoon's arrest, it was impossible to challenge her version of events.
Kim and his colleagues also point out that claims that comfort women were forcibly abducted, forced to work and denied basic human rights have been further damaged by the council "doing nothing" to challenge North Korea on its appalling human rights record.
This, they claim, is evidence of the council's pro-Pyongyang sympathies rather than a genuine concern about the well-being of victims of human rights abuses.
"Under the administration of [former President] Moon Jae-in, it was very difficult to explain to officials in Berlin, but we really believe we need to make our voices heard now," said Joo.
"Under Moon, the relationship with Japan was at its lowest ebb since the war," she said. "We believe that the most important thing right now is to re-establish military ties with Japan, as well as with the US, for security reasons.
"Economic ties with Japan have also suffered, but we need to revive that trade for our own national interests," she added. "South Korea may be small, but we are strong and we have a trade-driven economy, so the concept of tribalism is old-fashioned and damaging to the nation."
Kim concurred, saying, "The primary reason for our visit to Germany is to correct the false narrative surrounding the comfort women because it is hurting the South Korea-Japan relationship, but is also hurting Korea's ties with Germany and other countries.
"If this situation continues, South Korea will be labelled as a country where falsehoods are treated as facts and we will be isolated in the international community."
Last weekend, police shot at motorists protesting against fuel shortages in a town north of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Moody’s further downgraded Laos’s sovereign rating into “junk” territory as people queue at petrol stations. Lebanon’s electricity company provides four hours of power daily at best, as a hot summer approaches and generators become unaffordable for many. Quito, Ecuador, was paralysed on Wednesday by demonstrations against expensive food and fuel.
These countries are not the wealthy European states who are themselves struggling with high bills and worrying about a cut-off of Russian gas before winter. They are not the US, which considers an ineffective cut in petrol taxes to mollify angry drivers. With few financial resources, they are on the front line of energy shortages, hunger and often climate crises.
The most vulnerable are those lower- and middle-income countries heavily dependent on imports of energy and agricultural goods, fiscally-constrained by already high debt levels, often suffering climatic problems such as drought and heatwaves, and frequently with political problems, including the legacies of civil wars, insurgencies and violent drug gangs.
Depreciation makes basic necessities even more expensive in local currencies. Subsidies become unaffordable but cuts trigger protests, violence and even revolution.
Such crises matter in four ways. First, in the human suffering they impose in inflation, unemployment, hunger, collapsing living standards and forced migration. Second, in the effect on their neighbours, who may be drawn into wider regional downturns.
Third, in the danger for contagion, the rise in interest rates and a slowing in trade, that could repeat global emerging-market debt crises. Sri Lanka’s first ever sovereign default may be an omen
In the longer term, Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan and Ghana are at risk. Emerging market debt has leapt to 67 per cent from 52 per cent of gross domestic product before the coronavirus pandemic.
Fourth, in the danger of cascading interruptions, as production or transit of oil, gas, important minerals or agricultural goods is interrupted by protests, strikes and insecurity — tightening global markets even further.
Governments who fear domestic discontent often restrict food exports, worsening the situation for others. This would be reminiscent of the 2011 uprisings which, often sparked by hunger, led to the revolution in Libya and a major surge in oil prices.
Unlike previous periods of energy turbulence, which typically centred on oil disruptions, today’s troubles are multifaceted.
For example, Codelco of Chile, the world’s largest copper miner, has been hit by strikes, while Peru, the world’s second-biggest producer, has suffered repeated protests in recent months at its Las Bambas mine.
Copper is an essential component of renewable energy systems and electric vehicles (EVs). Battery cars require two to four times as much copper as their petrol equivalents, driving up their cost just as more EVs are needed to save oil and cut carbon dioxide emissions.
The Ecuadorean protests forced Petroecuador to declare force majeure on its oil exports when it was unable to meet contractual deliveries.
Rising oil prices encourage greater American and European use of biofuels, but more of the corn, soybeans and sugar cane harvest is burnt in vehicles rather than appearing on dinner tables. Meanwhile, high gas prices drive up the cost of fertiliser, for which gas is an essential feedstock.
The source of the most acute recent trouble, and the intensification of pre-existing conditions, come from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Gas to Europe has been throttled. Ukraine’s grain ports are blockaded, and silos bombed. But high-income countries have exported the pain of their own misguided policies.
Absurdities such as price caps and fuel tax cuts subsidise consumption. Export bans would cut off those most in need. Tariffs and trade barriers prevent poorer states from exporting their way out of trouble. Neither European countries nor the US are making any serious efforts on boosting energy efficiency and conservation, hoping to spare voters inconvenience.
European countries have to import more liquefied natural gas (LNG) to replace supplies from Russia. This is unavoidable now but the result of prewar foolishness. Germany is pressing ahead to close nuclear power plants that could still have a few years of viable operation.
The result is that LNG prices have gone through the roof for everyone, and many countries cannot afford the bill.
Several of Pakistan’s suppliers, such as Eni and Gunvor, have defaulted on long-term contractual deliveries, as it is more profitable for them to pay a 30 per cent penalty and resell the cargo elsewhere at a much higher price.
The country then must go on the spot market for a replacement — it received only one bid for supplies in July at an eye-watering $39.8 per million British thermal units, equivalent to $230 for a barrel of oil. Combined with a severe heatwave, Pakistan has suffered four- to six-hour power cuts and had to cut the working week.
Some of the struggling states have brought ruin on themselves: Lebanon through feckless and gridlocked politics, Sri Lanka by corruption and a disastrous ban on artificial fertilisers. But any country may have structural problems or episodes of misrule; some are unable to spend their way out of trouble. Their vulnerable populations need support. GCC oil exporters have at times sent fuel or financial aid; helpful, but a relative drop in the bucket.
Wealthy western states have their own low-income people to think about. But they need to shield developing countries from beggar-thy-neighbour policies. Otherwise, they will undercut the global economy, security, and their own stand against Russia.
Robin M. Mills is CEO of Qamar Energy, and author of The Myth of the Oil Crisis
As Trump looks on, Illinois Republican hails overturn of Roe as “victory for white life”
The Supreme Court decision abolishing the constitutional right to abortion has put wind in the sails of the fascist forces headed by Donald Trump that dominate the Republican Party.
Exuberant over the long-sought victory of clerical reaction over the elementary rights and social needs of millions of working women—and the promise of more rollbacks in democratic rights to come—some are letting slip the racist and anti-Semitic views they have up to now sought to conceal in their public statements.
At a Trump “Save America” rally outside of Quincy, Illinois, on Saturday night, the ex-president campaigned for two far-right candidates in this Tuesday’s Republican primary elections in the state: freshman Representative Mary Miller, who is running for U.S. Congress in a newly drawn district against a veteran GOP lawmaker and state Senator Darren Bailey, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the November gubernatorial race.
After hailing the destruction of a basic right in place for nearly 50 years as a “victory for the Constitution … the rule of law and, above all, a victory for life” and attacking the House committee investigating his January 6 coup attempt as a “vile group of unhinged partisans and craven lunatics,” Trump introduced Miller as “pro-life, pro-gun, pro-police, pro-American energy and pro-MAGA.”
Miller proceeded to tell the crowd: “It’s such an honor to be able to welcome you to God’s country. … President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday.”
Trump, beaming behind Miller on the platform, did not bat an eye as the crowd cheered.
Miller continued: “I’m running against a RINO [Republican in name only] named Rodney Davis, who betrayed conservatives. He betrayed us by voting against President Trump in 2016 … voting for red flag gun confiscation, voting for the January 6 witch hunt commission. This race is between MAGA and a RINO establishment member.”
Representative Mary Miller (Republican-Illinois) speaking at a news conference in Washington on July 29, 2021. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik File)
Miller added: “We will never surrender to the Marxists in Washington. We are the Christians who put our faith in God, not in the government.”
Following the rally, when some local press outlets began to publicize Miller’s racist outburst, her spokesperson called it a “mix-up of words,” telling the Associated Press that she had intended to call the court ruling a victory for the “right to life.”
There was no attempt to explain why Miller’s supposed “mix-up” took the form of a paean to “white life.” There is, in fact, nothing mysterious about this.
Miller was chastised shortly after she assumed office in January 2021 for giving a speech at the U.S. Capitol in which she cited in a positive way the example of Adolf Hitler. Speaking at a January 5 rally held by “Moms for America,” a far-right group that promotes Trump’s lie of a “stolen election,” she said, “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”
The next day, January 6, Trump’s mob of fascist paramilitaries, assembled with the aid and support of White House officials and Republican lawmakers, stormed the Capitol and came within seconds of seizing and likely killing Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi and other officials in a bid to block the official certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Miller was among the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certification in the early morning hours of January 7, some hours after the rampaging insurrectionists had finally been cleared out of the Capitol.
At the same rally, Trump announced his endorsement of Bailey, until recently considered a dark horse behind the more establishment figure Richard Irvin, the African American mayor of Aurora, Illinois. Billionaire GOP donor Ken Griffin ploughed $50 million into Irvin’s campaign, staking him to an early lead in a six-man primary race. But in recent weeks, after a pilgrimage to Trump’s estate in Mar-a Lago and some $17 million in campaign funding from the billionaire Republican kingmaker Richard Uihlein, Bailey has moved ahead in the polls.
Trump hailed Bailey for his defiance of anti-COVID mandates imposed in the early stages of the pandemic by Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire owner of the Hyatt Hotel chain.
In 2019, Bailey joined six other state Republicans in sponsoring a resolution calling for the city of Chicago to leave Illinois and become its own state. The resolution stated that “the majority of residents in downstate Illinois disagree with City of Chicago residents on key issues such as gun ownership, abortion, immigration, and other policy issues.”
After announcing his bid for governor, Bailey backtracked on the resolution, calling it “old” and “a warning shot” to Chicago. However, in a debate between Republican gubernatorial candidates earlier this month, he called Chicago a crime-ridden “hellhole” and attacked Irvin as a “corrupt Democrat.”
The cowardly failure of Biden and the Democrats to prosecute Trump or any of his top accomplices in the attempted overthrow of the Constitution, in the name of “unity” with their Republican “colleagues,” has allowed Trump and the Republicans to bring the attack on democratic rights to a new level and strengthened the fascist forces they are seeking to mobilize.
But the cynical machinations of the Democrats go even further. Pritzker and the Democratic Governors Association have spent $34 million on TV ads attacking Bailey for his far-right, pro-Trump politics. They have made no secret that the ad campaign is designed to build support for Bailey in the Republican primary within the GOP’s active base, particularly in the more rural, downstate regions, because they believe Pritzker has a better chance of winning in November against Bailey than against Irvin.
Thus, on the basis of the most narrow electoral calculations, the Democrats are actually working to bolster the openly fascist wing of the Republican Party.
Despite Supreme Court of Canada ruling, Robinson Treaties advocate hopeful for negotiated settlement
Last week the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Ontario government could move forward on its appeal of the Robinson Huron-Superior Treaty annuity case.
The Robinson Treaties, signed in 1850, provided for the augmentation of the perpetual annuity if revenues generated in the territory allowed the Crown to increase the payment without incurring a loss. The annuity was augmented once in 1875 to one pound (or four dollars equivalent) per person. It has not been augmented since.
The initial trial concluded that the Crown had a mandatory and reviewable obligation to increase the Treaties’ annuities when economic circumstances so warranted and that it should reflect a fair share of the value of the net Crown resource-based revenues generated from the territory.
The Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the trial decision.
However, on June 23 the Supreme Court said Ontario can present its argument at the highest court in the country.
That decision is disappointing but not unexpected, says Mike Restoule, chair of the Robinson-Huron Treaty Litigation Fund (RHTLF), which represents the 21 Anishinabek Nations that began legal action against Ontario and Canada in 2014.
“Ontario was the one who... sent an application to the Supreme Court for leave to appeal,” said Restoule. “But after awhile Canada wrote to the Supreme Court to say they were willing to participate in an appeal. I guess once the two governments got together on an application to appeal, I guess the Supreme Court decided it was … proper on their part to hear the case.”
Although Canada has not appealed any decisions in the litigation, court records indicate that the Attorney General of Canada filed a form letter Feb. 21 in response to Ontario’s application for leave to appeal.
“Canada’s substantive positions in response to Ontario’s appeal will be set out in documents to be filed on a timeline to be set by the Court,” said Randy Legault-Rankin, spokesperson for Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs in an email to Windspeaker.com.
“Canada agreed with Ontario that the case met the criteria for granting leave. In that sense they supported Ontario’s application,” said Catherine J. Boies Parker, Q.C., legal counsel for RHTLF.
The criterion for granting leave is whether the case raises issues of public and national importance, she added.
Restoule says he doesn’t understand how this case is of national interest as the Robinson Treaties are unique in Canada. They are the only treaties with an augmentation clause that’s connected with an annuity.
“We don’t yet know what position Canada will be taking on the appeal itself. Hopefully they will support (the lower court’s) decision, since they have not appealed it,” said Boies Parker.
“Canada continues to believe that negotiations remain the best forum for addressing outstanding issues. We look forward to continuing to work with Ontario and the First Nations at the negotiation table to try to find common ground for resolving this litigation outside of the courts,” said Legault-Rankin.
The majority decision of the Court of Appeal directed the parties to negotiate a modern agreement for the implementation of the Treaty.
Restoule is hopeful that the Ontario government will continue the work it began prior to the provincial election. The parties met twice on the issue before talks ended to go to the polls.
Also prior to the election, Premier Doug Ford met with Ontario chiefs in a virtual question-and-answer session. In response to a question from Wikwemikong First Nation Chief Duke Peltier, Ford said he was “committed to get the Robinson Huron Treaty done. It’s fallen on all our laps…After probably more than 150 years of government-after-government-after-government ignoring it, I’m committed to getting it done. I think we’re very close without getting into details.”
Ford and his Conservative government were returned to office in the election.
“We’re trying to get out of the court action…by requesting that the parties come together in negotiations to settle out of court because our feeling is that that’s the only way we can get reconciliation,” said Restoule.
The litigation, which has been broken into three stages, was scheduled to proceed with stage three in October. That stage is focused on determining the value of the compensation owed and the respective liabilities of Canada and Ontario.
At issue, says Restoule, is that resource revenue is collected by the province, but Canada pays the annuity.
Stage three “was to solve that argument: If you’re going to collect the money, you should pay the annuity too,” he said.
Now Restoule is uncertain as to whether stage three will proceed as the same legal team will be involved in preparing for the Supreme Court argument.
Even with a potential hearing at the Supreme Court—and it is unknown when that will happen—Restoule says he sees the light at the end of the tunnel.
“I’m very hopeful. I’m hoping that either through negotiations or through stage three ruling or Supreme Court of Canada ruling that we will get a just settlement, someway, somehow,” he said.
Restoule has been involved in this battle for 30 years. He was appointed by the chief to represent the Nipissing First Nation when he was elected to the council in 1992. He says First Nations holding chief and council elections every two to four years has caused challenges.
“The leadership changes and when the leadership changes that’s when things seem to bog down and you have to start up again, so that was kind of the ebb and flow that we experienced,” he said.
But the work stabilized in 2010 when the chiefs created the RHTLF and Restoule moved on to head it. Four years later, the case was filed in court. The actual hearing didn’t begin until 2017.
“I’m extremely tired but, you know, I don’t want to stop doing it because I have an interest in it, first of all. It’s part of me now. It’s part of who I am,” said Restoule.
Windspeaker.com
By Shari Narine, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Windspeaker.com, Windspeaker.com
Aliya Shakir Sheikh works from her home in Mumbai’s Shivaji Nagar slum. This summer she was pregnant and the heat left her anxious and too drained to work on most days, she says. (Shankar Menon for The Fuller Project)
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