UK

Three-year extension agreed to Hinkley Point C contract

02 December 2022

EDF, China General Nuclear (CGN) and the UK government have agreed a three-year extension to the contract for difference (CfD) for the Hinkley Point C (HPC) nuclear power plant under construction in Somerset, England. While the 'long-stop date' has now been moved to November 2036, EDF maintains the plant's start-up schedule remains unchanged.

The Hinkley Point C construction site, pictured in November 2021 (Image: EDF Energy)

In October 2013, a price of GBP92.50 (USD112.82) per MWh was agreed as the strike price for the HPC project, meaning the government will top up EDF's income to this level if wholesale prices are lower. EDF will have to pay money to the government if market prices are higher. From 2025-2029, EDF gets a 35-year CfD. After 2029 the CfD is reduced in value up to 2033 - the long-stop date - after which it could be cancelled for non-completion.

Under a deal agreed in October 2015, CGN took a 33.5% stake in the project to construct Hinkley Point C, which comprises two EPR reactors. Under the deal, EDF and CGN also planned to build a replica EPR plant at Sizewell C in Suffolk and a new plant at Bradwell in Essex, using China's HPR1000 (Hualong One) reactor technology.

The Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC), the government's counterparty in the contract, announced on 29 November that the long-stop date had been extended from 1 November 2033 to 1 November 2036.

"The extension reflects LCCC's work with the HPC project over the last 20 months to understand the impacts of COVID-19, as well as the outcome of the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy's negotiations with CGN on the Sizewell C nuclear project," LCCC said.

"Extending the long-stop date will not impact the delivery date of the project," the LCCC was quoted by New Civil Engineer as saying. "The terms of the contract provide an incentive to complete commissioning as soon as possible."

On 29 November, the UK government announced it will invest GBP679 million and become a 50% partner with EDF in the Sizewell C project. The money, it said, "allows for China General Nuclear's exit from the project, including buy-out costs, any tax due and commercial arrangements".

Construction of Hinkley Point C - composed of two EPR reactors of 1630 MWe each - began in December 2018. Unit 1 of the plant was originally scheduled to start up by the end of 2025.

In January 2021, EDF said the start of electricity generation from unit 1 had been rescheduled to June 2026. Delays arising from the COVID-19 pandemic would also increase the cost of the project by GBP500 million to between GBP22 and 23 billion.

In May this year, following a review, EDF announced the start of electricity generation for HPC unit 1 is now expected in June 2027 and the project completion costs were now estimated in the range of GBP25 to 26 billion.

"Hinkley Point C's schedule was recently reviewed in detail and remains unchanged," said a spokesperson for Hinkley Point C. "The power station's clean, home-grown electricity is needed to provide Britain with secure and affordable energy and to help the country kick its dependency on gas. The team at Hinkley Point C is working hard to make the plant operational as soon as possible."

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

Julian Assange appeals to European court over U.S. extradition

CGTN

WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange, who is battling extradition from Britain to the United States where he is wanted on criminal charges, has submitted an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the court confirmed on Friday.

Assange, 51, is wanted by U.S. authorities on 18 counts, including one under a spying act, relating to WikiLeaks' release of vast troves of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables which Washington said had put lives in danger.

Britain has given the go-ahead for his extradition, but he has launched an appeal at London's High Court, with the first hearing expected early next year.

His legal team have also launched a case against Britain at the ECHR, which could potentially order the extradition to be blocked.

"We confirm that an application has been received," a statement from the court said.

Stella Assange, his wife, said she hoped the ECHR would not be needed to consider the case and that it could be resolved in Britain. If the case was taken to the ECHR, she said it "would be a sad day and a major disappointment."

The case has gained prominence this week with major media outlets that had originally worked with Assange over the leaked material writing an open letter to say his prosecution should end.

Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he had raised the issue of Assange's release with U.S. officials, saying the matter should be brought to a close.

Cryptome Founder Asks to Be Indicted With Assange

John Young, the founder of the Cryptome website, has asked the U.S. Justice Department to also indict him as he published un-redacted State Dept. files before WikiLeaks did, reports Joe Lauria.



By Joe Lauria

Special to Consortium News
November 30, 2022

The founder of a U.S.-based website that earlier published the same un-redacted documents that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange was later indicted for has invited the U.S. Department of Justice to make him a co-defendant with Assange.

“Cryptome published the decrypted unredacted State Department Cables on September 1, 2011 prior to publication of the cables by WikiLeaks,” John Young wrote in a Justice Department submission form, which Young posted on Twitter on Tuesday.

“No US official has contacted me about publishing the unredacted cables since cryptome published them,” he wrote. “I respectfully request that the Department of Justice add me as a co-defendant in the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act.”

Assange has been charged with possession and dissemination of classified information, some of the same material that Young possesses and disseminated.

Young founded Cryptome, which he calls a “free public library” in 1996. It was a precursor of WikiLeaks in publishing raw, classified and unclassified government documents on the internet.

Young testified at Assange’s extradition hearing in London in September 2020. His sworn statement says:


“I published on Cryptome.org unredacted diplomatic cables on September 1, 2011 under the URL https://cryptome.org/z/z.7z and that publication remains available at the present. … Since my publication on Cryptome.org of the unredacted diplomatic cables, no US law enforcement authority has notified me that this publication of the cables is illegal, consists or contributes to a crime in any way, nor have they asked for them to be removed.”

‘Harmed Informants’

A cornerstone of the Justice Department’s case against Assange is that he recklessly published State Department cables leaked to him by Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning, which, the U.S. says, endangered the lives of named U.S. informants.

Young is asking the Justice Department why he too hasn’t been prosecuted for publishing these names before Assange did.

 

Award-winning journalist Julian Assange.

At Manning’s court martial, Brig. Gen. Robert Carr, testified under oath that no one was actually harmed by the WikiLeaks releases. Then Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the leaks “awkward” and “embarrassing” but said they did only “fairly modest” damage to U.S. foreign interests.

Reuters reported in January 2011:

“Internal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration’s public statements to the contrary.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.”

Assange was actually more concerned about redactions than the editors of his mainstream media partners who worked with him on publishing the releases.

Mark Davis, an Australian television journalist who documented Assange’s activities during the weekend in London before publication, said that while the other editors went home, Assange pulled all nighters to redact informants names.

Guardian Journalists & the Password

Two days before publication Assange wrote to the U.S. ambassador in London seeking help from “the United States Government to privately nominate any specific instances (record numbers or names) where it considers the publication of information would put individual persons at significant risk of harm that has not already been addressed.”

The U.S. responded by demanding that WikiLeaks stop publication of the cables and return those in its possession.

In the end, only a redacted version of the State Department Cables was published in November 2010 by WikiLeaks and its mainstream partners, The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and DER SPEIGEL.

This remained the case until a book was published by two Guardian journalists in February 2011, in which the password to the unredacted files mysteriously appears as part of a chapter heading. This went unnoticed, as WikiLeaks tried to keep it quiet, until a German publication named Freitag said it had the password in August 2011.

When Assange learned this he contacted the State Department to try to warn them about the impending publication of informants’ names. He was rebuffed. This is shown in a scene in Laura Poitras’ film Risk.

PirateBay published the unredacted files first and then Cryptome did on Sept. 1, 2011. It was the next day that Assange decided to publish the unredacted files so that informants could search for their names and try to get to safety. This was before it was known that no one was harmed,

“The notion that Mr. Assange knowingly put lives at risk by dumping unredacted cables is knowingly inaccurate,” said Assange lawyer Mark Summers at the extradition hearing in February 2020.

The publishers and editors of WikiLeaks‘ partners oppose Assange’s Espionage Act indictment and on Monday wrote an open letter to the Biden administration urging the case be dropped.

Having published WikiLeaks classified documents, are they ready to take the same step as Young, a U.S. citizen, who is daring the DOJ to indict him too under the U.S. Espionage Act, for doing the exact thing Assange, an Australian, did, only earlier?

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe

U.S. whistleblower Snowden gets a Russian passport -TASS

Fri, December 2, 2022 

Former contractor of U.S. National Security Agency Snowden speaks via video link at the New Knowledge educational online forum in Moscow

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who exposed the scale of secret surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), has sworn an oath of allegiance to Russia and received a Russian passport, TASS reported on Friday.

"Yes, he got [a passport], he took the oath," Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden's lawyer, told the state news agency TASS.

"This is still a criminal investigative matter," White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Friday, referring any questions about the report on Snowden to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to comment.

U.S. authorities have for years wanted Snowden returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges.

President Vladimir Putin in September granted Russian citizenship to Snowden, who fled the United States after leaking secret files that revealed the extensive eavesdropping activities of the United States and its allies.

"I'm in Russia because the White House intentionally canceled my passport to trap me here. They downed the President of Bolivia's diplomatic aircraft to prevent me from leaving, and continue to interfere with my freedom of movement to this day," Snowden, 39, said on Twitter on Friday, referring to events from 2013.

Snowden was referring an incident in July 2013, when Bolivia complained that its presidential jet carrying Evo Morales from Russia to Bolivia had been rerouted and forced to land in Austria over suspicion that Snowden was on board.

Defenders of Snowden hail him as a modern-day dissident for exposing the extent of U.S. spying and alleged violation of privacy. Opponents say he is a traitor who endangered lives by exposing the secret methods that Western spies use to listen in on hostile states and militants.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; additional reporting by Steve Holland, Andrea Shalal, Sarah N. Lynch, Susan Heavey and Kanishka Singh; Editing by Nick Macfie and Sandra Maler)

Amid geopolitical instability, NNSA looks to industry for new arms control verification tech

For US nuclear stocks, Jill Hruby of the Department of Energy said, "this is the most demanding moment in the history of our nation's nuclear enterprise since the Manhattan Project."

By THERESA HITCHENS

December 02, 2022


Seemingly overnight in the spring of 2021, a network of roads and regularly-spaced buildings sprung up on an expanse of barren gravel near Yumen, China. The structures match the appearance of missile silos under construction in other locations in China, and analysts believe the complex is intended to house the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, according to Planet. (Photo: June 9, 2021. Planet)

WASHINGTON — The Energy Department’s semi-autonomous nuclear security organization has launched a new effort to develop technology to bolster future arms control agreements, and is seeking innovative concepts from industry, according to a senior Biden administration official.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NSSA) “has established a new arms control advancement initiative to invest in next generation arms control capabilities. This initiative will allow new ideas for warhead monitoring and verification, including the establishment of a testbed and purposeful stewardship of expertise within the complex,” Jill Hruby, DoE undersecretary for nuclear security and NNSA administrator, said Thursday.

“We want to make sure we’re getting new ideas with new technologies. The technologies currently deployed or monitoring and verification are pretty old,” she added in an online interview with the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance (ANWA).

Hruby said that NNSA is looking to industry to provide innovative solutions across a multitude of technologies. These include satellite-based monitoring capabilities, “big data,” artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as “secure communications of different types.”

She explained that the plan is to build a testbed to try out proposed solutions “so that we can compare apples-to-apples on these things,” as well as bring in a wide variety of potential vendors.

Another goal of the new initiative is developing a next-generation workforce.

“Arms control comes and goes, but we need to maintain the workforce that ‘gets it’ — meaning understanding missiles, understanding weapons, understanding how they’re stored, all kinds of things,” she said. “So, we’re taking a page, frankly, from the science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, to say: ‘What do we need to do to maintain expertise and knowledge and the arms control program?'”

Hruby made clear, however, that the focus of the initiative is firmly on the far future, because at the moment any hopes the Biden administration had for nuclear arms control are on life support.

“We recognize that regrettably current geopolitical conditions do not lend themselves to the establishment of new arms control agreements in the near term, either bilaterally or multilaterally,” she said.

“China’s nuclear expansion and Russia’s pursuit of novel nuclear capabilities; North Korea’s ongoing missile tests and Iran’s willingness to enrich uranium far above the levels permitted by the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], all indicate that at this time these nations are not interested in new agreements, or even in productive dialogue. However, that is no reason to sit idle and wait for favorable conditions present themselves,” she said.

Further, Hruby said that the downhill slide of geopolitical stability — in particular, US relations with both Russia and China — makes any US moves toward nuclear disarmament inconceivable, and the need for modernization across the nation’s nuclear arsenal all the more important.

Overall, the Biden administration’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal includes $50.9 billion on nuclear weapons programs, with $34.4 billion for the Pentagon, which leads in building nuclear delivery systems, and $16.5 billion for the NNSA, which builds and maintains nuclear warheads.

“In the aftermath of the Cold War our enterprise shifted from a design, test and deliver methodology to a sustainment model centered on science-based Stockpile Stewardship. It made sense to take that approach during a period of strong nuclear disarmament cooperation, relative geopolitical stability, and because we had a weapons stockpile that was within its design lifetime,” she explained.

“Unfortunately, the increasing age of our weapon systems makes this approach unsustainable, without degrading confidence in our stockpile,” she continued. “And it is not considered practical to disarm under the current world conditions, maybe ever. Our nuclear weapons and their delivery systems were designed to last for a long time, but not forever.”

Hruby stressed that the “blunt truth” is that “this is the most demanding moment in the history of our nation’s nuclear enterprise since the Manhattan Project,” noting that NNSA is “in the early stages of recapitalizing our physical infrastructure to enable the execution of five weapons modernization and life extension programs.”

Meanwhile, DoD is facing a budget bow wave as it attempts to simultaneously modernize its nuclear weapons triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and bombers. The Congressional Budget Office in May 2021 estimated the price tag for the total DoD triad modernization effort at $405 billion from 2021 through 2030, up from the $238 billion it estimated in 2019.

Twitter’s credit rating was just withdrawn by S&P because of a ‘lack of sufficient information’

BYJILL R. SHAH AND BLOOMBERG
December 2, 2022 


Twitter Inc.’s credit grade was withdrawn by S&P Global Ratings, which said it lacked sufficient information to continue covering the Elon Musk-owned social media company.

The rating firm, which is among the top in the US, said the action was “due to a lack of sufficient information to maintain the rating” in a release on Friday. At the time of the withdrawal, both Twitter and its debt were on “CreditWatch,” suggesting an imminent rating action.

Twitter’s massive about $13 billion debt load was funded directly by banks led by Morgan Stanley when Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social media giant closed. Since then, Musk’s takeover of Twitter has brought sweeping changes to the company’s operations and product. Those changes included mass layoffs, changes in features and a raft of companies pulling advertising dollars from the platform.

The group of banks that funded the buyout now face the challenge of syndicating the debt to investors, many of whom use rating companies to determine the risk involved in buying credit.

S&P downgraded the company five notches to B- from BB+ on Nov. 1 as a result of its high leverage post-acquisition. The rating firm expected to “obtain more information regarding the final capital structure and any potential changes to the operating strategy,” according to the November research update.

Still, the rating firm said at the time, that “may not occur until the company’s new debt is syndicated.”

PATRICK LAWRENCE: 

Zhou Enlai’s Posthumous Triumph

Nations now fashioning a post–Western world order appear to be abiding by the Five Principles espoused by China’s first and long-serving premier.

King Fahd Road, Riyadh, 2020. (Timon91, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
November 28, 2022

The big news over the Thanksgiving weekend — big such that you could hardly find it in the mainstream press — is that top officials from China will travel to Riyadh in early December to meet counterparts not only from the Saudi kingdom but also from other Arab nations. There appears a strong possibility that Xi Jinping will attend.

The Chinese president is already scheduled to summit in the kingdom next month with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and, almost certainly, MbS’ father, the aging but on-the-ball King Salman bin Abdulaziz. I do not know why Beijing and the Arabs are coy as to Xi’s presence at the larger summit, but one way or the other this will be his first visit to Saudi Arabia since 2016 and could hardly come at a more significant moment.

Making the December docket yet more interesting, TRTWorld, the Turkish broadcaster, reported the day after Thanksgiving that this is to be understood as the “inaugural Chinese–Arab summit.” This starts to sound like the start of something very big indeed.

Riyadh’s rather bitter drift away from its oil-for-security alliance with the U.S., worn thin after nine decades, is by now a matter of public record. The interesting thing here is that Xi’s talks with MbS and presumably his Pop are to focus on none other than trade, as in oil and security.

It has been hard to miss these past months the Saudi kingdom’s simultaneous new tilt toward partnerships with major non–Western nations, China and Russia chief among them. Along with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar and various other nations, it had observer status at the 22nd summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Samarkand in mid–September.

As also noted in this space, Saudi Arabia is one of numerous nations that are also interested in joining an expanded version of the BRICS, whose original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, give the organization its name. The non–West waxes — a key feature of our century, as I have long held — just as the West’s ties with these nations wane, gradually or otherwise.

Shanghai Cooperation Organization Secretariat in Beijing, 2022. 

(N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

It is best to take the long view when trying to explain this fundamental shift. It is the flower of many decades of incremental material progress in the non–Western world. As the BRICS, the SCO’s members and other non–Western nations clambered up the development ladder from the 1950s and 1960s onward, Western markets were no longer the only markets if these nations had something to sell or as they searched for investment capital.

In this way the end of the West’s 500 years of global dominance has been rolling our way like a big, black bowling ball for a long time. To extend the simile, in our time we watch as it strikes its pins. The non–West now accounts for the majority of global gross domestic product — a reality that cannot be more than a couple of decades old but is among the key determinants of our era.

Why wouldn’t the Saudis, the other Gulf states, and various other nations traditionally allied or partnered with the West begin to shift loyalties? Why wouldn’t the BRICS now be planning to develop an alternative to the dollar based on a basket of currencies that heretofore have had a very minor place in global trade — notably but not only in oil?

“The end of the West’s 500 years of global dominance has been rolling our way like a big, black bowling ball for a long time.”

It is a dollars-and-cents question, then. Markets, investment capital, high-technology and heavy-industry development, scientific, cultural and educational exchanges: Not only is the West no longer the only game in town; it is not the most dynamic game in town, either.

But when I think of these practical reasons for this shift in global vitality, I get to thinking about Zhou Enlai, China’s first and long-serving premier and vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party during Mao’s final years.

Zhou was, more to the immediate point, among the visionary figures of those postwar decades when scores of nations were achieving independence and working out what kind of world order they proposed to live in.

The Five Principles

Zhou Enlai, left, Mao Zedong, center-left, and and Bo Gu, first from right, in Yanan, 1935. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Readers of this column may recall the admiration I have severally expressed for Zhou’s Five Principles. All five had to do with how nations should conduct themselves in an emerging era of unprecedented multiplicity: They were mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, nonaggression, noninterference in the internal affairs of others, equality and mutual benefit in relations, and peaceful coexistence.

Zhou fashioned these principles as Beijing and New Delhi worked out the Sino–Indian Agreement of 1954. Then they assumed a life of their own. Nehru took to citing them. They were incorporated into the People’s Republic’s constitution. When Sukarno hosted the seminal meeting of the Non–Aligned Movement at Bandung in 1955, the NAM declared its Ten Principles, elaborations of Zhou’s Five.

I have always thought of Zhou’s principles as great ideals. I still consider them in this way. A scholar named Dawn Murphy compares them with the tenets of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, wherein the European powers settled on a code of conduct among themselves that amounted to an early formula for achieving peaceful coexistence and avoiding war.

But as I watch the steady, encouraging coalescence of emerging non–Western nations, it seems to me Zhou’s Five Principles have a lot to do, in an altogether practical way, with their evolving relationships. Oddly enough, this is Zhou’s posthumous moment of triumph.

China’s President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin during welcoming reception for the Russian president in Beijing, June 2018. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Think about any set of relations among non–Western powers and consider the fundamental nature of their ties. The Russians or the Chinese or the South Africans would not dream of telling the Saudis or Egyptians or Indians how to conduct their internal affairs, or of intruding on their sovereignty. The same holds true, of course, if you reverse the exercise.

I suppose I ought to state a couple of obvious points here. One, there are some unwholesome names among the non–Western nations I have mentioned, just as there were among the NAM’s members. This must be acknowledged. Abdel Fattah al–Sisi’s Egypt? Another tragic dictatorship in Egypt’s long line of them. The Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan? The man is a tinpot tyrant.

Two, despite one’s objections to such nations, and I am sure figures such as Zhou and Nehru had theirs in their day, the principle of noninterference must prevail for the sake of a working, ultimately humane world order. There are exceptions to this having to do with extreme cases, of course, but this does not mean the kind of flagrant abuse the U.S. makes with its unlawful, disorderly, typically violent “humanitarian interventions.”

Going back to the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington — and one could go back much further — do you think the non–Western world did not take note of America’s lawlessness when it invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and then Libya, and then Syria? I do not even have to ask in the case of Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine. The great majority of nations objects, and no longer so silently as in the previous cases I mention.

Without saying so explicitly, and I do not know why they do not, those nations now fashioning a post–Western world order come to abide by Zhou’s principles even as they are fed up with America’s incessant violations of them. Again, we are talking about ideals and profound practicalities all at once.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Wuhan, China. 2018. (MEAphotogallery, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

On Nov. 14, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft sponsored a forum under the title, “Is America Ready for a Multipolar World?” I did not think this an interesting question because the answer is so obviously no. But the occasion elicited some worthy remarks nonetheless, notably from Gérard Araud, formerly France’s permanent representative to the United Nations and more recently its ambassador to Washington. (He is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, but nobody is perfect.)

Here are a few snippets from his comments:

“I’ve always been extremely skeptical about this idea of a ‘rules-based order.’ This order is our order…. Actually, this order is reflecting the balance of power in 1945….

When the Americans basically want to do whatever they want, including when it’s against international law, as they define it, they do it.

And that’s the vision that the rest of the world has of this order. Their vision of the world, is certainly not a ‘rules-based order.’ It’s a Western order. And they accuse us of double standards, hypocrisy, and so on and so on.”

It is noteworthy that a prominent diplomat from one of the West’s great powers is now saying such things. Araud is articulating precisely what the non–West has been saying for a very long time. His appearance at Quincy is merely evidence that the message is now crossing the great divide between the West and non–West.

This is not to say I am confident the message is heard in the Atlantic world’s capitals. I do not think it is. But they will surely start hearing it in Washington, London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin as the BRICS, the SCO and many nations not members of either make it plain by what they do and what they stand for. They will stand for a world order made of practicalities and ideals such as Zhou’s —practical ideals, if there is such a thing.

We should keep these matters in mind when Xi Jinping travels to Saudi Arabia next month. Any gathering of world leaders that puts people such as MbS in the room will challenge those who favor a world order that rests, if implicitly, on Zhou Enlai’s Five Principles.

Let us not be daunted. Let us not imagine Zhou assumed the non–West was led by a band of angels. Let us recall that in full what Zhou stood for was titled Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. They are as valid today, indeed as urgent, as they were when he drafted them not quite 70 years ago.



Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

Defense & National Security — US warns Turkey against attacking Syria

BY ELLEN MITCHELL - 12/01/22 

AP/Roman Koksarov

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin talks during the press conference with Minister of Defence of Latvia Artis Pabriks during the press conference in Riga, Latvia, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022. (AP Photo/Roman Koksarov)

The Pentagon is warning NATO member Turkey against a new military operation in Syria, after strikes in the country late last month endangered U.S. troops and caused casualties for their partner forces. 

This is Defense & National Security, your nightly guide to the latest developments at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and beyond. For The Hill, I’m Ellen Mitchell.

Pentagon warns Turkey after strikes threaten troops 

The Pentagon is warning NATO member Turkey against a new military operation in Syria, after strikes in the country late last month endangered U.S. troops.  

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday spoke by phone with his Turkish counterpart, conveying his “strong opposition” to a new Turkish military operation in Syria, according to a Pentagon readout on the call. 

The Pentagon’s message: Austin “expressed concern over escalating action in northern Syria and Turkey, including recent airstrikes, some of which directly threatened the safety of U.S. personnel who are working with local partners in Syria to defeat ISIS,” the readout said.   

“Secretary Austin called for de-escalation, and shared the Department’s strong opposition to a new Turkish military operation in Syria.” 

Earlier: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month launched airstrikes on northern Syria and Iraq targeting Kurdish groups in the two neighboring countries. Ankara claims the strikes are in retaliation for a Nov. 13 bombing in Istanbul that killed six people and injured 80 more, though the Kurdish groups have denied any involvement. 

Erdoğan additionally suggested on Nov. 23 that he also plans to order a ground invasion into northern Syria. 

Some context: The U.S. has notably partnered with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the effort to defeat ISIS in the region and continues to work with the group to keep the terrorist group at bay.  

Since the Turkish strikes, the U.S. military is operating at a reduced number of partner patrols with the SDF, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Thursday.   

Keeping lines open: Ryder noted that while the U.S. recognizes Turkey’s security concerns, “the focus here is on preventing a destabilizing situation, which would put ISIS in an ability to reconstitute.”  

He added that the U.S. has frequent and open lines of communication with its Turkish allies “at a variety of levels.” 

Read the full story here 

Trust in US military remains below 50 percent

Public trust in the U.S. military remains below 50 percent, according to a new survey released by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. 

About 48 percent of Americans say they have a great deal of trust in the military, slightly up from 45 percent last year. 

A major drop: Confidence in the U.S. military has plummeted in recent years. In 2018, about 70 percent of Americans said they had a great deal of trust in the institution. 

The drop to 45 percent last year was the first time only a minority of the American public expressed confidence in the armed forces in the Reagan Foundation’s survey. 

A trend: Government institutions have seen a steep decline in public trust over the years, most notably the Supreme Court after a conservative majority overturned the constitutional right to abortion in June. 

Odd man out: But the Reagan Foundation said “no other public institution” in its surveys has “seen as sharp a decline in public trust” as the military. 

A Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote in an opinion piece last month that “many Americans think the military is no longer an institution that runs on excellence, merit and individual submission to a larger cause.” 

“The current era is marked by fading trust in U.S. institutions, but confidence in one pillar has held up: the military,” it wrote. “But now even that is eroding.” 

Read more here 

  

Private Equity Is Destroying US Health Care

From driving medical facilities out of business to charging predatory interest rates on patient billing schemes, F. Douglas Stephenson outlines how private equity is stealthily destroying Americans’ healthcare.

Healthcare, Not Wealthcare! rally in Philadelphia, June 22, 2017. 

(Joe Piete, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

LONG READ

By F. Douglas Stephenson
Common Dreams
December 1, 2022

Private equity has succeeded in depicting itself as part of the productive economy of health care services even as it is increasingly being recognized as being parasitic.

The essence of this toxic parasitism is not only to drain the host’s nourishment, but also to dull the host’s brain so that it often does not even recognize that the parasite is there. This is the illusion that health care services in the United States suffer under today.

Parasitic private equity is consuming U.S. health care from the inside out, weakening its structure and strength and enriching investors at the expense of patient care and patients.

Incremental health reforms have failed. It’s time to move past political barriers to achieve consensus on real reform, says J.E. McDonough, professor of practice at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Private equity firms are financial termites devouring the woodwork and foundations of the U.S. health care system, as Laura Katz Olson documents in her new book, Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms US Health Care:


“PE firms are gobbling up physician and dental practices; homecare and hospital agencies; mental health, substance abuse, eating disorder, and autism services; urgent care facilities; and emergency medical transportation.”

Private equity has become a growing and diversified part of the American health care economy. Demonstrated results of private equity ownership include higher patient mortality, higher patient costs, fewer jobs, poorer quality and closed facilities.

What is Private Equity?

A private equity fund is a large unregulated pool of money run by financiers who use that money to invest in and/or buy companies and restructure them. They seek to recoup gains through dividend pay-outs or later sales of the companies to strategic acquirers or back to the public markets through initial public offerings.

But that doesn’t capture the scale of the model. There are also private equity-like businesses that scour the landscape for companies, buy them, and then use extractive techniques such as price gouging or legalized forms of complex fraud to generate cash by moving debt and assets like real estate among shell companies. PE funds also lend money and act as brokers, and are morphing into investment bank-like institutions. Some of them are public companies.

[Related: When Wall Street Came to My Mobile Home Park]

While the movement is couched in the language of business, using terms like strategy, business models, returns on equity, innovation, and so forth, and proponents refer to it as an industry, private equity is not business.

On a deeper level, private equity is the ultimate example of the collapse of the enlightenment concept of what ownership means. Ownership used to mean dominion over a resource, and responsibility for caretaking that resource.

[Related: The Consequences of Moving from Industrial to Financial Capitalism]

PE is a political movement with the goal of extending deep managerial controls from a small group of financiers over the producers in the economy. Private equity transforms corporations from institutions that house people and capital for the purpose of production into extractive institutions designed solely to shift cash to owners and leave the rest behind as trash.

Like much of our political economy, the ideas behind it were developed in the 1970s and the actual implementation was operationalized during the Reagan era.

Journalist Matt Stoller describes the essential business plan of private equity:

“Financial engineers… raise large amounts of money and borrow even more to buy firms and loot them. These kinds of private equity barons aren’t healthcare specialists who help finance useful health products and services, they do cookie-cutter deals targeting firms/practices/hospitals they believe have market power to raise prices, who can lay off workers or sell assets, and/or have some sort of legal loophole advantage.

Often, they will destroy the underlying business. The giants of the industry, from Blackstone to Apollo to Bain, are the children of 1980s junk bond king and fraudster Michael Milken. They are essentially super-sized mobsters.”

The classic description of this looting-for-profit practice process is presented by economists George Akerloff and Paul Romer:

“Firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society’s expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.” The fact that paper gains from stock prices can be wiped out when financial storms occur makes financial capitalism less resilient than the industrial base of tangible capital investment.”

January 2011 press conference about the merger of Dutch private-equity company Alpinvest with the Carlyle Group. (Rembrandt17, CC BY 1.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Harvard’s McDonough notes that in the past 45 years the U.S. economy has become heavily financialized more rapidly and decisively than in our peer nations:

“Just as General Electric’s Jack Welch transformed (ruined) his company from a goods manufacturer to a financial services company, so have financial flood waters now penetrated every corner of American health care. Private equity is winning, and any health care organization is a potential takeover target. Patients and patient visits become commodities and data points to be exploited for high profits by private equity’s “financial intermediaries who view healthcare organizations as vehicles for extracting wealth.”

Don McCanne, M.D., Physicians for a Nation Health Program (PNHP), says private equity firms are moving into health care by clustering specific specialties into new corporate entities.

“These equity firms may profess to infuse quality and efficiency into the systems they create, but their true objective is not altruism. Their interest is found in their label: equity, the more ($$) the better.”

McCanne describes private equity’s modus operandi:

1) acquire a relatively large platform practice in a given specialty
2) then acquire smaller practices in the same geographic area and merge them into the platform practice
3) use debt to finance the acquisitions and assign that debt to the acquired practices,
4) find ways to increase net revenue from the agglomerated practices
5) sell the agglomerated practices within three-to-five years for considerably more than the price paid by the private equity company.

Conveniently, Dr. McCanne notes, the debt is left with the practices they purchased and the equity investors walk away with the money. How does this benefit the patients? How does this benefit the health care professionals? We know how it benefits the equity firm investors, but does anyone seriously contend that this is what health care should be about? But that’s what it has become.

Consider the consequences.

Noble Health, a private equity-backed Kansas City startup launched in 2019, acquired Audrain and Callaway Community Hospitals in rural Missouri in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. This March, all hospital services ceased with the furlough of 181 employees.

Notes Kaiser Health News, “…venture capital and private equity firm Nueterra Capital launched Noble in December 2019 with executives who had never run a hospital, including Donald R. Peterson, a co-founder who prior to joining Noble had been accused of Medicare fraud.”

The fate of St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged in Richmond, Virginia, was told in The New Yorker. A New Jersey private equity firm called the Portopiccolo Group bought the home, “reduced stuff, cut amenities and set the stage for a deadly outbreak of COVID-19” that included a doubling in patient deaths.

The numbers of stories of private equity-generated health system harm grows rapidly. And if the health part of the business goes bust, as occurred in 2019 at Philadelphia’s now closed Hahnemann Hospital, the underlying real estate still offers rich rewards.


Philadelphia’s now defunct Hahnemann University Hospital in 2010. (Scott McLeod, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Patients at North Carolina-based Atrium Health get what looks like an enticing pitch when they go to the nonprofit hospital system’s website: a payment plan from lender AccessOne. The plans offer “easy ways to make monthly payments” on medical bills, the website says. You don’t need good credit to get a loan. Everyone is approved. Nothing is reported to credit agencies. Very high interest rates are standard however.

In Minnesota, Allina Health encourages its patients to sign up for an account with MedCredit Financial Services to “consolidate your health expenses.” Very high interest.

In Southern California, Chino Valley Medical Center, part of the Prime Healthcare chain, touts “promotional financing options with the CareCredit credit card to help you get the care you need, when you need it.” As usual, very high interest rates.

As Americans are overwhelmed with medical bills, patient financing is now a multibillion-dollar business, with private equity and big banks lined up to cash in when patients and their families can’t pay for care. By one estimate from research firm IBISWorld, profit margins top 29 percent in the patient financing industry, seven times what is considered a solid hospital margin.

Mental Health Services

Headquarters of private equity company Bain Capital in Boston’s John Hancock building. (RhythmicQuietude, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The Private Equity Newsletter reports that psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers once ran their own practices. Now the local therapist office could be controlled by a buyout king.

Venture capitalists and private-equity firms are pouring billions of dollars into mental-health businesses, including psychology offices, psychiatric facilities, telehealth platforms for online therapy, new drugs, meditation apps and other digital tools.

Nine mental-health startups have reached private valuations exceeding $1 billion last year, including Cerebral Inc. and BetterUp Inc.

Demand for these services is rising as more people deal with grief, anxiety and loneliness amid lockdowns and the rising death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic, making the sector ripe for investment, according to bankers, consultants and investors.

They say the sector has become more attractive because health plans and insurers are paying higher rates than in the past for mental-health care, and virtual platforms have made it easier for clinicians to provide remote care.

“Since Covid, the need has gone through the roof,” said Kevin Taggart, managing partner at Mertz Taggart, a mergers-and-acquisitions firm focused on the behavioral-health sector. “Every mental-health company we are working for is busy. A lot of them have wait lists.”

In the first year of the pandemic, prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25 percent, the World Health Organization said in March. About one-third of Americans are reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of behavioral-health acquisitions jumped more than 35 percent to 153 in 2021 versus the previous year, and of those, 123 involved private-equity firms, according to Mertz Taggart. In the first quarter of this year, there were 41 acquisitions, of which 30 involved PE firms.

The push into mental health carries risks. A rush of private-equity firms could send prices for practices higher, reducing potential profits. A risk for patients and clinicians is that new owners could focus on profits rather than outcomes, perhaps by pressuring clinicians to see more patients than they can handle. If care becomes less personal and private, patient care might also suffer.

Online mental-health company Cerebral and other telehealth startups have begun to face scrutiny over their prescribing practices. The Wall Street Journal has reported that some of Cerebral’s nurse practitioners said they felt pressure to prescribe stimulants. Last week, Cerebral said it would pause prescribing controlled substances such as Adderall to treat ADHD in new patients. Last year, Cerebral logged a $4.8 billion valuation.

Investors poured $5.5 billion into mental-health technology startups globally last year, up 139 percent from 2020, according to a report by CB Insights, an analytics firm. Of that, $4.5 billion was spent on U.S. firms. They range from platforms like SonderMind that match people with clinicians to meditation apps like Calm.

How Bad Has It Gotten?

Private equity-owned healthcare companies have also seen the following issues:

Reduced staffing, or filling beds without adequate staffing ratios

Over-reliance on unlicensed staff to reduce labor costs

Failure to provide adequate training

Pressure on providers to provide unnecessary and potentially costly services

Violation of regulations required for participants in Medicare and Medicaid such as anti-kickback provisions, creating litigation risk

Dentistry

A Small Smiles Dental Centers clinic in Houston, 2012.

(Hourick, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Kaiser Health News (KHC) reports that private-equity business tactics have been linked to scandalously bad care at some dental clinics that treated children from low-income families.

In early 2008, a Washington, D.C., television station aired a shocking report about a local branch of the dental chain Small Smiles that included video of screaming children strapped to straightjacket-like “papoose boards” before being anesthetized to undergo needless operations like baby root canals.

Five years later, a U.S. Senate report cited the TV exposé in voicing alarm at the “corporate practice of dentistry in the Medicaid program.” The Senate report stressed that most dentists turned away kids enrolled in Medicaid because of low payments and posed the question: How could private equity make money providing that care when others could not? The answer is “volume,” according to the Kaiser report.

Small Smiles settled several whistleblower cases in 2010 by paying the government $24 million. At the time, it was providing “business management and administrative services” to 69 clinics nationwide, according to the Justice Department. It later declared bankruptcy.

According to the 2018 lawsuit filed by his parents, Zion Gastelum was hooked up to an oxygen tank after questionable root canals and crowns “that was empty or not operating properly” and put under the watch of poorly trained staffers who didn’t recognize the blunder until it was too late.

Zion never regained consciousness and died four days later at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, the suit states. The cause of death was “undetermined,” according to the Maricopa County medical examiner’s office.

An Arizona state dental board investigation later concluded that the toddler’s care fell below standards, according to the suit. Less than a month after Zion’s death in December 2017, the dental management company Benevis LLC and its affiliated Kool Smiles clinics agreed to pay the Justice Department $24 million to settle False Claims Act lawsuits.

The government alleged that the chain performed “medically unnecessary” dental services, including baby root canals, from January 2009 through December 2011.

In their lawsuit, Zion’s parents blamed his death on corporate billing policies that enforced “production quotas for invasive procedures such as root canals and crowns” and threatened to fire or discipline dental staff “for generating less than a set dollar amount per patient.”

Kool Smiles billed Medicaid $2,604 for Zion’s care, according to the suit. FFL Partners did not respond to requests for comment. In court filings, it denied liability, arguing it did not provide “any medical services that harmed the patient.”

Olson, author of Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms U.S. Health Care, concludes, private equity does not belong in medicine at all and should it be banned.


“We really need to prohibit, I think, the corporate practice of medicine, period. If you look at the private equity playbook, its only goal is to make outsized profits – they can’t make ordinary profits. If they make ordinary, respectable profits, their investors will go somewhere else because of the risk.

Private equity doesn’t care whether the product is Roto-Rooter or hospice. That’s one of the major differences between PE and a regular company, which may care about the community, the reputation of the company, and the quality of the product. They want to keep their customers. They care about the future.

But private equity doesn’t work like that. Because private equity often aims to sell a company after four or five months, they don’t care about the future. They don’t care about the product at all. Private equity is antithetical to our health care system.

So yes, we need to ban private equity from health care. But given that it’s not going to happen, I would say that we need to prohibit the corporate practice of medicine — anybody can make a case for that.

You can eliminate their tax advantages.

You can limit the debt imposed on companies, especially in the health sector. You could easily control consolidation and monopolies in the health sector.

You could use specific anti-trust laws. I would definitely forbid investment by retail customers such as their 401(k)s.”

Also forbidden should be non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements, which make it so difficult to obtain information. I had a hard time interviewing people for this article. When people did talk, they were extraordinarily careful.

“Stealth branding” should also be banned — where the PE firm buys a chain, like a dental chain, but gives each office its own name, like Marilyn’s Happy Dental Care. It’s very deceptive.

PE players and firms don’t tend to be household names. They’ve really managed to fly under the radar. Here are some names that came up frequently in the research; names to look out for:

Bain Capital, the PE company that Mitt Romney still profits from, is one.

The Carlyle Group has been involved in recruiting high-ranking people from the government — one of its co-founders, David Rubenstein, served as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy during the Carter administration. George H.W. Bush became a senior member of its Asia advisory, and so on.

July 2019: David Rubenstein, a founder of the private equity group KKR, in a discussion with U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo in Washington, D.C. (State Department, Michael Gross)

KKR, of course, is one of the biggest. They control a lot in health care.

Dr. Olson concludes with concerns that can affect all communities.

“As PE gets more and more money — with these pension funds, and especially if they get their hands into the 401(k)s — they’re just going to keep buying up anything and everything. And it’s not just health care. More and more of these firms are appearing and getting into more and more industries.

As young people, or even older people involved in the well-established financial firms, realize how much money is involved, they just start a PE firm. Look at Jared Kushner [Affinity Partners]. It’s a very worrisome situation.”

Douglas Stephenson, LCSW, is a retired psychotherapist and former instructor of social work in the University of Florida Department of Psychiatry. He is a member of Physicians for a National Health Program.

This article is from Common Dreams.

COP15
China to Run UN Biodiversity Conference

This is the first time that Beijing has presided over a major intergovernmental meeting on the environment and wildlife ecologist Vanessa Hull is eager to see the country step into a global leadership role.

Four Père David’s deer (Elaphurus davidianus), also known as milu deer, 

on a wetland near the Dafeng Milu National Nature Reserve in Jiangsu

 Province, China. (He Jinghua/VCG via Getty Images)

By Vanessa Hull
University of Florida

November 30, 2022

As the world parses what was achieved at the U.N. climate change conference in Egypt, negotiators are convening in Montreal to set goals for curbing Earth’s other crisis: loss of living species.

Starting on Dec. 7, 196 nations that have ratified the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity will hold their 15th Conference of the Parties, or COP15. The convention, which was adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is designed to promote sustainable development by protecting biodiversity — the variety of life on Earth, from genes up to entire ecosystems.

Today, experts widely agree that biodiversity is at risk. Because of human activities – especially overhunting, overfishing and altering land — species are disappearing from the planet at 50-to-100 times the historic rate. The United Nations calls this decline a “nature crisis.”

This meeting was originally scheduled to take place in Kunming, China, in 2020 but was rescheduled because of the Covid-19 pandemic, with some negotiations held online. China will lead the deliberations in Montreal and will set the agenda and tone.

This is the first time that Beijing has presided over a major intergovernmental meeting on the environment. As a wildlife ecologist, I am eager to see China step into a global leadership role.
Biodiversity matters, because having more ecosystems, species and genes makes nature more resilient and able to weather stresses like diseases and climate change.

Biodiversity in China

If you ask people where on Earth the greatest concentrations of wild species are found, many will assume it’s in rainforests or tropical coral reefs. In fact, China also is rich in nature. It is home to nearly 38,000 higher plant species – essentially, trees, shrubs and ferns; more than 8,100 species of vertebrate animals; over 1,400 bird species; and 20 percent of the world’s fish species.

Many of China’s wild species are endemic, meaning that they are found nowhere else in the world. China contains parts of four of the world’s global biodiversity hot spots – places that have large numbers of endemic species and also are seriously at risk.

Indo-Burma, the Mountains of Southwest China, Eastern Himalaya and the Mountains of Central Asia are home to species such as the giant panda, Asiatic black bear, the endangered Sichuan partridge, Xizang alpine toad, Sichuan lancehead and golden pheasant.

Giant panda in southwest China. (Vanessa Hull, CC BY-ND)

China’s Conservation Record

Western media coverage of environmental issues in China often focuses on the nation’s severe urban air pollution and its role as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. But China has a vision for protecting nature, and it has made progress since the last global biodiversity conference in 2018.

In that year, Chinese leaders coined the term “ecological civilization” and wrote it into the nation’s constitution. This signaled a recognition that development should consider environmental impacts as well as economic goals.

At that point, China had already created over 2,750 protected areas, covering nearly 15 percent of its total land area. Protected areas are places where there is dedicated funding and management in place to conserve ecosystems, while also allowing for some human activities in designated zones within them.

In 2021 President Xi Jinping announced that China was formally augmenting this system with a network of five national parks covering 88,000 square miles (227,000 square kilometers) — the largest such system in the world.

China also has the fastest-expanding forest area in the world. From 2013 to 2017 alone, China reforested 825 million acres (334 million hectares) of bare or cultivated land — an area four times as large as the entire U.S. national forest system.

At least 10 of China’s notable endangered species are on the path to recovery, including the giant panda, Asian crested ibis and Elliot’s pheasant.

More to Do

Still, China has major areas for improvement. It has underperformed on four of the original Aichi Targets – goals that members of the Convention on Biodiversity adopted for 2011-2020 – including promoting sustainable fisheries, preventing extinctions, controlling invasive alien species and protecting vulnerable ecosystems.

For example, nearly 50 percent of amphibians in China are threatened. Notable species have been declared extinct, including the Chinese dugong, the Chinese paddlefish and Yangtze sturgeon, and the white-handed gibbon.

The Covid-19 pandemic spotlighted China’s central role in legal and illegal wildlife trade, which threatens many endangered mammals, fish, reptiles and birds. In response, China updated its Wildlife Protection Law, originally enacted in 1989.

On Feb. 24, 2020, the law was expanded to impose a near-total ban on trading wildlife for use as food. Now, however, the ban is being revised in ways that could weaken it, such as easing restrictions on captive breeding.

Around 90 percent of China’s grasslands are degraded, as are 53 percent of its coastal wetlands. China has lost 80 percent of its coral reefs and 73 percent of its mangroves since 1950. These challenges highlight the need for aggressive action to protect the nation’s remaining biodiversity strongholds.



The Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River, visible at lower right, was built to supply electricity and help control flooding. It altered habitats for thousands of plants, animals and fish, including endangered species. (NASA Earth Observatory)

Goals for COP15

The central goal of the Montreal conference is adopting a post-2020 global biodiversity framework. This road map expands on frameworks put forth in past meetings, including the 2010 Aichi Targets.

As the U.N. has reported, nations failed to meet any of the Aichi Targets by 2020, although six goals were partially achieved.

The proposed new framework includes 22 targets to meet by 2030 and four key long-term goals to meet by 2050. They include conserving ecosystems; enhancing the variety of benefits that nature provides to people; ensuring fairness in the sharing of genetic resources, such as digital DNA sequencing data; and solidifying funding commitments.

Many people will be watching to see whether China can successfully lead the negotiations and promote collaboration and consensus. One central challenge is how to pay for the ambitious efforts that the new framework lays out.

Environmental advocates are urging wealthy countries to provide up to $60 billion annually to help lower-income nations pay for conservation projects and curb illegal wildlife trafficking.

China moved in this direction in 2021 when it launched the Kunming Biodiversity Fund and contributed $230 million to it. Pledges from other countries currently total some $5.2 billion per year, mainly from France, the United Kingdom, Japan and the European Union.

China is likely to face questions about its Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project that is building railways, pipelines and highways across more than 60 countries. Critics say it is causing deforestation, flooding and other harmful environmental impacts — including in global biodiversity hot spots like Southeast Asia’s Coral Triangle, which contains one of the world’s most important reef systems.

China has pledged to “green” the Belt and Road Initiative going forward, and in 2021, Xi announced a ban on financing new coal power plants overseas, which so far has led to cancellation of 26 plants. This is a start, but China has more to do in addressing Belt and Road’s global impacts.

As home to 18 percent of Earth’s population and the producer of 18.4 percent of global GDP, China has a key role to play in protecting nature. I hope to see it provide bold leadership in Montreal and in the years ahead.

Vanessa Hull is assistant professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.