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)
Sunday, May 05, 2024
Shell Sold Millions of ‘Phantom’ Carbon Credits
Oil industry titan Shell has sold millions of carbon credits linked to CO2 removal that never actually occurred, the Financial Times found.
Carbon capture and storage has long been viewed as a potentially powerful, though perhaps limited, tool to combat climate change and lower overall carbon emissions. The problem, in part, is a serious lack of commercial viability. It’s why the Canadian government — and in particular the local government of oil-rich Alberta — spent much of the previous decade offering generous subsidy and incentive plans.
For instance, Shell, which owns and operates a carbon capture facility in Alberta called Quest, agreed with the Alberta government to register and sell carbon credits that were valued at twice the amount of carbon it actually captured at Quest. After eight years of operation, the 2-for-1 scheme likely resulted in more harm than help, the FT found:
The 2-for-1 program, which ran from 2015 through 2021 before ultimately being sunsetted in 2022, allowed Shell to register around 5.7 million unearned credits, with credits typically valued at the equivalent of one ton of CO2. Shell then sold most of the “phantom” credits to massive fossil fuel firms like Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Canadian Natural Resources, and Suncor Energy.
In selling the bunk credits, Shell effectively gave cover to the other energy firms to continue — and in some cases, expand — emissions-creating processes. According to the FT, the recent production boom in Alberta has slowed Canada’s progress toward achieving emission-reduction goals.
The 2-for-1 scheme was “probably not appropriate,” Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, told the FT. Greenpeace Canada senior energy strategist Keith Stewart put it more starkly, telling the FT: “Selling emissions credits for reductions that never happened… literally makes climate change worse.”
Captured Audience: Still, carbon capture technologies are likely to become more prevalent. The White House finalized new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency last month designed to limit power plant emissions. Existing coal plants and new natural gas plants will now be required to curb 90% of emissions by 2039, with carbon capture technology recommended as a method of compliance. But challenges remain. The Supreme Court has already struck down two previous attempts to enforce emissions standards on the power sector, one by the Obama administration and another by the Trump administration. At least it’s been nonpartisan.
How a few secret donors are fueling the new right-wing infrastructure
The Bradley Impact Fund helps finance the work of groups led by Michael Flynn and Stephen Miller. Most of the money can be traced to four undisclosed sources, documents show.
By Isabela Dias
Sunday, May 5, 2024 Photo: Shutterstock
In early 2021, Stephen Miller — former White House senior adviser to Donald Trump and architect of the 45th president’s hopeful second-term mass deportation agenda — announced his next venture: America First Legal (AFL).
Paraded as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” AFL fights for Trumpist values in the legal system. And the group is prolific: In its three years of existence, AFL has taken on more than 100 legal actions—between lawsuits filed, complaints lodged with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and court briefs written, according to the Washington Post.
The Supreme Court could help implement his plan to take billions from public school and give them to religious private and home schools.
While it has notably played a major role in stopping debt relief for Black farmers, Miller’s organization has been perhaps most famous for its aggressive publicity strategy of “lawfare.”
AFL targets so-called “woke” corporate and government programs, alleging employment discrimination against white, heterosexual men. It has challenged Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in higher education and supposed “radical transgender ideology” in school districts. Typically, after filing a suit or complaint, Miller makes the rounds of the right-wing media circuit and fundraises off the attention. “Bogus suits,” securities law expert Benjamin Edwards explained in the Daily Beast, seem designed for a nonlegal goal: to issue “press releases” so AFL can “recruit more donors.” Miller’s group has reportedly spent more on ads than legal services. (AFL did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.)
The strategy has worked. In 2022, AFL brought in $44 million. Its revenue shot up by nearly 600% compared with the previous year. But less scrutinized has been how AFL has secured its haul. More than 60% of its funding came from a little-discussed entity: the Bradley Impact Fund. In 2022, Bradley doled out more than $27 million to AFL, according to the organization’s most recent available tax filing.
And AFL is far from the only culture-war donation the Bradley Impact Fund has dispensed.
That same year, according to tax filings, Bradley gave $7.8 million to Turning Point USA and $1.8 million to Project Veritas, the conservative outfit founded by provocateur James O’Keefe that mounts sting operations. The year prior, both organizations ranked at the top of the fund’s list of recipients, receiving $7.4 million and $2.1 million, respectively. (Before 2019, such contributions were limited to a few thousand dollars.) Another group to benefit from the fund has been America’s Future — led by Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn — which received a $500,000 gift in 2022.
Over the last few years, the Bradley Impact Fund has experienced massive growth, emerging as one of the key bankrollers of the coterie of organizations and apparatchiks hoping to create institutions that carry out Trump’s ideological agenda. In the process, Bradley fuels the culture wars and undermines faith in democracy by stirring election denialism — all while keeping its donors secret.
More than 75% of contributions to the Bradley Impact Fund in 2022 came from just four sources.
Created in 2012, the Bradley Impact Fund is a donor-advised fund (DAF) “aligned” with the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has a long history of conservative influence and, of late, has become a source of money for organizations pushing Republicans to change election laws. Donor-advised funds, such as the Bradley Impact Fund, collect donations from various contributors and then make often untraceable gifts to other organizations. An increasingly popular charity tool—receiving a quarter of all individual giving in the United States — DAFs offer donors “multiple layers of anonymity,” explains Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the investigative watchdog Documented.
DAFs operate like private foundations but are classified as public charities. This allows the funds to give money without the same transparency requirements. And the donors, who can recommend where their contributions should go, are still awarded the publicly subsidized tax breaks associated with charitable giving.
Some of the largest US-based DAFs are funneling millions of dollars to groups pushing anti-LGBTQ agendas and working to restrict reproductive rights, as a recent OpenDemocracy investigation showed.
DAFs can essentially work as “slush funds for political engagement,” says Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It really is sort of a big wash for money.”
The Bradley Impact Fund has “quickly grown into a major player in the conservative space,” Fischer, an expert in campaign finance and government transparency issues, explains. Bradley is “shaping politics and policymaking in ways that will be felt for years to come,” Michael Beckel, research director with the political reform group Issue One, told the Guardian.
This work is being enabled by an extraordinarily small universe of donors. Bradley boasts about cultivating a network of contributors across 44 states. But more than 75% of contributions to the Bradley Impact Fund in 2022 came from just four sources, according to an audited financial statement filed with the California Department of Justice that the nonprofit research organization Accountable US shared with Mother Jones.
The Bradley Impact Fund received roughly $108 million in contributions and grants that year, including three donations of $36 million, $20 million, and $18 million, respectively. At least another $12 million came from a different donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust, the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement. By its own admission, DonorsTrust is a convenient conduit for benefactors wishing to provide “gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues.” (In an email, Lawson Bader, president and CEO of DonorsTrust, declined to comment on the reasons behind the grant to the Bradley Impact Fund, saying the implementation of the gift is left to the recipient. “Grants from one DAF provider to another are infrequent and certainly not nefarious,” he added.)
“It shows how purposefully opaque these money flows are,” Caroline Ciccone, president of Accountable US, says. “They move through multiple different entities in a way that intentionally obscures sources.” The limited number of major funding sources to the Bradley Impact Fund, she adds, suggests that “they’re really only intended to work for a small elite group who doesn’t seem to be comfortable perhaps with the values that they are pushing across the country.”
In the fall of 2019, the Bradley Impact Fund held its ninth annual conference in Lake Geneva, a resort town in Wisconsin. Earlier that year, it had welcomed a new president, Gabriel Conger, previously an adviser to the president of the Heritage Foundation specializing in donor relations. Once a bastion of Reaganite orthodoxy, Heritage has, like much of the right, pivoted to something closer to MAGA populism. And the Bradley Impact Fund has seemed to follow suit.
The theme of the conference was “Disruptors: Principles in Action.” One of the talks, focused on “Disrupting the Leftwing Agenda,” featured former Vice President Dick Cheney, Federalist top editor Mollie Hemingway, and right-wing commentator . Wilfred McClay, now a chair in classical history and Western civilization at Hillsdale College, was invited to “discuss the importance of breaking the Left’s stranglehold on American history.” (He promoted his book Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, an intended antidote to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—which McClay described as a “‘comic-book melodrama in which ‘the people’ are constantly being abused by ‘the rulers.’”)
“The war we have to fight is the war of ideas,” Owens told attendees. “We need to stand up and say what we believe every day — it’s the only way we will save America.”
The event also included a panel with the Teneo Network, a group that describes itself as “the Silicon Valley of Conservatism.” It aims to expand on the yearslong crusade of Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo — who is a chair of Teneo’s board — to move US courts to the right.
After the conference, Conger warned in a newsletter that conservatives were “at a crossroads in this fight for our country’s future.” There was much work for the Bradley Impact Fund to do.
In short order, Conger assembled a massive war chest for this battle. After he took over as president, Bradley’s revenue, as well as grant-making, jumped by more than 650%. And the fund seemingly adjusted its giving priorities to meet the moment of the conservative movement. (The Bradley Impact Fund and Conger didn’t respond to an email with questions.)
In the last couple of years, Bradley has given not only to Project Veritas, Turning Point USA, and Miller’s AFL, but also to anti-critical Race Theory groups. The fund has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to parental rights groups such as Parents Defending Education and Moms for America. In February, Moms for America joined a “Take Our Border Back” convoy that drew a mix of conspiracy theorists, January 6 insurrectionists, and Christian nationalists.
The limited number of major funding sources to the Bradley Impact Fund suggests that “they’re really only intended to work for a small elite group.”
“The ramping up of giving to far-right and MAGA-aligned groups since 2020 is indicative of a broader evolution of the conservative movement,” Fischer says. Deep-pocketed donors, he adds, are channeling less money toward a first wave of traditionally conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and the Federalist Society, and more toward a newer breed of institutions “providing the support to push politics even further to the right.”
The Bradley Impact Fund shares some board of directors with the somewhat low-profile but impactful Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Founded in 1942, the private foundation with assets of more than $900 million has dispersed upward of $1 billion to back conservative causes advancing school choice and welfare reform and to defund unions. More recently, the foundation has funded “election integrity” efforts. The Bradley Foundation, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote in 2021, “has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence.” And it, too, has doubled down on building right-wing infrastructure. In the Bradley Foundation’s 2023 annual report, the organization disclosed donations of $250,000 to the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where anti-CRT activist Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow, to “support efforts to combat identity politics,” $30,000 to Leo’sTeneo Network, and $100,000 to the sprawling MAGA “nerve center” known as the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
The Bradley Impact Fund has provided even more funding to CPI. It funneled more than $1 million in donations to CPI between 2020 and 2022.
CPI, as the New York Times reported, has become a policy incubator for a potential second Trump term. Launched in 2017, it serves as a refuge for Trump loyalists and aides-in-waiting, too. It is led by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (who got booted as president of the Heritage Foundation in 2017 amid concerns that the organization had become overly political) and Trump’s ex–chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was recently indicted by a state grand jury in Arizona on felony charges related to efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
The umbrella organization hosts a bevy of right-wing initiatives, including AFL and the Election Integrity Network, a project spearheaded by Cleta Mitchell — Trump’s former legal adviser who played a central role in the plot to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. (Mitchell also sits on the board of the Bradley Foundation.) The Election Integrity Network aims to recruit “an army of citizen volunteers” to monitor elections.
In 2021, Trump’s Save America PAC donated $1 million to CPI, which, like its spin-off organizations, is involved in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — a roadmap for a future Trump administration to overhaul federal agencies and give unprecedented power to the president.
The nonprofit watchdog Campaign for Accountability recently filed a complaint with the IRS claiming CPI, a 501(c)(3), “indirectly engages in political campaign activity through a for-profit subsidiary that provides services to former President Donald Trump’s political campaign, as well as other Republican candidates, committees, and certain other partisan entities.” CPI did not respond to a request for comment.
As a hub for pro-MAGA groups, CPI aspires to be a breeding ground for the next generation of conservative leaders. The organization conducts “ideological vetting” and training of candidates for congressional staff positions. One such bootcamp in April 2023 featured Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk as a speaker on “how to communicate conservative goals to a younger audience.” In another session, Stephen Miller spoke on “best practices for constructive social media posting.” (In its 2021 annual report, CPI calls his group AFL “the sling that hardworking, patriotic Americans can use to fight back against the abusive Goliath of the Biden Administration’s Deep State.”)
“We are the only organization that exists solely to unite and serve the conservative movement,” the group’s report states.
CPI itself has turned into a fundraising powerhouse too, bringing in $36 million in 2022. Much of that money can be traced to a relatively little-known donor, Mike Rydin, the now-retired founder of a Texas-based construction software development company. Rydin has given more than $25 million to CPI since the January 6 invasion of the US capitol, according to the Daily Beast, and offered a “generous gift” to help the organization purchase property on Capitol Hill. In turn, CPI has named one of the townhouses in its expanding real estate “Patriots’ Row” campus for the far-right “The Rydin House,” which Newsmax has since used to film an apologist documentary about January 6 titled Day of Outrage. CPI’s 2,200-acre retreat on Maryland’s eastern shore also goes by “Camp Rydin.” Rydin, whose bio highlights his use of programming skills to design a dating website where he met his late wife, has a profile page on Kirk’s Turning Point USA website.
There isn’t any indication that Rydin, who previously said he wasn’t aware of CPI’s hiring of people involved in the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol, has donated to the Bradley Impact Fund. Rydin couldn’t be reached for comment. (While major donors to the Impact Fund have been disclosed in the past, they are currently not known.)
But Fischer sees a “corollary trend” in the development of the MAGA-aligned political infrastructure at large. “There appears to be an emerging new wave of far-right donors, many of them individuals with no political profile, who are ideologically motivated and seeking more than just deregulation or climate change denial,” he says.
And that’s where DAFs come in. By obscuring the identity of big donors behind an extraordinary amount of money passing through and to different groups fanning the flames of the culture wars, they make it hard to nail down where the flow starts and where it ends.
Crowds gather to celebrate Beltain with burning of 40ft wicker man
Celtic Fire Festival: Burning the Wicker man took place at Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire.
PENTACLE DRUMMERS PERFORMED DURING THE TRADITIONAL CELTIC FIRE FESTIVAL (ANDREW MATTHEWS/PA)
PA WIRE
Crowds gathered to mark the coming of summer with a traditional Celtic fire festival held at Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire.
The experimental archaeology site in Waterlooville hosted the burning of a 40ft wicker man at dusk to mark the pagan quarter-day farming celebration of Beltane or Beltain, which has connections to later May Day celebrations
The May Queen and Green Man wre in attendance, as were members of the Pentacle Drummers who performed in front of the burning wicker man.
Germany is burning through far more resources than is sustainableI
mage: S. Ziese/blickwinkel/IMAGO
Just over four months into the year, Germany has already exceeded sustainable consumption limits for the year, according to the US-based environment NGO Global Footprint Network.
According to its calculations, if everybody in the world behaved like the Germans, humanity would need three Earths to provide enough resources to sustainably accommodate their consumption.
So-called overshoot days occur when a country's demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what the planet can regenerate in that year.
The worst offenders, such as Qatar and Luxembourg, already exceeded their limits in February. Other countries, such as Cambodia and Madagascar, will likely stay well below their limits and not overshoot.
Last year, Germany overshot its limit on May 4 — one day later than 2024, taking into account the leap year difference.
Overshoot Day as a chance to reform
"The German Earth Overshoot Day is a reminder to change the underlying conditions in all sectors now so that sustainable behavior becomes the new normal," Aylin Lehnert, education officer at German environmental NGO Germanwatch, said in a press release. "We need a new debt brake, a debt brake in relation to the overloading of the Earth."
According to Greenwatch, meat production and consumption in Germany is one of the main drivers of its overuse of Earth's resources. About 60% of its agricultural land is used for animal feed production, and millions of tons are imported from overseas.
Germany's total imports led to the destruction of 138,000 hectares (341,005 acres) of tropical forest worldwide from 2016 to 2018, according to the international development agency GIZ.
The Global South, which largely lives within sustainable limits, shoulders much of the burden of overconsumption through environmental destruction and climate change damage.
On Tuesday, Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) criticized the country's reckless use of soil, water and raw materials.
Meat consumption is one of the main factors behind Germany's sustainability overshoot
Image: INA FASSBENDER/AFP
BUND Chairman Olaf Bandt said in a statement, "Our Earth is overloaded. A country that consumes as many resources as we do is operating poorly and recklessly."
BUND is calling on the German government to introduce a resource protection law for soil and land, arable and pasture land, fishing grounds, ground and surface water, forests and wood.
More consumption does not mean more happiness
According to the Happy Planet Index (HPI) released on Thursday, all this overconsumption doesn't necessarily lead to better lives for its citizens.
The index, compiled by the Hot or Cool Institute, a Berlin-based public interest think tank, combines data on well-being, life expectancy and carbon footprint to assess how well countries are caring for their citizens without overtaxing the planet.
For example, Sweden and Germany have very similar levels of general well-being and life expectancy, but Sweden achieved that quality of life with 16% fewer emissions per capita than Germany and less than half the per capita footprint in the United States.
Costa Rica had comparable figures for life expectancy and well-being but almost half the environmental impact of Germany.
The index, which also breaks down income levels within countries, found that the top 10% of earners globally are responsible for nearly half of all emissions but have almost no gains in well-being and health over low-emitters.
A good example of this is air travel. People who fly a lot emit far more carbon than people who do not, but they do not show a significant increase in well-being compared to those who fly less. In the United States, a 2020 study revealed that wealthier homes have 25% larger energy footprints than low-income homes but equal levels of life satisfaction.
Lewis Akenji, managing director of the Hot or Cool Institute, called for countries to rethink their priorities.
"We need to focus on wasteful consumption and inequality, which is making the planetary crisis worse," Akenji said in a statement.
Edited by: Tamsin Walker
Dangerous Instagram? Iraqi LGBTQ+ community loses safe space
It was always double-edged, but in Iraq, social media was often a comparatively safe place where the local queer community could meet. Recent amendments to Iraqi law are changing all that.
Burning the rainbow flag: Conservative politicians in Iraq often describe LGBTQ+ rights as being "imported" from the decadent West
Image: Ameer Al-Mohammedawi/dpa/picture alliance
Social media has always been one of the only places where members of the LGBTQ+ community in Iraq could meet and be more open about their sexual identity.
"Before Instagram, members of the community created fake Facebook accounts and joined secret groups to get to know one another," Khalid, a 22-year-old student in the central Iraqi province of Babylon, told DW; he could not give his full name because doing so would expose him to danger. "Then with Instagram's 'close friends' story feature [launched in 2018], it became even easier for people to connect, and even to find love."
The country's conservative culture means that most queer locals have always hidden their sexuality. Surveys of attitudes toward homosexuality in Middle Eastern countries indicate that usually less than 10% of local populations "approve" of homosexuality.
"So social media has been the main platform of expression of any kind here, especially for those who do not have their own spaces," explained Ayaz Shalal Kado, executive director of the Iraqi human rights organization IraQueer. "That includes vulnerable groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community, disabled people and others. Social media was a way for these people to express themselves, connect and create communities," he told DW.
Many Middle Eastern countries have a queer scene but unlike in Lebanon
(pictured) it mostly remains hidden
Hassan Ammar/AP/picture alliance
While social media and digital platforms have offered an opportunity, they have also posed a danger, Human Rights Watch said earlier this year as it launched the campaign Secure Our Socials. Working with local rights groups, Human Rights Watch reported how digital activity was being used by authoritarian states against individuals suspected of being queer.
Dangers of digital life
This danger is now likely to increase for the LGBTQ+ community in Iraq.
Despite generally negative attitudes toward same-sex relationships, Iraq — unlike most other countries in the Middle East — never had a law explicitly criminalizing them. Instead, Iraqi officials used more vague anti-obscenity laws to punish and harass members of the LGBTQ+ community.
But in late April, the Iraqi government amended a pre-existing law on prostitution. The new amendments ban any sort of homosexuality or transsexuality, punishing these with up to 15 years in prison. Anybody seen to "promote" homosexuality could be fined up to 15 million Iraqi dinars ($11,220, €10,5050) or sentenced to jail for up to seven years.
This comes after the Iraqi Communications and Media Commission, which regulates local media, issued rules in August 2023 mandating that media in Iraq may no longer use the term "homosexuality" and should instead replace it with the phrase "sexual deviance." Media may also not talk about "gender."
According to the local media outlet Rudaw, Iraqi lawmakers insisted they needed the amendments "to preserve the entity of Iraqi society from moral degeneration," as the amendment text read.
"The truth is, this new law is not new at all," Babylon-based student Khalid complained. "We've always lived in fear and hiding." It's just that now there's even more thing to worry about, he told DW.
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq said the law contradicts a number of human rights treaties ratified by Iraq. The US State Department argued the new rules could be used to "further hamper free speech and personal expression and inhibit the operations of [non-governmental organizations] across Iraq."
Iraqi NGOs are still working out exactly how to respond. One Iraqi rights organization, Gala for LGBTQ, posted advice on its Instagram page that included telling users to make their accounts private, unfollowing openly queer accounts and deleting digital material that could be seen as LGBTQ+-friendly.
"If you are in Iraq, it is better not to talk or publish about the LGBTQ+ community and leave this to people who are outside Iraq," the organization suggested.
"There are many ways to fight back and that's what the community is working on currently," IraQueer's Kado told DW. "Safety and security are the highest priority. But we will not give up. That is not an option."
Kado does worry that the online presence of Iraq's LGBTQ+ community is about to be reduced or even disappear altogether, as locals realize the dangers of using social media. But, he adds, there are even larger ramifications around freedom of expression in Iraq.
Wide-ranging impact on rights groups
"Banning words like 'homosexual' or 'gender' is a huge step backwards — and not just for queer people," he argued. "It's intersectional. It doesn't just affect my organization, but also all feminist organizations, all those who work for women's rights, and those who focus on gender and bodily rights in general."
There have also been other cases of social media becoming dangerous in Iraq.
The same weekend Iraqi authorities passed the new LGBTQ+ rules, a popular Iraqi influencer, Ghufran Mahdi Sawadi, known online as Um Fahad, was murdered by an unknown assailant outside her home, most likely because of her online persona.
"Every young person has the right to entertainment and to share content on their Snapchat account," Sawadi's brother Amir, told DW. "This is their personal life."
Over the past year, two other Iraqis who were well known on social media — a transgender person known as Simsim and Noor Alsaffar, who posted videos of himself in women's clothing — were also murdered.
As Kado argues, all this should be seen as connected. "History shows us that when one group is targeted, then another vulnerable group is bound to be next," he concluded. "Once you allow perpetrators [of human rights abuses] to take a step without accountability, they will take more steps. At some point it will be too late to stop them."
