There was no regime so obnoxious, no tyrant too murderous, for Henry Kissinger’s blessings to be withheld, provided only it upheld US strategic interests
Celebrated for his diplomacy, especially over China, his true face was that of a callous murderer with the blood of millions on his hands, writes ANDREW MURRAY
HENRY KISSINGER, the US diplomat associated with some of the worst crimes of the cold war, has died at the age of 100.
He packed his worst offences against humanity into just six of those hundred years, when he served as national security adviser or secretary of state, and sometimes both, to presidents Nixon and Ford from 1969 to 1975.
A Metternich of the 20th century, Kissinger was a practitioner of cynical realpolitik in the service of the interests of US imperialism.
Even after leaving office, he retained considerable influence for decades, advising successive US administrations and various private clients on world affairs.
He is above all associated with the murderous bombing of Cambodia and the first outreach of Washington to socialist China, as well as support for the fascist coup in Chile in 1973, the pursuit of detente-through-strength with the USSR and peripatetic “shuttle diplomacy” during the Yom Kippur war between Israel and Arab states.
Days before the latest climate summit is due to begin in Dubai, the first flight powered entirely by “sustainable aviation fuel” landed safely in New York.
The twin engines of this Boeing 787 Dreamliner ran on farm waste and used cooking oil, an alternative to the kerosene that is usually dug up, refined and burned to satisfy the wanderlust of a relatively wealthy minority of Earth’s people.
Sadly, the entire event was a stunt, say political economists Gareth Dale (Brunel University London) and Josh Moos (Leeds Beckett University). They point out that the market for cooking oil is poorly regulated, and so “sustainable fuels” can come from palm oil plantations which have devastated orangutan habitat in the tropics.
The result is “a smoke-and-mirrors exercise” designed to give the illusion of a world leaving fossil fuels behind, they say. With climate disasters mounting and greenhouse gas emissions at an all-time high, the same could be said for the UN negotiations themselves.
“Eight years ago, the world agreed to an ambitious target in the Paris Agreement: hold warming to 1.5°C to limit further dangerous levels of climate change,” says Brendan Mackey, an environmental scientist at Griffith University.
“Since then, greenhouse gas emissions have kept increasing … In 2023, the world is at 1.2°C of warming over pre-industrial levels. Heatwaves of increasing intensity and duration are arriving around the world. We now have less than 10 years before we reach 1.5°C of warming.”
COP28 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will proceed under the shadow of the UN’s global stocktake. This assessed whether humanity was on course to cut emissions in line with the Paris agreement’s targets by 2030.
The results are in: if all national pledges are fulfilled (not guaranteed), global warming will peak between 2.1-2.8°C this century. Blowing past 2°C, the upper temperature target of the Paris agreement, makes triggering feedback loops (like the release of potent greenhouse gas methane from Arctic permafrost) and catastrophic sea-level rise more likely.
For a chance to avoid climate breakdown and limit warming to 1.5°C, the world needs to prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to 22.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from reaching the atmosphere over the next six years. This is roughly how much the top five polluters (China, US, India, Russia and Japan) emit in a year.
Tasked with leading negotiations to secure this outcome is Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of Adnoc, the UAE’s state-owned oil company. Al Jaber and the UAE hosts were recently embarrassed by leaked documents showing they intended to pitch oil and gas deals to international delegates at the summit.
“The UK invited ridicule by expanding its North Sea oil fields less than two years after urging the world to raise its climate ambitions as summit host. The UAE seems destined for a similar fate – before its talks have even begun,” say Emilie Rutledge and Aiora Zabala, economists at the Open University.
On the agenda at COP28 is a proposed target for tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling the efficiency of existing sources by 2030. Delegates from countries within the High Ambition Coalition demand a written agreement to halt the burning of coal, oil and gas which accounts for roughly 90% of all CO₂ emissions.
Rutledge and Zabala argue that the UAE is an apt case study for the inertia which seems to prevent countries from meeting these aims. The Persian Gulf state subsidises rampant energy use among its public with oil and gas sales that total 80% of government revenues.
Little wonder the UAE would rather talk about the potential for technology to mop up its emissions.
“Adnoc, along with the wider oil and gas industry, has invested in carbon sequestration and making hydrogen fuel from the byproducts of oil extraction. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such measures, even if fully implemented, will only have a small impact on greenhouse gas emissions,” Rutledge and Zabala say.
Where’s the money?
Another test of the UN negotiations will concern the money needed to help developing countries phase out fossil fuels, adapt to a hostile climate and overcome the damage wrought by greenhouse gases overwhelmingly produced by developed countries.
According to the UN, 80% of climate change can be attributed to G20 countries, a group consisting of the world’s major economies.
“For decades, nations have wrestled over the fraught question of who should pay for loss and damage resulting from climate change,” says Mackey.
“Now we’re close to finalising arrangements for the new Loss and Damage Fund. This will be [a] major issue for negotiators at COP28.”
Lisa Vanhala, a professor of political science at UCL, has followed the wrangling over a fund to compensate poor nations for climate change since one was agreed in principle in 2013. Ten years later, questions remain over who will pay into it, who will be able to draw from it and who will control it.
The last of those three questions was at least partially answered in early November. The World Bank, headquartered in Washington D.C., will administer the fund for an interim period. This would give rich donor countries like the US disproportionate influence over loss and damage funding, Vanhala says, and is a far cry from the partnership model small-island developing states had urged.
The World Bank traditionally offers loans instead of grants. Developing countries have consistently argued this funding should not increase a recipient’s debt burden, Vanhala says. And a board member for another fund hosted by the World Bank has reported that the admin fees it charges are rising and absorbing a larger share of its aid.
“This could mean that, for every US$100 billion offered to countries and communities reeling from disaster, the World Bank will keep $US1.5 billion. This will be hard for an institution still funding the climate-wrecking oil and gas industry to justify,” Vanhala adds.
Aside from loss and damage, rich countries failed to keep a promise to raise US$100 billion of climate change mitigation and adaptation funding by 2020. This money would help the most vulnerable nations build sturdier storm defences and solar farms, for instance, and will be the subject of heated debate at COP28.
US and EU negotiators have argued that China, the world’s second largest economy and its current biggest emitter, should be obliged to contribute to such funding – despite sitting with other developing countries in the UN talks.
But a new analysis by Sarah Colenbrander, director at the Overseas Development Institute and guest lecturer in climate economics at the University of Oxford, tells a different story. By following the substantial climate aid China already provides via other channels, such as multilateral development banks, Colenbrander argues that the real laggard and obstacle to a financial settlement is the US.
“The fastest way to restore trust in the international climate regime would be for the US to step up with its fair share of climate finance,” she says.
“Only once the developed countries have fulfilled their longstanding promise does a conversation about new climate finance contributors become politically possible.”
An Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft developed by Joby Aviation Inc. is seen outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the company’s initial public offering on August 11, 2021, in New York. (Photo: Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images)
The Future Can Do Better Than Air Taxis for the Super Rich
Just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs.
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane, it’s… Wall Street’s electric air-taxi future!
Earlier this month, a flying machine from the California-based Joby Aviation became the first “electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft—“eVTOL”—to go airborne from the Downtown Heliport that services Lower Manhattan’s financial district.
Joby is now expecting, by sometime in 2025, to be regularly ferrying high finance’s finest from Wall Street to JFK Airport in a mere seven minutes. Mere mortals taking autos and subways routinely spend well over an hour making the same trip.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
Joby’s new one-pilot, four-passenger eVTOL figures to be only the first of many corporate efforts to speed New York’s deepest pockets on their electric way to destinations both lucrative and exotic. A host of corporations—from China’s eHang to Germany’s Volocopter—already have big plans underway for zipping the world’s richest up and over congested city streets.
But just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs. Imagine air taxis, for instance, ferrying critically injured rural residents to distant emergency care.
Those sorts of efforts will have to wait. The vast wealth of our wealthiest is instead bending innovation and expertise to servicing the already rich. And that bending, new research out of Oxfam details, is keeping our planet’s richest entertained at a vast environmental cost.
The world’s wealthiest 1%, Oxfam’s latest research reveals, are now generating more carbon emissions than all the world’s poorest 66% combined. The carbon emissions from this 1% will—between 2020 and 2030—“cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths” worldwide.
The world’s bottom 99%, Oxfam adds, would have to consume away for 1,500 years to match the carbon output that billionaires now produce in a single year.
But, even so, the political impact of the super rich actually outpaces the impact of their personal energy consumption. Only our richest “have the wealth, power, and influence to protect themselves.” And that same “wealth, power, and influence,” the new Oxfam study lays out, is keeping governments worldwide doing no more than “incentivizing incremental change” in energy policy instead of phasing out fossil fuels and investing massively in renewable energy.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
“Either we safeguard living conditions for all future generations,” she relates, “or we let a few very rich people maintain their destructive lifestyles and preserve an economic system geared towards short-term economic growth and shareholder profit.”
The “twin crises of climate and inequality,” Oxfam’s Climate Equality: A planet for the 99% report goes on to spell out, are “driving one another”—and only “a radical new approach” stands any chance of “overcoming the catastrophe unfolding before us.”
That “radical new approach” must take on “the disproportionate role that the richest individuals play in the climate crisis through their emissions, investments, and capture of politics.”
How can we best realize this badly needed “new approach”? We would need, argues Oxfam, to start aggressively taxing our super rich and the corporations that fuel their fortunes “to help pay for the transition to renewable energy.”
Just one example: Some 45 major oil and gas corporations averaged annual windfall profits of $237 billion in 2021 and 2022, dollars that overwhelmingly funneled straight into rich shareholder pockets. Governments worldwide, Oxfam notes, could have increased global investments in renewable energy by 31% had they taxed this windfall profit at 90%.
The new Oxfam study surveys a wide range of other options the world’s nations could pursue to subject the rich to serious taxation. Govrnments could, for instance, levy “steep and progressive” tax increases on the incomes of the ultra rich—as well as on their property, land, and inheritances. They could raise taxes on corporate profits, fossil fuels, and financial transactions—or levy entirely new taxes on “high-emitting luxury travel.”
The world, in other words, could have plenty of money for social and climate spending “if rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms.”
“We cannot allow the richest countries to claim that they cannot afford to raise the trillions needed,” Oxfam ends up concluding. “Mobilizing this money simply takes political will.”
The anti-woke group, Restore Trust, had launched a renewed campaign to win seats on the Trust’s council this year after failing in their attempts last year, and this time they had the likes of Farage, along with the right-wing press backing them.
An attempt by a right-wing group to take over the National Trust, the UK’s largest charity, has failed after the candidates backed by the likes of Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg, failed to secure a place on the National Trust’s council in this year’s elections.
The anti-woke group, Restore Trust, had launched a renewed campaign to win seats on the Trust’s council this year after failing in their attempts last year, and this time they had the likes of Farage, along with the right-wing press backing them.
Why do the National Trust’s elections matter? Because what was at stake was the future not only of the UK’s largest charity but also one which owns more than 1,300 farms, 775 miles of coastline and 250,000 hectares of land, making it Britain’s largest private landowner. The right recognises the importance of an institution like the National Trust, and did all it could in the council elections to help its candidates.
On 7th November, King Charles III will open the next session of the UK parliament. It is likely to be the last before the general election expected to take place towards the end of 2024.
The King’s speech, written by the government, is the key part of state opening of parliament. It sets out the government’s policy priorities and legislative programme. So what can we expect, or not expect, the Conservative government to do to save its skin?
After 13 years in office and five Prime Ministers the government is spent and is unlikely to reverse any of its economic policies that have resulted in the highest ever public debt of £2.6 trillion (97.8% of GDP) and highest rate of inflation for 41 years.
The government won’t end austerity and real wage cuts. The average real wage is lower than in 2005. 14.4m were living in poverty in 2021/2022. 3.8m people experienced destitution in 2022, including around one million children. In the period 2012-2019, government imposed austerity caused nearly 335,000 excess deaths (nearly 48,000 a year) in England and Scotland.
A government obsessed with privatisation, outsourcing and cuts to public spending may pay lip-service to public investment, but won’t do much to deal with crumbling schools and public buildings. Parts of the National Health Service have been privatised by stealth and the government won’t do much to relieve the healthcare crisis. Some 7.8m people in England are waiting for hospital appointment (1 in 7 of the population). Some .2.6m are chronically ill and unable to work. In the five years to 2022, around 1.5m died whilst awaiting a hospital appointment.
The government is trapped by its subservience to defunct ideologies. It won’t modify Brexit and reach out to Europe to boost investment, trade and jobs. It won’t increase investment in infrastructure. In an OECD league table of investment in productive assets, the UK is ranked at number 35 out of 38 countries.
