NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (left) and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during a press conference at the Warsaw Armoured Brigade in Warsaw during Rishi Sunak’s visit to Poland and Germany, April 23, 2024
Leaders join forces to condemn Farage for comments on Nato expansionism
RISHI SUNAK and Sir Keir Starmer united in support of their bipartisan war policy as the row spread over Nigel Farage’s remarks blaming Nato and European Union expansion for contributing to the Ukraine conflict.
The two leaders expressed outrage that anyone would make an election issue out of the apparent drive to a wider war in Europe and Britain’s complicity in it.
But anti-war campaigners warned that the conflict could not be swept under the carpet.
Reform Party owner Mr Farage had been the first to break through the wall of silence surrounding British policy towards Russia and Ukraine during the election.
Mr Farage said: “The West’s errors in Ukraine have been catastrophic. I won’t apologise for telling the truth.”
He had told the BBC that “the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason to say to his Russian people, ‘they’re coming for us again’ and to go to war,” referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Making it clear that he did not support Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he added: “I am not, and never have been, an apologist or supporter of Putin.
“As a champion of national sovereignty, I believe that Putin was entirely wrong to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine.
“What I have been saying for the past 10 years is that the West has played into Putin’s hands, giving him the excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway.”
The squabbling Tory Party briefly united to condemn Mr Farage.
Mr Sunak said he had played “into Putin’s hands” and former defence secretary Ben Wallace called him, somewhat irrelevantly, “a pub bore.”
Security minister Tom Tugendhat linked the Reform leader with the left, telling the press: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re Jeremy Corbyn or Nigel Farage — if you parrot the Kremlin’s lies, you cannot be trusted with our national security.”
Not to be outdone, Sir Keir huffed that Farage’s comments were “disgraceful,” adding that Ukraine was basically off-limits as a subject for political debate.
“Anyone who is standing for Parliament ought to be really clear that Russia is the aggressor, Putin bears responsibility, that we stand with Ukraine — as we have done from the beginning of this conflict — and Parliament has spoken with one voice on this since the beginning of the conflict,” the Labour leader said.
Indeed, he threatened a dozen Labour MPs with loss of the whip for expressing concern at Nato policy slightly before the 2022 invasion.
Response to Rishi Sunak’s extremism speech at Downing Street 1 March 2024. Second version of this image with text slightly altered.Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
A new report shows oil majors fall short of meeting Paris Agreement targets while fueling global military conflicts.
Oil majors are not on track to hit Paris Agreement climate targets that limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, a new report reveals.
Eight fossil fuel giants – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, TotalEnergies, BP, Eni, Equinor, and ConocoPhillips – are on course to use 30 percent of the world’s remaining carbon budget for that 1.5°C goal, according to the Big Oil Reality Check report by nonprofit Oil Change International (OCI).
Combined, the oil and gas companies’ extraction plans are consistent with a temperature rise of over 2.4°C, the report found.That level of warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will reduce food security, risk irreversible loss of ecosystems, and increase heat waves, rainfall, and extreme weather events.
“We analyzed the climate promises and plans of the largest eight international oil and gas companies that are owned in North America and Europe. What would it take for an oil and gas producer to align their production with limiting warming to 1.5?” David Tong, global industry campaign manager at OCI and co-author of the report, told DeSmog.
“If an oil and gas company were serious about transitioning its business model, the first step would be ending all new production and then setting a Paris-aligned phaseout plan,” he added.
‘No New Fossil’ Standard
A recent paper by academics at University College London and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, published in Science in May, calls for stopping fossil fuel expansion and building a “No New Fossil” global norm. According to the authors, this would make it “easier to phase down fossil fuels” and achieve the Paris Agreement climate goals.
No new fossil fuel projects would be needed in a 1.5°C world, they wrote, because the “existing fossil fuel capital stock” is sufficient to meet energy demand. The authors also note that preventing new fossil fuel projects is, in general, more feasible than closing existing projects from an economic, political, and legal viewpoint.
In the face of continuing global pressure to stop fossil fuel expansion, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Equinor, Eni, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies have goals to increase oil and gas production within the next three years or beyond, the OCI report finds. While Shell does not quantify a target, the company plans to keep oil production steady while growing gas production in the near future, OCI said.
#BigOil has, in recent years, made splashy climate pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions & take on the climate crisis, but those plans don't stand up to scrutiny.
— Center for International Environmental Law (@ciel_tweets) May 27, 2024
“None of those companies came anywhere close to alignment [with climate goals],” said Tong. “Six of the eight companies we analyzed have explicit plans to increase their oil and gas production in this critical decade when we need to be cutting our reliance on fossil fuels, cutting oil, gas, and oil production.”
Plateauing oil and expanding gas production, like some of these companies plan to do, is “grossly insufficient” compared with the action that’s needed, Tong added. Even commitments to make businesses more efficient aren’t going to cut it alone, he said.
“It’s like a cigarette company claiming that it will solve lung cancer by producing cigarettes more efficiently,” he noted. “That’s not just not a credible claim. It’s a promise to become a more efficient climate breaker.”
Big Oil and War
According to the OCI report, all the oil majors fail to meet basic criteria for just transition plans for workers and communities where they operate.
“A number of these companies also face significant ongoing, unresolved allegations of human rights … and Indigenous people’s rights violations,” Tong told me.
A March 2024 investigation, commissioned by OCI and conducted by DataDesk, revealed that ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP, Shell, and Eni are “complicit in facilitating the supply of crude oil to Israel.” These findings are particularly noteworthy in the context of “Israel’s mounting evidence of war crimes” against Palestinians in Gaza, the OCI states in its new report.
Diesel and gasoline for tanks and other military vehicles are supplied by Israel’s refineries, which rely on regular imports of crude oil by these companies and, since October 2023, supplies mainly from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan/Russia, Gabon, and Brazil, the research has found.
The fossil fuel industry is “fueling war and military conflicts” in many regions of the world, said Svitlana Romanko, a prominent Ukrainian activist and founder and director of Razom We Stand, a Ukrainian organization campaigning to ban all imports of fossil fuels from Russia.
According to Romanko, the OCI Big Oil Reality Check report “reinforces the importance of moving away from fossil fuels and investing into distributed renewable energy.”
A new analysis by a group of climate experts estimates that the first two years of Russia’s war on Ukraine resulted in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to around 175 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. The estimated global cost of this warming in extreme weather impacts: $32 billion.
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia earned over 681 billion euros in revenue from fossil fuel exports. European Union countries purchased fossil fuels from Russia for more than 195 billion euros.
Big Oil, as well as Russia, is profiting from the war, Romanko said. After the invasion, BP, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies raked in $219 billion, more than double their profits compared to the previous year.
“Most [governments] subsidize fossil fuels, and these subsidies are accounting for trillions of U.S. dollars annually,” Romanko said. “This is a big part of fossil fuel profits, and the more fossil fuels are subsidized, [the] less investments are made available for renewable energies.”
She pointed out that the partnership between TotalEnergies and Russia’s largest private gas producer, Novatek, was also “instrumental” in helping Russia get access to technologies and engineering services to launch Novatek’s Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2 projects.
Romanko notes that fossil fuel infrastructure can also constitute a liability for military attacks and quickly become a target.
“Centralized infrastructure endangers energy supply and overall safety of the supply,” she said. In Ukraine, a massive effort to install solar power plants in schools and hospitals helped decentralize this key resource, Romanko explained. “Decentralized energy supply is essential to building true energy independence,” she added. “And this is the future.”
Pressure for Accountability
Some of the eight oil majors in OCI’s report have faced more international and national scrutiny than others. Such pressure can facilitate accountability, but that’s less likely when the fossil fuel company is closely intertwined with the institutional, political, and economic life of its country.
“We need to look at what has succeeded in putting so much pressure on companies like Shell and BP,” OCI’s Tong said.
One factor: when communities in a company’s home country work closely in partnership with communities in fossil fuel-producing countries. Tong said that positive results also happen when campaigners use a range of strategies to expose producers, from nonviolent direct action to op-eds, research, and court action.
“This is particularly challenging with Eni, TotalEnergies, and Equinor in different ways because of the close interactions that each of the companies have with their home states,” he added.
Public, political, and legal pressure for accountability must also be coupled with industry regulation, according to Tong.
“We concluded that there is no evidence that the oil and gas sector will voluntarily transition to renewable energy, or voluntarily act to align their production with what’s needed for the Paris Agreement,” Tong said. Instead, governments must no longer license new production sites.
The strong right-wing result in the latest EU Parliament elections could also affect Big Oil’s energy transition.
“The more the links between the state and big polluters are overt, the more people get out in the streets and protest,” Tong said.
What is safe to say is that Big Oil’s business as usual will increase climate change effects.
“Floods, hurricanes, extreme weather events, and the millions of human lives affected and lost – this damage to nature, to human lives and to life on earth will only mount,” Romanko said. “What will be lost in a few more years will also mount if fossil fuel companies are allowed to continue with business as usual.”
IF THERE was one thing that British listeners should have picked up from Vladimir Putin’s interview last week, it was the intervention by Britain’s then prime minister Boris Johnson over Easter 2022.
Putin confirmed that, just prior to Johnson’s visit, a signed agreement had been reached ratified by the representatives of both Ukraine and Russia and counter-signed by France and Germany.
Johnson’s intervention caused Volodymyr Zelensky to back out of the agreement. Whether Johnson acted alone or on behalf of the US government, or elements within it, we do not know. But it is unlikely that Johnson would have acted without some sort of US sanction.
What we do know are the human consequences. According to the UN, just over a thousand civilians had lost their lives by April 2022. Since then 10 times that number have been killed and the same ratio is likely for the much higher level of military casualties.
…
Jeremy Hunt’s May 2023 Budget found an extra £11bn for defence. For the forthcoming Budget still more money was being proposed over the weekend “to strengthen Britain’s defences in the Red Sea.” Britain remains the second biggest contributor to Nato after the US.
Yet Britain is a country that can no longer afford the basic infrastructure needed for clean water, rail transport or a national grid capable of connecting existing renewable capacity — let alone a viable health service and effective schooling.
War porn image provided the Ministry of Defence, an RAF Typhoon FRG4 aircraft prepares to take off to conduct further strikes on Yemen, from RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus, February 3, 2024
Speaking on NBC the day after separate overnight US and UK airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, Sullivan three times rejected a chance to rule out strikes on Iran itself, which would be a major escalation that the US has so far been determined to avoid.
We’re going to war against Iran for Israel. Israel has wanted war on Iran for decades. USUK are attacking Houthis who are fighting for Gaza. USUK say that it’s not about Israel but that’s not possible while that is their opponent’s purpose. While the Houthis are fighting over Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza how can it be about anything else?
A spokesman for Yemen’s Houthi-led government, Yahya Saree, said the capital Sana’a and other rebel-held areas were targeted.
Mr Saree said on X that “these attacks will not deter us from our stance in support of the steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” which Israel invaded late in October following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
He said the latest strikes “will not pass without response and punishment.”
Top Yemeni diplomat Mohammed Abdulsalam said that the attacks by Washington and London will only serve to pull them into a quagmire in the region.
“Instead of escalating and opening a new war front in the region, America and Britain should listen to international public opinion, which is calling for an immediate halt to the Israeli aggression, lifting the siege on Gaza, and ending protection to Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people,” he said.
The crew of a U.S. aircraft carrier direct warplanes conducting airstrikes against Houthi fighters on January 22, 2024. (Photo: U.S. Central Command)
“We urge you to prioritize diplomatic pathways to de-escalation, which must include urgently pressing for and securing a permanent cease-fire in Gaza,” the groups said in a letter to the president.
As U.S. forces on Friday launched intense airstrikes against Syria and Iraq in retaliation for this week’s deadly drone strike on an American outpost in Jordan, scores of advocacy groups urged President Joe Biden to avoid a wider Mideast war by pressing Israel for a cease-fire in Gaza.
According to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), American warplanes struck Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and “affiliated militia groups” in Syria and Iraq—countries that have suffered various degrees of U.S. bombardment since 2014 and 1991, respectively.
This, after U.S. and U.K.-led airstrikes last month targeted Houthi fighters in Yemen amid attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
“We fear that, as tensions continue in this escalatory spiral, the U.S. could become engaged in a protracted new war that spans across the entire region.”
“U.S. military forces struck more than 85 targets, with numerous aircraft to include long-range bombers flown from United States,” CENTCOM said Friday. “The facilities that were struck included command and control operations, intelligence centers, rockets and missiles, unmanned aired vehicle storages, and logistics and munition supply chain facilities of militia groups and their IRGC sponsors who facilitated attacks against U.S. and coalition forces.”
Anti-war voices condemned the latest bombings in the 22-year, open-ended U.S. War on Terror, during which millions of lives have been lost and trillions of dollars spent. A coalition of 80 advocacy groups sent a letter to Biden imploring his administration to eschew war by “leading with diplomacy.”
“We fear that, as tensions continue in this escalatory spiral, the U.S. could become engaged in a protracted new war that spans across the entire region,” the groups wrote. “To avoid such an unacceptable outcome, we urge you to prioritize diplomatic pathways to de-escalation, which must include urgently pressing for and securing a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.”
Stephen Miles, president of Win Without War—one of the signatories to the letter—said that “while these strikes come in response to the recent tragic loss of three U.S. service members, there is little reason to believe that they will be any more successful at halting the growing spread of violence across the Middle East than multiple previous rounds of similar U.S. bombing.”
“Instead, the president should do everything in his power to immediately secure a cease-fire in Gaza, the fire at the core of this regional inferno, while leading robust, regional diplomacy aimed at a genuine de-escalation of violence,” he continued. “More war will only put U.S. forces and people in the region at greater risk than they already are.”
“Finally, we remain concerned about the clear lack of appropriate legal authorization for this prolonged military engagement,” Miles added. “While the president always retains the constitutional right to engage in self-defense, planned retaliation and prolonged bombing campaigns are not self-defense.”
As the U.S. and its allies drop bombs on Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Palestine, and beyond, remember that the U.S. military routinely covers up civilian casualties by labeling innocent people as "militants" or covering them up altogether. pic.twitter.com/q3rZzsp1I8
Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been demanding that Biden attack Iran in retaliation for Sunday’s drone strike on the Tower 22 outpost in northeastern Jordan that killed three soldiers serving in the Army Reserve’s 718th Engineer Company and wounded dozens more.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI)—a coalition of Shia Islamist militant groups backed by Tehran—said it carried out the attack on the U.S. base. Iran denies any involvement in the strike, and the Biden administration admitted Monday that it has no proof that Tehran ordered the attack.
U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza—which has left more than 100,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing—has stoked intense outrage throughout the Muslim world. IRI warned following Sunday’s strike that “if the U.S. keeps supporting Israel, there will be escalations.”
“Nothing in the region is likely to de-escalate unless there is de-escalation in Gaza.”
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the letter signer Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Friday that “Biden’s strategy appears more focused on reducing the militias’ capability to strike the U.S. than reducing their interest in targeting Americans.”
“This is ultimately a suboptimal strategy. It would be more effective to reduce their interest in striking against the U.S. since that would render their capacity a lesser problem,” Parsi warned. “What would reduce their interest? A cease-fire in Gaza.”
“But Biden is doing everything he can to avoid putting any real pressure on Israel. He is accepting significant risk to U.S. soldiers—even willing to risk a regional war—just to make sure he doesn’t cross the Netanyahu government on the issue of a cease-fire,” Parsi continued, referring to far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Regardless of how Biden’s campaign is choreographed and calibrated not to elicit lethal retaliations from the militias or Iran itself, there is no escaping this reality: Nothing in the region is likely to de-escalate unless there is de-escalation in Gaza,” he added.
