A. E. 1:20 pm on April 22, 2020
Tags: Ebola, ebolavirus, EVD, West African Ebola Outbreak, WHO, World Health Organization

Lessons Have Not Been Learned: The WHO & The West African Ebola Outbreak of 2014-16

I warned in my last article that if we didn’t do something to hold our leaders to account for the role they played in making the coronavirus pandemic more difficult to manage than it needed to be, something similar would surely occur again in the future. This was not melodrama on my part: this was an opinion informed by the fact that similar things have already happened in the recent past, for highly similar reasons, albeit on a much smaller scale. In this article, we’re going to learn a little bit about one of these events, with a strong focus on the eerie similarities that this particular disease outbreak shares with our current one.

***

The story begins in early December of 2013, when a young boy hailing from a small village in the West African nation of Guinea died of a mysterious illness. Multiple members of his immediate family soon fell ill with similar symptoms, later dying themselves, though not before infecting their fellow villagers. Owing to the location of these cases, the sickness was initially attributed to conditions much more common to the area. As a result, it took several months for local health authorities to recognize the disease for what it was: Ebola. By then, multiple residents of multiple villages in rural Guinea had been infected, with 49 suspected (6 confirmed) cases and 29 deaths registered by the time the World Health Organization recognized the existence of the outbreak on March 23, 2014 (Bell et al., 2016: p. 7).

Ebola is an extremely infectious and deadly disease; so much so that it has acquired something of a memetic quality in the Western consciousness as the go-to, “worst disease you can think of” when prompted to come up with a candidate. The reputation is certainly well-earned: both internal and external bleeding from every possible orifice is a hall-mark of the disease’s terminal stages, and even with the best of modern medical care, Ebola’s case-fatality rate (CFR) can still be as high as 25% — up to 90% with no care at all, as would likely be the case for most of these African villagers. By the time the West African epidemic had been officially declared as “over” by the WHO, in June of 2016, 11,323 of the (reported) 28,646 cases in the region had ended in death, giving it a CFR of 39.5%. [1]

While Ebola is severe enough in its own right, a number of explanations have been offered with regards to why this recent round had been so ruthless in comparison to those previous. This “perfect storm of factors”, cited by Wenham (2017) in an article regarding the widespread criticism of the WHO’s response to the outbreak, include:

[T]he unprecedented size of the outbreak, the lack of sufficiently trained personnel, limited resources, weak national health systems, the spread of the outbreak to urban settings, a time lag between the initial appearance of the pathogen and the reporting of it to the national and international communities, the highly porous international borders, mis-trust of government and health officials, the virus’ first appearance in West Africa, an exodus of international health providers and a structural failure of global health governance (p. 1).

Now, it is important to note that none of the above factors can be solely attributed to the WHO’s numerous shortcomings. Indeed, as will be discussed, plenty of blame can be shouldered by government officials in Guinea, where the outbreak began, as well as by their counterparts in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia, to where the outbreak soon spread.

Unfortunately, aside from exactly one sentence referencing the “delicate political and economic situations in West Africa” (p. 2) at the time as a possible reason for their delayed declaration of the outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), Wenham’s article is unconcerned with the extent to which WHO officials may have been complicit in allowing economic concerns to super-cede public health concerns related to the ongoing spread of Ebola.

In this case, the Guinean government had plenty of reasons to cover-up, or at least downplay, the true extent of the outbreak. The country holds the world’s largest reserves of bauxite, a rock rich in both aluminium and gallium (used in the manufacturing of electronics), and it has been alleged that Guinean officials were rather hesitant to let any blows come to their nation’s primary source of income (Cheng, 2015: para. 41).

With this being the case, the WHO appears to have been quite content to play along with Guinea’s economic imperatives at the expense of trans-national health and safety. Just two days after the WHO put the world on notice regarding the outbreak in Guinea, cases were already being reported in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Cheng, 2015: para. 21). But at the annual World Health Association conference in May, the Guinean Minister for Health seemed highly optimistic that the outbreak would soon be over, dismissing previous concerns that had been raised by NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, aka Doctors Without Borders) that the outbreak was indeed much larger and much more serious than the Guinean government was willing to admit. While the claims of MSF would later be vindicated by June, the WHO, for its part, made no practical effort to counter the narrative being spun by the Guinean government (Kamradt-Scott, 2018: 202).

Is any of this beginning to sound familiar?

In July, catastrophe was narrowly averted when an infected traveler from the Liberian capital of Monrovia flew into Lagos, Nigeria, the most populous city in Africa with some 21 million inhabitants at the time. Thankfully, a rapid and aggressive response from local health authorities limited the number of Nigerian cases to just 19 (Bell et al., 2016: p. 9). Despite this and other close calls, the WHO did not declare the West African Ebola outbreak as a PHEIC until August of 2014. In this respect, the Associated Press (2015) article cited by Wenham gives us yet another gem from the increasingly-infamous WHO lackey Dr. Bruce Aylward, now world-renowned for responding to a Hong Kong-based journalist’s questions regarding the Taiwanese government’s exceptional response to the coronavirus pandemic by hanging up on her:

Aylward, WHO’s top Ebola official, said labeling the Ebola outbreak a global emergency would have been no magic bullet.

“What you would expect is the whole world wakes up and goes, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a terrible problem, we have to deploy additional people and send money,’” he said. “Instead what happened is people thought, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s something really dangerous happening there and we need to restrict travel and the movement of people’” (para. 16-17).

Well, yes, genius; we might expect some restricting of travel in affected areas to occur in the event of a known Ebola outbreak, because those people doing the travelling — and I’m just spit-balling, here — might be a tad concerned about, I don’t know, dying from Ebola, as an average of some 50% of patients are known to do. To borrow the analogy used in the AP article, “That’s like saying you don’t want to call the fire department because you’re afraid the fire trucks will create a disturbance in the neighborhood” — or, to be specific to the alleged economic concerns, this is like the manager of a Wal-Mart refusing to pull the fire alarm while sparks are flying in the electronics department because customers might not be interested in buying anything as they rush out the doors to safety.

Now, I get the concern about shutting down the economy to mitigate disease outbreak –really, I do. I understand that there is a need to strike some sort of balance between making sure that people don’t get sick (or, at the very least, that not too many people get sick in too short of a time-frame), and making sure that people can still pay their bills. However, and particularly where a disease with a high CFR is concerned, such as Ebola, I am quite tempted to argue that dead people can’t buy anything at all, ever again, so perhaps it’d be a smarter idea just to shoulder the burden of whatever sales hit may come from sounding the alarm — but I’m not a doctor, so don’t quote me on that.

At any rate, Aylward’s comments would seem to suggest that the PHEIC declaration would have resulted in the rest of the world effectively cutting ties with the affected nations and simply leaving them to their fates. As the same article points out, this was certainly not the case:

After WHO declared the international emergency[,] U.S. President Barack Obama ordered up to 3,000 troops to West Africa and promised to build more than a dozen 100-bed field hospitals. Britain and France also pledged to build Ebola clinics; China sent a 59-person lab team and Cuba sent more than 400 health workers (para. 52).

Clearly, the international community did not abandon West Africa: they took the necessary measures to protect their own citizens from harm [2], then they sent equipment and staff to the region to assist on the ground. This assistance surely saved lives – how many more could have been saved had the PHEIC declaration been made sooner? One has to wonder if the short-term sustenance of the Guinean economy really was worth the permanent loss of those human lives driving that same economy.

The buck doesn’t stop with the Guinean government, of course. By the end of April 2014, the Liberian government had reported just one suspected case of Ebola in Monsterrado County, the nation’s most populous. In defiance of the near-certainty that this was unlikely to be the only case, detected or otherwise, within Liberian territory, the WHO once again failed to challenge the government’s figures, appearing content to take them at face-value, a decision which Kamradt-Scott (2018) aptly describes as “perplexing to say the least” and that “can only be considered a serious error in judgement” (pp. 202-203).

In response to the scathing criticism levied at the WHO over its handling of the situation, it had pledged to establish a Health Emergencies Programme, “explicitly including an operational role for the organization when a state is unable to show the necessary operational leadership and management on their own” (Wenham, 2017: p. 3). But as Kamradt-Scott observes, like similar initiatives that have preceded it, “the [Health Emergencies Programme] is also struggling to gain the necessary financial backing to see the programme fully operationalised” (p. 209).

Of course, Wenham is careful to note that “The success of this initiative will only become apparent when the next global disease concern emerges” (p. 3).

Yeah… about that.

***

From our present perspective, finding ourselves in the midst of exactly that “global disease concern” that many of the above-cited authors had warned us about just four years ago, it is both disconcerting and, frankly, aggravating to be forced to conclude that neither the WHO nor its member states seem to have learned much of anything at all from their experience with the world’s largest Ebola outbreak on record. On the one hand, these institutions and their leadership push for ever greater inter-dependency and connectivity between nations, economies, and peoples – on the other, precisely when one might reasonably expect the oft-lauded notion of ‘global solidarity’ to be needed the most, time and time again these same institutions have demonstrated that are simply not fit for the roles they have set out to fill.

Anyone familiar with my views on the subject will know that I am by no means in favour of increased, let alone continued globalization of any sort. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that globalization is indeed inevitable, and that there really is no means of backing down from it now:

Is this the kind of leadership that we want at the helm? The kind that will gladly pander to selective national interests, even when those interests pose an international risk? If we’re really meant to be “all in this together”, as they like to say, why did the governments of three small countries in West Africa get to call the shots on whether or not several other countries around the globe were exposed to a deadly virus?

Why was the WHO allowed to get away with this? If 11,000 deaths (that we know of) from Ebola was not enough to convince them, let alone their clientele, that something had to change about the way they deal with such things, how sure can we be that 170,000 deaths (at the time of writing) from COVID-19 will be any more convincing?

And as for our leaders — why, oh why do they continue to blindly trust the WHO? This is an especially important question for countries such as Canada, where public health officials are seemingly content to take little other initiative aside from relaying the latest memo received from WHO headquarters to the masses. I must stress that the WHO does not exist because it was somehow determined to be “the best” organization for the task; it exists simply because there was no other organization performing these tasks prior to its creation [3]. Having no natural competition to speak of – like most, if not all other UN agencies – there is no reason for it to undergo sufficient and enduring reform if it is not effectively forced to do so.

Wenham, sadly, like many others, argues that the WHO cannot adequately accomplish its own mandates because it does not have the money or resources to do so. Curious how, despite such failures, the proposed solution to lasting inefficiency seems almost always to be that we should give them even more money than the billions that they already receive. I would argue quite the opposite: if they cannot manage their present operations with the resources on hand, they should scale down those operations to a much more manageable level. And believe me: anyone even vaguely familiar with the organization’s non-pandemic-related controversies, including (but not limited to) spending close to $192 million dollars on travel expenses in just one year, understands that there is a fair bit of fat to be trimmed.

Similar conclusions have been reached by the Harvard-London School Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola, stating, among other things, that “all countries need a minimum level of core capacity to detect, report, and respond rapidly to outbreaks” — rather than relying solely on the WHO to shoulder the burden for them. Additionally, the panel observes that “when preventive measures do not succeed, outbreaks can cross borders and surpass national capacities. Ebola exposed WHO as unable to meet its responsibility for responding to such situations and alerting the global community” (Moon et al., 2015: 2204). They, too, recommend the creation of a “dedicated centre for outbreak response with strong technical capacity” (Ibid.), further noting that “decisive, timebound governance reforms will be needed to rebuild trust in WHO in view of its failings during the Ebola epidemic” (Ibid., p. 2205).

Lastly, the panel would appear to agree with my own observation that the WHO clearly has far too much on its plate as is, and, as I have written many, many times in the past, that throwing more money at a problem need not always be the solution:

With respect to outbreak response, WHO should focus on four core functions: supporting national capacity building through technical advice; rapid early response and assessment of outbreaks (including potential emergency declarations); establishing technical norms, standards, and guidance; and convening the global community to set goals, mobilise resources, and negotiate rules. Beyond outbreaks, WHO should maintain its broad definition of health but substantially scale back its expansive range of activities to focus on core functions (Ibid.). [emphasis mine]

The Harvard-London panel was just one of four that Kamradt-Scott describes as being “of particular note.” “Disturbingly,” however, he elaborates that “very many of the recommendations produced by these commissions echoed the practical steps for enhancing global health security advanced by the various H1N1 [“swine flu”] review panels four years earlier” (p. 206).

When all of this coronavirus business is said and done, can we expect further review panels to make recommendations for reform that will, ultimately, be left almost entirely by the wayside? Call me crazy, but I’m personally unwilling to wait for the next pandemic to see whether or not this current crisis has inspired any feelings of change at the WHO. Even though the Canadian government is now talking about the “critical need” for a review of the WHO’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, I believe that I have made the point well enough that a mere review is simply not enough.

Enough with the reviews, and enough with the panels, unless those reviews and panels will be centred near-exclusively on how much funding we are prepared to withdraw from the WHO until the day comes where they finally get their act together – if such a thing is possible. And if it isn’t, it may just be the right time to bid abolish the organization once and for all.

As for whether or not the WHO could be, or indeed should be replaced by some form of successor, well… I’ll leave that one up to the ‘experts’ to decide.

Notes

[1] The ‘true’ CFR for the 2013-2016 outbreak is difficult to determine and may indeed be much higher, as an unknown number of cases (perhaps as high as 70%) were not reported to local health authorities. In addition, the survival outcomes for some 44% of “confirmed, probable, and suspected cases” in the WHO Ebola Response Team’s dataset have not been reported. See: Fourna, A., Nouvellet, P., Dorigatti, I., Donnelly, C. A. (2019). Case Fatality Ratio Estimates for the 2013–2016 West African Ebola Epidemic: Application of Boosted Regression Trees for Imputation. Clinical Infectious Diseases, ciz678. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciz678

[2] For instance, following a confirmed, fatal case of Ebola in a man whom had flown from Liberia to Texas in September 2014, the American Center for Disease Control (CDC) quickly set about developing and deploying Ebola Response Teams and evaluating local healthcare facilities for preparedness, in addition to implementing stringent screening and monitoring protocols for travelers arriving from affected countries. See: Bell et al., 2016: p. 10

[3] If we’re being pedantic, the WHO was technically preceded by the International Sanitary Conferences (1851-1938; intended to standardize quarantine regulations against the spread of cholera, plague, and yellow fever) and the Health Organization of the League of Nations. However, both bodies were absorbed by the WHO on it’s creation after World War II, and neither of them dealt with public health issues at the same breadth and scale as the WHO does currently.

References

Bell, B. P., Damon, I. K., Jernigan, D. B., Kenyon, T. A., Nichol, S. T., O’Connor, J. P., & Tappero, J. W. (2016). Overview, Control Strategies, and Lessons Learned in the CDC Response to the 2014–2016 Ebola Epidemic. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 65(3): 4-11.

Cheng, M. (2015, March). Emails: UN health agency resisted declaring Ebola emergency. Associated Press. http://archive.vn/veQNb

Kamradt-Scott, A. (2018). What Went Wrong? The World Health Organization from Swine Flu to Ebola. In Kruck, A., Oppermann, K., & Spencer, A. (Eds.), Political Mistakes and Policy Failures in International Relations (pp. 193-215). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68173-3_9

Moon, S., Sridhar, D., Pate, M. A., Jha, A. K., Clinton, C., Delaunay, S., Edwin, V., Fallah, M., Fidler, D. P., Garrett, L., Goosby, E., Gostin, L. O., Heymann, D. L., Lee, K., Leung, G. M., Morrison, S. J., Saavedra, J., Tanner, M., Leigh, J. A., . . . Piot, P. (2015). Will Ebola change the game? Ten essential reforms before the next pandemic. The report of the Harvard-LSHTM Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola. The Lancet, 386: 2204-2221. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00946-0

Wenham, C. (2017). What we have learnt about the World Health Organization from the Ebola outbreak. Philosophical Transactions B., Royal Society, 372(1721): 1-5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0307

A. E. 5:16 pm on January 12, 2020
Tags: child labour, FAO, palm oil, palm-oil, Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, RSPO, sustainable agriculture, Sustainable Development ( 4 )

The Palm Oil Paradox: Just One of Sustainable Agriculture’s Dirty Little Secrets

In terms of breadth and scale, perhaps the grandest of all the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s efforts in the interest of sustainable agriculture has been in the promotion and production of palm oil, a substance used in a variety of processed foods, as well as non-edible products and, to a lesser extent, as a source of biofuel. Of the countries involved in the palm oil industry, Indonesia heads the list as the top exporter, followed by Malaysia; together, the two countries produce 80% of all the world’s palm oil. [1] Elsewhere, the FAO has managed to introduce a more cold-resistant hybrid of palm tree to be grown in Kenya, which has seen encouraging results: “The potential of the hybrids is considerable,” the project’s website states. “Fruit can be harvested from three-year-old palms, and the palms reach maturity at about six years, if well tended. Mature palms yield about 20 tonnes of fresh fruit bunches per hectare a year, or 4 tonnes of oil. The palms’ productive life is about 25 years.” Moreover, we are told, the cultivation of palm oil is of ecological benefit: “Oil palm is environment-friendly,” according to one of the project’s “key technical officers,” Peter Griffee. “It doesn’t compete with native vegetation or food crops in western Kenya. There’s no need to turn the soil over every year, so there’s less erosion and soil compaction.” [2] But wherever it is grown, the cultivation of palm oil has been frequently touted by the FAO and others as a means of combating poverty, either by providing employment on large plantations to locals whom are needed for the labour intensive task of land-clearing and harvesting, or by its use as a cash crop for smaller, typically family-run farms. [3] In this respect, the enterprise might not sound like such a bad idea – so, where’s the catch?

Unfortunately, in the years since the aforementioned project, perspectives on the environmental-friendliness of palm oil production have shifted massively in the opposing direction. Writes Natasha Gilbert for Nature, “Palm oil was once touted as a social and environmental panacea — a sustainable food crop, a biofuel that could help to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and a route out of poverty for small-scale farmers.” However, more recent research would suggest that not only does large-scale production of the crop lead to “damaging deforestation” in the countries concerned, “the oil’s use as a biofuel offers only marginal benefits for mitigating climate change” — in fact, according to tests conducted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the use of biofuel emits just 11-17% less greenhouse gas emissions than diesel over an entire ‘life-cycle’ of use. [4] By all appearances, the environmental movement’s honeymoon with palm oil would seem to be over — within the industry itself, however, not everyone seems willing to let go.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a lobby group composed of various corporate stakeholders in the palm oil industry, seeks to “transform markets” and “make sustainable palm oil the norm” by leading the charge on standard-setting and monitoring of sustainable production practices within the industry. At the time of writing, the RSPO’s board of governors includes representatives of palm oil production and processing companies, in addition to those from the manufacturing and retail sectors, companies such as Unilever and Procter & Gamble, and other non-profit organizations like the WWF and the World Resources Institute (WRI). [5]

At any rate, they certainly have their work cut out for them. As alluded to previously, a great deal of the controversy that has emerged over the cultivation of palm oil trees has to do with the large amounts of natural forest that need to be cleared in order to make way for the plantations. This has consequences both for the ecological stability of an area as well as for its animal inhabitants, such as orangutans and other endangered species resident in Southeast Asia, where most of the world’s palm oil is produced. Furthermore, resident respondents in one survey of an oil-producing region in Malaysia expressed concerns that the processing mills in the area were polluting the local water supply, in addition to noting the loss of the natural forest as a valuable resource for hunting game and gathering wild fruits. [6] This latter development is of particular concern to the many households who did not own the land they customarily used for subsistence agriculture; due to the nature of Malaysian property laws, these families did not need to be consulted regarding the conversion of this land into plantations — indeed, as the researchers note, seventy-seven percent of the respondents were not given any advance warning, with the remainder being notified of the change by village authorities. As such, these households were now forced to rely much more on hunting and gathering within the shrinking forests as a main food source. [7] With all of this in mind, the picture becomes more complicated: is it possible to change the inner workings of the industry in a manner that reduces the negative effects of palm oil cultivation, as outlined above, while still retaining the positive benefits to local communities?

A cursory review of the RSPO’s “Principles and Criteria for Certification” for large-scale producers appears promising: contained therein are guidelines and indicators not only for ensuring better environmental practices, but as well for taking into consideration those households and communities that may be negatively affected by plantation activities, such as including them in consultations despite a legal lack of land ownership. On the other hand, and despite the RSPO having been founded in 2004, there are presently no similar standards or guidelines in place for smaller-scale operations — this is certainly problematic, considering that these ‘smallholder’ palm oil producers make up between 35-40% of the total plantation land in Indonesia and Malaysia alone. [8] Nevertheless, the mere existence of industry standards is surely a step in the right direction. Now, the question is whether or not these standards are being reliably enforced and upheld.

In November of 2012, the International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF), alongside the local NGO Sawit Watch, visited three RSPO-certified plantations in Indonesia with the hope of finding out just that. At all three locations, the field researchers spoke with workers who shared their experiences, from which many frightening commonalities began to emerge: low compensation for the amount and intensity of labour provided; parents having to bring their children with them to work on plantations in order to meet the set harvesting quotas; little or no job security or employee benefits in any respect; and overall poor and/or hazardous working conditions, including frequent exposure to corrosive chemicals without proper protective gear or, when needed, even basic medical care. One worker describes being lured to his place of employment with promises of a good salary and paid accommodation, only to discover on arrival that he would receive no housing, no food, and be paid considerably less than promised for work performed in extremely poor conditions — now, being unable to cover his family’s expenses and forced into taking on debt with the plantation’s on-site commissary, the man has no choice but to continue working there in order to pay it off. At a different site, a ‘casual’ worker (in essence, a labourer who is paid less than a permanent worker, receives no benefits, works unstable hours and may be fired at any time) claims that some of her fellow workers will attempt to bribe the site’s foreman with food and cigarettes in hopes that they will be selected to work a particular shift. [9]

At the time of writing, only some of the abuses observed by Salit Watch and the ILRF appear to have been dealt with by the RSPO in any meaningful manner. Among the parent companies of the three plantations visited — Wilmar International, Socfin, and Salim Ivomas Pratama Tbk (SIMP) — only SIMP no longer appears on the RSPO’s roster of members. In this case, the ILRF and two other NGOs eventually filed a formal complaint with the RSPO over conditions discovered during yet another visit of the PT Lonsum plantation, one of the three investigated previously by the ILRF and Sawit Watch; a subsequent RSPO-led investigation of the site later confirmed their findings. Following the SIMP’s failure to meet the conditions of the decision rendered by the Complaints Panel, the RSPO terminated the company’s membership and nullified their certification in February 2019. [10] As for Socfin, at the time of writing there appear to have been no formal complaints lodged with the RSPO (according to their database) regarding labour practices on their plantations to date. [11]

Meanwhile, Wilmar International, one of the largest shareholders in the global palm oil industry, has continued to generate controversy in more recent years: a 2016 investigation by Amnesty International (AI) uncovered multiple instances of children on Wilmar-owned plantations engaged in labour contrary to both Indonesian and international law; this, too, seems to have resulted from the children’s parents being unable to meet their harvesting quotas without their assistance, which for some of the workers could mean a reduction in their pay, irrespective of the actual hours worked. As the report explains:

The targets that workers have to achieve are set by individual companies, and appear to be set arbitrarily to meet companies’ needs rather than being based on a realistic calculation of how much workers can do in their working hours. [ … ] Workers can face deductions of their salary for failing to meet their targets, in some cases leading to their salaries falling below the minimum wage, or lose out on ‘bonus’ payments despite working long hours in excess of the working hours limit. Workers are rarely paid overtime for extra hours worked. [12]

Some of the children interviewed claimed to have begun working on the plantations at as young as eight years old. [13] In a statement responding to the findings presented to them by AI, Wilmar claims to have taken all of the necessary steps to remind parents not to bring their children to work with them, and to conduct regular patrols for enforcement — but, as AI points out, this response entirely ignores “the impact of low wages and the use of targets and penalties for certain tasks as causative factors that lead to parents bringing their children to help them with work.” [14] Just as the previous investigation conducted by the ILRF and Sawit Watch had found, some of the sites surveyed did not bother providing proper training or protective gear to workers handling hazardous chemicals; in one instance, a worker described having been splashed in the eyes with a particularly strong herbicide, “leading to severe damage in her eye and optic nerve.” [15]

Not only is Wilmar still a member of the RSPO, a number of Wilmar’s customers are as well — two of them, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, as mentioned previously, sit on the RSPO’s board of directors. With this in mind, it seems quite unlikely that the RSPO’s internal governance is completely unaware of the multiple allegations of this nature that have been levied against Wilmar. What kind of implications do such revelations have, not only for the palm oil industry, but for the very notion of ‘sustainable agriculture’ more generally? The entire, central idea behind the group’s existence has been, ostensibly, to establish standards for sustainable business practices within the industry, and to certify those who have been deemed to meet them: if consumers are to willingly go out and purchase products stamped with the RSPO’s seal, they are doing so with the belief that nowhere along the production chain was the palm oil within the product produced in a manner that violates the sustainability mantra – which, we may reasonably assume, includes respect for labour laws and regulations, at the very least. As it presently stands, it appears that all such a seal provides is the justification for charging a higher price for the end-product — done properly, it is generally more expensive to manufacture products in a non-abusive (regarding both workers and the environment) manner, but this is of course hard for one to verify on the spot when considering whether or not to make a purchase; hence, the alleged point of RSPO certification to start with. With no enforcement of their own standards, however, consumers might well be better off purchasing an uncertified product at a lower price — if they’re being produced in the same, ‘unsustainable’ manner, what’s the point in paying more?

We might wonder how the UN feels about its sustainability ‘branding’ being appropriated by the RSPO for such dishonest and, frankly, downright abusive practices. Well, in 2014, the UNEP nevertheless signed a memorandum of understanding with the RSPO, aiming to “raise the global awareness of sustainable palm oil and generate market demand for an important commodity that has the potential to play a key role in preserving the Earth’s biodiversity.” Said the former Executive Director of the UNEP, Achim Steiner, in a press release, “The RSPO deserves our support in their commitment to produce palm oil sustainably.” [16] But if RSPO-certified companies continue to benefit directly from the exploitation of these workers, such an ‘understanding’ is effectively meaningless: all they are doing is trying to “generate market demand” for a phony product. Even if it were the case that every other RSPO-certified company adheres faithfully to the organization’s standards, this failure to adequately address the severe infractions committed by one of its most prominent members — Wilmar International — completely discredits the supposed value that such certification purports to generate. The sustainability brand, at least as far as the RSPO is concerned, appears to be just another form of marketing: a means of tricking consumers into purchasing products they believe to be more ethically produced, when it is in reality the exact same product in fancier, ‘sustainable’ packaging.

Notes & References

[1] Sonja Vermeulen and Nathalie Goad, Towards Better Practice in Smallholder Palm Oil Production, Natural Resource Issues Series No. 5 (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 2006), 4.

[2] Teresa Buerkle, “Hybrid oil palms bear fruit in western Kenya,” FAO Newsroom, November 24, 2003, http://www.fao.org/english/newsroom/field/2003/1103_oilpalm.htm (accessed August 21, 2019).

[3] Vermeulen and Goad, Towards Better Practice, 10.

[4] Natasha Gilbert, “Palm-oil boom raises conservation concerns,” Nature 487, no. 7405 (July 5, 2012): 14-15.

[5] “Our Organization,” Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, n.d., https://www.rspo.org/about/our-organisation (accessed August 21, 2019).

[6] A. A. B. Dayang Norwana, R. Kunjappan, M. Chin, G. Schoneveld, L. Potter and R. Andriani, The local impact of oil palm expansion in Malaysia: An assessment based on a case study in Sabah State, Working Paper 78 (Bogor, Indonesia: Center for International Forestry Research, 2011), 8.

[7] Ibid., 12-13.

[8] Vermeulen and Goad, Towards Better Practice, 8.

[9] International Labour Rights Forum and Sawit Watch, Empty Assurances (Washington, D.C.: ILRF, 2013).

[10] “RSPO Secretariat’s Statement on Complaints Panel Decision Regarding PT Salim Ivomas Pratama Tbk,” Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, March 1, 2019, https://www.rspo.org/news-and-events/news/rspo-secretariats-statement-on-complaints-panel-decision-regarding-pt-salim-ivomas-pratama-tbk (accessed August 22, 2019).

[11] That said, according to American policy think tank The Oakland Institute, Socfin’s land-leasing practices have come under fire from locals in Sierra Leone. See: The Oakland Institute, Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa: Socfin Land Investment in Sierra Leone (Oakland: The Oakland Institute, 2012).

[12] Amnesty International, The Great Palm Oil Scandal: Labour Abuses Behind Big Brand Names — Executive Summary (London: Amnesty International, 2016), 5.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., 6.

[15] Ibid., 8.

[16] “UNEP and Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil Sign New Agreement,” United Nations Environment Programme, November 14, 2014, https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/press-release/unep-and-roundtable-sustainable-palm-oil-sign-new-agreement (accessed August 22, 2019).

A. E. 1:37 pm on October 3, 2019
Tags: carbon credits, carbon tax, clean energy, clean tech, green tech

Organic Energy, The Rich Man’s ‘Idiot Tax’

Just last night, a considerable amount of controversy erupted over the revelation that the Liberal campaign has used not one plane to transport their staff from sea to shining sea, but two — one for people; the other, allegedly, for their luggage. Not to fear, however, as the LPC swiftly issued a press release stating that they had “purchased carbon offsets” to cover their air travel emissions; the Conservatives, meanwhile, they were quick to point out, had not. I’m not entirely sure how this explanation has worked out for them thus far, considering the vast majority of the responses I have seen on social media have been very much along the lines of, “What the f**k is a ‘carbon offset’?”

And, in all fairness, it’s a pretty good question.

In order to find an answer, I had a browse through the website for the company the LPC is alleged to have purchased these “carbon offsets” from: Bullfrog Power Inc., which bills itself as “Canada’s leading green energy provider.” As it turns out, however, Bullfrog does not itself provide energy of any sort — rather, they take your money and use it to pay actual green energy producers to generate it. So, more like green energy retailers, right?

Nope, not even that.

Bullfrog does not change anything about the energy consumption practices of its clients: it will not somehow make your home run entirely on green energy, nor will it even have any effect on how much “dirty” energy you’re currently using. Starting at just $11 a month, you can simply pay Bullfrog to pay for green energy to be sent to the electrical grid, “on your behalf”.

That’s it. Moreover, this appears to be their entire business model.

Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why on Earth would I pay extra for energy that I will not personally be consuming?” Great question! Using the analogy of a sink being filled with two taps of water — one “dirty”, the other “clean” — they say that, as you are adding the dirty water from the one tap and draining it through the sink (consumption), you can pay to also have the other tap turned on; this will fill the “sink” (grid) with a higher ratio of clean:dirty water than it had held before. Supposedly, the idea is to get to a point where we don’t need as much water from the dirty tap, because the clean tap has enough to fill the entire sink.

The analogy works, but perhaps not for the reason they think — they leave out the part where the sink, much like an electrical grid, has a limited capacity to hold water/energy and will hit capacity much faster if there is more water (of any sort) flowing into it than before, and it is not accordingly being drained at a higher rate. In other words, increasing supply without increasing demand. This is a bit of a problem, as the entire premise rests on the idea that there will be an increase in demand for green/renewable electricity — but once the water is in the same sink, it’s not possible to scoop out a portion and determine how much of it came from either tap, and exactly the same holds true for electricity in the grid. If you’re on the grid to start with, you don’t get a choice as to how the energy you draw from it was produced. Thus, in order to ensure that it was all produced in a “clean” manner, you would have to prevent the dirty water from getting into the sink in the first place — i.e., stop using fossil fuels entirely. But until we are in a position where we can feel safe shutting down all of our “unclean” energy sources without really throwing a wrench into the works — and we’re not — the entire exercise is pretty much pointless.

In the meantime, you’re basically sending Bullfrog money to help subsidize the massively inefficient and unreliable production of energy by renewable means, and in return you’ll receive a monthly bill that maybe makes you feel better after having been relentlessly shamed by the media for the fact that you exist. Crucially, your actual electrical bills are not going to be impacted in any way that benefits you: again, since you don’t get to choose where the energy you use comes from, it’s not as if you’ll get to pay less carbon taxes in exchange for having also payed for low-carbon energy production. If anything, your bills will probably increase as time goes on, considering that renewable energy is much more expensive to produce than it is via fossil fuels — after all, if it were cheaper to produce, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. All in all, you’re paying more money now for the opportunity to pay even more money later.

But don’t take my word for it — even a representative of Greenpeace has spoken out against the use of carbon offsets as a “get out of jail free card”, owing to the obvious fact that you cannot justify increasing (or maintaining) your emissions simply by paying extra to do so, any more than you can justify beating your wife because you donate money to a battered women’s shelter. If the theory behind reducing CO2 emissions holds that a build-up of the stuff in the atmosphere is bad, it follows that you would actually have to reduce the amount being emitted in order to keep it from building up. Regrettably, it is not yet possible to cut a cheque fat enough to stop the first law of thermodynamics in its tracks.

Essentially, this is the same marketing tactic used by companies who offer to donate X amount of proceeds from a given product for each item that is sold: the ‘donation’ is contingent upon your purchase. They don’t just donate the money outright because they want you to buy the product so they can make a profit — even if they donate 5% of the proceeds to charity, they get to keep the other 95% of profit that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Carbon offsets/credits appear to function in much the same way: Bullfrog isn’t going to just invest in clean energy and tech with their own money (and given the non-profitability of the sector, I can’t say that I blame them); they want you to give them money so that they can invest X amount of it on your behalf, while keeping some undisclosed amount for themselves. The only product that they’re really selling here is, by all appearances, the opportunity to “feel good” about doing something for the climate, while not actually doing anything for the climate.

My mother used to refer to lottery cards and scratch tickets as the “idiot tax” — a non-mandatory tax paid by people dumb enough to think they have a reasonable chance of winning more money than what they’d paid for the tickets in the first place. Now, with all due respect to lottery players (I’ll grab a card or two myself sometimes), what I’m sensing from this whole carbon credit scheme is very much along the same lines: it’s an extra carbon tax paid by people dumb enough to believe that it’s OK to drink a cup of cyanide if you chase it with a cup of water. At the very least, I can understand why people play the lottery: there is a chance, however infinitely small, that one may receive a tangible reward for doing so. With carbon offsets, you are only compensated insofar as you believe that you’re doing something to help.

The whole thing sounds so unbelievably stupid, it’s hard to believe the fact that carbon credits/offsets have managed to become an industry at least profitable enough to have won the favour of the leader of a G7 country, who is perfectly willing to donate what is probably taxpayer money to companies like Bullfrog “on our behalf.” Until, that is, you remember that said leader has a higher net worth than he does functional intelligence; perhaps the same can be said for every other person buying into this scheme. At any rate, I’ve become increasingly convinced that, given a well-written and convincing enough proposal, I could probably get the federal government to send me money to find a way to transmute nickel into gold — only one way to find out!

A. E. 5:59 pm on August 17, 2019
Tags: edible insects, food systems, Sustainable Development ( 4 ), unep ( 2 ), united nations ( 6 ), world bank ( 2 )

Save the Planet: Eat a Maggot

If you’ve not already come to terms with the existence of this particular UN-led initiative, I can understand why you might be hesitant to entertain the thought of it. You might be thinking, surely, this is a step too far? Maybe you’re willing to believe me when I write about the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP)’s promotion of Chinese smartphone apps to encourage “green behaviors”, or even the honest suggestion of brainwashing schoolchildren into becoming climate doomsday prophets for the purpose of converting their naysayer parents. Or, maybe you’re already aware of the UN’s consistent urging us to eat less meat in the name of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions produced by livestock — but do they really want us to eat insects instead of beef?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a drill. Here’s the front page for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations’s Edible Insects Programme. You can download their flagship publication, from which I will be quoting extensively in this post, by clicking here. And, if you’re still unconvinced that this is a real initiative that the UNEP, FAO and World Food Programme (WFP) are seriously funding and promoting, here’s a bunch of recent, mainstream news articles on the subject of bug-eating:

Ottawa Citizen, July 18/19: “Maggots are the answer to feeding a human population that’s heading to nine billion people.”

Miami Herald, June 25/19: “Are bugs the next sushi? Insect meat will be $8-billion business soon, report says.”

Brisbane Times, May 2/19: “The researcher who wants Australians to eat a maggot sausage.”

Digital Journal, July 16/19: “Seeking an insect superfood? Grasshoppers top the list.”

And, for the pet owners out there — BBC, January 10/19: “Climate change: Will insect-eating dogs help?”

Take as much time as you need to go through these links: breathe it all in, and get back to me. We’re about to embark on a wild ride.

Now, if you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed my tendency to re-tweet pretty much any article on this subject that appears on my timeline. I have one, main reason for this seeming obsession with the UN’s maggot-meat initiative: this particular globalist project serves to demonstrate just how far these people are willing to go in terms of controlling our lives; a realization that greatly benefits from it’s coverage in “regular”, mainstream media outlets. Things like the proposed reduction of global living standards to pre-industrial levels, mandatory contraception, banning private ownership of cars, etc., are much harder to expose to the general public owing to, putting it bluntly, just how bat-shit insane they sound — and, if we’re being honest, I can’t say that I blame them. Furthermore, only the banning of private cars has received MSM attention to date, the remaining proposals must be found via dedicated review of UN publications and documents. Eating bugs, on the other hand, lacks this “conspiratorial” aura due to the media’s willing compliance in promoting the ever-living hell out of the idea.

But why — aside from the obvious — eat bugs, specifically? Why not eat any of the number of meat-substitute products that have coincidentally become available at practically every major fast food chain across the West, and are now surely available at your own local grocer to boot? Why not do as the vegans have done and switch over to tofu, nuts and vitamin supplements? Hell, much of the ire levied toward meat consumption these days is aimed at the GhG-costs associated with rearing livestock (i.e. pigs, cows, etc.) — but what about poultry and eggs? Surely, we are not (yet) in a position where insects are the only reliable source of protein left — so what gives?

Well, as I should have come to expect considering my investigative experience with the United Nations’ wacky schemes up to this date, the real meat of the issue (if I may) goes much, much deeper than what can be seen on the surface. Thus, in order to understand the bigger picture, we need to lay some ground-work: first, we need to understand the UN’s particular role to play in dictating the new path to be taken by the world’s “food-systems infrastructure”; second, we need to look deeper into why meat has been identified as a problem-item on this new-and-improved menu; then, and only then, will we be able to at least try to wrap our heads around exactly how on Earth insects, of all things, came to be pushed so heavily as an appropriate substitute for meat.

The UNEP, the UNDP, the FAO, and your refrigerator

To start with, we might recall that the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of Agenda 2030 is that of “zero hunger” — more specifically, the goal is, by the year 2030, to “end hunger and ensure access by all people [ … ] to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round;” “end all forms of malnutrition, including achieving, by 2025, the internationally agreed targets on stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age;” “double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers [ … ] including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services [ … ];” “ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change” (United Nations, 2015: 17) … there are another four ‘indicators’ listed under this goal, but those just listed are the most relevant for our purposes.

Well, as can be reasonably expected when it comes to the highly-contradictory SDGs, it is once again at the intersection of “people” and “planet” where we begin to run into trouble. Just as an aside, given that the UN doesn’t care much to address the issue of government and/or local-elite corruption and exploitation of domestic food production and consumption patterns in these countries, we won’t spend much time on it either: remember, as far as the UN et al. are concerned, the reality of a given situation is only relevant to the extent that it happens to be convenient for the narrative. Anyway, on to the core problem:

Producing more food (assuming that this is what must be done in a given national context) obviously requires the use of more land, and in the case of the near-universally overpopulated developing world, they’re going to need a lot of land. Naturally, a great deal of this land might be identified among the host of forests and nature reserves that dot Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular — but no UN entity is about to let a pretty, bio-diverse rain forest be converted into farmland, no matter how many human mouths that farmland could potentially feed. As such, they’d much rather maximize the production capacity of existing farmland, by any ‘eco-friendly’ means necessary. How exactly they might go about this (aside from providing poor countries with better crop-harvesting methods and technology, which comes with its own host of problems) remains a largely-unresolved question; hopefully, it is assumed, “science” will come up with something eventually.

From this vantage point, the connection to meat consumption is relatively simple: according to the World Resource Institute (WRI), the raising of ruminant livestock (cattle, sheep, and goats) accounts for two thirds of global agricultural land use, and is responsible for roughly half of GhG emissions related to agriculture (2018: 2). In other words, one can grow more crops on the same-sized plot of land than they can raise livestock — and it has been determined that crop production is, generally, less harmful to the environment (or is at least perceived by the UN to be so) than that of livestock. Thus, if one wishes to increase the amount of food (crops) produced without acquiring more land, then it follows that existing plots dedicated to ‘unsustainable’ practices — such as pastures –might be re-purposed into being used to grow said crops instead. Never mind what the owners of that land would like to do with it, of course — we’re not taking reality into account just yet, remember?

But what do developed, industrialized nations have to do with any of this? We have, more or less, both the farmland and the standard of living to keep the majority of our first-world populations fed — we don’t need to convert any of our livestock pastures into cropland, do we?

Well, that’s where climate change comes in.

The (Stated) Argument for Eating Less Meat

Most of the push to abandon meat consumption originates from the supposed need to limit the GhG emissions of livestock, particularly that generated from ruminants. By the way; yes, this is the infamous “cow farts” problem — or, as the WRI prefers to call it, “enteric fermentation,” for which they are presently testing feed additives that might help them fart less (p. 45). Anyway, as stated above, livestock are said to account for half of the GhG emissions produced by agricultural activities (or, put another way, 14.5% of all human-caused emissions); additionally, we are told of the tendency for nations to switch over to a “Westernized” diet as they become more urbanized and developed, which we are further told can be defined as being “high in sugar, fats, refined carbohydrates, meat, and dairy” (p. 15). If this is the case, then it stands to reason that it would be, in fact, Western countries that are consuming the most animal products per capita compared to the rest of the planet. Right?

Oh, wait a minute.

(p. 17) For the record, 52 calories of meat is roughly equivalent to one ounce of skinless chicken breast, or just under one ounce (0.7) of 80% lean ground beef.

As we can see in this graph, the data for which is supplied by the FAO and United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) themselves, it is the single nation of Brazil that topped out the list for per capita meat consumption in 2010; followed by the many nations that make up the former Soviet Union and Latin America, respectively; then the United States and Canada, which for whatever reason have had their data combined. Just for perspective: in 2010, Brazil had a population of just under 200 million, while the entire EU’s population stood at about 500 million (according to Wikipedia, that is). If my interpretation of this graph is correct, then, in the year 2010 less than half the population of the EU, in Brazil, consumed almost twice the amount of ruminant meat. Yikes.

So, has anyone talked to the Brazilians about this? Well, and perhaps it is just a case of my not being sure exactly where to look — I confess, I am not well versed in Brazilian media — but as far as I can tell? No, not really. A DuckDuckGo search for “comer menos carne mudança climática” (Google Translate’s Portuguese offering for the query “eat less meat climate change”) yields a number of articles on the subject, most of which (again, according to GT) use very much the same kind of talking points and figures as have become standard in English-language media. Curiously, however, I couldn’t find a single one that referenced the extremely high per capita meat consumption of Brazilians in particular, even in passing. Again — maybe I just don’t know where to look or how to search for it, but it sort of seems to me like Western nations are being unfairly singled-out as consuming too much meat, when the information above indicates that the consumption levels of Central and South America (Latin America + Brazil) are higher than those of the United States, Canada, the EU, and “OECD (other)” combined [1]; and Brazillian media doesn’t appear too bothered by the fact, to boot. What gives?

Enter, stage left: the infamous “meat tax”. See, something that Western countries do tend to better than their South/Central American counterparts is to generate tax revenue — unlike many developing, typically poorer nations, we have the necessary financial and bureaucratic frameworks in place already, along with a relatively tax-tolerant labour force; all that is needed now is a product to slap a tax on and a “good enough” reason to do so. Besides — just imagine trying to follow any one of the recommendations listed below, as an official in a given, poverty-stricken and likely corrupt Central American government. To what extent is “minimizing disruption to customers” at all feasible in, say, Honduras?

Let’s recap what we’ve learned so far:

The UN et al. believe it to be more feasible, in terms of reducing world hunger without expanding agricultural lands, to emphasize the production of crops as opposed to livestock. It can be reasonably assumed that they will be more than willing to infringe upon, or outright seize, privately-owned lands in order to enforce such measures, as they have done many, many times in the past — but that’s a post for another day.
Moreover, the rearing of livestock supposedly uses more resources and produces more GhG emissions than compared to crop farming; thus, eating less meat is seen to be “good for the environment”. The goal, or at least the stated goal, then, is to maximize crop yields somehow in addition to converting at least some of the existing pasture lands into croplands.
Both the above points — “ending hunger” and “save the planet”, respectively — are being used as moral justification to push policies on Western countries in an effort to get them to eat less meat, up to and including an actual tax on meat and animal-based foods. This comes despite the fact that other populations eat far more meat than do Westerners; because, if making money is the true end-goal, you’ll want to focus on “targets” that are actually capable of paying-up (hence, why the mafia targeted shopkeepers rather than the homeless). And, of course, we can all guess where the proceeds of this new source of tax revenue are likely to end up (i.e., if not directly into the UN’s reserves, then to some far-flung developing nation or two as a part of the “redistribution of wealth” scheme on the global-level).

Alright: so the UN (allegedly) wants to convert more pasture into cropland in order to produce more food and “end hunger”, and happens to have found a potential, convenient way to make a quick buck along the way by guilt-ing Western nations into taxing their meat consumption habits by tying the broader issue to the increasingly-hysterical climate change narrative. So, that answers both the questions of why the UN even cares about any of this to start with, as well as why meat has been identified as “problematic” — but, we still have yet to approach the issue of where and why eating bugs enters into the picture.

The (Alleged) Rationale for Eating Bugs

The core, practical reasoning behind pushing insects as a food source, in my mind, is a lot less interesting than the theoretical arguments put forward in the attempt to justify forcing it upon a largely unwilling population. Simply put, bugs require far less land use than any given farm animal, are generally quite easy to raise, and are not as “resource intensive” in the grand scheme of things as are their warm-blooded counterparts. As such, so long as you’re quite OK with the thought of eating bugs, if the primary objective is to increase food production without using more land then it makes absolutely perfect sense to use what land you do have to raise hundreds of millions upon millions of your insect of choice, rather than to raise one, mid-to-small-sized herd of cattle. It’s not until we get to the task of moving the product into the market that we start to encounter some problems; namely, the one rather giant problem of a fair amount of Western citizens (whom are the UN’s go-to revenue source, remember) being completely repulsed by the thought of ingesting insects. As such, the main battle to be fought here is in terms of somehow generating demand for a product than no one really wants.

Of course, a lack of “political will” or “consumer acceptance” has never stopped the UN et al. (and the UNEP in particular) from pursuing a dumb idea before, and it sure isn’t about to start doing so now. It is already the case, as the main FAO report on the topic reassures us, that some 2 billion people worldwide eat insects as part of their diet; primarily in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (2013: xiii). Crucially, the report would like to stress that these folks eat bugs because they want to; and certainly not because they have little to nothing else to eat. While unable to confirm this with certainty, I would be curious to know whether or not the rich or otherwise better-off inhabitants of these areas also consume insects: if yes, then perhaps insects really are a willing part of the local cuisine; if no, then I’d be forced to hold on to my suspicions. The report does note that urban residents in Malawi (and Christians) “react with disdain to eating insects” (p. 39) — this, however, is blamed on Western corruption. I suppose, if it weren’t for those pesky colonizers, those Malawians would still be eating bugs to this day. Damn it, guys!

On that note, the report is overall quite critical of the fact that the vast majority of Western culinary traditions don’t have bugs on the menu. Because bug-eating is sanctioned in the Bible, they argue, the only reason we’re not presently stuffing our faces with fly larvae is because we associate the practice with poor brown people (i.e., we’re racist), in addition to our general unwillingness to let go of this particular cultural taboo (i.e., we’re poor sports) (ibid.). It is further argued that the reluctance of roughly 10% of the world’s population to eat insects is causing the other 90% to not want to eat insects — despite their earlier claim that people who eat bugs do so because they’re delicious; so, why would they stop on our account?

Now, I would argue that the much more likely reason that Westerners don’t eat bugs is because, geographically speaking, we don’t have much to choose from in the way of edible insects. As such, their only practical importance to us has been, for the most part, as pests to be exterminated — hence, the disgust factor around eating them. This argument happens to be backed-up well by the FAO’s own data — in the screenshot below, you’ll note how few regions north of the equator actually have any edible species of insects.

(p. 9) Note that Brazilians, as discussed above and despite their nation being home to 100 – 200 species of edible insects (according to this graphic), apparently still prefer to eat “regular” animal meat, *for whatever reason*. Can’t imagine why!

It should be further noted that there are, in fact, some dishes of European origin that feature bugs — for example, the Italian island of Sardinia has a type of cheese called casu marzu, which is riddled with live insect larvae. Though, I suppose that these sort of facts don’t jive too well with the Whitey Ruins Everything narrative, in which case I can understand why they’d leave them out.

But one burning question remains: why are they so hell-bent on selling the public on “insects-as-food” in the first place? Why the mad rush to convince Westerners to eat insects if, as claimed by the WRI report, some plant-based foods can still provide adequate protein for the non-meat eater if one plays their cards right (2018: 15)? Could they not just take our money and leave us to our rations of tofu and soy juice, without trying to rub our faces in the whole thing by pushing maggots on us as well? We might even hazard a guess that there would be not much to complain about if insects were only being pushed as feed for fish and livestock, which the FAO report goes into in quite a bit of detail. Great, I’d say — it’d be a good thing to have to use less land to grow animal feed, right? Can we not, just… leave the issue there, and call it a day?

Sadly, I’m not sure if I can provide much in the way of answers — it could be that they are unsure of whether or not the current meat substitutes on the market will really take off as previously imagined, and maybe now they’re attempting to introduce a substitute meat substitute, just to be on the safe side of things when people start getting really mad about the rising cost of real meat. Or, maybe this is yet another instance of the the UN trying to preemptively monopolize and influence an emerging industry, as is currently the case with the UNEP and fintech — are they trying to gain effective control over food production and distribution, just as they are trying to do with the global financial sector? Who knows, really — hell, the whole thing could just be a giant “make-work” scheme for the ultra-poor in developing nations, who don’t have the resources or training to find any form of employment more gainful than collecting insects in the woods to sell to hipster-granola start-ups in the West — I am honestly, sincerely unsure.

At the very least, from a purely “public relations” or “optics” point of view, I can say that it does not appear particularly wise to be calling for less meat consumption and an increase (or more rather, a beginning) of insect consumption, simultaneously. Quite predictably, this has generated a strong public perception that the UN is up to no good with the “meat file”: by bombarding the media with both messages at once — “eat less meat; eat more bugs” — they’ve made it remarkably easy for even the more naive among us to put two and two together and call it as they see it. Still, those on the bug-eating bandwagon appear to be fairly antagonistic toward the naysayers in the West; the former claiming, in one instance, that the latter’s aversion toward insects in general is “unjustified” in light of how relatively few species are actually harmful to plants, animals and people (Van Huis, 2016: 295); in another, that aversion to bug-eating “is not justified from a nutritional point of view.” (FAO, 2013: 141) That’s right — we appear to be moving toward a narrative wherein one has to have a “good reason” not to eat certain foods; the day may come where “I’d just rather not eat larvae, thanks” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Hopefully, then, we don’t ever find ourselves at a point where powdered insect-parts are considered to be on equal footing with grain-based flour from a regulatory point of view, and we’re forced to check the labels on all our grocery purchases to be sure we’re not buying something made up of 5% bug paste — even more hopefully, we’ll have put our feet down in some manner long before such a scenario could ever come to fruition. In the mean time, we should at least try to enjoy as much meat as we can before the impending taxation regime renders it too costly for the average consumer to eat on a regular basis — and believe me, this is indeed coming down the pipes. Since this Global News editorial was written at the beginning of 2018, Canada has indeed joined the ranks of Belgium and the U.K. in revising our national food guide to promote less meat consumption — perhaps it really is only a matter of time before insects formally replace meat and dairy on the oft-politicized “food pyramid”. For now, we’ll have to stock-up the freezer and see how it all plays out.

Notes

[1] Using data from the UNDESA (available here), the 2010 population of Latin America (including Brazil) and the Caribbean was 591,532,000; the combined population for the EU, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, on the other hand, was 869,684,000 — and this is not including the “OECD other” category (too tedious to sort out). So, again, it is not simply the case that there are more people in a given region, therefore, they consume more meat on the whole — per capita, less meat is consumed in the West than is in Latin America and the Caribbean, despite the former’s larger population.

Sources

FAO. (2013). Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security. Click here to download the PDF.

United Nations. (2015). Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, A/RES/70/1. Available here.

Van Huis, Arnold. (2016). Edible insects are the future? Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 75, 294-305.

WRI, UNEP, and World Bank. (2018). Creating a Sustainable Food Future. Available here.

A. E. 12:49 pm on August 10, 2019
Tags: climate finance, financial technology, globalism ( 3 ), green economy ( 2 ), Sustainable Development ( 4 ), sustainable finance ( 2 ), unep ( 2 ), united nations ( 6 ), united nations environment programme

Fintech for Sustainable Development: Assessing the Implications

This report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which I am about to overview is technically the second of a two-part release — the first, which provides a general overview of the relevance of fintech (financial technology) to sustainable development, is available here. While this report is ostensibly concerned with fintech specifically, there are arguably far more valuable implications (for our purposes, at least) regarding the ever deepening-relationship between the UNEP and the global financial sector more generally, that can be drawn from a simple review of the stated goals and intentions contained within.

Right from the executive summary, for instance, we have good cause for concern. Part of my near-obsessive focus on the financial aspects of sustainable development is informed by what I know about other attempts that have been made, throughout history, toward the formation and management of a planned economy — namely, that they generally don’t work very well. Not in the sense that we, as average consumers, would readily identify as ‘well’, anyway.

So when I see that there’s a focus on “society at large” and phrasing such as “a net-positive impact,” I’m concerned: neither of these terms necessarily mean that even most people will benefit; it means, all things considered, it averages out as positive. To be more precise, it could very well be that a comparatively small percentage of folks come out of this transition much better off economically than before, while everyone else is negatively impacted, some perhaps quite severely — this would still ‘average out’ as a positive impact. Or, it could be that any losses incurred here in the present are “worth it” purely for the supposed benefits that will be gained for future generations from aligning the global financial system with sustainable development — but the thing about the future is that it can never be “the future” now. It’s a very convenient thing to point to as a means to justify all sorts of horrible ideas and initiatives that take place in the present, and I don’t think I need to spell-out the types of ideologies that have done exactly that throughout human history.

Furthermore, we’re presented with a little something that I like to call, techno-tarot reading, i.e. attempting to “predict the future” by use of computerized models and ‘forecasting’ by extrapolating historical trends into the future. I compare it to tarot reading because it’s just about as effective: Simply put, there are far too many possible variables that could have a major effect on the outcome of any particular “prediction model”, and it is not humanly possible for even a team of several hundred scientists to account for every single one of those highly-important variables — it just isn’t. Several hundreds, maybe even thousands of meteorologists across the globe continue to make notable errors in trying to predict the weather over the next two weeks, and they think that they can use those same prediction methods to tell us the state of the global economy two decades down the road? Are you kidding me?

Notwithstanding all the techno-babble in use here, it would appear that Mark Carney has forgotten that economics is a *social science*; meaning it is not beholden to the same standards of predictability as are physics or computer science.

So, what is the UNEP up to with all of this ‘fintech’ stuff, anyway? Well, as I briefly covered in a previous post, much of the push toward “financial inclusion” and “sustainable finance” comes from two directions; both being united by their common goal of making more money: the UN (obviously) and a handful of key players in the international banking system. For the UN, the issue is simple: if they’re ever going to have the planned, decentralized and ‘green’ economy of their dreams, they’ll need not only the funding to make it happen but as well the regulatory power to ensure that everyone’s playing by their rules — lest they be hit with fines and taxes for unsustainable business practices, the revenue from which will assuredly end up in the UN’s coffers. As for the bankers, some 2 billion people in the developing world have no bank account (the ‘unbanked’) — meaning they also pay no interest rates or overdraw fees, they have no credit card debt siphoning off their limited income, they’re taking out no loans and no mortgages — you get the idea. Just as “female empowerment” is more about expanding the income tax base and lowering birth rates than it is about women’s well-being, the same two-faced logic applies to “financial inclusion” — these poor folks have no ‘opportunity’ to rack up lots of debt, you see? Oh, the inequity!

Make no mistake, this is exactly what happens to these people, by the way. One cross-country comparison between microloan recipients in Bangladesh and payday loan recipients in Canada found that both ‘products’ tend to attract the same kinds of people to them from very similar backgrounds, for largely the same reasons — i.e., neither group tends to use these loans for re-investment, such as starting a business; rather, they use them to cover day-to-day expenses at exorbitant interest rates, thus entrapping themselves in a cycle of never ending debt (Islam & Simpson, 2018). If you know how bad the consequences of payday lending can be for people in the first world, imagine how bad it is for someone who’s already living in third world-levels of poverty.

Now, part of the reason why the UNEP, of all possible agencies, is so heavily invested (emotionally and literally) into fintech and other start-up technologies is because many of the “incumbent banks” — the top-players of our current system — don’t think that completely up-ending the global financial system to move the focus away from profits and toward complying with heavy-handed, UN-decided environmental regulations is a particularly attractive road to go down. In the next excerpt, the UNEP openly admit that start-ups in this area are better to invest in for the pursuit of ‘change’, specifically because their owners tend to be new to the world of business and, as such, don’t know enough about what they’re doing to avoid being manipulated — and that’s where the UNEP comes in.

‘Do, fix, learn’ cycles, AKA “shoot first, ask questions later.”

It’s not until the second chapter that we get to the real meat of the matter; namely, what sustainable finance really has to do with sustainable development in general, aside from its potential use as a money-grabbing tool; at least some of which will, we are re-assured, actually end up being put toward some sustainability project or another. Sadly, this is not really explained in any meaningful manner — instead, we are treated to a ‘double helix analogy’ that is apparently meant to clear things up for us. Each of the terms listed below is expanded upon with an additional two or three sentences; amazingly, I remain unsure of exactly what the hell they’re talking about and will not waste any more space trying to figure it out.

The authors do not provide any further justification as to why the double helix analogy is any more appropriate than, say, a simple flow chart. I’ll have to assume that they did so because the DNA graphic “looks cooler.”

What I can do, however, is fill in a few gaps between what might be called “standard financial vocabulary” and “UN-Newspeak vocabulary”, because the two differ from one another in several crucial ways. First of all, “Redefining accounting for value”, here, is not referring solely to the monetary value of a given product or investment; rather, it refers to the environmental and social ‘value’ of the product/investment, with the monetary/economic value serving as something of an afterthought. In other words, the idea is to integrate the financial sector into the spheres of social/environmental concerns, such that anyone wanting to take out a loan is required to meet UN-defined social and environmental standards in addition to satisfying the financial risk threshold for whatever it is you need the loan for. As I briefly discussed in an earlier post on fintech and personal banking, this could get messy very, very quickly.

I’ll end this overview with my personal, absolute favourite part of this document, which is in the section on “possible, unintended consequences” that might come as a result of completely digitizing the world financial sector; specifically, the part where they admit that there’s just this one, giant conflict of interest in doing so: energy.

See, from the UN’s perspective, energy is the currency of the future. Almost everything they’ve done, or tried to do with the climate file, relates in some way to achieving their ultimate goal of controlling the production, distribution, and use of energy. This is why they’ve gotten their hands dirty with the clean energy crowd; start-up companies, as outlined above, are much easier to manipulate than incumbent companies — such as those involved in oil and gas production. So, when it happens to be the case that the current amount of energy used in bitcoin mining is about the same as the annual energy consumption for the entire nation of Ireland, they’re gonna have themselves a bit of a problem. Simply put, unless they’re willing to reverse their stance on nuclear energy, there is no conceivable way of producing the amount of energy that would be required to power even more bitcoin mining-CPUs in a manner reliable enough to sustain the global economy, without resorting to fossil fuels.

So, to recap: the ‘implications’ for the future of finance, as it were, appear to be oriented around the UNEP’s effective infiltration and subversion of the sector’s machinery. As demonstrated in both this publication and elsewhere, both private and public capital — e.g., pension funds; see this post from Canuck Law for an in-depth analysis of how the Canadian Pension Plan is being mobilized to fund sustainable development projects overseas, as one example — are to be tied to what we might consider to be an ‘energy standard’ for the determination of economic value, in lieu of the ‘gold standard’ of decades past; of course, we can make a reasonable guess that it will be the UNEP itself who will get to call the shots regarding the proposed ‘conversion rates’.

Whether or not this is a workable, never mind a good idea appears to be largely irrelevant, in terms of genuine concern for the environment or otherwise. Rather, the desired end-state is for both large and small-scale financial operations to become completely digitized — i.e., the institution of a cashless society wherein it becomes an effective necessity to be “on the grid” in some manner should one have any hopes of receiving or making payments within the system. As such, all transactions will become traceable to some extent and much, much more easily monitored and profiled. Combine this possibility with that of the ever money-hungry UNEP being placed at the helm of global economic operations, and it is not a far leap from this proposal to that which is currently being tested in China, whereby financial and/or game-ified smartphone applications are used to provide “nudges” toward desired behavioral changes among its users.

More worrying, however, is the potential for this UNEP-guided financial system to be used as a means of forcing both individual and corporate capital to be invested into those firms, products and projects that the UNEP happens to approve of, while effectively being prohibited from investment into those firms, products and projects deemed to be less favoured. Again, as I mentioned in my previous post on the subject of fintech, we might one day find ourselves in a situation wherein virtually every aspect of consumer behavior can be, in some way, tied back to a growing profile of ‘sustainable’ (or, conversely, ‘unsustainable’) personal behaviors, such as whether or not we drive a gasoline-powered car to work or how much meat we like to consume on a weekly basis: once every single financial transaction is made electronically, it will become quite easy to tell which bank accounts are visiting gas stations or buying burgers off Skip The Dishes. If we think of the Chinese social credit system as dystopian now, just wait until the UNEP adopts this model into a sustainability credit system: if the impending deluge of sin taxes on a variety of ‘unustainable’ products (such as meat) doesn’t leave you too financially destitute to even consider moving out of the expanding surveillance networks that increasingly characterize our urban areas, then the ‘sustainability-fees’ and penalties incurred from filling up your gas tank just a wee bit too often than what has been decided for you by some anonymous, mid-level bureaucrat at the UNEP ought to do the trick. This is the hell of financial enslavement that awaits high-income countries, never mind the highly predictable, likely disastrous consequences that could be had for those living in low to middle-income economies.

None of this, of course, is going to be of any tangible benefit to the environment, as was basically admitted during the discussion above regarding the massive amounts of electricity required to power the new, digitized economy. All of this is entirely concerned with handing the reigns of legal and regulatory oversight over the world financial sector — and, in doing so, the “means of production” in the global economy at large — over to the UNEP, the wider UN system, and their chosen lackeys and faithful enforcers: as previously described by this report, incumbent firms are far too set in their ‘old ways’ of doing things for the UNEP’s tastes; thus, it has become necessary for newer, more malleable start-ups to be manipulated into positions of power and influence that, eventually, may come to rival and, assuming all goes according to plan, perhaps even knock their predecessors out of the competition entirely. In other words, they are not seeking to ‘transform’ the world’s financial system so much as they are looking to replace it outright. ‘Climate change’ serves only as the justification provided for doing so.

Sources

Islam, K. J., & Simpson, W. (2018). Payday lending and microcredit: Two faces of the same problem? Journal of International Development, 30, 584-614.

Castillo-Rubio, J. C., Zadek, S., & Robins, N. (2016). Fintech and Sustainable Development: Assessing the Implications. United Nations Environment Programme, retrieved from https://unepinquiry.org/publication/fintech-and-sustainable-development-assessing-the-implications/.

A. E. 11:47 am on July 22, 2019
Tags: fact checking, fact-check, independent research, research

CRASH COURSE: Research and Fact-Checking

To some extent, we can recognize that various forms of media — mainstream or otherwise — almost always have some nature of bias informing the topics that they report on and the way in which they report them. Nevertheless, it had been general practice for the field of journalism to try and remain as objective and neutral towards bipartisan issues as they could possibly manage — up until roughly the period following the First World War, that is. This problem of media bias has accelerated in strength over the last two decades, to the extent that mainstream outlets are perfectly willing to lie about the subjects on which they report; sometimes blatantly but most often by excessive editorializing (injection of personal opinions into the narrative of the story) and/or lying by omission of certain facts and figures.

If you’re tired of all the BS, lying and paternalism that now characterizes so much of our mainstream media, this guide is for you. Crucially, the point is to get the reader feeling at least somewhat confident in judging the merits of the points made and arguments put forth by various commentators on their own. Even so-called ‘fact checkers’ are frequently compromised by political interests and biases; as such, we no longer have the privilege of simply ‘trusting’ that these individuals and outlets have good, genuine truth-seeking intentions — if you really want to know the truth, you will first need to know how to accurately identify non-truths. Before you can become informed, you must learn how to avoid being misinformed.

As this is a “crash course”, the tips provided below are meant to be just that: tips, rather than some unassailable code of personal conduct. Rest assured however that doing your own fact-checking becomes much easier with practice. Eventually, you may come to a point where you are able to identify a bogus narrative mid-sentence. This is good: this means the ‘spell’ is being broken, and that’s precisely what needs to happen. To be blunt: you don’t want to ever act as stupid as the intelligentsia (elites + journalists + academics) believe you to be. It’s time to prove them wrong.

General tips for identifying potentially fraudulent claims

Trust your instincts. One’s ‘gut feeling’ is as close to authentic foresight as one can get: Human evolution has provided us with this amazing ability to subtly detect when we’re being lied to, even through written text. If some claim that you read seems suspicious, there is no harm in doing a little bit of digging into whether or not it’s true — even if you’re wrong about it, you are still one step closer to genuine truth.
Avoid blind trust in expertise, genuine or otherwise. This is very important to keep in mind, as it is common practice for journalists to introduce ‘expert opinions’ as a means of arguing their point for them. Funny enough, however, if you actually look into the background of these experts, many times they are not even experts in the field that they’re commenting on! This is most common with climate change rhetoric; you will find that many of the ‘experts’ referred to re: the value of carbon taxation or green energy are economists — economics being a social science, we should certainly not be taking our cues from them on how to ‘fix’ the climate. Of course, they will rarely (if ever) be referred to by their true profession within the article: They are banking on your assuming that they have ‘expert authority’ in the topic at hand.
Familiarize yourself with commonly-used logical fallacies. Following from above, which is formally called “appealing to authority”, both journalists and the average person have a tendency toward employing logical fallacies in their arguments. In the above case, the fallacy results from assuming that an ‘expert’ is incapable of being wrong — but they are people too, not omnipotent gods. Because many people are unaware that these are fallacies, however, their use is something of a ‘quick and dirty’ way to make a claim appear more salient than it really is. Don’t be one of those people! See here for an easy guide to some common fallacies.
Do not get comfortable with any one set of news sources. Even if you have found a given source to be generally trustworthy, you should not let your gut down: always trust your instincts, no matter where or from whom the information is coming. You should always be prepared to do some further digging on dubious claims, even for your favorite authors and preferred outlets. Ideally, you should be cross-referencing similar claims across different sources, while keeping in mind that truth is not built on consensus, but facts.
Keep an eye on the ‘compliments:criticism’ ratio. An article (aside from an op-ed, where bias is basically intended) that provides five arguments for a position but only one against it is more likely to be driven by an underlying motive than one that provides a more balanced perspective. When reading such an article, it is good to get into the habit of trying to think up the missing counter-arguments yourself; then, go see if you can find those arguments presented elsewhere. Keep an eye on the terminology used, as well: Is the favored argument described using overwhelmingly positive terms, and the counter-view with primarily negative ones? If so, this is often evidence of bias and/or hidden motives.
Ask yourself: who benefits? Who might benefit from having this information made public, whether it is genuine or not? This relates to the mantra of “follow the money”: it may be worth checking if an organization’s representative or industry/scientific expert cited in an article has donors or business ties that would benefit from that person’s opinion being so widely read.

General tips for verifying authenticity of information

Use more than one search engine. Generally speaking, this means that you should not use Google as your primary search engine, unless you are familiar with using database search techniques such as Boolean Operators. This is because Google intentionally uses algorithms to push certain results higher than others, regardless of their specificity to the search input — as such, you are not as likely to get the results you’re looking for on politically-charged topics such as climate change, gender dysphoria, “fake news” and so on. In the first case, for example, searching “climate change skepticism” on Google yields a page full of links on how climate change is definitely real and skeptics are delusional; rather than any that really are skeptical of climate change. DuckDuckGo and Bing provide worthy substitutes to over-reliance on Google results. (To really drive the point home, consider the difference in results between searching the exact same term, “arguments against climate change”, on Google and DDG, respectively.)
Get in the habit of auditing citations. This is somewhat more specific to academic articles or similar publications (e.g. by the UN et al. or other advocacy groups), but it is also good practice for news articles, too. What it means to ‘audit’ citations is for you to actually check where the citation comes from, rather than take for granted that the source is legitimate. As a relatively benign example, one UNESCO publication on countering fake-news (with journalists as the audience) featured a story about how fake news was allegedly used in Ancient Rome, backed with three, seemingly independent sources. An audit of these sources revealed that one led to an article behind a paywall in a financial journal; the second led to a blog post; and the third used that blog post as its own source! Which leads us to…
Actually read the citations, at least for more dubious claims. I know this can be tedious for some (myself included), but if you are really in doubt or at all suspicious of a certain claim, try not to be intimidated by any apparent prestige or incomprehensibility of the citation that is provided. If you don’t understand a term, search it up. Try to figure out for yourself, as best as you reasonably can, what exactly the information is saying in relatively-plain English. I have oftentimes resorted to asking my Twitter followers if they have any background in a particular area, and if they wouldn’t mind clarifying a few terms or validating my understanding of the issue at hand. Gone are the days when you’d have to hang out all day at a public library, or take a course, or at least try to get a hold of someone at a university. You have all the world’s knowledge in your hands — use it!

Some resources for gathering information

This is a short, non-complete list of sites, tools and techniques that I either use myself or know of many people who use them for research. Now, the fact that I may not have found use for some of these things does not mean that you won’t; everyone is a little bit different in this regard.

In terms of programs, everything listed here is either completely free to use or at least offers an indefinite, limited-state ‘trial version.’ But, sometimes, the trial version is all you really need. As a disclaimer, I am not affiliated with any of these sites, products or services in any manner, nor am I receiving any compensation for endorsing them. I just think they’re useful and I’m trying to spread the love.

This section will be continuously updated as I find more sites/tools that might be of use. Last update: October 9, 2019

Websites

A resource compilation from Corey’s Digs — full credit to her, of course, for compiling this. Mostly US-specific, includes: obtaining background checks; information on registered charities; scientific archives; judiciary information; FBI press-releases and other government documents; etc.
Retraction Watch – updates with detailed explanations every time an academic journal or similar publisher is forced to retract an article. This site also hosts a searchable database, which lists every single retraction recorded by the site to date (believe me, there’s an enormous amount!). I often use this to ‘audit’ the academic credibility of certain, suspect authors, articles and journals.
Inside Philanthropy – this pro-industry site hosts a ton of valuable information on donor and organization profiles, activities, news, etc. As the name implies, it is an “inside look” at the philanthropy industry that has been invaluable to me in researching various foundations and NGOs.
Influence Watch – provides (often, though not always) detailed information, including historical roots and cross-org relationships, on various NGOs, political parties, foundations, and other “public policy influencers” worldwide. It is structured in a manner similar to Wikipedia, insofar as citations are typically provided to back up the information offered — that said, like Wikipedia, keep an eye out for possible editorial bias. This site is typically better used for a general overview of a given influencer, or as a “springboard” toward further avenues of inquiry.
Follow the Money – Canadian-specific; hosted by The National Post, this database lists financial donations (individual and corporate) made to political parties and candidates. I am not sure how often the database content is updated, however; the latest entries that I have seen date from 2017, though there could very well be more recent ones there as well.
Deletionpedia – how this works is that every time a Wikipedia article is proposed for deletion, a bot makes a copy of the page and uploads it to this site. If the Wikipedia article ends up being deleted, then the copy remains on the site; if the proposal is rejected and it stays up on Wikipedia, the Deletionpedia copy is deleted. So you do have to know what you’re looking for, but if so this site can be very useful for collecting links and information that might have been deleted from Wikipedia for less-than-honest reasons.

Tools

MEGA.nz – offers 50 GB of free, encrypted cloud storage, which can be further synced to folders on your hard drive for ease of up/downloading files. You can also set passwords on shared files (with an expiry date too, should you choose) so that only those you want to share the file(s) with are able to access it. You have the option to subscribe monthly for more storage, as well — I pay roughly $7 CAD per month for the Pro-Lite plan, which gives me 200 GB of storage (of which I’ve only used up half so far, in all honesty). Lastly, it is very easy to trade files between MEGA accounts (no need to download and re-upload), which is useful for downloading content (legally, of course!) from 4ch and 8ch, as it’s largely their file-sharing platform of choice.
XMind – for the visual learners among us, this program allows you to make “mind maps” or event timelines using easily-modifiable templates. I find this very helpful for collecting information in a manner that lets me “see” where all the parts fit in relation to the whole. You can get very creative with this; I use it for both general research and for outlining projects. The free trial version is fancy enough for me, but subscription access to even more features is also available. There is a mobile app version for it as well, which is a bit clunky to use but could be useful for those who are away from the computer more often than not.
Zotero – this is one that I did not personally find much use for, but it is very popular among students, academics and authors. It is basically a file-sorting program to help you organize citations, create quick citations and bibliographies, organize your files in the manner of your choosing, and download web pages and other content directly into the program, which uses metadata to detect and auto-fill relevant information for easier citing. If you don’t already have a system in place for organizing your files, this may be worth checking out.
Throw Away Mail – this site generates a temporary email address and inbox, which automatically deletes itself after 48 hours. I use this to download documents that ask for contact information before releasing the PDF, just to avoid creating an electronic ‘paper trail’ of my research history — I may be paranoid, but better safe than sorry, right?
Foxit PDF Reader – this is the program I use for reading and editing PDF files; again, the free version does the trick just fine for me. Adobe Reader may be fine for simply opening PDFs, but if you want the ability to highlight text, add side notes/comments, or even to create your own PDFs, this is what I recommend.

Misc. Resources

Some inspirational reading from Corey’s Digs, on the challenges of information overload: Become the Master of Your Mind.

A. E. 12:20 pm on April 20, 2019
Tags: globalism ( 3 ), mass surveillance ( 3 ), SDGs ( 2 ), sustainable finance ( 2 ), united nations ( 6 )

Green Is The New Red: Introducing ‘Sustainable Digital Finance’

Imagine if your credit history was tied to your carbon footprint, or in some cases, even replaced by it? Imagine if every transaction you made online – be it from Amazon, eBay, SkipTheDishes and so on – was calculated against the predicted amount of CO2 that could be emitted during the product’s manufacturing (where applicable), shipping, and usage, to be added to your own, personal “carbon bill?” Imagine if you could bring that bill down by walking or taking the bus instead of driving to where you need to be – verified, of course, through GPS tracking of your location? Imagine if carbon became some form of digital currency; “tokens” that you could trade in to offset the “carbon cost” of your next, big purchase?

What if there was an app that you could use to compete with your friends for the most “green points?” What if your ability to secure a loan for a small business or mortgage was tied not only to your own carbon-consumption habits, but to the potential carbon costs associated with the business you’d like to open or the house you’d like to live in?None of this is fantasy – this is precisely the type of “carbon economy” that our globalists friends have in mind for us. Much of this appears to be undergoing pilot testing in the Asia-Pacific region; particularly China and Singapore, where citizens are quite used to being under constant surveillance and subjected to repeated, government intrusion into their personal lives and activities.

Coming to a once-free nation near you: “sustainable digital finance.”

Available at: https://www.sustainabledigitalfinance.org/initiatives-publications

DBS is a government-founded regional bank operating out of Singapore; Global Mangrove Trust is an NGO also operating out of Singapore.

(Just so we’re all on the same page; any report produced in close conjunction with the Singaporean government that speaks of “cultural revolution” and “behavioral change” should be cause for concern.)

Another report (see above link) speaks of “gamifying” behavior change through an app tested in China, “Ant Farm.” The app tracks users’ actions — such as those I “hypothetically” listed above — and awards points based on eco-friendly behaviors; get enough points and the company will plant a tree in Inner Mongolia in your name.

Sounds cute — but what if this becomes tied into the infamous “social credit” scheme in China? What if you could lose points for doing the wrong thing?

What if Farmville was real life?

Cut off at the bottom left: “A relatively easy way into these novel services is for banks to…”

And, of course, if we’re going to radically change the rules of the global financial system, we’re gonna need all hands on deck.

It would no longer be enough for banks and other lenders to report on financial risks alone — they would have to be sustainably compliant as well.

Make no mistake: the idea behind this and other schemes is to make sustainability an inevitability. They do not want you to not go along with it; they are going to re-tailor the system so that it will be impossible for the average citizen not to participate. You will be opting-in by default.

Maybe they’ll let us dissenters, we “enemies of the climate,” live on isolated tracks of land far away from the rest of the world, like the savages in Huxley’s Brave New World? For now, at least, we can only speculate.

A. E. 11:47 am on March 22, 2019
Tags: censorship ( 5 ), government transparency, transparency, Trudeau government

Google Transparency Report, Requests from Canada: 2015 – March 2019

The following reports detail the amount of requests to remove material received from the Canadian government by Google. All of the data presented below was collected on the 21st and 22nd of March, 2019, and can be accessed here.

Total Requests

The spike preceding the gradual increase from Jan 2016 onward is from June 2015, with 77 requests.

The high-point seen here is also from June 2015, with 464 items.

This is interesting – not only have the amount of requests gone up from Jan 2016 onward, but requests from the executive branch of government greatly outweigh those from the judicial branch, too. As you can see, however, there are a number of instances where this was true during the Harper years, as well.

Requests by Reason

Snapshot from the Harper years, for comparison.

Requests for User Information

Note that Google did not start tracking the reasons given for the requests until July 2014. The bar furthest to the right is for Jan – June 2018; just doesn’t show up on the screenshot.

Thoughts

It’s interesting that “Fraud” has topped the list of reasons from July 2016 to June 2018, with “Defamation” usually coming in at a distant second during the Trudeau years in power; especially since “Fraud” is entirely absent from the stats until the reporting period immediately preceding this (Jan – June 2016). Unfortunately, Google does not provide exact details for every single request, so I am not sure what either category refers to in practice — for instance, “defamation” of whom, by whom?
I had personally been expecting to see “Privacy and Security” in either first or second place, consistently throughout both periods. At least, one would hope that requests for content removal would be issued for very important reasons, such as, well, privacy and security… that, or “National Security,” which only comes up once.
Note as well that “Other” featured heavily as a reason during the Harper years, and disappears during the Trudeau years. What would fall under “Other,” I wonder?
Why did the number of requests for user information nearly double between July – Dec 2017 and Jan – June 2018? I also wish we could see what falls under “other legal requests,” as this is the largest percentage for the most recent reporting period. Furthermore, “Emergency disclosure” requests noticeably increased during the Trudeau years — is this perhaps counter-terrorism related (i.e. tracking ISIS recruits or “far-right radicals”) or something else?

Uppity Peasants

"Have the courage to use your own understanding." – Immanuel Kant

Category Archives: Research/Data