Tag Archives: unep

Unknown's avatar A. E. 5:59 pm on August 17, 2019
Tags: edible insects, food systems, , unep, ,   

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?

(WRI, 2018: 16)

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?

(p. 17)

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?

p. 40 (“Eat the maggots, bigot!”)

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.

Unknown's avatar A. E. 12:49 pm on August 10, 2019
Tags: climate finance, financial technology, , , , , unep, , 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.

Whoops!

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/.