Client Earth
wow
rights of nature? indig?
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BS attack: reposted on realclear investigation
trying to trash via foreign bilionaire BS ~ sino
https://unherd.com/2021/12/does-the-ccp-control-extinction-rebellion/
no lnx
Does the CCP control Extinction Rebellion?
Western activists are blind to President Xi's ambition
BY DAVID ROSE
. Is he just a useful idiot? (NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP via Getty Images)
David Rose is aninvestigative journalistand author. His next book is about caving.
DavidRoseUK
December 15, 2021
Filed under:
Global affairs BeijingCCPCensorshipChinaClimate changeCommunismDon't missEducationEnvironmentExtinction RebellionFossil fuelsUniversityWEFXi Jinping
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A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, amid the cavernous splendour of the Beijing Hotel Convention Centre, an array of senior Communist Party officials gathered in September to proclaim a clear message: by “focusing on cutting carbon emissions… China will promote green development, and continuously improve its ecology”. The annual general meeting of the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development (the CCICED) was in full swing.
Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.
What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.
Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.
Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a report for Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.
Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting,Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals”— the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.
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Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.
Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.
And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.
Such moves have, unsurprisingly, attracted robust criticism. Professor Jun Arima of Tokyo University, one of Japan’s Cop26 negotiators, told me that allowing China to benefit from cheap, coal-fired energy will only consolidate its industrial domination. Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that China’s leaders have repeatedly shown they are not “men of their word”.
Yet those in attendance at the meeting in September have been unified by their reticence. Why?
Last year, in their book Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, Clive Hamiltonand Mareike Ohlberg revealed how China influences Britain and other Western democracies by seducing their elites. Its ‘useful idiots’ often believe they are acting for the common good, but become blind to Xi’s avowed ambition: for China to achieve global supremacy by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Maoist revolution.
Nowhere is this more effective than in the climate movement. I asked a specialist researcher fluent in Mandarin to examine open-source material from the Chinese web. The results suggest Western greens have become prime targets. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising: before he was a climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua helped run the Party Discipline Commission, which operates a secret prison network where torture, according to Human Rights Watch, has long been rife.
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I asked Hamilton if China’s wooing of Western environmentalists explains why the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has aroused so little protest? He believes it is likely: “They’ve fallen for what the Party calls ‘discourse control’ — to shape the way the rest of the world thinks and talks about China, presenting the Chinese government in a favourable light. Toadying to the Party leadership is letting them off the hook.”
For Lord Stern, this is nothing new: his environmental record is littered with papers saying CCP leaders are making great progress, and suggesting — prematurely — that their coal use and emissions have already or will soon peak. In 2014, for example, he claimed in a paper for the World Economic Forum that China was “emerging as a global leader in climate policy”. His co-author was He Jiankun, a ‘counsellor’ to China’s top administrative body, the State Council, and the director of the Energy, Environment and Economy Institute at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Three years later, following the the annual WEF jamboree at Davos, Stern said: “The world is looking for a climate champion. In China, it has one.”
Has Stern been naïve and let himself get too close to the CCP? Certainly for the Party, Tsinghua University has a special role: it is Xi Jinping’s alma mater, and home to multiple labs conducting secret research for the People’s Liberation Army. Yet the pair still work together: Stern’s spokesman told me that Tsinghua and the LSE are joint leaders of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, which held two international meetings before Cop26 with contributions from Alok Sharma, US climate envoy John Kerry,and — of course — Xie Zhenhua.
This year, for what it’s worth, Stern has called on China to stop building new coal-fired plants. But he still spoke at this year’s CCICED, while his spokesman told me that China remained “keen to learn from the UK’s example of world-leading action on climate change” and said the rate of increase in its emissions had slowed enormously. While this may be true, China’s emissions continued to rise even through the pandemic, and now exceed the total produced by rest of the developed world.
On paper, at least, you might argue there’s no harm in that. After all, the CCICED’s “mission” is to build “a more beautiful China and a green and bountiful world”. Who could possibly object?
Hardly anyone, I suspect, until they learnt that, the CCICED’s Chinese members include not only top Party bosses but officials who work with China’s United Front Work Department, one of the CCP’s main instruments for exerting influence abroad. Among them is Li Xiaolin, a top party cadre and the daughter of China’s late president Li Xiannan. Until recently, she was the chair of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries — which, as Hamilton and Ohlberg show in their book, is one of China’s most important foreign influence organisations.
What does this mean in practice? According to Patricia Adams, director of the Toronto-based environmental think tank Probe International, in 2017 a new Chinese law forced foreign NGOs there to submit to “close supervision” by the Ministry of Public Security, responsible for crushing dissent and controlling China’s secret police. Any organisation deemed to have “harmed the national interest” risks having its assets seized, its staff jailed, and being permanently banned.
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Adams knows this fully well: in 2014, when the new law was being discussed, two Chinese academics she was working with were arrested and later jailed, and Probe International named as co-conspirators. Their crime? “Picking quarrels and provoking troubles” for speaking out on issues such as the rule of law. After that, Adams tells me, “it was no longer safe for us to work in China”. As for the Western environmentalists who still do, she adds: “They hope they can influence China’s leadership. But they are also aware that for them, to publicly criticise China’s policy would be suicide.”
Take, for example, the aforementioned CIFF, whose Chief Executive attended the CCICED gathering in September. Along with the WWF and ClientEarth, it has a branch in China which is subject to CCP control. There, the CIFF employs one Wang Yi as its “independent adviser on climate projects”. As chance would have it, he also happens to be a high-ranking member of China’s puppet parliament, the National People’s Congress.
To what extent that compromises his impartiality is anyone’s guess. But it is striking that the CIFF — a registered UK charity — gives away millions of pounds to projects in China. These include an £18 million grant to “help contribute to peaking China’s emissions”, £14 million to give China “evidence-based recommendations” for renewable energy, and, most astonishingly of all, £8 million to assist China “in global climate governance”.
This might not matter quite so much were Sir Christopher and the CIFF not prominent funders of green causes in Britain and Europe. He has personally given £50,000 to Extinction Rebellion, with a further £150,000 from the CIFF. When these payments emerged in 2019, Hohn said: “I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.”
But not, apparently, to China’s role in it. When I asked an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson why they never said anything about China, she told me: “It would be divisive to put pressure on one particular nation. It would be hypocritical.”
Yet the CIFF’s China connection extends well beyond Extinction Rebellion: it is also the biggest funder of the European Climate Foundation, based in Brussels but with an office in London, to which the CIFF donated £29 million last year. Strikingly, the ECF’s deputy chair is a familiar figure: the CIFF’s Kate Hampton.
Like the CIFF, the ECF website provides few details of the groups it funds. But its UK ‘grantees’ include ClientEarth and the Conservative Environment Network, an alliance of more than 100 Tory MPs and peers set up by environment minister Zac Goldsmith and his plutocrat brother Ben.
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Its ‘global ambassador’, meanwhile, is the Prime Minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, a self-declared “Sinophile” who said last year that China “will come over to our side”, and it was vital “not to raise the temperature” by criticising them. He added he had recently enjoyed “a wonderful, wonderful meeting with the Chinese ambassador”, at which, after discussing global warming, they had sung the Flanders and Swann song ‘Mud, Glorious Mud’ together, inspired by mud’s supposed ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
And yet for all the pledges made in recent years by China and Western environmentalists, the evidence suggests that any future action will be strictly on China’s terms. For many years, Chinese leaders avoided trying to promote the Communist system in the West, but since Xi took power in 2012, this has changed. China, says Clive Hamilton, now touts the ‘China model’ as superior to the West’s.
Anyone doubting this had only attend yet another Beijing meeting, held in June at a Chinese government office by the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Centre, part of China’s environment ministry. The meeting’s attendees included staff from the CCICED, and discussed “the building of ecological civilisation and the community of common destiny”. One leading participant was Chen Xiangyang, the Director of China’s Total State Security Outlook Research Centre — an arm of the Ministry of State Security, which has helped to direct a regime of surveillance against Chinese citizens.
Meanwhile, Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.
None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.
An ECF spokesperson told me: “Climate change impacts every country and so we work with every country, and of course that includes China.” A CIFF spokesperson added: “China is the world’s largest emitter and its transition to a net zero economy is therefore of utmost importance to the entire world. CIFF’s work in China aims to accelerate this transition.”
ClientEarth said: “As a result of our work delivering legal training, the legal system in China is now used to hold Chinese government bodies to account… We are focused on reducing pollution and bringing down emissions both in China and from its overseas investments.” And a WWF campaigns chief added: “All countries need to contribute towards reducing emissions to net zero by 2050. By promising to stop building coal plants abroad, China had ‘given an important signal’.
Ultimately, however, the meaning of that “signal” remains unclear. Is it a sign that President Xi is seriously committed to saving the planet? Or is it a sign that he understands how to fool an influential group of Western environmentalists, with the intention of making that planet his own?
no lnx
British Petroleum (BP) is working to clean up its climate image. In the two months since environmental law nonprofit Client Earth filed a complaint against the UK oil giant with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) alleging its ads were misleading, BP has announced intentions to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, stop all “corporate reputation” advertising and, now, withdraw from trade associations with approaches on climate that are out of step with its values.
The company announced this week it will resign its membership in the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) and the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) and will not renew its membership with the Western Energy Alliance (WEA).
The decision came after BP conducted a review comparing the climate-related policies of several trade associations to its own. The company found its policies are not aligned with those of the AFPM, WSPA and WEA.
BP cited WEA’s opposition of federal methane regulation as a main area of misalignment. BP said “recent and developing differences in the area of carbon pricing” have contributed to its decision to leave the WSPA, as has its current focus on stopping a low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) initiative in Washington state. But while proclaiming to support a tax on carbon, BP contributed nearly $13 million to a campaign by the WSPA to help defeat a Washington state carbon emissions fee initiative in 2018.
BP listed disagreements over carbon pricing as the main reason for leaving the AFPM.
However, BP will remain a member of the American Petroleum Institute (AP), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), despite finding that its policies are only partially aligned with those groups. According to its review, BP disagrees with the API’s opposition to the federal regulation of methane, disagrees with NAM over its opposition to carbon pricing and differs from the Chamber’s approach to climate science and emissions reduction efforts.
Yet for now, BP will remain a member of these groups, despite the fact that the API, U.S. Chamber and NAM are well-known architects of climate science denial.
“A company like BP that engages with trade associations is doing a constant cost-benefit calculation--to what extent does this group represent BP's interest and its policy advocacy versus pose a reputational risk for the company with its own investors, and with the public," said Kathryn Mulvey, climate accountability campaign manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Clearly the fact that the company is staying with the American Petroleum Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers, despite finding only partial alignment indicates that there's a calculation being made on its part.”
BP is not the first oil major to call it quits with the AFPM. Shell withdrew its membership last year in response to pressure from investors. It continued its membership with the WSPA despite finding “some misalignment” between its own policies and those of the WSPA. Shell appears to have discontinued its WEA membership in 2016.
AFPM president and chief executive officer Chet Thompson said the association is disappointed.
"As a member of our executive committee they know that AFPM is and has been committed to supporting policies that address climate change. Because of that, it leads us to assume that this decision was made based on factors other than our actual positions on the issues,” Thompson said in a statement without specifying what those factors are.
The split could ratchet up the pressure on ExxonMobil and Chevron, along with other oil companies to examine their trade association membership, Mulvey said.
"We would expect it would make it a good deal harder for major oil and gas companies to hide behind third-party lobby groups,” she said. “We're starting to see a real new norm in terms of transparency, regarding climate policy positions and also action to address misalignment and inconsistency of trade group positions with stated company positions.”
BP said it will conduct its next review in two years and plans to provide periodic, internal updates to its board of directors and stakeholders. It did not rule out potentially withdrawing from more trade associations in the future.
“BP will pursue opportunities to work with organizations who share our ambitious and progressive approach to the energy transition. And when differences arise we will be transparent. But if our views cannot be reconciled, we will be prepared to part company,” said BP chief executive officer Bernard Looney in a statement, adding that the industry has long demonstrated it can collaborate effectively through trade associations.
“My hope is that in the coming years we can add climate to the long list of areas where, as an industry, we work together for a greater good,” Looney added.
Catherine Rheis-Boyd, president of the WSPA resident said her group and its members will continue to talk with BP and other stakeholders regarding the creation of a sustainable energy future.
“Our members know the way the world produces, distributes and consumes energy is evolving, and our industry will remain leaders in investing in and developing the diverse energy sources and technologies we need for the future,” Reheis-Boyd said. “Working together as an industry, we will rise to the challenge of a changing climate.”
The WEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mulvey said while BP is clearly concerned about its reputation and has pledged to be at net zero, whether the company will take the necessary steps remains to be seen. The company has so far only mentioned carbon capture technology and carbon offsets as methods to achieving net zero, promising to provide more details in September, nine months after its announcement.
Meanwhile, the company has pulled its “Possibilities Everywhere” campaign (the source of the Client Earth OECD complaint), but has been advertising its net zero commitment quite a bit on social media and in search engines.
BP’s withdrawal from the three associations does make one thing clear, Mulvey said.
"It lays down a gauntlet for ExxonMobil and Chevron to really step up or they may be understood, by the investor community in particular, to be falling behind their competitors."
BP Calls It Quits with 3 Trade Associations, but Continues Membership in NAM, API, US Chamber
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11/18
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07214-2
A landmark climate-change lawsuit brought by young people against the US government can proceed, the Supreme Court said on 2 November. The case, Juliana v. United States, had been scheduled to begin trial on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon, in a federal district court. But those plans were scrapped last month after President Donald Trump's administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene and dismiss the case.
The plaintiffs, who include 21 people ranging in age from 11 to 22, allege that the government has violated theirconstitutional rights to life, liberty and propertyby failing to prevent dangerous climate change. They are asking the district court to order the federal government to prepare a plan that will ensure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls below 350 parts per million by 2100, down from an average of 405 parts per million in 2017.
By contrast, theUS Department of Justice argues that “there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’” — as the Juliana plaintiffs assert.
Although the Supreme Court has now denied the Trump administration's request to the dismiss the case, the path ahead is unclear. In its 2 November order, the Supreme Court suggested that a federal appeals court should consider the administration's arguments before any trial starts in the Oregon district court.
Lawyers for the young people said they would push the district court to reschedule the trial next week.
“The youth of our nation won an important decision today from the Supreme Court that shows even the most powerful government in the world must follow the rules and process of litigation in our democracy,” said Julia Olson, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, in a statement reacting to the Supreme Court decision.
A new generation
Although climate change is a global problem, lawyers around the world have brought climate-change-related lawsuits against local and national governments and corporations since the late 1980s. These suits have generally sought to force the sort of aggressive action against climate change that has been tough to achieve through political means.
Many of the cases have failed, but in 2015, a citizen’s group called the Urgenda Foundation won a historic victory against the Dutch government. The judge in that case ordered the Netherlands to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions to at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, citing the possibility of climate-related damages to “current and future generations of Dutch nationals” and the government’s “duty of care … to prevent hazardous climate change”. A Dutch appeals courtupheld the verdict last month.
Over the past few years, the Dutch case has emerged as a model for climate lawsuits in other countries,says Gillian Lobo, a lawyer who specializes in climate-change-related cases at ClientEarthin London. More recently, she says, the Juliana lawsuit has inspired its own copycats — some of which have progressed further than Juliana itself. “It is a global phenomenon,” Lobo says.
One case modelled on the Juliana lawsuit has already produced a striking victory. In January, 25 young people sued the Colombian government for their right to a healthy environment, in a case called Demanda Generaciones Futuras v. Minambiente.
The Colombian Supreme Court found in the plaintiffs’ favour in April. Not only did it order the government to take steps to reduce deforestation and climate change, it also ruled that the ColombianAmazon rainforest is “a subject of rights” that is entitled to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration”.
Fuzzy future
The young plaintiffs in the Juliana case allege that they have already suffered harm as a result of climate change. Seventeen-year-old Jaime and her family left their home on the Navajo Nation Reservation in Cameron, Arizona, in 2011 because the natural springs on which they depended for water were drying up.Fifteen-year-old Jayden’s home in Louisiana was severely damaged by flooding in 2016, and 19-year-old Vic’s school in White Plains, New York, closed temporarily in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy hit.
US climate hawks hope that the Juliana plaintiffs will ultimately prevail, but President Donald Trump’s administration is mounting a multipronged defence. The Justice Department denies that the district court in Oregon has jurisdiction over the broad sweep of federal policies at issue, and that the rights to life, liberty and property set out in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution translate into the right to a stable climate.
In any case, the department argues, no meaningful redress is possible, given that drastically reducing emissions in the United States might not move the needle on climate change much if other countries’ greenhouse-gas output grows. This echoes the argument made in 2007 by the Supreme Court's chief justice, John Roberts, when he dissented from the court’s decision in a pivotal climate case, Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency. The court’s ruling, which Roberts protested, forced the agency to regulate carbon emissions as a pollutant.
Andrea Rodgers, co-counsel for the Julianaplaintiffs, says that the Trump administration hasn’t challenged the fact that humans are changing the climate. “They haven’t presented experts to contest what our scientists are saying about ice melt or sea-level rise or terrestrial impacts or how climate change happens or ocean acidification,” she says.
To win, Rodgers says, “we have to show that the United States government is liable, but also that there is a remedy that the judge can order”. The United States has seen its greenhouse-gas emissions drop in recent years, as the country shifts its energy mix away from coal and towards renewable sources, but as of 2016, it remains the second-largest emitter after China.
James Hansen, a climatologist at Columbia University in New York City and a long-time climate activist, is an expert witness in the case — but he is also a plaintiff, representing “future generations” not yet born. (His 20-year-old granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is also a plaintiff.)
Hansen has been fighting for action on climate change since he first testified on the subject before the US Senate in 1988. He says that if the Julianaplaintiffs lose their case, he will simply try another way. “We need to win as soon as possible,” Hansen says, “but if we lose, we don’t give up — we come back with a stronger case.”
Nature 563, 163-164 (2018)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-07214-2
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