Will COP28 End Up As The Greatest Flop In Global Climate Diplomacy Thus Far?

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

James K. Boyce – Photo: jameskboyce.com

12-11-2023 Environmental economist James K. Boyce analyzes the roadblocks to climate action at the COP28 climate summit.

Global climate summits have rarely produced tangible results. More than anything, they have proven to be nothing less than platforms for verbose empty promises and extensive lobbying for the fossil fuel industry. COP28, currently underway in Dubai, may very well end up as the greatest flop so far in global climate diplomacy. Aside from the fact that it is presided over by the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state-run oil company, global leaders like Joe Biden and Xi Jinping have decided to skip the conference.

In the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, leading environmental economist James K. Boyce discusses the main roadblocks to climate action facing COP28 and argues for the need to introduce global carbon pricing as an essential policy towards decarbonization. Boyce is emeritus professor of economics and senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of numerous books, including The Political Economy of the Environment (1972), Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change (2019) and The Case for Carbon Dividends(2019).

C. J. Polychroniou: COP28 President and United Arab Emirates climate chief Sultan Al Jaber said there is “no science” behind demands for phasing out fossil fuels; in addition, he expressed doubts that there is a road map for the phase out of fossil fuels that would allow sustainable development, “unless [we] want to take the world back into caves.” Isn’t this already sufficient evidence that COP28 will be yet another global climate summit flop? Indeed, why would any country serious about tackling the climate crisis agree to a global climate summit that is hosted by a global leader in the oil and gas industry and whose vested interests are therefore in a product that puts the whole planet at risk? Be that as it may, what are the biggest roadblocks to climate action facing COP28?

James K. Boyce: Look, there is a reason these things are called negotiations. And there is something to be said for taking the fight to the heart of the beast.

There are powerful people who profit greatly from fossil fuel extraction. We’re talking here about big corporations as well as oil fiefdoms. But the vast majority of us, and the generations to come, will benefit far more by phasing them out. So there are opposing interests at play, and the issue is who will prevail.

It is ironic, of course, to see a climate summit happening in the Emirates. But the big roadblock isn’t where the summit is held. It is the vested interests worldwide who want to keep us hooked on fossil fuels as long as they can. This is a transnational alliance among people whose commitments to any particular place are weaker than what bonds them together: the pursuit of self-interest. Rising temperatures could make the Emirates uninhabitable in coming decades, but billionaires can buy safe landings in a more salubrious place. It is the people around the world who are more attached to the places they live and work, people who cannot easily move, who are at greatest risk.

It is important to realize that the climate crisis is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. We have already entered an era of crisis, and this will intensify in the years ahead. The real question is how bad it will get. And that depends on what we do today. There is never a point where all is lost, because it can always get worse. Nothing could be more irresponsible than to throw up our hands and say, “Game over.”

The head of the International Monetary Fund said at the COP28 climate summit that decarbonization cannot proceed without carbon pricing. Could carbon pricing policies that incentivize reduced use of fossil fuels do enough to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius? The projections say that fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas — will continue to provide the bulk of our energy needs for the foreseeable future. So, how effective can a carbon tax be in transforming pathways to reach zero emissions?

She did not say that decarbonization cannot proceed at all without carbon pricing. What she said was that it will not happen fast enough. She is right, but only partially right: We need a carbon price as part of the policy mix, but not just any carbon price. The price must be anchored to a hard emissions-reduction trajectory.

As I have written elsewhere (here, for example), there is a straightforward way to do this: Any country that is serious about tackling climate change could put a strict limit on the amount of fossil carbon — carbon embodied in oil, natural gas and coal — that is allowed to enter its economy. This limit would decline — the cap would tighten — year by year, on a path to net-zero emissions by a specific date, say 2050.

A hard limit is different from a carbon tax. A tax puts a price on carbon and lets the quantity of emissions adjust. A hard limit sets the quantity and lets the price of fossil fuels adjust. The carbon price that results from this limit drives a wedge between the price paid by fossil fuel users and the price received by fossil fuel producers. The first goes up as the supply of fossil fuels is curtailed, while the second goes down as the market contracts.

The higher price to consumers of fossil fuels is not a bug of the policy, it’s a feature: It helps steer the consumption and investment decisions of firms and individuals away from use of fossil fuels toward alternative fuels and energy efficiency. Like it or not, prices matter. They matter a lot. Most investment in the world economy — about three-quarters of the total — is private, not public. And private investment responds above all to price signals.

The problem, of course, is that higher fuel prices on their own would hit consumers, including working families who already struggle to make ends meet. For this reason, many politicians — even those who are not on the take from the fossil fuel lobby — have been reluctant to embrace carbon pricing in any form. But there is a straightforward way to solve this problem, too.

First, auction off the permits to bring fossil carbon into the economy. Don’t give them away, as often is done in “cap-and-trade” systems. For fossil fuel suppliers, the permit price becomes part of the cost of doing business. It’s passed on to final consumers in the prices of goods and services in proportion to the amount of fossil carbon used in their production and distribution. Read more

Why The World’s Most Popular Herbicide Is A Public Health Hazard

• by: Caroline Cox

Caroline Cox – Photo: LinkedIn

Known by its brand name Roundup, glyphosate is a clear and present danger to human health.

Glyphosate, known by its famous brand name, Roundup, is a widely used herbicide (a pesticide designed to kill plants). It is a broad-spectrum herbicide that kills or damages all plant types: grasses, perennials, vines, shrubs, and trees. Glyphosate has been sold as an herbicide since 1974. Its use dramatically increased in the 21st century as its patents expired and genetically modified crop varieties that tolerated exposure to glyphosate became popular.

Experts now believe it is the “most heavily” used herbicide globally. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.

Glyphosate: Widespread Use and Exposure
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated glyphosate usage in 2019—based on data collected between 2012 and 2016—and concluded that almost 300 million acres of farmland were treated with about 280 million pounds of glyphosate yearly. Another 24 million pounds of the herbicide is used every year in home yards, roadways, forestry, and turf, according to a 2020 analysis by the agency.

Given this enormous use of glyphosate in the United States, it is perhaps unsurprising that exposure to it is widespread. A unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did the largest and most comprehensive study to determine glyphosate exposure using urine collected from a sample of Americans selected between 2013 and 2014 to accurately represent the entire population. Researchers found that more than 80 percent of participants, who were six years and older, had been exposed to glyphosate. In discussing the results, the CDC suggested that food was an important source of exposure to the chemical. “Participants who had not eaten for eight or more hours had lower levels of glyphosate in their urine.”

The Salinas Study: Liver Diseases and Diabetes
A growing number of studies link exposure to glyphosate with various human health problems other than the cancer hazard that IARC evaluated. Typically classified as epidemiology, this research does not formally determine cause and effect but is more realistic and often more compelling than research done using laboratory animals or cell cultures.

One example of an epidemiology study comes from the agricultural town of Salinas, California. Starting in 1999, the University of California, Berkeley, scientists recruited pregnant mothers and then their children as volunteer participants in a study called the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS), which was conducted over a period of more than 20 years. These “480 mother-child duos” mostly belonged to farmworker families in the Salinas area. The mothers provided their blood and urine samples and other health information during pregnancy, while the samples from children were collected when they were 5, 14, and then 18 years old. All of this data was used to answer essential questions about glyphosate exposure.

The CHAMACOS study compared teens with higher-than-average exposure to glyphosate as children to those with lower exposure. Teens with higher exposure to glyphosate and its primary breakdown product, aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), were more likely to show signs of liver inflammation, meaning they had a higher risk of developing liver disease. They were also more likely to have metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low levels of “good” cholesterol, and several other health problems), which could make them more susceptible to serious health concerns such as liver cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, later in life.

The study had several other interesting results. In the early years of the study (2000-2002), glyphosate exposures in children were infrequent and low. Most participants did not have glyphosate in their bodies. This changed dramatically as time went on. Glyphosate and AMPA were found in 80 to 90 percent of the 14-year-old participants. The researchers note that this mirrors the national and global increase in glyphosate use.

In addition, the Salinas study showed that glyphosate exposures in this agricultural farmworker community were similar to exposures across the country in people who were not farmworkers. According to the researchers, this suggests that the primary source of glyphosate exposure was food, concluding that “diet was a major source of glyphosate and AMPA exposure among… study participants… as indicated by higher urinary glyphosate or AMPA concentrations among those who ate more cereal, fruits, vegetables, bread, and in general, carbohydrates.”

American Women: Pregnancy Problems
Another example of epidemiology showing glyphosate hazards comes from a study of pregnant women living in California, Minnesota, New York, and Washington. This study found that more than 90 percent of these women were exposed to glyphosate and that higher exposures to glyphosate and AMPA during the second trimester were linked to shorter-than-normal pregnancies. The study participants represented all American pregnant women in terms of race, ethnicity, economic status, and urban versus suburban families. The report concluded that exposure to glyphosate “may impact reproductive health by shortening length of gestation.”

Canadian Study: Glyphosate in Food
A detailed evaluation of glyphosate exposure comes from a study of about 2,000 pregnant women in 10 cities across Canada between 2008 and 2011. Based on urine analysis and questionnaires, the researchers concluded that food was a more likely source of glyphosate exposure than household pesticide use or pesticide drift. The foods linked to higher glyphosate exposures were spinach, whole grain bread, soy and rice beverages, and pasta. The strongest link was “between consumption of whole grain bread and higher urinary glyphosate concentrations.” Read more

Do Grandmothers Hold The Key To Understanding Human Evolution?

• by: Brenna R. Hassett

Brenna R. Hassett – Photo: en.wikipedia.org

Of the innumerable species on the planet, just a bare handful have evolved to have one of the most counterintuitive adaptations possible. In a small number of animals, all big-brained mammals, we see something that should not, at first glance, be of adaptive value: animals that have lived past the ability to reproduce. This is so clearly contra the main aim of any living species, which is to survive and reproduce, that evolutionary biology has been forced into entirely new theoretical directions in order to explain one of the most baffling phenomena in science: grandmothers.

Why should grandmothers cause such a stir? As humans, we tend to think of them as a natural part of life—and women who are past reproductive age are in fact a critical part of our societies. Most of the women who hold positions of power and respect around the world, be it in politics, culture, family life, or other aspects of society, are at a point in life where they are not involved in the time-consuming business of physically reproducing. But however common we might think women of a certain age are, there is no getting around the fact that they are virtually unknown in the rest of the animal kingdom. One of the hallmarks of evolutionary theory is that success for a species is measured by offspring. Offspring are how genetic material passes itself through time, and any species that reproduces through combining genetic material is going to have to focus on offspring if it wants to continue. The idea that we deliberately turn off our potential to have children flies in the face of a basic tenet of evolutionary success—that doing well is measured by having children. Yet, even though reproduction is the absolute key to the survival of a species, in humans we give up on reproduction well before the individual itself is done.

It is worth noting that this odd adaptation to living beyond reproduction is really only seen in females. We talk about the oddity of grandmothers but not of grandfathers, because, technically, grandfathers do not outlive their reproductive potential. Despite reduced reproductive success with age, males do not have the same vertiginous shift in hormonal production that females do, and they do not stop producing male gametes (sperm) in the same way that females stop releasing eggs. We know from a vast amount of scientific research on human female fertility that our species really does call time on releasing eggs that can turn into embryos sometime in our fifth decade. Producing those eggs is something that actually happens before we are even born; 7 million potential egg-forming cells (oocytes) in utero become 2 million by the time we are born and are down to about 400,000 before puberty and the hormonal mechanisms even start that would let oocytes become pregnancies. About a thousand oocytes self-destruct each menstrual cycle, but we start with such high numbers that we could in theory keep producing them for 70-odd years after puberty—but we don’t. Something intervenes in our species—and only in biological females—to turn off the entire process. The million-dollar evolutionary question is: why?

Up until this year, only humans and a few whale species had ever been shown to have post-reproductive individuals alive and well in their societies—and all of them female. This has led to a flurry of theorizing about what elements of whale and human evolution might have conspired to create such an extraordinary adaptation as a grandmother. Much of the theoretical background on why these few species, and only these few species, have individuals that happily live on after reproduction is no longer possible has centered on the role those individuals play in promoting group fitness. The aspect of evolutionary biology that has come in for considerable attention in the issue is the role of alloparental care. An alloparent is any animal that does a bit of substitute parenting, be they a biological relative or just another group member. Alloparenting is thought to be evolutionarily advantageous as it allows for a wider support base for group offspring. This support can come in many forms: from providing protection and resources to offering more teachers and playfellows. In social species—like whales and humans—having extra hands is part and parcel of growing up. And for humans, the most well-known explanation of the utterly unlikely existence of grandmothers was first laid out in exactly those terms.

In 1978, researcher Kristen Hawkes and her collaborators proposed “The Grandmother Hypothesis.” Based on Hawkes’s own research with the Hadza people, who are mobile within Tanzania and largely forage food rather than farm, she noted that grandmothers had a very special role in Hadza society because they are expert foragers and carers with years of experience. What’s more, they don’t have children of their own who eat up all those resources. Hawkes’s contribution was to note that in families where grandmothers were around to help their own children provide for their children—particularly their daughters—those grandkids grew better. Even more important from an evolutionary standpoint was that not only did grandmothers enhance the ‘fitness’ of their grandchildren, but their support also meant even more grandkids. Here was a proposal that made sense: the adaptive value that allowed for the evolution of post-reproductive individuals is the contribution of those individuals not only to the next generation but also to the generation after that.

The discovery of post-reproductive whales seemed to add weight to the idea that post-reproductive females are a way to get the benefit of older females without the drain on resources that having children entails. Female orcas, false killer whales, and pilot whales all have been observed to have long periods of life after ceasing reproduction, and all species are highly social, with survival depending on the success of each social unit, thought to be mostly led by females. But in whales, the benefit appears immediately, to the whales’ own children: adult whales with living mothers do better than those without. For both humans and whales, it seems that post-reproductive females are valuable assets who contribute significantly to the survival of their families. This led to two different ways of theorizing the evolutionary role of grandmothers: that they are adaptive because of the contribution of alloparental care (as in humans), or simply because their knowledge and experience make them better resource-gatherers (as in whales).

In 2023, a group of particularly long-lived chimpanzees waded into the debate. In the group of chimpanzees living at Ngogo in Uganda, many of the females survived for quite some time beyond the age of 50, which is the usual point at which chimpanzees stop giving birth. A lack of births in these older individuals combined with hormonal evidence from urine samples that shows the same hormonal changes associated with menopause allowed researchers to suggest that these individuals really are post-reproductive. However, in chimpanzee society, grandmothers do not live in the same group as their daughters and so could not help out the same way Hadza grandmothers do. The adaptive benefit to the chimps is less clear, but the researchers have argued that it is the grandmothers themselves who benefit by not having to compete to reproduce. Their work suggests maybe the reason we haven’t seen grandmother chimps before is that in most chimpanzee groups, life expectancy doesn’t go beyond 50, but at Ngogo, the group has been very successful, with abundant fruit and meat available and most predators (particularly leopards and humans) no longer a threat. This gives us a fascinating insight into the conditions that could have driven our own evolutionary process. Perhaps grandmothers, with their additional resources and valuable experience, are the result of species success—and their success becomes the success of their children, their grandchildren, and their species.

By Brenna R. Hassett

Author Bio:
Brenna R. Hassett, PhD, is a biological anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire and a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum, London. In addition to researching the effects of changing human lifestyles on the human skeleton and teeth in the past, she writes for a more general audience about evolution and archaeology, including the Times (UK) top 10 science book of 2016 Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death, and her most recent book, Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood. She is also a co-founder of TrowelBlazers, an activist archive celebrating the achievements of women in the “digging” sciences.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Socialism’s Self-Criticism And Real Democracy

• by: Richard D. Wolff

Richard D. Wolff

Democracy is incompatible with class-divided economic systems. Masters rule in slavery, lords in feudalism, and employers in capitalism. Whatever forms of government (including representative-electoral) coexist with class-divided economic systems, the hard reality is that one class rules the other. The revolutionaries who overthrew other systems to establish capitalism sometimes meant and intended to install a real democracy, but that did not happen. Real democracy—one person, one vote, full participation, and majority rule—would have enabled larger employee classes to rule smaller capitalist classes. Instead, capitalist employers used their economic positions (hiring/firing employees, selling outputs, receiving/distributing profits) to preclude real democracy. What democracy did survive was merely formal. In place of real democracy, capitalists used their wealth and power to secure capitalist class rule. They did that first and foremost inside capitalist enterprises where employers functioned as autocrats unaccountable to the mass of their employees. From that base, employers as a class purchased or otherwise dominated politics via electoral or other systems.

Socialism as a critical movement, before and after the 1917 revolution in Russia, targeted the absence of real democracy in capitalism. Socialism’s remarkable global spread over the last three centuries attests to the wisdom of having stressed that target. Capitalism’s employee class came to harbor deep resentment toward its employer class. Shifting circumstances determined how conscious that resentment became, how explicit its expressions, and how varied its forms.

A certain irony of history made the absence of real democracy in socialist countries an ongoing target of many socialists in those countries. More than a few socialists commented on the shared problem of that absence in both capitalist and socialist countries notwithstanding other differences between them. The question thus arose: why would the otherwise different capitalist and socialist systems of the late 20th and early 21st centuries display quite similar formal democracies (apparatuses of voting) and equally similar absences of real democracy? Socialists developed answers that entailed a significant socialist self-criticism.

Those answers and self-criticism flowed from a recognition that in both capitalist and socialist systems, business enterprises (factories, offices, stores) were organized overwhelmingly around the dichotomy of employer and employee. This was and remains true of private enterprises, whether more or less state-regulated, and likewise of state-owned-and-operated business enterprises. In parallel fashion, much the same was true in slave economic systems: the master-slave organization of productive activities prevailed in both private and state enterprises. Similarly, the lord-serf organization of production prevailed in both state (royal) and private (vassal) feudal enterprises.

Real democracy proved equally incompatible with slave, feudal, capitalist, and socialist systems in so far as the socialist systems retained the prevailing employer-employee structure of their enterprises. In fact, the three kinds of modern socialist systems all display that employer-employee structure. Western European social democracies do so because they leave most production in the hands of private capitalist enterprises that were always built on employer-employee foundations. Moreover, when they established and operated public or state-owned-and-operated enterprises, they copied those employer-employee structures.

Soviet industries—chiefly publicly owned and operated—positioned state officials as employers in relation to employees. Finally, the People’s Republic of China comprises a hybrid form of socialism combining a mix of both of the other forms, a roughly equal split of private and state enterprises. China’s hybrid socialism shares the employer/employee organizational structure in both its state and private enterprises. All three kinds of socialism—social democratic, Soviet, and Chinese—broke in many important ways from the capitalism that preceded them. But they did not break from the basic employer-employee organization of enterprises, that relationship which Marx’s Capital pinpoints as the source of exploitation, that appropriation by employers of the surplus produced by employees.

All three kinds of modern socialism remain crucially incomplete in terms of having not yet gone beyond the employer-employee organization of production. It follows that socialists’ self-criticism—that actually existing socialist systems fell short of their standard of real democracy—may be linked crucially to those systems’ retention of the employer-employee relationship at their economic core.

Employers and employees are, together, defined by a specific class structure. They are its poles, the two possible positions individuals hold in production. They emerged with capitalism out of the disintegrations of previous systems. Such prior systems included (1) feudalism and its economic structure’s two positions of lord and serf, and (2) slavery and its economic structure’s two positions of master and slave. Because masters, lords, and employers are usually few relative to the numbers of slaves, serfs, and employees, and because they live off the surplus extracted from those slaves, serfs, and employees, they cannot allow a real democracy as it would directly threaten their class positions and privileges. In actually existing socialist societies, real democracy’s incompatibility with class-divided economic systems is encountered yet again.

Because this time it is many socialists who make the encounter, they ask why modern socialism, a social movement critical of capitalism’s lack of real democracy, would itself merit a parallel criticism. Why have socialist experiments to date produced a self-criticism focused on their inability to create and maintain authentic democratic systems??

The answer lies in the employer-employee relationship. It always was the key obstacle to real democracy, the cause and literally the definition of those classes whose oppositional existence precludes real democracy. Those socialists who faced the problem of real democracy articulated it as a definition of/demand for “classlessness.” Without classes, no ruling class. If the employees become, collectively, their own employer, the capitalist class opposition disappears. One group or community replaces two. Absent a class-divided economic system, efforts to bring real democracy to a society’s economy and politics could anticipate success.

Socialist self-criticism can enable a solution to real democracy’s absence by advocating for a transition from an employer/employee-based economic system to one based on workers’ self-directed enterprises (or “worker coops” in common language). The incomplete socialisms constructed in the 20th century need to be upgraded by making that transition. That would get those socialisms nearer to completion, nearer to real democracy, and further from capitalist systems whose undying commitment to the employer-employee relationship precludes them from ever getting closer to real democracy.

By Richard D. Wolff

Author Bio:
Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Marxism, the latter of which is now available in a newly released 2021 hardcover edition with a new introduction by the author.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

ExxonMobil Wants To Start A War In South America

• by: Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad

On December 3, 2023, a large number of registered voters in Venezuela voted in a referendum over the Essequibo region that is disputed with neighboring Guyana. Nearly all those who voted answered yes to the five questions. These questions asked the Venezuelan people to affirm the sovereignty of their country over Essequibo. “Today,” said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, “there are no winners or losers.” The only winner, he said, is Venezuela’s sovereignty. The principal loser, Maduro said, is ExxonMobil.

In 2022, ExxonMobil made a profit of $55.7 billion, making it one of the world’s richest and most powerful oil companies. Companies such as ExxonMobil, exercise an inordinate power over the world economy and over countries that have oil reserves. It has tentacles across the world, from Malaysia to Argentina. In his Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012), Steve Coll describes how the company is a “corporate state within the American state.” Leaders of ExxonMobil have always had an intimate relationship with the U.S. government: Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond (Chief Executive Officer from 1993 to 2005) was a close personal friend of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and helped shape the U.S. government policy on climate change; Rex Tillerson (Raymond’s successor in 2006) left the company in 2017 to become the U.S. Secretary of State under President Donald Trump. Coll describes how ExxonMobil uses U.S. state power to find more and more oil reserves and to ensure that ExxonMobil becomes the beneficiary of those finds.

Walking through the various polling centers in Caracas on the day of the election, it was clear that the people who voted knew exactly what they were voting for: not so much against the people of Guyana, a country with a population of just over 800,000, but they were voting for Venezuelan sovereignty against companies such as ExxonMobil. The atmosphere in this vote—although sometimes inflected with Venezuelan patriotism—was more about the desire to remove the influence of multinational corporations and to allow the peoples of South America to solve their disputes and divide their riches among themselves.

When Venezuela Ejected ExxonMobil
When Hugo Chávez won the election to the presidency of Venezuela in 1998, he said almost immediately that the resources of the country—mostly the oil, which finances the country’s social development—must be in the hands of the people and not oil companies such as ExxonMobil. “El petroleo es nuestro” (the oil is ours), was the slogan of the day. From 2006, Chávez’s government began a cycle of nationalizations, with oil at the center (oil had been nationalized in the 1970s, then privatized again two decades later). Most multinational oil companies accepted the new laws for the regulation of the oil industry, but two refused: ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil. Both companies demanded tens of billions of dollars in compensation, although the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) found in 2014 that Venezuela only needed to pay ExxonMobile $1.6 billion.

Rex Tillerson was furious, according to people who worked at ExxonMobil at that time. In 2017, the Washington Post ran a story that captured Tillerson’s sentiment: “Rex Tillerson got burned in Venezuela. Then he got revenge.” ExxonMobil signed a deal with Guyana to explore for off-shore oil in 1999 but did not start to explore the coastline till March 2015—after the negative verdict came in from the ICSID. ExxonMobil used the full force of a U.S. maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela both to cement its projects in the disputed territory and to undermine Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo region. This was Tillerson’s revenge.

ExxonMobil’s Bad Deal for Guyana
In 2015, ExxonMobil announced that it had found 295 feet of “high-quality oil-bearing sandstone reservoirs”; this is one of the largest oil finds in recent years. The giant oil company began regular consultation with the Guyanese government, including pledges to finance any and every upfront cost for the oil exploration. When the Production Sharing Agreement between Guyana’s government and ExxonMobil was leaked, it revealed how poorly Guyana fared in the negotiations. ExxonMobil was given 75 percent of the oil revenue toward cost recovery, with the rest shared 50-50 with Guyana; the oil company, in turn, is exempt from any taxes. Article 32 (“Stability of Agreement”) says that the government “shall not amend, modify, rescind, terminate, declare invalid or unenforceable, require renegotiation of, compel replacement or substitution, or otherwise seek to avoid, alter, or limit this Agreement” without the consent of ExxonMobil. This agreement traps all future Guyanese governments in a very poor deal.

Even worse for Guyana is that the deal is made in waters disputed with Venezuela since the 19th century. Mendacity by the British and then the United States created the conditions for a border dispute in the region that had limited problems before the discovery of oil. During the 2000s, Guyana had close fraternal ties with the government of Venezuela. In 2009, under the PetroCaribe scheme, Guyana bought cut-price oil from Venezuela in exchange for rice, a boon for Guyana’s rice industry. The oil-for-rice scheme ended in November 2015, partly due to lower global oil prices. It was clear to observers in both Georgetown and Caracas that the scheme suffered from the rising tensions between the countries over the disputed Essequibo region.

ExxonMobil’s Divide and Rule
The December 3 referendum in Venezuela and the “circles of unity” protest in Guyana suggest a hardening of the stance of both countries. Meanwhile, at the sidelines of the COP-28 meeting, Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali met with Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves to talk about the situation. Ali urged Díaz-Canel to urge Venezuela to maintain a “zone of peace.”

War does not seem to be on the horizon. The United States has withdrawn part of its blockade on Venezuela’s oil industry, allowing Chevron to restart several oil projects in the Orinoco Belt and in Lake Maracaibo. Washington does not have the appetite to deepen its conflict with Venezuela. But ExxonMobil does. Neither the Venezuelan nor the Guyanese people will benefit from ExxonMobil’s political intervention in the region. That is why so many Venezuelans who came to cast their vote on December 3 saw this less as a conflict between Venezuela and Guyana and more as a conflict between ExxonMobil and the people of these two South American countries.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

By Vijay Prashad

Author Bio: This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Source: Globetrotter

Gerrit Boer – Diggels. Op vesite in de Veenakker. Naogedachten.

• door: Auke van der Berg

Gisteravond was ik al lezend een paar uur in de Altingerhof in Beilen. Op de afdeling voor dementerenden, de Veenakker, woonde de opoe van Gerrit Boer.
Boer heeft met ‘Diggels. Op vesite in de Veenakker. Naogedachten’ een ontroerend boek geschreven over de bezoeken aan zijn oma in de voorbije jaren.

‘Diggels bint weergaves van woorden en bielden die mij bijbleven bint nao jaorenlange vesites in de Veenakker, verpleeghuus in Beilen veur mèensen met dementie. Vesite betiekent: theedrinken en meelkoekjes eten met de woongroep van opoe, kuiern met zien beiden.

Diggels bint naogedachten over een leven in Midden-Drenthe, vertellings over’t dörp, verhalen over de ruilverkaveling, over de moestuun, over törf, over bloempies, over vögels, over ‘t Olde Diepie, over stienen en over dingen die west bint. Zaken die eigenlijk al vergeten bint en toch iniens weer opduukt.
Totdat alles vort is.

Herinnering is seins een singeliere kostganger.’

Het is verleidelijk om aan de hand van citaten te laten zien hoe langzaam, maar onomkeerbaar, opoe verdwaalt in haar eigen wereld. En hoe mooi het Drents is.

Eentje dan:
‘s Aovends nao ’t melken was ’t eten en koffiedrinken. Miesttied las Harm de Asserkraante en ik dee ok wat. Breien, of ik schreef wat op’n bladtie pepier. Op de achterkaante van een kelenderblad of zukswat.
Seins zungen wij ook wal. Harm speulde mondharpie en ik zung. Daar bij die molen of Achter in het stille klooster …
Dat is wal droevig, dat liedtie, moar wij kunden wal mooi zingen met zien beidend.

Het boek is meer dan ‘wal mooi’.
Wat een bijzonder boek.

Gerrit Boer – Diggels. Op vesite in de Veenakker. Naogedachten.
Uitgegeven door Stichting Het Drentse Boek.
ISBN 978 90 6509 272 4

Bestel het boek in de boekhandel of rechtstreek: https://huusvandetaol.nl/…/diggels-op-vesite-in-de…/