Rewilding Britain Timeline – Partners George Monbiot and Rebecca Wrigley’s Cover For Private Equity’s Global Enclosure By Stealth … and Pantheism?

Across the UK, in Holland and as far away as India and New Zealand farmers are protesting. Here, DEFRA’s new ‘environmental’ requirements known as Biodiversity Net Gain force farmers to take about 15% of land out of production putting many who are surviving on slim profit margins out of business, and off the land.

The spin is that farming is incompatible with wildlife, but the sinister end result is upland and downland, woods, pasture and arable land are becoming just tens of thousands of acres of distressed assets forced to market to be snapped up by private equity. Hang on. Farming, after all, and the surplus food it provides, formed the basis, 4,000 or so years ago, of civilisation.

‘I thought they were my friends’

This is particularly worrying because it appears to have been so well-planned, so pre-meditated… Though post-WWII, US-style industrial agriculture is more destructive, before the 1930s, traditional non-pesticide, non-chemical fertiliser farming, with horses and horse-muck, always left plenty of space for wildlife.

“…when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing the harvest.”: 1 Corinthians 9:10.

So whilst producing vast food surplus to feed a growing empire, the staunch Anglican-Nonoconformist Christian culture ensured God’s England and its wildlife were respected. Poachers were treated harshly, but manorial rabbit warrens, dovecotes, wild boar and deer provided common-sense reserve of village protein in times of unrest, or famine.

Until 2021 there was a successful charity that celebrated this. The Countryside Restoration Trust (CRT), founded by journalist Robin Page, championed the integration of farming and wildlife. The CRT, however. was clobbered in a nasty 2021 hostile takeover which arguably killed heartbroken Robin who’d seen his life’s work wrecked by ruthless Rewilding carpetbaggers.

China and the developing world have roundly beaten Western Finance Capitalism at its own game. But blocked economically and militarily, where will the West’s voracious rent-seekers turn? The answer is, of course, to consolidate their domestic monopolies, predate on domestic Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and middle-class asset owners. Quietly placing family farmers right in the crosshairs.

Old markets, squeezed dry, are rebranded as new markets in ‘Carbon Credits’, then, which King Charles personally benefits in terms of offshore wind and carbon trading regulation. But these are nothing but a great deception, a sophisticated excuse for global elite asset managers and high-priests of globalisation… to privatise the earth and bring in formalised digital human slavery.

The second great land-grabbing wave of enclosure has begun. This time its not the aristocracy, but Blackrock, Vanguard, the new kings on the block, private equity cartels.

‘Toxic positivity’

Some say Accelerationism, fathered by 21st century Nietzschean philosopher Nick Land, has the Western World in its spell. Land, who this writer Tony Gosling grew up with, delights in speeding towards Armageddon. Accelerationists like Peter Thiel and Yuval Noah Harari, backed by the financial 4th Reich, encourage omni-crises and come up with ‘solutions’ to each, for the public, that just make things worse.

So, from a cosy little cottage near Totnes, Devon, George Monbiot and Rebecca Wrigley’s forked-tongues chime out that, ‘The greatest threat to life on earth is farming’, and only by denying meddling farmers access to land can we prevent ‘climate breakdown’.

It doesn’t seem to matter that Agenda 2030/COP/WEF rewilding of wolves in Germany has been such a disaster. Nor that it’s only a matter of time before one of the hundreds of reintroduced wolf packs kill a wandering German child or two. Wolf welfare is elevated above human welfare, this, my friends, is pantheism.

Nietzsche was Adolf Hitler‘s guru, and butter wouldn’t melt in Monbiot and Wrigley’s mouths.

Rewilding Britain’s Timeline of WEF Treachery

TLIO Rewilding Britain’s Timeline .odt [right click to download]

Understanding the recent increase in “Rewilding” initiatives in Cornwall by examining a wider global “Rewilding” agenda.

Nigel Sumpter

CONTENTS
1 Introduction to this Working Paper
2. Rewilding Initiatives
2.1 What is “Rewilding”
2.2 Summary
3. Two Organisations key for understanding current Rewilding initiatives
3.1 The World Economic Forum (The WEF)
3.2 The United Nations (The UN)
3.3 The 2019 Strategic Partnership Framework between The WEF and The UN.
4. Timeline of Rewilding related initiatives
4. Timeline of key international initiatives relating to rewilding.
4.1 1970s to 1990s: Some foundational elements of current Rewilding Initiatives
4.2 2000 to date: Global reiteration and reinforcement of he preceding Rewilding principles
5. Taking Farmland Out of Food Production for “Climate Change” mitigation and/or Rewilding
5.1 International Taking Farmland Out of Food Production
5.2 Europe Taking Farmland Out of Food Production
5.3 Britain Taking Farmland Out of Food Production
5.4 Cornwall Taking Farmland Out of Food Production
6. Cornwall: Some other recent examples of local level rewilding initiatives
7. Addendum
7.1 Some comments on how rewilding can be a mechanism for wealth transfer.
7.2 World Human Population Reduction – “to save the planet”
7.3 Some guides to Agenda 2030:

1: Introduction to this working paper
This working paper considers a marked recent increase in local “rewilding” initiatives using the example of Cornwall and examines how they are/may be driven by a wider global agenda.
Representative text extracts from readily available public sources are arranged into a broadly chronological order. This presents an overall picture of the key initiatives that are part of a global agenda including “rewilding” and their impacts from global down down to local level. These quoted text extracts are highlighted in Italics.
Links are provided against many of the representative text extracts to allow deeper enquiry.
(CAPITAL NOTES IN BRACKETS) offer comment and queries for the reader to consider.
Underlined and/or in bold in the text extracts where introduced and considered of particular significance are: Names – of individuals and organisations, Policies, Initiatives etc

2: “Rewilding”
2.1 What is “Rewilding”
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewilding_(conservation_biology)
Definition: “Rewilding” , or re-wilding, activities are conservation efforts aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and wilderness areas. Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration with an emphasis on recovering the geographically specific set of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystem dynamics prior to human influences. This may require active human intervention to achieve.”
Origin: “The word “rewilding” was coined by members of the grass roots network Earth First!, appearing in print by 1990, and was refined and grounded in a scientific context by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss. According to Soulé and Noss, rewilding is a conservation method based on “cores, corridors, and carnivores.” The concepts of cores, corridors, and carnivores were developed further in 1999. Dave Foreman, Earth First! co-founder, subsequently wrote …about rewilding as a conservation strategy”.
Note: Earth First! co-founded by Dave Foreman, referred to in the Wikipedia extracts above, has been described as an extreme Eco-Terrorist group [this is not true, Earth First is a pagan-oriented non-violent direct action (NVDA) group which hold regular open gatherings, ed.]. As set out below in the timeline section Dave Foreman wrote the influential “The Wildlands Project” published by The Club of Rome in 1992 which is substantially about Rewilding and the intrinsically necessary management of the human population . Recommendations in the “The Wildlands Project” are foundational to current global Rewilding Policies embodied in the likes of Agenda2030 “The Sustainable Development Goals” which is signed up to by 178 Governments worldwide. The foundational 1992 The Wildlands Project’s recommendations for rewilding go hand in hand with radical control of human populations into just 25% of the land including relocation into “Sustainable” cities.

2.2 Summary: On the face of it some degree of selective “Rewilding” proposals in their own right seems a perfectly reasonable option to consider to address loss of flora, fauna and habitat arising from human activities such as historic and ongoing clearance of original wild forests and other habitats to allow for agricultural land use, urbanisation and resource exploitation along with hunting mostly larger wild animals to extinction as either food sources or if perceived as dangerous.
This brief study however concludes that the current global to local “rewilding” imperative substantially arises from the global United Nations (UN)’s Agenda2030 “The Sustainable Development Goals” and in particular Sustainable Development Goal 15 (SDG15) “Life on Land”.
Agenda2030 is supported by it’s 178 signatory world Governments who are bound to implementing all 17 SDGs. This appears to be integrated with other global initiatives of The World Economic Forum (WEF) such as the “The 4th Industrial Revolution” and “The Great Reset” .
A key part of advocating and advancing implementation of this overall global agenda globally down to local level , including rewilding, is through the “Strategic Partnership Framework” signed in 2019 between the UN and the WEF .
The UN, WEF and signatory world Governments, along with private and public stakeholder organisations and individuals are due to meet in September 2023 to discuss how to accelerate delivery of this overall global agenda some aspects of which involve rewilding.
The “rewilding” element of Agenda 2023 SDG 15 “Life on Land” appears to have evolved from being fundamentally founded on the extreme rewilding recommendations embodied in the 1992 Wildlands Project, published as noted earlier by The Club of Rome and written by Dave Foreman co-founder of Earth First! The later organisation also as noted earlier being regarded as among the most extreme eco-terrorists of the time.
The Club of Rome, publisher of the Wildlands Project is said to express a desire for One World Government. The World Economic Forum have also promoted One World Government. The United Nations (UN) who it has been said are increasingly moving in some respects toward being a component of a One World Government approach(eg UN Secretary-General’s remarks at the 2017 World Government Summit : https://www.un.org/youthenvoy/2017/02/secretary-generals-remarks-world-government-summit-qa/.)
None of these bodies are elected or accountable to the people and there appears to be little opportunity or offer of public consultation on the Agenda 2030 measures, including Rewilding, or the seemingly related “4th Industrial Revolution” or “Great Reset” measures.”
2009 December Telegraph “There’ll be nowhere to run from the new world government” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/6845967/Therell-be-nowhere-to-run-from-the-new-world-government.html)
2010 May Martin Edward. One World Governance – A Common Purpose? “[Would these global agreements] sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate. There’ll be nowhere to run from the new world government.” https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/one-world-governance-common-purpose

3. Organisations central to understanding current Rewilding initiatives:
3.1 The World Economic Forum (The WEF)
World Economic Forum (WEF) – From Wikipedia March 13, 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum : The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation….founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation is mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies – typically global enterprises with over US$5 billion in turnover, & views its own mission as “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas”.
Also: North Western Research Institute (NWRI) “The Forum suggests that a globalised world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations ..which it expresses through initiatives like the “Great Reset”. ” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za4Q8WXI4vQ https://nwri.org/world-economic-forum/
Rewilding is listed on the World Economic Forum’s website. The WEF say: “..In the future, food will be produced more intensively in fewer areas”, and “less productive land will be used for rewilding”, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/what-is-rewilding-nature/ “Rewilding has gone global, and rewilding projects are growing in more than 70 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, Latin America and North America.” “The Global Rewilding Alliance, which was created in 2020, says rewilding the Earth will “stabilize the climate, halt mass extinction, and reduce the risks of new pandemics”. (THE LATTER COMMENT REF PANDEMICS SEEMS BIZARRE? – DOES IT HINT AT THE COVID19 ‘PANDEMIC’ BEING LINKED TO THE WEF AND THEIR GREAT RESET?)
1992 – ongoing. The WEF has claimed to be able to insert it’s Young Global Leaders (YGLs) into world Governments to deliver WEF policies (presumably including Rewilding). Already in the first year of WEF’S Young Global Leaders (YGL)training programme, 1992, a number of highly influential candidates were elected. Among 200 selected were global profiles such as Angela Merkel, Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, Bill Gates, Bono, Richard Branson (Virgin), Jorma Ollila (Shell Oil), and José Manuel Barroso (President of the European Commission 2004–2014) (Personal conversation has suggested that around half of the current members of the Cabinet of the current British Parliament may be WEF trained YGLs.) Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, has claimed that the WEF have penetrated many world government cabinets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOuLQDRCexs https://geopolitics.co/2022/02/22/world-economic-forums-young-global-leaders-revealed/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/meet-the-2021-class-of-young-global-leaders https://expose-news.com/2022/01/05/ernst-wolff-world-economic-forum/
2030 March The Expose News: “Obscured by noble-sounding verbiage, the text of the World Economic Forum’s Agenda 2030 hides a hideous truth. When you look past the “sustainable development” jargon, it’s clear they want to take away your goods, such as electrical appliances, motor vehicles and even property rights.” https://expose-news.com/2023/03/05/what-you-need-to-know-about-agenda-2030/
2023 February Video: “Whitney Webb | What is the World Economic Forum?” Investigative journalist Whitney Webb reveals the inner workings of the World Economic Forum (“WEF”), the driving force behind The Great Reset. “The World Economic Forum (WEF) plays a significant role in guiding international developments in the interests of the business community.” ..”These are dreams where the powerful stay powerful, and the underclasses continue to toil and suffer. ..to solidify corporate control over the governments’ of the world”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za4Q8WXI4vQ

3.2 The United Nations (The UN)
The United Nations, referred to informally as the UN, is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations
“Within the UN’s Sustainable Policy, which Britain has adopted, we find the objective to remove private ownership whilst at the same time we also find the objective to re-wild the countryside – the UN envisions that most of the people in the world will be living in cities by 2050.”
2021 September Expose news: “Building an Empire – The United Nations Using the World Economic Forum to Roll Out Its Agenda”. “A key facet of that action plan is to push the agenda down to the most local levels in society. There are multiple paths and they all lead to a ‘One World Government’. ” https://expose-news.com/2021/09/14/building-an-empire-the-united-nations-using-the-world-economic-forum-to-roll-out-its-agenda/ “…as explained in James Jaeger’s documentary (below). Although it’s lengthy at 2.5 hours, it’s well worth watching as it gives a deeper understanding of the Agenda, how it’s being implemented and its local and global impact. While watching you will find you are able to draw parallels to what is happening in your own locality.” 2020 July James Jaeger’s documentary “UNSUSTAINABLE – The UN’s Agenda For World Domination” https://archive.org/details/2020-unsustainable-the-uns-agenda-for-world-domination. “The UN says “sustainable development” is simply the “Environmental Movement” reconfiguring the planet into a safe, green world. Others maintain it’s the forced inventory and control of all land, water, minerals, plants, animals, building projects and human beings on the planet. In other words, a blueprint for what many fear could morph into a totalitarian World Government. So what’s the real agenda behind Agenda 21?” . 2.5 hours long, it gives a deeper understanding of the UN and it’s agenda, how it’s being implemented and its local and global impact. While watching you are able to draw parallels to what is happening in your own locality.” (Including Rewilding initiatives.)

3.3 The 2019 Strategic Partnership Framework between The WEF and The UN to deliver Agenda 2030 “The Sustainable Development Goals”,globally down to locally (including SDG15 and Rewilding) .
2019 June The United Nations (UN) and The World Economic Forum (WEF) signed the “Strategic Partnership Framework” between them to accelerate the implementation of UN Agenda 2030 which under it’s Sustainable Development Goal 15 (SDG15) titled “LIFE ON LAND” promotes Rewilding. …. Agenda 2030 is a ..”global movement, co-ordinated through a global to local action plan.” A key facet of that action plan is to push the Agenda down to the most local levels in society. This would include pushing Rewilding (under SDG15) from globally down to locally – eg in Cornwall.
2021 September Expose News. “The United Nations (“UN”) “unites” the governments of 193 countries of the world. The World Economic Forum (“WEF”) “unites” 1,000 of the world’s largest corporations. The two are joined by a strategic partnership to implement the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030. An agenda which aims to control every aspect of our lives.” https://expose-news.com/2021/09/14/building-an-empire-the-united-nations-using-the-world-economic-forum-to-roll-out-its-agenda/ (UN/WEF Strategic Partnership Framework in the embedded video from approx -9.5minutes)
In the late ’90s at the World Economic Forum annual meeting, the then-head of the UN, Kofi Annan, essentially said that the World Economic Forum had been in part responsible for what he referred to as a silent revolution at the UN, where the UN, instead of championing the public sectors of the world (which is how most people think of the UN) they would instead begin to prioritise the needs of the businesses of the world … multinational corporations … over the past several decades the World Economic Forum being a major part of this. The United Nations has been pushed to essentially prioritise corporate needs over public needs.
2022 October Expose News. The U.N. & World Economic Forum are using each other to implement ‘Agenda 2030’ & ‘The Great Reset’ “The United Nations (“UN”) “unites” the governments of 193 countries of the world. Whilst the World Economic Forum (“WEF”) “unites” 1,000 of the world’s largest corporations. The two are joined by a strategic partnership to implement the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030. An agenda which aims to control every aspect of our lives. ” https://expose-news.com/2022/10/21/un-wef-agenda-2030-great-reset/
2023 March Expose News. “…a strategic alliance WEF entered into with the United Nations (“UN”) in 2019, which called for the UN to “use public-private partnerships as the model for nearly all policies that it implements, most specifically the implementation of the 17 sustainable development goals, sometimes referred to as Agenda 2030”.”(which includes Rewilding) https://expose-news.com/2023/03/05/what-you-need-to-know-about-agenda-2030/

4. Timeline of key Rewilding related initiatives
4.1 1970s to 1990s: Foundational elements of current Rewilding initiatives
1972 “Limits of Growth” Report – published by The Club of Rome (see introduction for comment ref CoR aims of eg Global Government). Main author Dennis Meadows is an honorary member of the Club of Rome and a member of the World Economic Forum. The Limits to Growth is a 1972 book about the computer modelling of exponential economic and population growth with finite resource supplies. Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and commissioned by the Club of Rome https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/mode/2up It advocates an up to 86% reduction in human population (without saying how) The impacts from too large a human population are established in this report and appear to remain part of the underlying arguments around rewilding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_Growth : After reviewing their computer simulations, the research team came to …. conclusions (including):”It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.” The introduction goes on to say: ” These conclusions are so far-reaching and raise so many questions for further study that we are quite frankly overwhelmed by the enormity of the job that must be done.” (THE UNEXPECTED ORIGIN OF THE ‘CLIMATE CRISIS’ “Jeffery Jaxen takes a deep dive into the origin of the ‘climate crisis’ narrative, highlighting the Club of Rome’s hand..) – ‘Climate Change’ is widely presented as among the justifications for Rewilding. Includes background to Club of Rome coming to publish the Limits of Growth & reference to selection of ‘Climate Change’ as a possible justification for establishing global government. https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/the-unexpected-origin-of-the-climate-crisis/)
1973 A Thames Television UK documentary on the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth explained that “only through complete control of societies can catastrophe be avoided and that a coming revolution should be planned.” https://archive.org/details/limits-to-growth-documentary-1973
Video of Dennis Meadows in 2017 talking about Limits of Growth (45 yeas after it’s publication & reasserting the Limits to Growth report’s recommendations): https://youtu.be/Dbo6uvJBtZg The video shows Meadows musing over his hopes that the population reduction by 86% of the world population could be accomplished peacefully under a “benevolent” dictatorship. He said: “We could have eight or nine billion, probably, if we have a very strong dictatorship which is smart … and [people have] a low standard of living … But we want to have freedom and we want to have a high standard of living so we’re going to have a billion people. And we’re now at seven, so we have to get back down. I hope that this can be slow, relatively slow and that it can be done in a way which is relatively equal, you know, so that people share the experience.”
Expose News – MARCH 2023 Retrospective review: “The Limits to Growth is deeply flawed yet advocates used it to claim societies need to be completely controlled to avoid catastrophe. It may have been the first computer model and the first to fuse global temperature with variables like population growth, resource loss, and the under-defined category of ‘pollution’..”: https://expose-news.com/2023/05/13/the-limits-to-growth-is-deeply-flawed/)
1976 UN Conference on Human Settlement. Principle of “Sustainable Development” publicly aired in effect the principle of state control over private property for wider good.
1987 Our Common Future Report (commonly known as The Brundtland Report) was published. (UN had in 1983 appointed an international commission to propose strategies for “Sustainable Development” and it had originally been written by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Switzerland.). The term Sustainable Development was first introduced to the world in the pages of a 1987 report “Our Common Future” produced by the United Nations World Commission on Environmental and Development, authored by Gro Harlem Brundtland, VP of The World Socialist Party. The term was first offered as official UN policy in 1992, in a document called UN Sustainable Development Agenda 21, issued at the UN’s Earth Summit, today referred to simply as Agenda 21. In signing, each of 178 nations pledge to adopt the goals of Agenda 21 https://nwri.org/agenda-21/ https://thenewamerican.com/print/un-agenda-2030-a-recipe-for-global-socialism/Conservation
Biological diversity is the subject of Chapter 15 of Agenda 21. Agenda 21’s aim initially had been to achieve global sustainable development by 2000, with the “21” in Agenda 21 referring to the original target of approach the 21st century (this was not achieved). (since directly translated recently into Agenda 2030 as Sustainable Development Goal 15. (SDG15) “Life on Land” https://youtu.be/rTE-3Fl7wgg.
1992 “Beyond the Limits” updates the findings of Limits of Growth Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Limits “Beyond the Limits is a book continuing the modeling of the consequences of a rapidly growing global population that was started in the 1972 report Limits to Growth.” “A sustainable future will require profound social and psychological readjustments in the developed and developing world.” “Current crop yields can only sustain the world’s population at subsistence levels, …”
1992 UN Agenda21 signed by USA during the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro

1992 The Wildlands Project was published and remains an influential source for several key aspects of current global rewilding policies. Author Dave Foreman was founder of Earth First which has been described as the most militant eco-terrorist organisation on the earth. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlands_Network : The Wildlands Network (formerly known as “Wildlands Project”) https://jmm.nu/united-nations-wildlands-project/ https://americanpolicy.org/2020/04/07/the-wildlands-project-and-the-biodiversity-treaty-agenda-21-the-early-days/ https://americanstewards.us/the-wildlands-project-returns/ On Page 15 of the The Wildlands Project it says: “We must convert (ie Rewilding) at least 50% of the land area of North America to Wilderness off limits to Human Beings.” he continues that “Those Core Wilderness Areas are to be interconnected by Wilderness Corridors also off limits to human beings. Those Wilderness areas are to be surrounded by Buffer Zones that may have limited resource use under the supervision and permitting of the Central Government in collaboration with Non Government Organisations (NGOs). Human population is to be resettled into the remaining 25% of the land into communities described as “Sustainable Communities”. (NOTE: SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES APPEAR TO CORRESPOND TO THE CURRENT INITIATIVE OF “15 Minute Cities”)
1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). 16 pages long only and described by some as principles only, bland and vague (eg Henry Lamb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vW9ORaIR_w ). Signed by 150 World Leaders. President George Bush refused to sign the Treaty but not long after President Bill Clinton (Al Gore was then Vice President ) did sign it. Key features include: Nations will create a sytem of protected areas – seemingly not controversial as 12% of USA land area was already protected. CBD Article 25 – ‘There shall be created a Conference of the Parties (ie established annual COP) that shall create a subsidiary body that shall produce a Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA)
1994 1st Conference of the Parties (ie COP1) in Berlin- which arose from the recommendations of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) report of 1992. At COP1 the U N Environment Programme present to COP1 a report titled: “A Global Biodiversity Assessment” (GBA),
1994 A Global Biodiversity Assessment” (GBA) report. 1140 pages long and explains how to implement the Convention (or Treaty) on Biological Diversity. The last 200 pages deals with a system of protected areas. The last 200 pages, section 13, of the Global Biodiversity Assessment, deal specifically with a system of protected areas (see page 915) which are core wilderness areas surrounded by buffer zones. The Global Biodiversity Assessment Report on Page 773 proposes a substantial reduction of the world population (but does not specify how) https://archive.org/details/united-nations-agenda-2030-global-biodiversity-assessment-1995/page/773/mode/2up The Global Biodiversity Assessment Report on Page 993 says the recently published 1992 Wildlands project, the controversial long-term strategy (100 or 200 years), (see above) is the central theme of protected areas… to expand natural areas (ie in effect by Rewilding) to cover as much as 30% of the US land area. (Note: ’30 by 30′ ie: 30% by 2030 is now a key UN Sustainable Development theme). https://archive.org/details/united-nations-agenda-2030-global-biodiversity-assessment-1995/page/993/mode/2up
1994, The campaign that blocked the international signing and adoption of the The Global Biodiversity Assessment as a binding treaty (including internationally mandated human population reduction -along with rewilding) : A detailed account of the nail biting campaign that at the last minute blocked the adoption of the treaty – with what could have mandated extensive Rewilding and population relocation & reduction is on this link: https://nwri.org/the-wildlands-project/un-biodiversity-treaty-and-the-wildlands-project/ “On July 19, Dr. Michael Coffman, a Director of Maine Conservation Rights Institute, and a regional director for the Alliance for America, was in Washington talking to Senator Mitchell’s staff and to Senator Dole’s staff, trying to convince them that the Treaty would have the effect of making the “Wildlands Project,” the objective of the Treaty’s implementation. The study revealed the existence of a draft of the Global Biodiversity Assessment, required by the Treaty, and the identification of the “Wildlands Project” (which includes extensive Rewilding) as a primary mechanism for Treaty implementation.” “…..about an hour before the Senate debate, Voight received a call from Mitchell’s office reporting that the Treaty would be withdrawn.”
1995 Video : Eco Fraud – An Interview With Dr. Michael S. Coffman on the On Target show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNkgjcosteM He discusses a wide range of environmental issues that are being used to scare people into being willing to give up their Constitutional protections to “save” themselves by creating “global governance”. From 34 minutes he discusses the UN’s plan to protect biodiversity in the Convention on Biological Diversity will not only reduce biodiversity, but will lock up to half of America into wilderness reserves and corridors. Dr. Michael Coffman was an author, researcher, speaker, and founding contributor to the fight against Agenda 21 Sustainable Development. He was President of Environmental Perspectives, Inc., and Executive Director of Sovereignty International. Dr. Coffman played a key role in stopping the ratification of the Biodiversity Treaty in the US Senate. He died in 2017.
1996 Video: Henry Lamb talking at the 1996 Granada Forum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vW9ORaIR_w Henry Lamb was the first to discover Agenda 21 and sound the alarm. He wrote the book ‘The Rise of Global Governance, and Agenda 21’. He also produced a series of videos on Agenda 21. Each stand as invaluable tools for anyone wanting to know where this evil agenda came from and why it must be stopped. Lamb died in 2012.
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NOTE: DELIVERY OF AGENDA 21 WAS INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN COMPLETED BY THE BEGINNING OF THE 21st CENTURY – IE BY THE YEAR 2000, BUT WAS NOT. THE ABOVE PRE- 2000 UN & CO INITIATIVES (INCLUDING THEIR REWILDING ASPECTS) INCLUDING AGENDA 21 APPEAR TO HAVE BEEN MOSTLY SUBSTANTIALLY RETAINED, REITERATED AND REAFFIRMED, SOME ALMOST VERBATIM, IN THE CURRENT AGENDA 2030 & GENERALLY IN CURRENT UN & WEF POLICY AS SUMMARISED IN THE POST 2000 CONTINUATION OF THE TIMELINE BELOW.
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4.2 2000 to date: Global reiteration of Agenda 21 as Agenda 203 and expansion of the preceding Rewilding principles
2003 July 15 to date. WEF has been listed as a participant of the UN’s Global Compact . Global Compact is a mechanism to advance the global goals of the UN. https://unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/participants/10162-World-Economic-Forum
2011 June . Rewilding Europe was formally established as an independent, not-for-profit foundation (ANBI status) registered in the Netherlands. “Rewilding is being practised at scale across Europe. The application of rewilding principles, models and tools is delivering measurable, demonstrable, and sustained benefits for nature and people. With many actors we create a Europe that is richer in nature and more resilient to climate change. Rewilding Europe currently incorporates two limited liability companies, the Rewilding European Capital B.V. and the Rewilding Europe B.V”..https://rewildingeurope.com/
2014 August USA Tea party against Agenda21 (An example of push back against Agenda 21) “In recent years the United Nation’s Agenda 21 policy has become the rallying cry for many in the Tea Party who believe that the U.N. threatens American sovereignty. This concern led to the introduction of anti-Agenda 21 legislation in 26 states in 2012 and 2013”. “…The United Nations Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of environmental extremism, social engineering and global political control… This United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called “sustainable development” views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership, individual travel choices and privately owned farms as destructive to the Environment…” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/08/08/stopping-the-uns-agenda-21-policy-on-sustainable-development-has-become-a-rallying-cry-for-the-tea-party-across-the-u-s/
2015 Rewilding Britain established Rewilding Britain is an independent charity committed to catalysing rewilding and influencing rewilding policy across all of Britain. We are the first and only country-wide organisation in Britain focusing on rewilding and the amazing benefits it can bring for people, nature and climate. Rewilding Britain’s current motto is: ” 30% BY 2030″ Rewilding Britain’s vision for achieving 30% by 2030 is to expand the scale, quality and connectivity of our native habitats through: The creation of core rewilding areas across at least 5% of Britain. https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/about-us/manifesto https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/about-us/who-we-are-and-how-were-run/our-funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewilding_Britain World Economic Forum on Rewilding Britain: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/rewilding-better-than-tree-planting-britain-forests “…rewilding Britain could absorb even more CO2 than tree planting” “…support marginal upland farming in shifting from low-productivity sheep and deer ranching to rewilding.” https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/CE003335 Income: £1,802,042. Rewilding Cornwall (currently only a subset of the Rewilding Britain website) https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/local-network/cornwall-rewilding-network “A Cornwall Rewilding Network is currently at the planning stage. We will release more details here once it has been launched.”
2015 United Nations (“UN”) Sustainable Development Summit. Agenda 2030, also known as the “Sustainable Development Goals”, is a set of goals decided upon at the United Nations (“UN”) at the 2015 Sustainable Development Summit. Agenda 2030 takes all of the goals set by Agenda 21 (including those relating to Rewilding) and re-asserts them as the basis for “sustainable development”. Goal 15. Protect, restore (ie Rewilding) and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss” became Agenda 2030 SDG15 “Life on Land”: Three of the UN’s foundational documents appear to continue to at least in part inform the aims of Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 15 (SDG15) ie the 1992 Biodiversity Treaty; the 1992 Wildlands Project and the 1995 Global Biodiversity Assessment (all three are as referred to earlier in the timeline above showing the continuity of intentions including tose of rewilding. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/implementing-the-sustainable-development-goals/implementing-the-sustainable-development-goals–2 ”
2019, June The UN-WEF Strategic Partnership Framework was signed to accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2030. The WEF represents the financial “elites.” https://expose-news.com/2022/10/21/un-wef-agenda-2030-great-reset/ The United Nations (“UN”) “unites” the governments of 193 countries of the world. Whilst the World Economic Forum (“WEF”) “unites” 1,000 of the world’s largest corporations. The two are joined by a strategic partnership to implement the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030 an agenda which aims to control every aspect of our lives. None of these organisations or companies has officials which represent the people. We have not elected them into office to govern or make decisions on our behalf. And, no electorate has been asked if their goals are our goals or if their goals will create the world we, the people, want. Within the UN’s Sustainable Policy, which Britain has adopted, we find the objective to remove private ownership whilst at the same time we also find the objective to re-wild the countryside – the UN envisions that most of the people in the world will be living in cities by 2050. https://expose-news.com/2021/09/14/building-an-empire-the-united-nations-using-the-world-economic-forum-to-roll-out-its-agenda/
2020 The Global Rewilding Alliance, was created.
2020 Boris Johnson promising to rewild a third of the country by 2030. “Boris Johnson has promised to restore to nature 30 per cent of Britain by 2030 as he signs a biodiversity pledge with other UN leaders…. “https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/27/boris-johnson-commits-restoring-nature-30-per-cent-britain-2030/
2020 January The World Economic Forum issued a report entitled “Nature Risk Rising. Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy.” “Our research shows that $44 trillion of economic value generation – more than half of the world’s total GDP – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services and is therefore exposed to nature loss. Together, the three largest sectors that are highly dependent on nature generate close to $8 trillion of gross value added (GVA): construction ($4 trillion); agriculture ($2.5 trillion); and food and beverages ($1.4 trillion). This is roughly twice the size of the German economy. This is particularly bad news when put next to the current measurements of global warming.” https://247wallst.com/energy-economy/2020/01/19/wef-more-than-half-of-global-gdp-linked-to-nature-and-at-risk/
2020 November Global Rewilding Alliance created https://globalrewilding.earth/take-action “….global partners include the IUCN, World Bank, World Resources Institute, World Economic Forum and Society for Ecological Restoration.” “As part of the planning for WILD11 (11th World Wilderness Congress), our many collaborators worked with us to create the Global Charter for Rewilding the Earth which is the foundation for the Global Rewilding Alliance that is now an official implementing partner of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. WILD will act as secretariat and facilitator of this Global Rewilding Alliance. “A prime aim of the Alliance will be to get official recognition, through inclusion in language and global action plans, of the term and concept of “rewilding“ as the most advanced form of restoration and as the best and most cost-effective nature-based solution in solving the dual climate/biodiversity crisis.” The World Economic Forum () state: “The Global Rewilding Alliance, which was created in 2020, says rewilding the Earth will “stabilize the climate, halt mass extinction, and reduce the risks of new pandemics” (NOTE: NO EXPLANATION APPEARS TO BE OFFERED REGARDING HOW REWILDING WILL REDUCE THE RISK OF NEW PANDEMICS) . https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/what-is-rewilding-nature/
2020 December The Guardian “2022: the year rewilding went mainstream – and a biodiversity deal gave the world hope” “Away from Cop15, rewilding came to the fore in 2022, with projects across the globe, from the reintroduction of bison and cluster rewilding in the UK to big ambitions in Argentina, lessons learned in the Netherlands and the US, and the 10th Rewilding Europe project launched. Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellie Goulding were two celebrities who expressed their support for the movement during the Age of Extinction’s Wild world project.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/26/2022-the-year-rewilding-went-mainstream-and-a-biodiversity-deal-gave-the-world-hope
2021 WEF meeting at Davos, ..since when WEF has publicly discussed how these goals can be used to achieve King Charles’ “Great Reset.” https://expose-news.com/2022/09/20/meet-the-great-reset-king-charles-iii/ Charles launched three related instruments at Davos 2020: the Terra Carta, the Sustainable Markets Initiative and the Sustainable Markets Council. The Terra Carta is a 17-page “Earth Charter” created by Charles and released on 11 January 2021.The voluntary framework commits companies and investors to ensure their businesses are aligned with preserving the world’s biodiversity – protecting 50% of the biosphere by mid-century- and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. (50% – a figure originally mentioned in 1992 Wildlands Report – and would presumably have to include substantial Rewilding to be achievable.)
2021 “After taking office, President Biden signed an executive order announcing his America the Beautiful plan to conserve 30% of US land and water by 2030. He challenged Americans to collaboratively “conserve, connect, and restore (ie rewild) the lands, waters, and wildlife upon which we all depend” at a national scale ” (US Departments, p. 9: Here, we take a major step in advancing President Biden’s plan by envisioning a bold and science-based rewilding of publicly owned federal lands….: https://americanstewards.us/the-wildlands-project-returns/
2021 June “UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration”. The objective of the UN Decade is to “build a strong, diverse global movement towards a sustainable future by accelerating restoration (ie including rewilding) through building political momentum for restoration (ie including rewilding) and thousands of practical initiatives. The official launch of the UN Decade was on World Environment day, 5 June 2021, and the initiative will last through 2030, which also is the deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals and the timeline scientists consider the last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change. Lead agencies are the UN Environment Programme and the FAO with “collaborating agencies”: UNFCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), CBD (Convention on Biological Diversity), UNCCD (UN Convention to Combat Desertification), UNECE (Un Economic Commission for Europe) and UNESCO. Other global partners include the IUCN, World Bank, World Resources Institute, World Economic Forum and Society for Ecological Restoration (ie including rewilding) . https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/06/1093362 https://www.unesco.org/en/ecosystems-restoration-decade
2021 October. In Your Area Newsroom. Friends of the Earth believe that rewilding areas of Cornwall is not only good for the environment and wildlife but could also help create some 6,860 green jobs in the Duchy by 2030. https://www.inyourarea.co.uk/news/cornwall-has-potential-to-be-largest-rewilding-area-in-england/
2021 November UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCC) COP 26 WEF: Climate change summit: What is COP26 and why does it matter? https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/cop26-un-climate-change-summit/ , “In the fight against climate change, the UN says time is fast running out. So COP26, the United Nations climate summit, is an opportunity to agree to global action that’s seriously overdue.” “The World Economic Forum estimates that nature is responsible for half of global GDP ($44 trillion) and that shifting to a nature-positive economy in key sectors could create 395 million jobs by 2030.”
Climate Crisis Report: “10 Ways Rewilding Can Help Beat the Climate Crisis” https://rskgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/rewilding-climate-change-report.pdf A report by RSK presented at COP26.”In November 2021, the UK is hosting COP26, so all eyes will be on us as we seek to deliver against our climate commitments and recover from the coronavirus pandemic”. “Why does Britain need to rewild? Britain is one of the most ecologically depleted nations on earth. Once, species like bears and wolves roamed wild but we’ve seen populations of our most critical species plummet by 60% since 1970. Agricultural intensification, ever expanding urban development and an increasingly polluted environment have all taken their toll …” https://rskgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/rewilding-climate-change-report.pdf
2021 December The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 15 (The 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP15) took place in Kunming, China. In January 2021, the CBD published a 21-point draft of the agreement, which commits signatories to protect at least 30% of the planet, control invasive species, and reduce pollution from plastic waste and excess nutrients by 50%. https://www.cbd.int/decision/cop/?id=13394 The first part concluded negotiations on a post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.
2022 March “Living within Limits”. Video. The Club of Rome: The Limits to Growth + 50 years on: Global equity for a healthy planet – Anniversary Webinar Series | , (94 mins) https://youtu.be/ItLNPn4rXxU
2022 Oct World Economic Forum & rewilding: “Rewilding: letting nature do its own thing.” , https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/what-is-rewilding-nature/ “The Global Rewilding Alliance, which was created in 2020, says rewilding the Earth will “stabilize the climate, halt mass extinction, and reduce the risks of new pandemics” (AN UNUSUAL CLAIM PERHAPS?)… “Rewilding can help combat climate change and reverse species extinction, Rewilding Britain says.”
2022 December COP15 – the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (“UNCBD”) conference. (COP15 took place in a virtual format, from 11-15 October 2021. The second part of COP 15 was a face-to-face meeting in Kunming, China, from 25 April-8 May 2022.) The plan to “expand natural habitats and corridors to cover as much as 30% of the land area” as was originally proposed in the 1992 The Wildlands Project and reiterated and reinforced in the the 1994 Global Biodiversity Assessment is what is currently now being called the 30 by 30 plan (Note: that The 1995 Global Biodiversity Assessment also proposes a substantial reduction of the world population (but did not specify how) . 30 by 30 is now incorporated in a so-called “New Deal for Nature” which will involve new investments or financial markets worth about $10 trillion over this decade being created to provide opportunities for businesses to “engage” with the plan. Shortly after COP15 concluded, the Indigenous Environmental Network issued a statement which also exposed the private commercial interests planning to profiteer from “Mother Earth.” https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/indigenous-people-seek-stronger-land-rights-cop15-nature-talks-2022-12-08/ 30 by 30 has been described as: .. the biggest land grab in history marketed under the guise of “protecting biodiversity.” Survival International estimates that the plan will displace around 300 million indigenous people worldwide from their native lands and forests in the name of “conservation.” And it will make a very few very rich while doing so.
2023 April An announcement has been made by the World Economic Forum (“WEF”) that World leaders will be gathering together later this year (September) to “accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2030,”. “The United Nations (UN) and the WEF appear frustrated by a lack of progress made towards their “Great Reset” ideology, alongside Agenda 2030,..!” https://www.legitgov.org/world-economic-forum-says-it-will-accelerate-implementation-globalist-agenda-2030
2023 May WHO’s draft text of WHO CA+ (Comprehensive Agreement+) proposes COP (Conference of the Parties) to be established as in effect an unaccountable unelected international bureaucracy. Option 8a “One Health” would cover rewilding etc. See UK Column News 6th June 2023 from 1hour: https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/uk-column-news-5th-june-2023
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5. Taking Farmland Out of Food Production for “Climate Change” mitigation and/or Rewilding
Predicated on the claim that it will both tackle “Climate Change” and/or restore(rewild) nature there appears to be a global push for taking land out of food production often with a stated intention to restore (rewild) it to a natural state. This has started to be actioned relatively recently.
(NOTE: THERE HAS BEEN GROWING COMMENT THAT THE CONCEPT OF “MAN MADE CLIMATE CHANGE” HAS BEEN PROMOTED AS A JUSTIFICATION FOR GLOBAL GOVERNANCE OR GOVERNMENT & APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN SELECTED AS A (SUPPOSED)CRISIS THAT WOULD LEND JUSTIFICATION TO A ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT BY THE CLUB OF ROME IN 1968 FROM SEVERAL GLOBAL CRISIS OPTION .
RECENT STUDIES HAVE CONFIRMED THE LINK BETWEEN CO2 AND GLOBAL WARMING – BUT SUGGESTING THAT THE WARMING COMES FIRST FOLLOWED LATER BY RISING CO2. THE PREDICTIONS OF VARIOUS COMPUTER MODELS OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS CAN NOW BE TESTED AGAINST WHAT HAS ACTUALLY HAPPENED AND MOST IF NOT ALL ARE INCREASINGLY BEING SHOWN TO HAVE BEEN WHOLLY UNRELIABLE IN PREDICTING THE PRESENT DAY SITUATION HENCE ARE ALSO LIKELY TO BE UNRELIABLE IN PREDICTING THE FUTURE AND SO WITH SUCH LOW TO NON EXISTENT PREDICTIVE RELIABILITY ARE UNFIT AS A BASIS FOR LOCAL, NATIONAL OR GLOBAL POLICY AND ACTIONS.
THE ABOVE IS CONSIDERED TO BE A TOPIC IN IT’S OWN RIGHT AND SO IS NOT EXAMINED IN THIS WORKING PAPER BUT SOME STARTING POINTS FOR THE READER’S SELF STUDY INCLUDE:
https://clintel.org/ – over 1,500 leading world scientists challenge the narrative of “Anthropogenic Climate Change” – Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation that operates in the fields of climate change and climate policy. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Z5FdwWw_c Annual GWPF Lecture – Patrick Moore (scientist & founder of Greenpeace) – Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
5.1 International Taking Farmland Out of Food Production
2017 January Dr Adrian Colston: Blog. “Catastrophe in uplands farming…..” “…in October 2015, the Dartmoor National Park Authority invited Monbiot to come and speak on rewilding to the biennial National Parks Conference [2]. His used of words such as ‘sheepwrecked’ and ‘the white plague’ to describe his views of the sheep grazing regimes on Dartmoor caused widespread offence amongst the farming community [3] but won him many supporters from elsewhere.” https://adriancolston.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/the-politics-of-rewilding-on-dartmoor/
2022 April Report by Ice Age Farmer Biden pays farms to STOP – EU out of feed – Meat taxes & chicken permits – Up to you to GROW FOOD!Even as Biden and Trudeau announce food shortages, farmers are being paid to stop farming. Chickens are now designated illegal animals, due to bird flu (diagnosed by a fraudulent PCR test), also justifying millions of birds being culled in the UK and France. The EU is culling livestock as they run out of animal feed, and in the UK, cows are being exterminated due to a lack of farmworkers. Meanwhile, the Netherlands is seriously considering a meat tax. https://www.sott.net/article/466391-Ice-Age-Farmer-Report-Biden-pays-farms-to-STOP-EU-out-of-feed-Meat-taxes-chicken-permits-Up-to-you-to-GROW-FOOD
2023 February. World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Pandemic Accord Will Give It Control Over U.S. Livestock and Food Supply Parties must acknowledge “the creation of the Quadripartite” to “better address any One Health-related issue.” The draft states explicitly that the “Quadripartite” consists of the WHO—whose top three donors include the U.S., Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the People’s Republic of China—the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Organisation for Animal Health, and the United Nations Environment Programme. https://earlking56.family.blog/2023/02/24/whos-pandemic-accord-will-give-it-control-over-u-s-livestock-and-food-supply/
2023 April. The People’s Voice. WEF Orders Governments To Start Limiting Food To Fight Climate Change – The People’s Voice. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum has been laying groundwork to begin starving the people it considers useless and has now ordered governments in the West to begin attacking the food supply. (https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/wef-orders-governments-to-start-limiting-food-to-fight-climate-change/)
2023 USA This Administration’s Agenda Is To CONTROL The FOOD And To CONTROL The PEOPLE”! 30 x 30 Biden Bill – don’t let our farmers die. Rumble (https://rumble.com/v2h6rte-this-administrations-agenda-is-to-control-the-food-and-to-control-the-peopl.html)
2023 The United Nations and Private Land Ownership – Setting the Stage for Farmland Expropriation. It certainly appears that society is on the cusp of major change, particularly if the ruling class gets its way. One of the goals of Agenda 21 is to end private property ownership and all farming of animals by 2050. https://twitter.com/wef/status/799632174043561984?s=21
2023 April Australia – Globalist Plans to Steal Farmland & Regional Land THE REAL AGENDA BEHIND THE VOICE TO PARLIAMENT: Exposing the Globalist’s Plan to Steal Australian Farmlands and Regional Land. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vows, “I’m here to change the country.” It is not a vow, but a threat. https://stephenreason.substack.com/p/the-real-agenda-behind-the-voice Stephen Reason: https://stephenreason.substack.com/p/the-real-agenda-behind-the-voice?r=17nqkb
The forced land acquisition will not end with farmland. Forest, parklands, nature reserves, coastlines will be geo-fenced and permanently restricted — deemed “sacred,” and non-traversable, forevermore. You will not dare trespass on the Globalist’s newly acquired land; indeed, you will not even venture beyond the radius permitted by your carbon credit allocation. https://telegra.ph/THE-REAL-AGENDA-BEHIND-THE-VOICE-TO-PARLIAMENT-Exposing-the-Globalists-Plan-to-Steal-Australian-Farmlands-and-Regional-Land-04-10 (https://ctreaderbot.vercel.app/a/CsW7tyl42ifh3DY.html)
2023 YouTube: Farmland WARS: The Global TAKEOVER of America’s Land | Glenn TV | Ep 244 There’s a world war raging right now between globalist and nationalist authoritarians. All sides want absolute control, https://youtu.be/M5WBTDJyDug) https://thefederalist706261013.wordpress.com/2022/04/02/chickens-are-now-illegal-animals-in-the-new-world-order/ https://mrtrueman.posthaven.com/governments-pay-farms-to-stop-farming-eu-out-of-feed-meat-taxes-and-chicken-permits
2023 May Democrat USA President Joe Biden’s “climate czar” John Kerry is calling for farmers to stop growing food in order to meet the administration’s radical “net zero” goals for lowering “emissions.” Kerry, Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, issued the warning during a green agenda conference in Washington D.C. During the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) AIM for Climate Summit, Kerry told the audience that “we can’t get to net zero, we won’t get this job done, unless agriculture is front and centre as part of the solution.” Kerry warned attendees that his and other world leaders’ “lives depend” on farmers ceasing their operations. https://slaynews.com/news/john-kerry-farmers-stop-growing-food-meet-net-zero-goals-emissions/
2023 May Expose news. John Kerry: “Destruction of farming is front and centre in the fight against climate change,” says. “Kerry’s narrative to starve people by cutting off their food supplies to save people from starving seems bizarre. But that’s because the agenda he’s promoting uses climate and greenhouse gas emissions as a smokescreen. … He was accused as far back as 2011 of being the US Senate’s “most globalist-oriented insider” when he was named as one of 12 members of the newly formed “Super Congress.” https://expose-news.com/2023/05/31/destruction-of-farming-is-front-and-centre/

5.2 Europe Taking Farmland Out of Food Production
2022 December Netherlands’ Land Grab: If there’s one thing bureaucrats like to do it’s to push people around but Dutch farmers aren’t having it. Government leaders claim that the radical restructuring of Dutch farming is necessary for the good of the environment. However, facts suggest that this has little to do with the environment and much to do with centralising power. https://expose-news.com/2022/12/15/if-theres-one-thing-bureaucrats-like-to-do/
2023 February “Irish farmers warn of an uprising if Government continues with “vicious” measures to meet net-zero targets” “Ireland will need to quadruple its afforestation targets, reduce its livestock by 30% and re-wet 90% of reclaimed land if the agricultural sector is to meet net-zero targets.” https://expose-news.com/2023/02/15/irish-farmers-warn-of-an-uprising-net-zero-measures/
2023 March. Netherlands’ Land Grab: Dutch farmers are not safe yet. After the stunning victory in the elections in the Netherlands this week, some are warning that the BBB’s seats may not be sufficient to stop the Dutch government’s land grab. https://expose-news.com/2023/03/18/netherlands-land-grab-dutch-farmers-are-not-safe-yet/
2023 March Tucker Carlson interviews Dutch Farmer rep: WAR ON FARMERS Could Lead To Mass Starvation. Learn How To Protect Your Family WAR ON FARMERS Could Lead To Mass Starvation | Learn How To Protect Your Family https://rumble.com/v2j1w4i-war-on-farmers-could-lead-to-mass-starvation-learn-how-to-protect-your-fami.html
2023 March “Netherlands’ Land Grab: Dutch farmers are not safe yet” https://expose-news.com/2023/03/18/netherlands-land-grab-dutch-farmers-are-not-safe-yet/
2023 May The Expose. Netherlands Land Grab: Dutch farmers prepare for a battle. Despite the election results and the outrage, the Dutch government is pushing ahead with its plans to destroy Netherlands’ agricultural sector. (https://expose-news.com/2023/05/17/dutch-farmers-prepare-for-a-battle/)
2023 May The Expose. Netherlands’ Land Grab: What is driving the Dutch nation to attack itself and destroy the bedrock of its society? Under the plans, farmers will be offered financial compensation to stop farming. However, the deal isn’t a “willing buyer willing seller” deal, the term farmers are being threatened with is “compulsory farm buyouts.” https://expose-news.com/2023/05/06/netherlands-land-grab-what-is-driving-the-dutch/
2023 May Ireland. “The Department for Agriculture has said a report outlining a 200,000 reduction in dairy cows was a “modelling document”. It was reported yesterday that cows would have to be culled at a cost of €600,000 to taxpayers over the next three years to meet climate emissions targets. Together beef and dairy account for around two-thirds of the country’s agricultural output with around 90 per cent of the produce exported.” https://forums.mixedmartialarts.com/t/absolute-insanity-ireland-to-cull-200-000-cows-for-climate-goals-200m-yr-cost/3831309
Irish government proposes culling 200,000 cows to meet climate targets “The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association called the deal a “sellout” that would make many farms unviable. Cutting emissions by a quarter will drive many farms into bankruptcy” https://expose-news.com/2023/06/01/irish-government-proposes-culling-200000-cows/
2023 “The Battle Is Over” DEVASTATING NEWS For Farmers Just Announced. Massive ‘forced’ Farm Closures to go ahead!! This latest shocking, but not surprising news will significantly contribute to massive food shortages and massive increases in food prices across Europe over the coming years!! After appeals from the Dutch farmers, the EU has finally passed a law for the forced closure of farms in the Netherlands which is the number one, most productive, farming country on planet Earth! All orchestrated by the WEF, under the fake claim that Nitrogen fertilisers which create CO2 creates global warming, which is stated to be ‘fake science’ by many independent climatologists (i.e. not the climatologists funded by the global elites) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-HI_Np9xFQ

5.3 Britain Taking Farmland Out of Food Production
October 2018 Cambrian News “A project to ‘rewild’ a massive area of north Ceredigion and the Dyfi Valley, including parts of the sea in Cardigan Bay, has been slammed as “cultural imperialism”. https://www.cambrian-news.co.uk/news/rewilding-plan-is-urban-values-forced-on-a-rural-welsh-area-102678
2019 October Daily Post. “Farming anger forces Rewilding Britain to pull out of Summit To Sea project in Mid Wales “A project to ‘rewild’ a massive area of north Ceredigion and the Dyfi Valley, including parts of the sea in Cardigan Bay, has been slammed as “cultural imperialism”. “A statement by Rewilding Britain this morning confirmed it was withdrawing from the scheme followed feedback from farming unions and local communities.” https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/local-news/rewilding-britain-summit-sea-wales-17119541
2020 March. Friends of the Earth wants to double UK woodland cover by 2050 – to tackle the climate emergency and make more space for nature. Increasing tree cover is an essential part of a range of measures needed to fight climate change. While woodland currently covers 13% of the UK, approximately 70% of the UK is farmland. It’s clear that if we’re going to double tree cover, some of this farmland will need to be converted into woodland. https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/finding-land-double-tree-cover
February 2020 Daily Mail “War of the wild: How trendy metropolitan eco-zealots with close ties to Boris Johnson are set on driving out traditional farming and ‘rewilding’ the land” “…an experiment in ‘rewilding’ — a trendy, but for some, highly controversial form of land management in which large areas of countryside are allowed to revert to nature. Popular with conservationists (but hated by many farmers) it boasts many powerful supporters in the UK. They believe removing land from agricultural production can help fight climate change and reverse the catastrophic decline in wildlife populations we have suffered in recent decades. Boris Johnson’s Government, currently formulating a farm-subsidy policy for life outside the EU, seems particularly keen. Indeed, large amounts of public money could be diverted from traditional farming and used to help rewild the British countryside.” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8057699/How-trendy-metropolitan-eco-zealots-set-driving-farming-rewilding-land.html
2021 September BBC 24 “A major new project aims to rewild an area of more than 500,000 acres (202,343ha) in the Highlands. Over a period of 30 years, mountains, hills, glens and forests would be left to natural processes. Moray-based charity Trees for Life is working with Rewilding Europe, along with 20 landowners and six organisations on the project.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-58663615
2021 Mail Online (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10374283/Anger-rewilding-plan-hand-millions-farmers-plant-trees.html)
2021 May P&J Newspaper, Scotland. Leading Scottish farmer sounds warning over planting trees on productive farmland. “Similar reports from Scotland: farms being shut down in order to “rewild” them and plant trees. Ironically this farmer is worried it will end up INCREASING carbon footprint, to then have to import all food. Mr Connon said: “I am receiving fresh calls every week from despairing farmers and crofters across Scotland telling me of another farm or estate destined for tree planting. “The more of Scotland’s limited productive land that shifts from farming to forestry, the more we are likely to simply offshore our emissions or even increase our carbon footprint.” https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/farming/3141586/leading-scottish-farmer-sounds-warning-over-planting-trees-on-productive-farmland/
2022 January Daily Mail Fury at plan to hand millions to farmers to turn 741,000 acres of land into nature reserves as ‘rewilding cult’ loved by Carrie’s pals the Goldsmith brothers forms centre of shake-up George Eustice launches £2.4billion-a-year plan replacing EU’s £2.4bn common agricultural. Farmers and landowners will be paid for planting trees and restoring wetlands in 15 new nature reserves. The ‘landscape recovery scheme’ will eventually cost the taxpayer £800million a year from 2028. But there are concerns about risk to food security and policy will benefit Britain’s richest landowners. Farmers say Boris Johnson’s ‘mad’ obsession with rewilding will drive smaller farmers out of business. Ministers claim plans will turn 741,000 acres into wildlife habitats in 20 years and will not risk food supply https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10374283/Anger-rewilding-plan-hand-millions-farmers-plant-trees.html
2022 January The Spectator “The problem with rewilding. Humans have shaped Britain for thousands of years”Under new plans, just announced by Environment Secretary George Eustice, farmers and landowners in England could be paid to turn large areas of land into nature reserves and restore floodplains.” https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-problem-with-rewilding/
2022 May UK “Farmers Being Paid to Stop Farming”. “It is hard to fathom the UK government’s recent lump-sum- exit- scheme that effectively bribes farmers to retire and turn over their land to woodland, whilst a potential world food crisis looms according to the IMF (International Monetary Fund).” https://libertytactics.co.uk/farmers-being-paid-to-stop-farming/
2022 January ITV News. “Farmers and landowners to be paid to rewild English countryside” https://www.itv.com/news/2022-01-06/farmers-and-landowners-to-be-paid-to-rewild-english-countryside
2022 The Independent. Enormous tree-planting push will turn farmland into forests to hit net-zero goals. “A major tree-planting push by the government to help the country reach its climate goals will be the biggest in 50 years and could result in some farmland currently used for livestock being repurposed to create new woodlands.” https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/tree-planting-forests-woodlands-farming-b1845086.html
2023 March Devon Live. Farmers fear plans to remove livestock from Dartmoor “Natural England says that the relationship between farming, nature and other impacts like climate change are “not in balance” Dartmoor Natural England: Reflections from Wes Smyth, Natural England’s Area Manager, on how we ensure Dartmoor’s unique wildlife is preserved. https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/farmers-fear-plans-remove-livestock-8262004
2023 April Expose News: “A report produced by Oxford University and Imperial College London for the UK Government reveals that all airports will be ordered to close, eating beef and lamb will be made illegal, and construction of new buildings will not be permitted in order to meet the legal commitment of zero emissions by 2050. According to the report this will require the public to never eat beef or lamb ever again. To do this national consumption of beef and lamb will drop by 50% between 2020 and 2029. Then between 2030 and 2049 beef and lamb will be “phased out. However, the timeline of events may speed up significantly because the Government enshrined a new target in law in April 2021 to slash emissions by 78% by the year 2035.” https://expose-news.com/2023/04/12/all-uk-airports-must-close-in-the-name-of-climate-change/

5.4 Cornwall Taking Farmland Out of Food Production
2023 February Cornwall Live. “Moors plan leaves Cornwall farm families fearing for their livelihoods” Farmers in west Cornwall say they are being “treated like dirt” and feel not heard amid proposals which could see vast swathes of farmland taken out of production. https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/moors-plan-leaves-cornwall-farm-8094536
2022 November Cornwall Live. An area of over 3,000 hectares stretching from St Just to St Ives has been earmarked for protection by Natural England in recognition of its national importance for wildlife. However, with around 13% of that area being farmland, some farmers on Penwith Moors say that new restrictions on their land could threaten their livelihoods, forcing them to sell up. https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/gallery/west-cornwall-farmers-fear-natural-7810160
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6. Cornwall: Some recent examples of local level rewilding initiatives
2019 October “Massive plans for a Forest for Cornwall covering 8000 hectares” “The aim is to plant trees to use the carbon emitted by homes, business and machines” https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/massive-plans-forest-cornwall-covering-3420536 “Forest for Cornwall (F4C) has been chosen as one of only two new Woodland Creation Partnerships funded by Defra’s Nature for Climate Fund.” https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/environment/countryside/forest-for-cornwall-programme/forest-for-cornwall-and-landowners-farmers-and-businesses/woodland-creation-partnership-funding/
2020 June Cornwall Wildlife Trust backs new form of protection for the sea and call on Government for ambitious delivery plan for Highly Protected Marine Areas within a year from June 2020. “In Highly Protected Marine Areas, on the other hand, all damaging activities including fishing, dredging, construction and sea angling would be banned.” https://www.cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk/news/cornwall-wildlife-trust-backs-new-form-protection-sea-and-call-government-ambitious-delivery
2019 Cornwall Council report: ‘Climate Change Action Plan’. In the Introduction on page 4 at 1.4 says that “..a fifth of our agricultural land must shift to alternative use”. On page 18 refers to “Cornwall’s … availability of grassland’s suitable for afforestation”. On page 26 under 5.8 ‘Balancing Interventions’ refers to “.. rewilding of previously managed land” (types of previous land use not specified)
2021 March Forest for Cornwall F4C https://www.gov.uk/government/news/defra-announces-funding-boost-and-new-partnership-with-forest-for-cornwall Press release: Defra announces funding boost and new partnership with Forest for Cornwall. Funding boost and new woodland creation partnership formed between Defra and Forest for Cornwall.
2021 October “Cornwall has potential to be largest rewilding area in England” “Cornwall has the potential to lead the way in England when it comes to rewilding and regenerating woodlands. According to new findings by environmental charity Friends of the Earth, in partnership with Rewilding Britain, there are 69,598 acres of potential natural regeneration in Cornwall, making it the largest local authority in England for any rewilding projects. Nationally more than a million acres of new tree cover could be created simply by letting existing woodland regenerate and spread.” https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/moors-plan-leaves-cornwall-farm-8094536 Analysis carried out by Tim Richards from TerraSullis on behalf of environmental charity Friends of the Earth, in partnership with Rewilding Britain also identified the local authority areas with greatest potential for natural woodland regeneration, which include Cornwall, Harrogate and Northumberland. https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/news-and-views/press-releases-and-media-statements/million-acres-of-new-woodland-in-england-say-friends-of-the-earth-and-rewilding-britain
2021 The National Trust in Cornwall- https://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/19981416.woodland-helston-planned-details-meeting-cattle-market/ Currently, the six-hectare site consists of three fields of improved grassland. Note: Personal conversation with National Trust staff at the public consultation indicated there were other areas also intended for conversion to woodland as farm tenancies came to an end – ie when they would normally be renewed. It is understood that more farms are to be considered for large scale tree planting as tenant’s contracts come up for renewal.
2021 October Falmouth Packet: “Rewilding in Cornwall could help Council hit climate targets” https://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/19679725.rewilding-cornwall-help-council-hit-climate-targets/
2022 Rewilding Cornwall on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rewildingcornwall/
2023 Cornall Science Community: “Rewilding is a progressive conservation strategy that goes beyond protecting natural areas. It aims to restore areas of land to their natural states.” https://cornwallsciencecommunity.org/2023/02/19/species-loss-and-rewilding-in-cornwall/
2023 Cabilla, Bodmin Moor – “KICK STARTING REWILDING”: “Natural processes will be kick started on the site through initial interventions. This will include the removal of sheep grazing from most of the site to allow vegetation to naturally regenerate. Other grazing animals will be introduced in low numbers to mimic natural grazing, including Belted Galloway cattle, Cornish black pigs and Dartmoor ponies. Internal fencing will be removed to allow animals to move throughout the farm. The natural regeneration of woodland on site, especially the expansion of existing ancient oak woodland and temperate rainforest, will be encouraged through changes to grazing pressure. Deer management will also be undertaken to reduce pressure on tree saplings. This will be supplemented with additional tree planting, with 100,000 native trees proposed.” https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/rewilding-projects/cabilla-cornwall
2023 March “Rewilding. It’s a buzzword. But could keystone species that once shaped Britain – from beavers to boar to bison – be the key to tackling the nature and climate crises?” Text by Award-winning television producer, nature writer and conservationist, Benedict Macdonald, now working as Head of Nature Restoration at Real Wild Estates, a company specialising in restoring nature at scale for landowners, NGOs and communities, https://www.cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk/blog/benedict-mcdonald/rewilding-cornwall-where-wild-things-are-or-could-be
2023 April Cornwall Wildlife Trust open to public on zoom panel discussion event: ‘Rewilding. Our last hope or a current craze.’ On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP4igEEiLA4
2023 April. UK Column from 40 to 45 minutes. Natural England & re-wilding in Cornwall: https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/uk-column-news-5th-april-2023
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7.0 Addendum
7.1 Some comments on how rewilding can be a mechanism for wealth transfer.
Below are a few extracted comments from links used in the document above where financial benefit to “the elite” from rewilding is indicated.
30 by 30 is now incorporated in a so-called “New Deal for Nature” which will involve new investments or financial markets worth about $10 trillion over this decade being created to provide opportunities for businesses to “engage” with the plan.
30 by 30 has been described as: .. the biggest land grab in history marketed under the guise of “protecting biodiversity.”
2021 November, The World Economic Forum estimates that nature is responsible for half of global GDP ($44 trillion) and that shifting to a nature-positive economy in key sectors could create 395 million jobs by 2030. https://rskgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/rewilding-climate-change-report.pdf

7.2 World Human Population Reduction – “to save the planet”
Whilst human population reduction “to save the planet” does not seem to have reappeared formally in writing in UN or WEF public documents since activists in 1994 blocked the signing as a Treaty the UN’s Global Biodversity Assessment (which included substantial human population reduction) the issue has continued to be aired. For example:
2020 WEF Davos meeting: Jane Goodall, British Ambassador for Peace to the United Nations, at the WEF forum at Davos in 2020 said, “We can solve climate change by depopulating the earth by a mere 7.5 billion people. We cannot hide away from human population growth. Because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population there was 500 years ago” Video: https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1550377992563503105 https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/must-watch-unearthed-video-shows-animal-rights-activist-jane-goodall-calling-depopulating-earth-solve-climate-change-video/
2022 December Expose news. “Self-appointed elites want far fewer people in the world and they have wanted this for a long time” “The depopulation agenda has been festering behind the scenes for a long time and now it is coming out in the open and going mainstream.” https://expose-news.com/2022/12/31/self-appointed-elites-want-far-fewer-people/
2023 May Expose news “Jane Goodall is not a kindly grandmother; she is a promoter of eugenics and reduction of the world’s population to 450 million” “To convince the public the UN’s “30 x 30” goal is a “good thing,” the World Economic Forum (“WEF”) and the World Wildlife Fund (“WWF”) have chosen three leading influencers – Greta Thunberg, Jane Goodall and David Attenborough – to market the ideology under the guise of a “New Deal for Nature.” https://expose-news.com/2022/12/29/jane-goodall-is-not-a-kindly-grandmother/

7.3 Some guides to Agenda 2030:
2023 June UK COLUMN. Interview: https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/unpicking-agenda-2030-climate-change-and-more-sandi-adams
2022 November UK COLUMN. Agenda 2030, — Good 3 part video resume: Part 1 For one mother, a brief meeting with Bill Gates led to conducting a dedicated investigation of the Global Biodiversity Assessment (from 10 minutes 30 seconds) https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/agenda-2030-part-1 Part 2 – the current SDG15 “Life on Land” is discussed from circa 50 minutes & Limits to Growth from circa 1hour 5 minutes. https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/agenda-2030-part-2. Part 3 . Land being taken away from Farmers for rewilding from circa 39 minutes 50 seconds & from 45 minutes UN/WEF Strategic Partnership to accelerate implementation of the 17 Agenda 2030 SDGs (including SDG15 Life on Land which includes Rewilding) https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/agenda-2030-part-3).
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End of working paper

Biomass power station produced four times emissions of UK coal plant, says report

Drax received £22bn in government subsidies, despite being UK’s largest CO2 emitter in 2023. Drax Inc., rejects ‘flawed’ research

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/09/biomass-power-station-produced-four-times-emissions-of-uk-coal-plant-says-report

Jillian Ambrose Energy correspondent Fri 9 Aug 2024

03Oct22: Drax: UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada | 28Feb24: Drax: UK power station still burning rare forest wood | 08Aug24: Drax: cops arrest 22 activists BEFORE they’ve even done anythingThe Drax power station was responsible for four times more carbon emissions than the UK’s last remaining coal-fired plant last year, despite taking more than £0.5bn in clean-energy subsidies in 2023, according to a report.

The North Yorkshire power plant, which burns wood pellets imported from North America to generate electricity, was revealed as Britain’s single largest carbon emitter in 2023 by a report from the climate thinktank Ember.

The figures show that Drax, which has received billions in subsidies since it began switching from coal to biomass in 2012, was responsible for 11.5m tonnes of CO2 last year, or nearly 3% of the UK’s total carbon emissions.

Drax produced four times more carbon dioxide than the UK’s last remaining coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, which is due to close in September. Drax also produced more emissions last year than the next four most polluting power plants in the UK combined, according to the report.

Frankie Mayo, an analyst at Ember, said: “Burning wood pellets can be as bad for the environment as coal; supporting biomass with subsidies is a costly mistake.”

The company has claimed almost £7bn from British energy bills to support its biomass generation since 2012, even though burning wood pellets for power generation releases more emissions for each unit of electricity generated than burning gas or coal, according to Ember and many scientists. In 2023, the period covered by the Ember report, it received £539m.

The government is considering the company’s request for billpayers to foot the cost of supporting its power plant beyond the subsidy scheme’s deadline in 2027 so it can keep burning wood for power until the end of the decade.

Drax has won the support of the government thanks to claims that its generation is “carbon neutral” because the trees that are felled to produce its wood pellets absorb as much carbon dioxide while they grow as they emit when they are burned in its power plant.

The company plans to fit carbon-capture technology at Drax using more subsidies, to create a “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (BECCS) project and become the first “carbon-negative” power plant in the world by the end of the decade.

A spokesperson for the company dismissed the thinktank’s findings as “flawed” and accused its authors of ignoring its “widely accepted and internationally recognised approach to carbon accounting”.

“The technology that underpins BECCS is proven, and it is the only credible large-scale way of generating secure renewable power and delivering carbon removals,” the spokesperson added.

A government spokesperson said the report “fundamentally misrepresents” how biomass emissions are measured.

“The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change is clear that biomass sourced in line with strict sustainability criteria can be used as a low-carbon source of energy. We will continue to monitor biomass electricity generation to ensure it meets required standards,” the spokesman said.

Climate authorities, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UK’s Climate Change Committee, which provides official advice to ministers, have included BECCS in their long-term forecasts for how governments can meet their climate targets.

The government’s own spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, has warned that ministers have handed a total of £22bn in billpayer-backed subsidies to burn wood for electricity despite being unable to prove the industry meets sustainability standards.

Mayo said: “Burning wood for power is an expensive risk that limits UK energy independence and has no place in the journey to net zero. True energy security comes from homegrown wind and solar, a healthy grid and robust planning for how to make the power system flexible and efficient.”

The FTSE 100 owner of the Drax power plant (itself owned by several private equity firms led by Invesco, BlackRock and Vanguard) made profits of £500m over the first half of this year, helped by biomass subsidies of almost £400m over this period. It handed its shareholders a windfall of £300m for the first half of the year.

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SEE ALSO – The Chain of Issuance: The People and Patents That Built The Financial Surveillance Network

Latin America is quietly being forced into a carbon market scheme through regional contractual obligations enforced by the satellites of a US intelligence-linked firm which seeks to create an inter-continental smart grid, erode national and local sovereignty, and link carbon-based life to the debt-based monetary system via a Bitcoin sidechain.
by Mark Goodwin and Whitney Webb 48 minute read

Sweeping across the shores of Latin America comes a scheme from some of the most predatory figures in the venture capital ecosystem of the United States. It is a brazen attempt to assert foreign influence across Latin America and threatens to reshape the very fabric of the region and the day to day lives of its people. At its core is a serpentine set of contractual obligations, held at the municipal level, cast throughout Central and South America, upheld by an intelligence-linked satellite company, and controlled by a private sector consortium of green-washed financiers aiming to turn the regions forests into equity and carbon credits. At the same time, it obliges local governments to spend conservation funds on projects that further financialize nature and aid the construction of an inter-continental smart grid. One of its key ambitions appears to be further entrenching the debt load of the region through the multi-lateral development banks and the dollarization of the continent from the subnational level up through carbon markets upheld by a digital ledger. What seems like a technological marvel aimed at progress and connectivity harbors a darker agenda one that intertwines planetary surveillance, financial predation, geopolitical maneuvering, and the domination of a resource-rich continent buried in debt.

This grand design, known by the acronym GREEN+ and conceived by stalwarts of the digital dollar and debt schemes of the private sector, has quietly taken root through a web of political entanglements at the local level. Even a key figure in the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond scandal plays a role. Astonishingly, every capital city of Latin America has eagerly signed on, apparently unaware of the strings attached to these seemingly benign partnerships, while a majority of municipalities in the region have also made commitments with these same groups that will push them to join GREEN+, potentially in a matter of weeks. The (hopefully) well-meaning regional governments have unwittingly paved the way for a sweeping surveillance apparatus tied to American intelligence that threatens to erode privacy and civil liberties under the guise of progress and combating the climate crisis.

Upon further observation, GREEN+s connections reveal a disturbing narrative of financial interests melding with geopolitical ambitions. The backers of the satellite company share ties with former members of the highest offices of US financial policy and regulation alongside the key architects and profiteers of private capital creation, aiming to consolidate control over monetary flows in Latin America within the redistribution of distressed government debt from the public to the private sector. As this two-part series will show, this concerted effort is not merely about surveillance its a calculated move towards further dollarization, tightening the grip of corporate and technological monopolies over the economic landscape of the Americas.

The schemes proponents also speak of how it will significantly advance the economic and regional integration of the Americas, invoking visions of unity while obscuring the true nature of their agenda for economic domination and stronger regional governance. Their model, eerily reminiscent of the EUs transition from a free trade union to a bureaucratic behemoth yoked to the US through the Eurodollar, sets the stage for unelected entities to enforce policies through programmable money, enabled by smart contracts on blockchains and designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. What materializes before us is not just a technological evolution but a quiet banker coup one that lays the groundwork for land grabs and invasive surveillance under the guise of progress and conservation. Its a narrative that echoes throughout history, where intelligence-linked figures and predatory financial interests converge to prey upon the Global South, leaving a trail of economic exploitation and geopolitical manipulation in their wake. What masquerades as progress for individuals and the environment at large may very well be the harbinger of a new era of subjugation and control.

THE GREEN+ PROGRAM

In 2022, several groups came together to launch the GREEN+ (Government Reduction of Emissions for Environmental Net + Gain) Jurisdictional Programme, the first program that will monitor by satellite all subnational protected areas of the planet and through contracts with numerous local and state governments propel and deepen the economic integration of the Americas through the quiet imposition of a continent-wide, blockchain-based carbon market.

GREEN+ has been piloted in a handful of Latin American cities since its founding and is due to launch globally in just a few weeks time. Most of the GREEN+ agreements with subnational governments have remained focused on Latin America. Per the program, the subnational agreements have established the rules and requirements to enable accounting and crediting with GREEN+ policies and measures and/or nested projects, implemented as GHG mitigation activities, with GREEN+ being described as the planets new subnational government advisory mechanism.

Key to the program are the services provided by GREEN+ founding member Satellogic, an Argentina-founded company closely aligned with Peter Thiels Palantir and Elon Musks SpaceX that specializes in sub-meter resolution satellite surveillance. Satellogic, a contractor to the US government and whose founders were also previously contactors for the US DHS, NSA and DARPA, will provide surveillance data of the entire worlds protected areas to GREEN+s governing coalition, composed of the NGOs CC35, the Global Footprint Network, The Energy Coalition and other respected stakeholders.

According to the press release that details Satellogics alliance with GREEN+, the satellite surveillance data will enable individuals, organizations, and global markets to accurately monitor the compliance of signatory jurisdictions to avoid deforestation. However, other information in the press release reveals that forests will actually be monitored for the purpose of generating credible carbon credits to be traded on exchanges by GREEN+ on behalf of subnational governments. The press release also states that the GREEN+ alliance with Satellogic will advance the future measurement of energy emissions in the most populated areas of the planet, i.e. the surveillance of carbon emissions from space. Satellogic launched some GREEN+-affiliated satellites in 2022 as part of its pilot and is due to launch the remainder this April during Miami Climate Week. Satellogics past and upcoming launches of GREEN+ satellites were/will be conducted in collaboration with Elon Musks SpaceX, also a contractor to the US military and US intelligence agencies.

Though framed as a way to develop economic incentives to mitigate climate change, the program is based on Californias controversial and grift-prone cap and trade program and has been created (and is being implemented by) individuals and companies that are seeking to covertly dollarize Latin America and/or have deep ties to US intelligence. Its ultimate ambitions go far beyond carbon markets and seek to use satellite surveillance to enforce carbon emission levels in both urban and rural areas. It also seeks to impose a new financial system centered around energy, commodity, and natural resource credits that are underpinned by extensive and invasive surveillance, underscored by the motto: Earth observation is preservation.

The alliance that created GREEN+ includes the NGOs CC35, the Global Footprint Network (GFN), Arnold Schwarzeneggers Catalytic Finance Foundation (CFF, formerly R20) and The Energy Coalition (TEC); the Gibraltar-based law firm Isolas; the global insurance giant Lockton; the satellite company Satellogic; the green blockchain company EcoRegistry; the dominant carbon credit certifier in Latin America, Cercarbono; and Rootstock (RSK), the bitcoin side-chain protocol responsible for smart BTC. Several members of the alliance, though how many is unclear, now operate as part of a consortium linked to a company called Global Carbon Parks, which is discussed in greater detail later in this article and now manages major aspects of GREEN+. The NGOs (i.e. CC35, GFN, CFF and TEC) involved in founding GREEN+ are those who actually govern the GREEN+ program from California.

As previously mentioned, the program takes carbon in effectively conserved protected areas of a sub-national jurisdiction, i.e. a city, county, province, or state/region, and converts them into carbon credits. Per the program, these credits are traded on the [carbon] offset market, and income is deposited in a trust fund that is controlled by GREEN+ and is known as the GREEN+ Trust. That trust is run by unspecified individuals who work for Lockton, Isolas and Rootstock. Alejandro Guerrero, head of Locktons Argentina & Uruguay branch, is the only publicly acknowledged member of the trust.

Another website tied to the GREEN+ initiative describes the initial process as follows:

1. Public and private agreements between [a subnational] government and custodians are signed with zero upfront cost.
2. Custodians trade the carbon units that are produced by the subnational governments (the public sector) signing contracts with the private sector in voluntary carbon markets.
3. Those contracts signed by the subnational governments become smart contracts and carbon credits are then tokenized for traceability.
4. The GREEN+ Trust holds government funds in escrow.

Subsequently, a partial release of trust funds is made periodically during the crediting period of the jurisdictional initiative. From this partial release, a percentage operational fee is deducted (the percentage is undisclosed in the programs documents) and paid to the GREEN+ program while a separate (and also undisclosed) fee is also deducted for the operation of the GREEN+ Trust. Disbursements of what remains are made annually over a ten year period and, per graphs produced by GREEN+, those payments remain the same, fixed value even if the value of the carbon credits of the protected areas grows.

Between 40% and 60% of the funds actually received by subnational governments can be used to design and execute projects aimed at conservation, while the rest is allocated for new jurisdictional decarbonisation initiatives that can produce additional or consequential carbon credits. These consequential credits are then offered as a preferred option to the investors who initially purchased the conservation credits at a 50% discounted price calculated at the current market price. However, later in the same document, the program says that the amount required for the initial implementation of conservation projects may not exceed 20% of the funds allocated [from the GREEN+ Trust] to the jurisdictional initiative. Clearly, the amount of funds actually being generated for conservation-related projects is minimal and, even in the best case scenario, is less than half of the capital generated by the carbon credits themselves. However, as we shall see, these conservation projects must be done in conjunction with approved partners of Global Carbon Parks, which like the organization itself are tied to predatory financial interests and oligarchs with questionable motives.

Of the funds that governments actually receive as part of GREEN+, half are officially meant to go toward conservation-related projects while the other half are meant to go toward decarbonization-related projects. However, on the Global Carbon Parks-GREEN+ website, it notes that the decarbonization projects must be conducted alongside Community Electricity, which forms part of Global Carbon Parks and is closely connected to the GREEN+ alliance member The Energy Coalition (TEC). As will be discussed later, TEC and Community Electricity are together attempting to build an inter-continental smart grid in the Americas and are also involved in efforts to develop smart cities and suburbs.

As for GREEN+s conservation projects, the website states that 50% of the resources received by the capital [city as part of GREEN+] must be used for social and environmental impact in protected urban areas with partners such as Cities4Forests. Cities4Forests was founded by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a World Economic Forum affiliate and contractor to suspected CIA front USAID that is focused on resource sustainability. WRI is funded by the US and several European governments, billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg as well as Google, Meta/Facebook, the Soros familys Open Societies Foundations, the UN, Walmart, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, among others. WRIs Cities4Forests shares many of the same funding sources, such as the governments of the UK, Germany, Denmark and the US as well as the World Bank and the Caterpillar Foundation. Other funders include the Wall Street giant Citi Group, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Notably, the Rockefeller Foundation and the IDB recently teamed up to create the Intrinsic Exchange Group, which has spearheaded the financialization of nature via the creation of Natural Asset Corporations (NACs). As Unlimited Hangout previously reported, NACs create corporations that take control of natural assets that were previously part of the commons, such as forests, rivers and lakes, and then sell shares of those assets to Wall Street asset managers, sovereign wealth funds and other financial institutions in order to generate profit under the guise of conserving the asset they target.

Unsurprisingly, most of Cities4Forests projects, such as those that would be built with GREEN+ funds, are similar to NACs in that they focus on using natural assets and natural capital to produce new financial and insurance products. Examples of Cities4Forests conservation projects include the development of a Forest Resilience Bond and the India Forum for Nature-based Solutions. One of the India-based forums core partners is the Nature Conservancy, which has been run by Wall Street bankers for years and has pioneered the modern iteration of the controversial debt for conservation swap among other nature-based solutions. The funders of Cities4Forest and its creator the WRI are also deeply affiliated with groups like the Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and UN-backed climate finance initiatives that openly seek to use debt imperialism to herd the global economy, with a focus on emerging markets, into a new system of global financial governance.

Thus, the conservation and decarbonization efforts that subnational governments must enact as part of their contractual agreements with GREEN+ will go towards projects tied to either the smart grid/smart city developer Community Electricity or a conservation organization backed by Western oligarchs, multi-national corporations and banks that seeks to financialize and monetize nature under the guise of conserving it.

CC35 AND THE SUBNATIONAL PIVOT

CC35, or Ciudades Capitales de las Americas frente al Cambio Climᴩco (American Capital Cities Facing Climate Change), is the most visible organization behind the GREEN+ program and one of the members of its governance committee. CC35s goal is the economic integration of the Americas (North, South and Central) through coordinated climate change policies, specifically the creation of an Inter-American carbon market, with GREEN+ being the means of implementing that market. The group focuses on subnational governments, namely capital cities of the Americas, thereby circumventing national governments with respect to Climate Change-related policy.

Regarding GREEN+, SebastiᮠNavarro, the secretary general of CC35, stated of the program that: We will be relentless from the governance of the GREEN+ program with those who want to continue playing with the future of humanity, adding that their relentless approach would be greatly aided by Satellogics satellite surveillance capabilities, which would also generate unprecedented credibility among investors of the carbon credits produced by conservation. Navarros promise to be relentless in governing a satellite surveillance regime of American forests for the purpose of producing high-credibility carbon markets.

While framed as an initiative born out of Latin America, CC35 is registered in Miami; Florida (Coral Gables, specifically) and has long been funded and partnered with US-based interests. For instance, CC35s first partners were R20 (Regions of Climate Action, now the Catalytic Finance Foundation), a group created by former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in partnership with the UN, and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. From there, CC35 partnered with UN and UN-linked organizations as well as Pegasus Capital Advisors, which also finances CC35 and Schwarzeneggers R20/Catalytic Finance Foundation. R20/Catalytic Finance, like CC35, focuses its attention on subnational governments.

Pegasus Capital is the firm created by Craig Cogut, a key figure in the junk bond financial scandal at the now defunct Drexel Burnham Lambert. Drexels junk bond department, led by Michael Milken, engaged in blatantly illegal activity and used junk bonds to help fuel the takeovers of major corporations by the eras infamous corporate raiders before the banks collapse. Specifically, Cogut was the lawyer who advised the Milken-run and scandal-ridden junk bond department on the legality of transactions, including those that saw Milken become a convicted felon. Following Drexels collapse, Cogut teamed up with a group of Drexel alumni led by Leon Black now best known for his close association with the deceased sex trafficker and financial adviser Jeffrey Epstein to co-found Apollo Advisers (now Apollo Global Management) in 1990. Cogut left Apollo to found Pegasus in 1996 and Pegasus has since became a key player in several UN-supported green finance initiatives. Cogut is also financially entangled with Satellogics co-founder, Emiliano Kargieman, as will be discussed later.

Cogut subsequently became a board member of Arizona State Universitys Global Institute of Sustainability, which was created by Michael Crow (and who served on the board alongside Cogut). Crow is chairman of the board of trustees of In-Q-tel, the CIAs venture capital arm. Cogut also served on the board of ASUS McCain Institute, named for the late Senator John McCain, which has links to Ashton Kutchers CIA-linked charity Thorn. Current board members of the McCain Institute include both Crow and former CIA director David Petraeus, as well as Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who co-created the Council for Inclusive Capital with the Vatican. Cogut was also on the board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), part of the Clinton family philanthropies, and CHAI was largely shaped and influenced by notorious sex trafficker and financial advisor for billionaires Jeffrey Epstein, having been the chief reason for former president Bill Clintons flights on Epsteins plane in the early 2000s.

Notably, Cogut is not the only Drexel alum to be involved in green finance. The field of green finance itself was essentially invented by Richard Sandor, who made millions at Drexel during the 1980s, pioneering innovative products like the collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO), which would later contribute to the 2008 financial crisis. Sandor had previously been deemed the father of financial futures and is also credited with helping create derivatives. After Drexels collapse, Sandor moved on to pioneering carbon emissions trading and carbon markets with the vision of creating an all-electronic exchange for carbon trading, a vision that has since taken shape.

CC35 has long been led by SebastiᮠNavarro. Under his leadership, CC35 helped broker the creation of the Subnational Climate Fund, which is backed by Coguts Pegasus Capital along with BNP Paribas, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bloomberg Philanthropies and the governments of Germany, the UK, Australia and the Netherlands. That fund focuses on financing infrastructure projects in the Global South at the subnational (e.g. city, state) level, again bypassing national governments. Indeed, the main modus operandi of CC35 is brokering contracts between small, subnational governments and green finance entities that are tied to centers of US/European political or financial power.

Navarro is listed as a director of CC35 as are two prominent, right-leaning Latin American politicians: Felipe Alessandri Vergara, mayor of the Chilean capital Santiago from 2016 to 2021, and Nasry Asfura Zablah, former mayor of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa and former Honduran presidential candidate. Alessandri is a well-known figure in Chilean center-right politics and an ally of the recently deceased former Chilean president SebastiᮠPi. Alessandri is controversial within the Chilean right for his covert support of initiatives generally favored by the left and publicly shunned by his party while serving as Santiagos mayor, such as climate finance/regional economic integration (via CC35) and his financing of initiatives related to illegal immigration. Alessandris successor and supposed political nemesis, Irac���assler of Chiles Communist Party, has since taken over for Alessandri as CC35s Vice President for South America. As for Nasry Asfura, he was the subject of a Honduran political scandal due to his appearance in the Pandora Papers and his alleged involvement in suspicious offshore finance activities. He was also indicted on money laundering and fund embezzlement, but charges were dropped under Asfuras successor Jorge Aldana, who is now president of CC35.

The current vice president of CC35 for Central America is Mario Durᮬ the mayor of San Salvador and a close ally of El Salvadors president Nayib Bukele as well as a member of Bukeles Nuevas Ideas party. Durᮠis poised to take over the leadership of CC35 per a recent announcement from the group. In 2021, Durᮠsigned a contract with CC35 regarding education about the use of Bitcoin in all metropolitan region municipalities in El Salvador, and is the only mention of CC35 promoting the use of Bitcoin. As will be noted again later on, the CC35-led GREEN+ initiative is partnered with Rootstock, which created and develops a Bitcoin sidechain that enables smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. Presumably, the goal is to run GREEN+s digital carbon market on the same blockchain.

While it may seem odd to an American audience that regional integration efforts under the guise of climate change would be led largely by right-leaning politicians, it is important to point out that such integration efforts have historically been led by both left and right factions in Latin America, who compete for dominance over the region. For instance, right-leaning efforts at economically and/or politically integrating the Americas include Mercosur (the Southern Common Market, now championed by the anti-globalist Javier Milei) and Prosur (Forum for the Progress and Integration of South America, launched by Chiles center-right Pi). Left-leaning efforts include ALADI (Latin American Integration Association) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). All of these efforts have failed due to geopolitical disagreements mainly centered around whether to grant membership to countries like Venezuela, Cuba and others with governments estranged from the so-called Washington consensus or, more recently, efforts to forge closer ties to Russia and/or China. Given that several important Latin American countries can suddenly change what side of the consensus they are on depending on presidential election results, such as recently happened in Brazil and Argentina, these regional integration efforts have failed to gain significant traction over the last several decades. Nevertheless, the end goal of economic integration begetting political integration remains the same. Thus, as CC35 shows, the push to regionally integrate Latin America has now, very quietly, pivoted away from engagement at the national level to the subnational level.

THE CLUB OF ROMES GLOBAL FOOTPRINT

While CC35 is the most visible face of GREEN+s governing body, it is actually chaired by a group called the Global Footprint Network (GFN). The GFN exists to promote the Ecological Footprint, which tracks how much nature we use and how much we have, as an accounting tool for green finance initiatives and originated the concept of ecological debt based on that metric. Elsewhere, the GFN calls for one-planet prosperity and emphasizes climate finance, a field dominated by predatory Wall Street banks and billionaires, as an economic imperative. They work with governments at both the national and subnational level and establish the carbon emissions limits for localities, states and countries that programs like GREEN+ seek to enforce with satellite surveillance and binding contractual obligations.

The GFN is intimately connected to the Club of Rome. For instance, GFNs founder and a member of its board, Mathis Wackernagel, who also co-created the Ecological Footprint concept, is a member of the Club of Rome. Wackernagels former mentor and the other developer of the Ecological Footprint, William Rees, was a member of the Club of Rome until 2018. Heiko Specking, a GFN board member, is also affiliated with the Club of Rome as is another GFN board member, Lewis Akenji.

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish chemist Alexander King. Its earliest success was the 1972 report and later book The Limits to Growth, which was based on an MIT study and claimed that if the worlds consumption patterns and population growth continued at the same high rates of the time, the earth would strike its limits within a century. The book was heavily promoted by the earliest annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, particularly in 1973.

Peccei, who spent a large part of his life living in Argentina, had previously been a member of ADELA, the Atlantic Community Development Group for Latin America. ADELA was composed of powerful Western companies that pooled money to invest in Latin American companies of their choosing, essentially king-making the titans of the Latin American corporate world. ADELAs backers included Bank of America, IBM, Fiat (where Peccei was an executive), and the Rockefeller familys Standard Oil. The group was part of the Rockefeller-dominated network in Latin America, which also included the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), which has been linked to the 1973 CIA-backed military coup in Chile through the Chilean Rockefeller associate Agust���Edwards, and Deltec, best known today as a main bank for the failed crypto exchange FTX and its close relationship with the stablecoin Tether. Modern iterations of this network include Endeavor and the Council of the Americas (CoA), which will be discussed in the second part of this series. Notably, it was Pecceis speech at an ADELA conference that spurred his partnership with Alexander King and led to the Club of Romes formation.

At the time he got involved with Peccei and made the Club of Rome, King was head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD was originally established as the OEEC to help administer the post-WWII, US-developed Marshall Plan and was later expanded to become a global organization in 1961. The US remains the OECDs main funder by a significant margin. The group has long claimed to promote sustainable economic growth and consistently improving standard of living in its member countries, but in practice it routinely favors neoliberal policies that enrich Western-based multi-national corporations. It is closely partnered with entities like the IMF, the World Bank and the broader multi-lateral development banking system that has used debt slavery sold as economic development to privatize state-owned assets and sell them off to privileged corporate interests. That system has also been considered by the US military to be part of its arsenal of financial weapons used to protect US interests abroad.

The Club of Rome was criticized for many decades for embracing neo-Malthusian thought (i.e. eugenics and specifically population control measures in the developing world) as well as for promoting greater global governance. Some of its members have championed the imposition of a benevolent global dictatorship. Criticisms of the Club of Rome have been voiced by academia as well as independent and mainstream media. The groups attempt to rebrand as an environmental group in order to gain popular support for those same policies was discussed in their 1991 book The First Global Revolution, which states:

In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

The Global Footprint Networks methods, products and ideology are very much aligned with the neo-Malthusian Limits to Growth view of the Club of Rome as well as the efforts to incorporate nature into financial markets via so-called nature-based solutions. Indeed, the GFNs ecological footprint metric is promoted by groups like the World Economic Forum and the World Wildlife Fund (where Peccei served on the board and which has long been tied to European oligarch and corporate interests). GFN also provides the statistical means of imposing Limits to Growth-style models that control both population levels and industrialization levels on governments by developing ecological budgets that, as evidenced by GREEN+, are now interfacing directly with carbon markets.

BUILDING A GREEN POWER MONOPOLY

The other member of the GREEN+ governing committee that will control the program as well as Satellogics surveillance data is The Energy Coalition (TEC). Notably, it was TECs executive director Craig Perkins who said that GREEN+ would also enable the surveillance of carbon emissions of populated areas, presumably via satellite. TEC was founded by John Phillips, who ran Phillips Energy an oil and gas company, in 1975. Since 1979, it has been closely partnered with local California governments via its Community Energy Partnership program. Currently, TEC is partnered with, and some of its key initiatives are financed by, major California gas companies, referred to by TEC as Californias investor-owned utilities. These include Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison, SDGE and SoCalGas.

With the backing of these major oil and gas companies, TEC assures us it is creating the building blocks for a new energy economy. One of its main partners in doing so is Community Electricity, which claims to be building the NASDAQ of the clean energy field. TEC and Community Electricity, which is backed by Google, have co-designed a master plan financed by the California Energy Commission to implement the largest and first-of-its-kind decarbonization by electrification protocols using DERs [distributed energy resources], carbon emissions management, blockchain, AI and IoT [internet of things] all connected under one plug-and-play platform. Community Electric designs, funds and develops this technology for GluHomes (formerly GluEnergy), its parent company which shares the same founder as Community Electricity Felipe Cano. The program is being piloted in the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles as well as in disadvantaged communities in Colombia. The goal, per Cano, is to bring the Americas together through an inter-continental, clean smart grid.

The blockchain involved in these efforts is RSK, the smart contract-oriented sidechain that runs on top of the Bitcoin network. As previously mentioned, RSK is a founding member of GREEN+. The initiative involving TEC, Community Electricity, Californias government, and RSK also seeks to digitize carbon credit reporting and to create opportunities for businesses to redeem credits. The Community Electricity/TEC program also uses the RSK blockchain to record a persons energy usage with the help of RIF, an identity product [i.e. digital identity] developed by RSK Labs. The Community Electricity system requires a digital ID tied to a digital wallet that is embedded to store daily profits derived from surplus energy sales that allow electricity consumers to trade energy credits and become what the company calls prosumers, with the goal of creating an energy social network. The Community Electricity hardware produced with GluHomes also utilize[s] AI and machine learning to transform any home intro a smart micro electricity generation utility.

The group is partnering with real estate developers to develop smart homes connected to their energy-related technology, with a focus on social housing and affordable housing, i.e. housing for lower income families. The goal is to connect together retro-fitted existing homes, new smart homes, a neighborhood co-op of electric vehicles and a reward-payment system called GluPay, which is partnered with Mastercard and Contigo, which designs products for the unbanked, immigrants, homeless and disadvantaged population, with a focus on remittance payments. Contigo is currently in talks with El Salvadors government to have the companys Payments Wallet tied into the Salvadoran financial inclusion products. Contigo is run by Raul Hinojosa, an academic at UCLA who wrote a book entitled Convergence and Divergence between NAFTA, Chile, and MERCOSUR: Overcoming Dilemmas of North and South American Economic Integration, which focuses on the impact of a potential Free Trade of the Americas Agreement.

The creator of Community Electricity and GluHomes, Felipe Cano has also spent most of his career attempting to economically integrate large swathes of the world. For instance, in 1998, his vision was to unify both European and US stock exchanges under one platform and protocol, the create the smart grid of the equity market and stock trading in a bilateral, single network. This vision led him to create ECN Access, which was the first tech hub in Europe to route the first block of institutional order flows from a European Bank directly to the NASDAQ electronic exchange without intermediaries, creating what Cano calls the first smart grid every built. He then sought to create a digital market for the energy sector, which has since culminated in his creation of Community Electricity and GluHomes. Cano is an adviser to TEC and is also a senior partner at Silverbear Capital, where he focuses on investments related to smart cities. According to his bio at Silverbear, Cano is also CEO of Olidata Smart Cities LLC, a market-maker platform which uses nano-grids and microgrids as the underlying strategy to deploy the Internet of Things Protocol of the future.

Cano was also, until recently, the president of Global Carbon Parks, which is a consortium of companies, the only known members of which all happen to be companies that founded GREEN+, with the one exception being Canos Community Electricity. Global Carbon Parks, unsurprisingly, is now one of the main implementers of the GREEN+ program. Global Carbon Parks is also partnered with Aclima, a start-up backed by Microsoft and the foundation of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Global Carbon Parks stated mission is to transform protected areas into natural equity via public-private partnerships, essentially admitting that the GREEN+ program it now helps manage is about financializing protected natural assets and resources.

Global Carbon Parks transforms these forests into natural equity by measuring, certifying and trading carbon credits in conjunction with the carbon credit certification Cercarbono (discussed later in this article). Their partnership with Satellogic, which goes beyond but also includes the GREEN+ program, uses satellite surveillance to ensure the integrity of the preserved area which contains the carbon represented by the carbon credits. The company also promotes their integration with The Energy Coalition and Community Electricity to develop advanced electricity communities that develop renewable energy credits, which the company claims will contribute to local wealth creation. The company is partnered with a financial firm, which does the actual trading of carbon credits for both Global Carbon Parks and presumably GREEN+. However, Global Carbon Parks declines to reveal their identity, merely stating that They are a financial firm that integrates technical, economic, and environmental solutions.

In summary, the governance of the GREEN+ program and the group with control over its satellite surveillance data; are tied to or funded by groups that have long used debt as a form of control over the Global South in particular; seek to control the population size and the degree of industrialization in countries; are tied to globalist efforts to economically and politically integrate the Americas; are building a Bitcoin blockchain-based smart grid that surveils and limits energy usage and links energy usage to currency; and are integrating and tokenizing the natural world, including endangered or protected areas, into the financial system under the guise of conservation. Through CC35s Alcades por el Clima (Mayors for the Climate) initiative, over 15,000 local governments in Latin America have signed agreements with CC35 related to carbon emission trading schemes and limits, led by Brazil (5,564 local governments), Argentina (2,457 local governments), and Mexico (2,481 local governments). Presumably, those carbon neutrality/trading agreements will allow CC35 to push those municipalities into the GREEN+ program, if they arent already planning to participate directly (many are).

In other words, the vast majority of Latin America, unbeknownst to the vast majority of its populace, is already contractually yoked to one of the main organizations behind the GREEN+ program run by interests tied to foreign banks, corporations and even intelligence services. The program is set to launch continent-wide in a matter of weeks. As this article and subsequent article will show, what has transpired is a brazen attempt to conduct a silent coup of the continents natural resources, energy production, local governments and economy.

THE GREEN+ TRUST AND THE BITCOIN CARBON MARKET

The GREEN+ Trust, which is to hold and handle the profits from the carbon credits produced and then disburse them to governments if certain conditions are met, is to be managed by individuals selected from the members institutions of the [GREEN+] Executive Board as well as from Isolas, Lockton and Rootstock (RSK). According to GREEN+, the Trust is not only responsible for fund custody, but also the regulation of smart contracts, in coordination with the certification standard [Cercarbono] and the monitoring of mitigation initiatives [conducted by Satellogic]. The only known member of the Trust, as previously mentioned, is Alejandro Guerrero, the head of Locktons branch in Argentina and Uruguay.

Lockton, a founding member of GREEN+ and also of Global Carbon Parks, is the worlds largest, privately held insurance brokerage firm that also provides risk management services, employee benefits and retirement services. They are owned by the Lockton family and the company and the family behind it are rather secretive. However, the company has been overt about the opportunities they see in the type of carbon market that initiatives like GREEN+ will create.

In a 2023 article, Locktons head of Digital Integration and Special Projects, David Briscoe, wrote that making carbon credits a stable and trusted currency would require the support of the insurance market. This is because, as Briscoe notes, voluntary carbon markets come with risks, particularly because of the financial values involved. Per Briscoe, these risks include non- or under-delivery of forward purchased carbon removal credits, start-ups involved in the voluntary carbon market may face insolvency risks, and fraud and negligence. Indeed, mismanagement and fraud has been a major driver of why carbon markets have failed to catch on despite relentless promotion and the adoption of ESG and climate change plans by many of the most powerful names in finance and industry. Instead of addressing the rampant fraud in carbon credits directly, it appears that the high probability of fraud and insolvency has been seen as an opportunity to create a new market for the insurance industry, with carbon credit insurance being framed as the only feasible means of de-risking the fraud-prone world of carbon markets, which have been criticized by environmental groups and have been shown to have a negligible impact on climate.

Lockton offers a variety of products related to carbon credits and so do its competitors, with the first such insurance having been issued by the UK-based insurance company Howden in 2022. That product was designed to increase confidence in the Voluntary Carbon Market and was incubated in collaboration with the Insurance Task Force of the Sustainable Markets Initiative; an initiative led by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales [now King Charles]. Industry publications have openly posited that carbon credits are likely to be the next $1 billion insurance market. Some companies, like Kita and Oka, were created specifically to insure carbon credits. Presumably, Locktons involvement with GREEN+ means that Lockton will be insuring the mass of carbon credits to be produced by the program, which plans to harvest carbon credits from all of the worlds subnational protected areas. In addition, Locktons role as the carbon credits insurer means it will be involved in ensuring that those cities/regions that are to become part of GREEN+ comply with the programs stipulations in order to receive funds from the trust.

Another member of the GREEN+ Trust is RSK, or Rootstock. RSK is a federated sidechain built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that allows smart contract functionality akin to the Ethereum blockchain, leveraging the same programming language known as Solidity. In effect, this means that any smart contract that can be designed and authored on Ethereum, such as identity systems, dollar-pegged stablecoins, or tokenized carbon credits, can be trivially ported to Bitcoin. The concept of Bitcoin sidechains was first introduced in October 2014 by a group of Bitcoin developers mainly employed by Blockstream, whose November 2014 seed round was led by Reid Hoffman, that gives bitcoins and other ledger assets the ability to be transferred between multiple blockchains giving new functionality to assets they already own without compromising any of the security innate to Bitcoins blockchain. RSK works by allowing users to deposit funds sent using traditional bitcoin transactions into a wallet controlled by a federation (in this case, a known group of Rootstock-selected key signers) that issues a 1:1 token called Smart Bitcoin, represented by RBTC, which fuels the RVM (Rootstock Virtual Machine), a forked version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). RBTC is the native currency of Rootstock, and is used to pay for the fees required to complete and settle the smart contracts or transactions that take place on the RSK sidechain.

RSK was launched in 2015 by RSK Labs, which was acquired by RIF Labs before becoming IOV (internet of value) Labs. IOV labs, as of last week, has rebranded once again to become RootstockLabs. It was co-founded by Sergio Lerner, who became the Bitcoin Foundations bitcoin core security auditor the same year he conceived of RSK, and Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar. Gutierrez is the current chairman of RootstockLabs, while Lerner is its chief scientist and they are the president and vice president, respectively, of the IOV Foundation, which enables interventions that contribute to sustainable development, specifically the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a focus on emerging markets and territories. A major goal of the SDGs is to create a new global financial governance system. That system has been described in recent years by top UN climate finance official, central banker, and ex-Goldman Sachs executive Mark Carney, as relying largely on programmable, surveillable digital currencies (namely central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs) and a global carbon market.

According to RootstockLabs and its affiliated foundation, the groups mission is to harness the power of digital technology, blockchain, and collaboration to break down barriers and create a more equitable society. They also state that Rootstock Labs was created with the intent of creating a new open financial ecosystem, while RIF Labs states it (along with RootstockLabs) is creating a global financial system that works for everyone.

Diego Gutierrez is a long-time associate of Wenceslao (Wences) Casares, an Argentine tech entrepreneur sometimes referred to as the Peter Thiel of Latin America. Gutierrez worked with Casares at Argentinas first Internet service provider, which Casares had launched, and then helped create the Casares-founded Argentinian online brokerage firm Patagon that was later sold to Spanish banking giant Santander. Casares, like Gutierrez, is a long-time promoter and early adopter of Bitcoin and is allegedly responsible for pitching the promise of Bitcoin to elites, like Bill Gates and LinkedIn/PayPals Reid Hoffman. Hoffman once referred to Casares as Bitcoins patient zero in terms of Silicon Valleys interest in Bitcoin. Forbes has even referred to Casares as crypto royalty who ran with the original gang of Bitcoin OGs. Casares subsequently became a board member of PayPal and also part of Facebooks failed stablecoin project Libra/Diem. He is also a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

Casares was formerly a partner at NXTP Ventures, one of the oldest venture capital firms in Latin America, and he is credited with introducing the firms founders to crypto. NXTP subsequently became a major investor in Gutierrezs RSK as well as another Gutierrez-founded company, Koibanx, a Latin America-focused asset tokenization company that per its CEO is at the forefront of redefining Latin Americas financial system. Gutierrezs Koibanx has been instrumental in developing Bitcoin products and services sponsored by El Salvadors government as well as enabling the role of Algorand as an intermediary in El Salvadors Bitcoin ecosystem. Algorand is also a major investor in Koibanx and is currently run by Staci Warden, who aided the cronyist privatization of Russia while at Harvard, oversaw J.P. Morgans division of emerging market government debt and led crypto-related initiatives and global market development for the Institute of the mastermind of the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond scandal, Michael Milken.

Gutierrezs Koibanx has also launched a blockchain-based digital ID in Colombia with over 12 million users and is partnered with Nigerias government on a crypto initiative where Nigerians can exchange their intellectual property (IP) for a stable token considered equivalent to the Naira, Nigerias currency that has been completely taken over by the governments central bank digital currency (CBDC) project. Both of those projects have also been conducted jointly with Algorand. Algorand is a member alongside PayPal and Amazon of the Digital Monetary Institute, which works with central banks, major commercial banks, and Big Tech firms to examine the distribution and use cases of both retail and wholesale central bank digital currencies, tokenised assets, deposits and capital markets, cross-border payments and domestic interoperability. The DMI also focuses on crypto assets and stablecoins.

NXTP is also an investor in Ripio, an Argentina-based crypto firm partnered with the World Economic Forum. Rootstock co-founder Sergio Lerner sits on the board of Ripios P2P lending subsidiary, the Ripio Credit Network (RCN). Ripio is backed by Tim Draper, who is on the board of the Netanyahu family-founded crypto company Bancor, Barry Silberts Digital Currency Group, and Argentinas richest man Marcos Galper��� Galper���also sits on the board of GREEN+ partner and intelligence-linked satellite surveillance firm Satellogic (discussed in greater detail later in this article). Galper���is intimately connected to the emerging market entrepreneurial network known as Endeavor, the board of which is chaired by Edgar Bronfman Jr. and includes Reid Hoffman. Both the Bronfman family and Hoffman have considerable ties to sex trafficker and financial criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Wences Casares was previously on Endeavors board and still maintains ties with the group. Ripio is also an Endeavor-backed company.

Galper���s company, Mercado Libre, is considered the first Endeavor success story, and Galper���sits on the board of Endeavors Argentina branch alongside controversial Argentinian oligarchs, like former George Soros prot駩 Eduardo Elzstain. Galper���s Mercado Libre is deeply interconnected with PayPal as well as Paxos, the stablecoin issuer creating PayPals stablecoin, PYUSD. Mercado Libres Mercado Pago subsidiary, Ripio and Brazils Mercado Bitcoin (another Endeavor/Mercado Libre-connected company) collectively dominate crypto use in South America, especially its biggest markets Argentina and Brazil.

Diego Gutierrezs RSK and Wences Casares Xapo, a crypto-focused bank founded in 2014 with a long-standing interest in Bitcoin and stablecoin providers, share a common tie in Joey Garcia, who is on the board of both companies. Garcia is also listed as being Xapos Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer. Garcia is a lawyer for and head of the fintech team at the Gibraltar-based law firm Isolas, which is also part of the GREEN+ group and manages the GREEN+ Trust alongside RSK and Lockton. Both Xapo and RSKs parent, Rootstock Labs, are based in Gibraltar a UK overseas territory, where Garcia helped develop and lobby for crypto regulations with hopes of having that regulatory regime influence coming regulations in the US and Europe. Garcia is also connected to UN initiatives on digital currencies, with a focus on regulation and law enforcement.

The involvement of this network in GREEN+ speaks to an effort to utilize the Bitcoin blockchain in the creation of a new global financial system centered around digital currencies and carbon markets. As carbon markets have developed, it has become clear that the carbon market which central and commercial bankers wish to build (with UN backing) will be blockchain-based and that carbon credits will be tokenized and traded on digital exchanges, such as the Goldman Sachs and Blackstone-backed Xpansiv, which is partnered with GREEN+ members Cercarbono and EcoRegistry.

There are efforts to make Bitcoin the blockchain on which these markets (or at least key parts of them) will run, hence the relatively recent effort to create a more sustainable and net zero Bitcoin. RSK is clearly part of this effort, as evidenced by their involvement in GREEN+, where they are managing the smart contracts of GREEN+ carbon credits, as well as their partnership with the California Energy Commission and GREEN+ member The Energy Coalition on creating an experimental market for carbon credit trading on top of Bitcoin.

The importance of RSK within the maturation of the carbon credit market in the blockchain era is two-fold; the direct and immediate interoperability between tokenized assets representing green finance instruments and bitcoin, and the leveraging of the most distributed and most secure blockchain in the world, Bitcoin, as a universal ledger for the execution and settlement of otherwise impossible smart contracts. Rootstock allows Bitcoin the protocol to become the enabling and enforcing environment for all aspects of climate capitalism green bond authoring and settlement, parametric insurance clauses, the tokenization of carbon emission offsets, and the issuance of dollar stablecoins that denominate the entire system and globalize the US Treasury market.

As recently mentioned, Diego Gutierrez of RSK was a very early adopter and promoter of Bitcoin and today runs Bitcoin Argentina while also being a co-founder of Latin Americas largest and oldest Bitcoin conference. In an interview with Argentinian outlet La Voz early last year, Gutierrez stated that, in order for Bitcoin to become part of the global financial system that is emerging, there would have to be a trade off that would mean stripping Bitcoin of its ethos and part of its disruptive potential. In other words, in Gutierrezs view, Bitcoin must cease to be a threat to central and commercial banks as it integrates into the system those banks have designed and uphold and will become their tool. There is perhaps no greater evidence of this than the recent pivot of BlackRocks Larry Fink on Bitcoin and its promise as a technology for asset storage and the wild success of BlackRocks Bitcoin ETF. Gutierrez also tellingly stated in the same interview that there would soon be a move away from fiat and fiat-backed stablecoins to commodity-backed stablecoins that would make the companies and entities that control those commodities (which would include carbon in this emerging financial paradigm) more powerful than central banks and eliminate the need for central banks entirely.

Wences Casares, Gutierrezs close associate, created his bank Xapo to help solve the disjointed nature of our world economy and to act as the bridge between bitcoin, US dollars and stablecoins. As a consequence, Xapo has been a key player in efforts to dollarize bitcoin and has developed close relationships with Circle (USDC), Tether (USDT) and Lightspark, whose founder David Marcus invested in Xapo while head of PayPal. Marcus also previously worked for Facebook and co-created Facebooks Libra/Diem stablecoin project, where Casares was on the board and which was allied with Xapo. Xapos initial advisory board was composed of former longtime head of Citibank John Reed, Visa founder Dee Hock and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. Summers is best known for his close association with Jeffrey Epstein and his role in repealing key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act at Citis behest, which is widely believed to have provoked the 2008 financial crisis. While on Xapos board, Summers became a leading voice behind the effort to put a price on carbon and implement carbon taxes and carbon markets. In 2015, together with these men, Xapo claimed, they would build the global bitcoin ecosystem.

THE GREEN+ REGISTRY

Working closely with the GREEN+ Trust is the carbon credit certification standard chosen by GREEN+, Cercarbono. In addition to certifying the carbon credits produced by the program, Cercarbono also has a role in choosing which initiatives participating jurisdictions can implement with funds received and are also involved in fund custody alongside the GREEN+ Trust. Cercarbono was launched in 2016, shortly after Colombia where Cercarbono was formed passed a law establishing a carbon tax. Cercarbonos founders created the company because the law created a need for a national certifying entity that would provide solutions to the climate problem. Further Colombian legislation in 2017 spurred the company to expand into carbon markets. It has since become a leading voluntary carbon credit certifier in Latin America.

In 2018, Cercarbono formed a partnership with EcoRegistry, a blockchain registry that is also part of GREEN+ and develops services and platforms for reporting, monitoring and registering environmental assets and carbon units. The program says the company also addresses the issuance, monitoring and cancellation of the carbon credits generated by the jurisdictions in close coordination with the certification standard and the Trust Fund. EcoRegistry provides a unique serial number to each carbon credit issued and allows for close monitoring of that credit on-chain. As a consequence, it works closely with the lead of GREEN+s monitoring unit, the intelligence-linked satellite surveillance firm Satellogic. EcoRegistry is also a part of the Climate Action Data Trust, or CAD Trust. The CAD Trust was discussed in previous reporting from Bitcoin Magazine and Unlimited Hangout and is an effort led by the World Bank and funded by Google (among others) in an effort to construct what they refer to as climate wallets. IETA, discussed below, is also a member of the CAD Trust.

The World Bank has been exploring tokenization and digital ledger technology in order to create a modular and interoperable end-to-end digital ecosystem for the carbon market. Through the Digital for Climate (D4C) working group, the World Bank aims to build the next generation of climate markets by directing governments to create National Carbon Registries reliant on blockchain technology. The data produced by these registries will be link[ed], aggregat[ed] and harmoniz[ed] by the CAD Trust. D4C itself leverages the Chia blockchain, developed by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen. Part of the D4Cs Climate Tokenization Suite includes the aforementioned Climate Wallet to facilitate the exchange of carbon credit tokens, requiring an active connection to a Climate Action Data Trust node to function.

EcoRegistry is also part of the Climate Chain Coalition, whose other members include disgraced WeWork CEO Adam Neumanns new venture Flowcarbon, the Cardano Foundation, the Google-backed oracle service Chainlink, and the Sustainable Bitcoin Protocol (SBP), which seeks to encourage [bitcoin] miners to utilize environmentally friendly energy sources using tokenization. The SBP aims to turn sustainability into an investable asset when they create what they refer to as a Sustainable Bitcoin Certificate (SBC), a verified on-chain environmental asset representing bitcoin mined using clean energy.

The SBP website further specifies the incentivized opportunity for additional revenue streams for Bitcoin miners, stating that unlike carbon credits or RECs which are retired, each individual SBC is a tokenized asset which permanently represents the sustainability of one bitcoin. Due to an upcoming 50% reduction in the rate of bitcoin issued per block referred to as a halving alternative sources of income for miners can be the difference between thriving and barely surviving in such an unforgiving market. While initially issued alongside the mining of every new bitcoin, the SBC itself can later be sold to other investors. Depending on future regulations of energy in relation to Bitcoin mining operations in the United States, non-mining businesses might look to purchase these certificates from miners as a means to offset the carbon footprint of their bitcoin holdings.

In effect, the SBP aims to incentivize carbon neutrality for Bitcoin miners while simultaneously allowing investors to meet ESG goals while holding bitcoin on their balance sheet, the latter exemplified in their partnership with Bitcoin custodian BitGo. Their website explains that they believe Bitcoin has a unique potential to expedite the clean energy transition and due to being the worlds first commodity derived from a network, every bitcoin mined is fully fungible in both price and also carbon footprint culminating in a sustainability opportunity unlike any other industry. If a large company with a large carbon output due in large part to the sheer energy demands of being a multi-national company traveling employees, large scale data centers, and simply offices that require electricity was holding bitcoin on their balance sheet, they could purchase large amounts of SBCs to source yield on the appreciating certificate token while also generating accounting opportunities to reach metric-based ESG goals faster.

The co-founder of SBP, Matthew Twomey, previously worked at Goldman Sachs, OSL and Deutsche Bank, while Head of Climate Strategy Elliot David previously held positions at the US Department of Energy, as well as worked with the Clinton Foundation within their Clinton Climate Initiative on their Island Energy Program. Listed among the SBP Advisors are Natasha Barrientos (S&P Global and the United Nations), Dr. Julia Nesheiwat (the Atlantic Council), Emma Todd (World Economic Forum) and Kelvin Chang (Coinbase and Microsoft).

Cercarbono and EcoRegistry share several noteworthy partners and affiliations. For example, both are members of Asocarbono, an alliance of different companies and actors running or supporting Colombian carbon markets, that has written about the issue of carbon rights within voluntary carbon markets. According to the UN, carbon rights comprises two fundamental concepts: 1) the property rights to sequester and store carbon, contained in land, trees, soil, etc. and 2) the right to benefits that arise from the transfer of these property rights (i.e. through emissions trading schemes). The issue itself portends the possibility that those who purchase carbon credits will obtain the property rights of the carbon sequestered in trees and other natural elements found in the area tied to those carbon credits, opening the door to land grabs through carbon markets. Notably, there is no clear definition of carbon rights and it is unclear, due to the fact that their contracts with jurisdictions/governments are not publicly available, how GREEN+ views the issue of carbon rights in relation to property rights.

EcoRegistry and Cercarbono are also both partnered with AirCarbon Exchange (ACX), the worlds first fully digital carbon exchange, established in 2019 with the Singapore Sustainable Energy Association subsidized by the Singapore governments Enterprise Singapore and backed by the UN. ACX was founded by CEO Thomas McMahon, an over 30 year veteran of the commodities and derivatives industry, having spent over 20 years at the New York Mercantile Exchange before establishing himself in Singapore, where ACX is based. ACX is Singapores first international carbon credit exchange, chosen by McMahon due to demand for carbon credits from the airline industry. The exchange uses distributed ledger technology, specifically the Ethereum blockchain, to trade six different tokenized carbon credits, boasting settlement for as low as $3 per 1,000 CO2 tonnes. While ACX began mainly by focusing on the airline industry, the exchange now has over 160 clients ranging from financial institutions to project developers. Between January and August 2021, over 5.7 million CO2 tonnes were traded on the exchange. Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, acquired a 20% stake in the company, with the intent to build a carbon exchange in the UAE. ACX is also partnered with IETA (more on them below), as well as the Carbon Business Council, and the International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC). It can be assumed that ACX will be the exchange on which GREEN+ carbon credits will be traded due to its partnerships with GREEN+s credit certifier and registry.

Both Cercarbono and EcoRegistry were also recently integrated into Xpansiv, which operates the leading multi-registry, multi-asset environmental portfolio management system and market data service as well as CBL, the largest spot exchange for environmental commodities, including carbon credits and renewable energy certificates. Xpansiv is backed by Blackstone, which poured $400 million into the company, with other investors including British Petroleum (BP) Ventures, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. Xpansivs CBL has partnered extensively with CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) Group, which is one of the worlds main derivatives exchanges, and together they have produced several futures contracts on carbon markets.

Cercarbono and EcoRegistry also both share an affiliation with the International Emissions Trading Association, or IETA. Founded in 1999 under the auspices of the UN, IETA is dedicated to the establishment of linked trading systems to ensure efficient and competitive GHG [greenhouse gas] markets. Its inaugural members included the titans of the oil and manufacturing industries. Current members include AngloAmerican mining, Saudi Aramco, Bank of America, Bayer/Monsanto, Cargill, Chevron, Citi Group, Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Koch Industries, PetroChina and the Mossad-linked commodities company Glencore. Another company that is a member of IETA is StoneX, which is partnered with the aforementioned exchange ACX and is sponsoring the launch of GREEN+ satellites in Miami later this month. IETA is also part of the aforementioned Climate Action Data Trust, along with EcoRegistry, the World Bank and others.

IETA is also notably behind the ICROA accreditation program, which Cercarbono and most other carbon credit certification standards of note have received. These include the worlds leading carbon credit certifier Verra, which was recently embroiled in a major scandal when it was revealed that 90% of their most common category of carbon credits were worthless despite being ICROA (and IETA) approved.

SATELLOGIC OBSERVATION IS PRESERVATION

As the digital carbon credit industry grows into a multi-trillion dollar market upheld by smart contracts on a distributed ledger, so too does the need for participants to access metric-specific data to insure the eventual pay outs of green bonds. For example, the company Atos, best known for its Olympic Games IT partnership since 1989, raised $916 million in sustainability-linked bonds at the end of 2021. According to a press release in November 2021, the bonds were issued with an eight-year maturity and one percent coupon, with a clause that the annual interest rate paid during the last three years will be unchanged if the company reduces its annual GreenHouse Gas CO2 emissions (Scopes 1, 2 & 3) by 50 percent in 2025 compared to 2019. While these particular bonds were not authored using a blockchain, there remains the now-sudden economic incentive a one percent coupon on nearly $1 billion to deliver verifiable real world data to the participants, the state of which determines the eventual payout. These bonds were issued with BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and J.P. Morgan acting as Global Coordinators and with Joint Bookrunners such as HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Banco Santander, Bank of America Securities, and Wells Fargo Securities, among others, with Rothschild & Co acting as financial advisor to Atos SE. An article from Data Center Dynamics on the raise makes note of the common trend of sustainability-linked financing among data center and communication firms, referencing how NTT, Aligned, Airtrunk, KPN, Baidu, and Nabiax all raised funds or converted existing debt to include interest rates tied to sustainability and ESG goals within the last year.

When the eventual payout of billions of dollars in cleverly-authored green bonds comes down to accurate measurements of carbon molecule density over a vast land mass, such as a South American rainforest, the market for reliable data service providers has quite literally left the atmosphere. As the debt instruments of the private sector evolve alongside the proliferation of blockchain technology, the data that makes these smart contracts execute to eventually settle the issued bond no longer goes to a human arbitrator, but rather a consciousness-free protocol that reduces a pair of potential outcomes to a single output. In the case of a sustainability-linked green bond, if the carbon emissions of a business are not empirically reduced beyond a relative metric at a certain time both data points of which are determined at the issuance of the smart contract and thus willingly agreed-upon by both parties the coupon on the bond is not paid out. With the carbon credit market presenting itself as one of the preferred debt instruments of the modern era, the aforementioned Satellogic an intelligence-linked company focused on privatizing the data from satellite surveillance with an advisory board full of key players in the digital debt system finds itself ready to act as a crucial pillar of the encroaching new financial system.

Satellogic was co-founded in 2010 by Emiliano Kargieman, its current CEO, and Gerardo Richarte, its current CTO, after spending some time at the NASA Ames Campus in Mountain View, CA. According to press releases on their website, Satellogic is the first vertically integrated geospatial company that is building the first scalable, fully automated EO [Earth Observation] platform with capabilities to remap the entire planet at both high-frequency and high-resolution in order to generate accessible and affordable solutions for customers. Their listed mission is to democratize access to geospatial data through its information platform of high-resolution images and analytics to help solve the worlds most pressing problems of which they list climate change, energy supply, and food security. Other Satellogic documentation reveals that by democratize, they mean expand satellite surveillance from the public sector (i.e. governments and security agencies) into the private sector. Due to their patented Earth imaging technology, Satellogic unlocks the power of EO to deliver high-quality, planetary insights at the lowest cost in the industry.

Both Kargieman and Richarte previously worked for Core Security Technologies, which Kargieman co-founded, with clients such as Apple, Cisco, Homeland Security, NSA, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and DARPA. In 1998, Core Security was recognized as an Endeavor Entrepreneur by the Endeavor Foundation and in 2002, Morgan Stanley invested $1.5 million into Core Security, with the bank gaining a seat on the board. The company was also funded by Bank of America in its Series A. Kargieman later founded Aconcagua Ventures in a joint venture with Craig Coguts Pegasus Capital, and served as a Member of the Special Projects Group at the World Bank. As previously noted, Coguts Pegasus Capital is also a main funder of CC35. Another Core Security Technologies employee that migrated to Satellogic with Kargeiman and Richarte is Aviv Cohen, a former Israeli intelligence officer who is now Satellogics head of special projects.

Satellogics seed round raise was funded by Ariel Arrieta and NXTP Ventures, Starlight Ventures which Kargieman advises and Santiago Pinto Escalier of Endeavor. As stated earlier in this article, NXTP is a funder of GREEN+ member Rootstock as well as the tokenization firm created by Rootstocks co-founder, Koibanx. Chinese tech giant Tencent, which owns a significant stake in Elon Musks Tesla, invested in Satellogics Series A as did Endeavor Catalyst, which is run by LinkedIn/PayPals Reid Hoffman, and Valor Capital. Valor Capital, whose partners include figures tied to US military and intelligence activities in Latin America as well as CBDC development on the continent, invested in Satellogics Series B, again joined by Tencent, with the Inter-American Development Bank (mentioned more than once in this article) joining in the companys Series C funding round.

In July 2021, Satellogic went public with a $1.1 billion valuation through a merger with Cantor Fitzgeralds CF Acquisition Corp. V, with J.P. Morgan serving as the exclusive financial advisor to Satellogic, with a concurrent PIPE offering of $100 million led by SoftBanks SBLA Advisers Corp alongside Cantor Fitzgerald and other top-tier institutional investors, including former US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchins Liberty Strategic Capital. Mnuchins recently created venture capital firm, along with Softbank, are major investors in Cybereason, a controversial company tied to Israeli intelligence that previously simulated the hacking of US critical infrastructure in order to cancel a US presidential election and spur the declaration of martial law. Mnuchins firm also includes Trumps ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and previously attempted to recruit former Mossad director Yossi Cohen, who instead went on to join Softbank. Joseph Dunford, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump who is now senior managing director of Mnuchins firm, is on the advisory board of Cybereason while Mnuchin is on its board of directors. Both Mnuchin and Dunford simultaneously sit on the board of Satellogic and Mnuchin is Satellogics chairman.

Satellogics board also includes Howard Lutnick, longtime head of Cantor Fitzgerald (as well as Jeffrey Epsteins neighbor and a major Clinton donor); Marcos Galperin, the founder and CEO of MercadoLibre who is closely associated with Endeavor, a Satellogic funder; Former Facebook and Twitter lawyer turned venture capitalist Ted Wang; Tom Killalea, former Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President of Security for Amazon who is also on the board of Capital One; and Miguel Guti鲲ez, a Partner and a Co Chief Investment Officer at The Rohatyn Group. Guti鲲ez previously worked with Nicholas Rohatyn at J.P. Morgan, where Rohatyn positioned the bank to become a leader in taking ownership of distressed government debt in the 1980s and 1990s, with a focus on Latin America. Guti鲲ez was involved with J.P. Morgans debt markets in Argentina, before becoming its head of Latin America Emerging Markets and later head of Global Emerging Market Sales.

The press release about Satellogics SPAC paints a clear picture of the hefty value proposition behind the public offering, which boasts that Satellogic is the proven leader in Earth Observation with 17 commercial satellites currently in orbit, more than the next four Earth Observation companies combined. The satellite companys vertical product stack offers enhanced analytics capabilities with commercial, sustainability, and government applications by providing a live catalog daily of every square meter of Earth, providing vital information to power the conversation around global challenges such as climate change, water and energy use, and food supply.

In the SPAC press release, Cantors Howard Lutnick stated that Satellogic is uniquely positioned to dominate the Earth Observation industry. Its technology, data, and analytics have vast use cases across countless industries. Kargieman echoed these remarks: We think this is a winner takes most or winner takes all market. This is a supply limited market governments just cant get enough data today; theres not enough satellites out there.

This is also true for the private sector. Satellogic showed CNBC a then-current investor deck which exemplified the true economic potential of dominating the Earth Observation industry. Kargieman noted that the company had completed a pilot program with a major oil and gas corporation, in which the company required surveillance data for about 1,800 miles of pipeline every other week. Doing this visual audit with airplanes cost about $750 per mile, whereas Satellogic demonstrated similar detection capabilities for less than $60 per mile. While Satellogic failed to clear $0 of revenue in 2020, the company was expecting to see that tick up due to new contracts that began generating revenue in the spring of 2021. According to an investor slide deck, the company had a backlog of about $38 million in signed contracts around when they went public, but was predicting $800 million in opportunities over the next two years.

In their full year 2022 financial results update, Satellogic CEO Kargieman tallied 34 satellites in orbit making the largest commercial fleet of sub-meter resolution satellites and thus well positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for Earth Observation data and satellites. Kargieman claimed their revenue grew 42% year-over-year due in large part to their Asset Monitoring and Constellation-as-a-Service businesses. Satellogics new Space Systems, or satellite sales business, creates a satellite purchase program that aims to lower the financial barrier to Earth Observation spacecraft ownership according to CFO Rick Dunn. Space Systems is designed to offer governments asset ownership to enhance national geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) with global tasking autonomy Going forward, revenue will be driven by our continued growth in Asset Monitoring.

Luciano Giesso, Sales Director for Satellogic has stated that Latin America is an area of focus for us. He explained a current trend of Latin America being increasingly focused on space technologies in order to create new infrastructures that unlock the benefits of satellite data throughout multiple industries. The press release states Satellogics position is informed by their view that countries unequipped with their own satellites are thus limited in their ability to meaningfully capture data about their policy implementation and infrastructure. Satellogics Dedicated Satellite Constellation Program is specifically marketed as a product for strategic national interests allowing governments of all sizes to create unique earth-observation programs to support key decisions and manage policy impact, measure investment and socio-economic progress, and foster collaboration, data and information sharing, and innovation.

The stated mission of Satellogic is to privatize and monopolize Earth Observation in the form of satellite surveillance sold as a service to both the public and private sectors. Palantir, a private sector intelligence firm led by PayPal founder Peter Thiel and created with CIA funds to replace a controversial DARPA mass surveillance and data-mining program, committed to a five year strategic partnership wth Satellogic. Satellogics partnership with Palantir enables its government and commercial customers, which include the CIA and J.P. Morgan, access to Satellogics Aleph platform APIs to feed raw satellite imagery to Palantirs MetaConstellation and Edge AI. This partnership builds on a previous collaboration between Satellogic and Palantir to field unique AI capabilities to the orbital edge, including live upgrades to the satellites onboard AI that enables an ultra-low-latency maritime use-case. Palantir and Satellogic customers, which include the Pentagons Space Systems Command, Space Force, SpaceX, the government of India, and others, will soon have access to the Edge AI platform running on Satellogic satellites to offer customers tailored AI insights which is expected to increase Satellogics business of data products, streamline pipeline management, and further scale customer delivery required for weekly and daily world remaps.

The holistic capabilities of Palantirs Foundry will be instrumental in helping Satellogic realize our mission to improve life on Earth through geospatial data, commented Matthew Tirman, President of Satellogic North America. Tirman later made note that within this agreement, Satellogic will provide Palantirs US government customers with access to high-resolution satellite imagery which will drive analytical insights across a range of mission-oriented use cases. Other notable private-public sector partnerships of Satellogic include the Endeavor-funded SkyLoom, which in late 2021 partnered with Honeywell to produce laser crosslinks for both commercial and military satellites, including for the Pentagons Space Development Agency, as well as with CIA contractor Amazon Web Services, to facilitate the 50 gigabytes of data per day per satellite, which beams to Earth with the help of the Amazon.com Inc. units AWS Ground Station service.

While it is surely a profitable venture, what Satellogic truly enables is venture capital access to high resolution data of every single square meter on Earth. Space surveillance as a service allows the operators themselves to fill up on up-to-date information of the worlds industry, energy use, transportation, commodity storage, and asset consumption information that could influence a firms decision while playing in the private markets. It could also be used by the public-private partnership engineering global technocratic policies that seek to limit consumption, industrialization and energy use by the public and enforce them via space.

Outside of this metric-driven advantage, the aforementioned transition to a universal ledger upholding and settling the majority of financial (including purely speculative) activity will require obscene amounts of data. If the private sectors so-called commodity-backed, Real World Asset tokens are to take off in any meaningful way, highly reliable satellite imagery will be needed to uphold billions of dollars of value. Any push towards smart contract-derived money representing tangible objects will demand exactly the data Satellogic intends to not only supply but sell as a service to any firm, or government.

BLOCKCHAIN THE NEW ENABLING ENVIRONMENT

The idea of green finance, in which private firms utilize data and physical elements from the real world to create novel economic instruments such as bonds based on carbon emissions, necessitates government-upheld agreements and eventual court-based litigation as the ability to find consensus, thus acting as the enabling environment, for the settlement of large values of securities between the public and private sector. Regulation and contractual agreements between governments and their commercial sector partners require not just the literal letter of the law, but vetted insurance brokers, data firms, legislative bureaucrats, and various other accredited lawyers to dictate the grounds in which business can be legally conducted. The private-public partnership has become continually blurred by the relaxing of regulation restricting how corporations can influence current and aspiring politicians via campaign fundraising. In turn, this group of purchased public sector employees must repay the corporations responsible for their successful attempts at gaining office, leading to the push for further dissolution of certain laws that prevented their donors from gaining footholds within a once-regulated market. No longer is the public sector primarily beholden to their constituents, but rather their corporate donors.

This ongoing dynamic has led to a runaway feedback of legal corruption and conspiracy between these ostensibly delineated sectors. The net result of the public-private partnerships that upholds the CC35, Green+ and Satellogic collaborations is due to the calculated focus on regional governments, thus finding their enabling environment through pacts and treaties at the subnational level.

Once larger regulatory fish are fried, the fight for further interoperability of digital assets (such as dollar instruments) moves down to the regional governments of the Global South. For example, the regulation allowing US banks to custody digital assets and stablecoins was put forth by former OneWest official and Coinbase VP Brian Brooks while he served as comptroller of the currency under Mnuchin in the Trump administration. Once world governments, local and national, are forced onboard the universal ledger, the enabling environment will trend towards the ledger itself a product of the private sector and further out of the hands of the public sector.

This capturing of the commons by the private sector via a revolving door of public-then-private operators has been done before, such as during the Plaza Accord, the creation of Brady Bonds, the dissolution of Glass-Steagall, the demolition of Enron, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 fiscal response. The intended future of blockchain now that US regulators have embraced Bitcoin as an asset and universal ledger is to serve as the new enabling environment, complete with its very own digital dollar instruments, most likely backed by US government debt.

There are very few people in the world more responsible for the digitization of the dollar than Steve Mnuchin and Howie Lutnick the formers VC firm now consists of several members from his stint at the Treasury, while the latters firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds the securities for Tether, the worlds largest dollar-denominated stablecoin that recently crossed $100 billion issued and here they are partnering with the richest man in Argentina and the founder of the largest online marketplace (as well as crypto marketplace) in Latin America, Marcos Galperin.

The network of firms associated with Galperins MercadoLibre Xapo, Paxos, Circle, Visa, among others is rife with board members and venture capital from the PayPal Mafia, as well as the Argentine advisor group Endeavor. These powerful organizations, successors to groups like ADELA that spurred the creation of the Club of Rome and chose the winners of Latin Americas corporate landscape, have made it clear that they foresee this fundamental market transition. They have quietly positioned themselves to dominate the main pillars of the new financial system in Latin America and the world at large: regulated banking services, global marketplaces, payment processing, digital asset infrastructure, and capital creation monopolies. As we will see, this financial system is not about inclusion or sustainability as professed, but about using and deepening Latin Americas debt burden to force policy changes while enforcing foreign control over the regions economic activity and governance, all under the watchful eyes of US intelligence-linked satellites.

To Be Continued.

Steven’s Croft Biomass Power Station, Lockerbie. The German-owned plant requires 220,000 tonnes of trees a year

Biomadness: Biomass power station produced four times emissions of UK coal plant – Drax received £22bn in subsidies despite being UK’s largest emitter in 2023, though company rejects ‘flawed’ research – Drax: UK power station still burning rare forest wood

Drax burns the equivalent of 27 million trees annually – twice the number of trees in the New Forest. The cutting and shipping of trees to Yorkshire across the Atlantic in ships running on diesel will never be sustainable, but the story goes further than this. Multiple investigations have found that Drax uses pellets from whole logs sourced from globally important forests, including taking more than 40,000 tonnes of wood from old growth forests in British Columbia in 2023.

‘Eco-hypocrisy’ over Scotland’s biomass boiler ban, while subsidies are available to install them!

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24252775.confusion-biomass-boiler-ban-subsidies-install/

Ministers have been accused of implementing “disjointed legislation” after it emerged that new regulations effectively ban biomass boilers in new homes while subsidies worth thousands are still available to install them in existing properties, it is being reported.
Restrictions on wood-burning stoves in new build houses are part of the Scottish Government’s attempts to curb emissions of fossil fuels as part of its net-zero strategy.

The legislation also covers biomass boilers, which use sustainably sourced pellets made from woodchips, saw-dust, straw and other plant material.

However, an investigation has found that grant funding of up to £9,000 is available for biomass boilers for existing properties, when an applicant can provide evidence that a heat pump, the Scottish Government’s preferred option, is not suitable.

That means some families will be prohibited from installing the systems in their new homes, while others in existing houses are given thousands of pounds in grants and interest-free loans.

Douglas Lumsden, the Scottish Conservative energy spokesman, said ministers were preventing rural communities, where wood-burning and biomass stoves were more important, from heating their homes “while subsidising others elsewhere”.

“This latest shoddy legislation again demonstrates their contempt for rural Scotland and there’s still no Scottish Government guidance on how exemptions will work,” he said. “You can’t have one family barred from using responsibly sourced wood while offering to subsidise others.”

The Government has been heavily criticised by rural communities after the regulations came into force at the beginning of this month, stating that all new homes must be fitted with “clean” heating such as air or ground-sourced heat pump technology rather than gas or wood-burning boilers.

It later clarified that wood-burners could be built in homes but only for emergency purposes if special exemption rules were satisfied. The regulations have no effect on homes that already have wood-burning systems installed.

Anna Gardiner, policy adviser for Scottish Land & Estates, told the Sunday Post that wood-burners were the cheapest, most efficient way to warm homes in rural areas because of a ready supply of local timber.

“The gas grid present in cities such as Edinburgh and Glasgow does not exist in many rural settings,” she said. “We do not believe a ban on installing wood-burning stoves in new rural homes is suitable at present.”

A spokesman for Patrick Harvie, the net zero minister, said: “The new building standard will mean new homes are built with modern and green heating systems while allowing wood-burning systems for emergency back-up where required. This move, which follows two consultations, has been widely welcomed as a positive step forward in our fight against climate change, and was approved unanimously by the Scottish parliament, including Mr Lumsden’s party, when they considered the regulations last year.”

Scotland: Biomass plant plans under attack

By Scott Hussey | Times Online | April 25, 2010

Plans to build a network of biomass power plants in Scotland as part of Alex Salmond’s green revolution could damage the environment and cost thousands of jobs, according to a new report.

A shortage of domestic wood means that millions of tonnes of timber will have to be imported to fuel the plants, which are a key element of the SNP’s renewable energy strategy.

In addition to the carbon footprint of importing wood, the independent study warns that the surge in demand from government-subsidised biomass plants is likely to squeeze Scottish timber-processing firms out of the market.

According to the report, commissioned by the Confederation of Forest Industries (ConFor), demand for wood could exceed supply as early as next year — before the biggest biomass plants are built.

There are only a handful of the plants in Scotland, but more than a dozen are in the pipeline.

The biggest is a 225-megawatt plant in Hunterston, North Ayrshire. Others include four 100-megawatt plants at the ports of Leith, Rosyth, Grangemouth and Dundee. These four plants alone would burn four million tonnes of wood every year, almost half of Scottish timber production.

A subsidy of £8.1m was given to a 44-megawatt plant in Markinch, Fife, and £10m to a plant in Irvine, Ayrshire. The largest biomass plant in Scotland — and one of the UK’s largest — is in Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway. The £114m plant delivers 44 megawatts of energy and burns 475,000 tonnes of sustainable wood a year.

The report, by the Edinburgh-based firm John Clegg Consulting, concludes: “If new large users of British-grown wood and other wood fibre enter the marketplace, supported by subsidy, then it can only be at the expense of existing users, impacting negatively and disproportionately on sustainability, employment, carbon sequestration and mitigation of climate change.”

Stuart Goodall, chief executive of ConFor, which represents about 2,000 woodland owners and forest businesses across the UK, urged the Scottish government to reconsider its policy of subsidising biomass plants.

“Diverting wood from existing users to large-scale biomass plants will be bad for the environment and bad for jobs.

“By subsidising the dash to large-scale biomass, the Scottish government threatens to damage its own aim of a low-carbon economy — creating an artificial market that undermines its environmental and economic objectives. The policy will create a huge demand for wood that just isn’t there.”

Only 12% of Britain is covered by forest, the lowest proportion of any European country. About 20,000 workers are employed in Scotland in industries that use wood, such as saw-milling and wood-panel, paper and pulp manufacturing…

see also Barbarians at the barn: private equity sinks its teeth into agriculture also Cost-price imbalance takes toll on farm profits in 2023 and Dairy farming: private equity’s next cash cow?

Farm profits slumped by 19% in 2023, says Defra report

Eastern Daily Press 20th July 2024

Farm profitability fell by 19pc across the country last year, according to the latest government figures – illustrating the ongoing financial volatility in the sector.

Defra’s Total Income from Farming (TIFF) is a measure of the total profit from all UK farming businesses in a calendar year.

The figure for England in 2023 was £4.5bn, a fall of £1.1bn from 2022.

Defra says this decrease was mainly due to a 13.1pc fall in the value of crop outputs, which dropped by £1.5bn to £9.9bn.

“Low commodity prices combined with a poor yield resulted in substantial decreases in the value of many crop items, with wheat seeing the largest decrease at £1.2bn less than in 2022,” says the report.

These decreases follow a spike in 2022, when high global costs pushed up commodity prices due to the war in Ukraine.

Farming leaders said the latest statistics demonstrated the “volatile environment” in which food growers have been trying to make a living in recent years.

National Farmers’ Union (NFU) president Tom Bradshaw, who farms near Colchester, said: “We have moved from high commodity prices and soaring production costs in 2022 caused by the tragic situation in Ukraine, to much lower income figures in a weather-affected 2023, as commodity prices fell but production costs remained high.”

He added that, since the survey ended, farmers have been struggling with record levels of rain and flooding which has contributed to a “huge drop in confidence among farmers and put a real question mark over this year’s harvest”.

“While farmers are well used to dealing with variation year on year, the volatility we’ve seen in the last few years isn’t sustainable,” he said.

“Food security is national security, and that’s why we need the new government to be prioritising food production in its policy-making.”

Defra’s figures show agriculture’s overall contribution to England’s economy also dipped by £1bn to £10bn last year, an 8.7pc fall compared with 2022.

Total livestock output in 2023 remained at £12.4bn, but there was a small increase in income from diversification, which rose from £1.321bn to £1.393bn.

Banking Nature (2014), new WBCSD environmental markets | see also Planet of the Humans (2020)

Privatization Of Nature – Who is behind the new environmental wave of interest in planting forests in Afrika, making you buy rain-forest and climatic quotas for pollution? It surely wouldn’t be the same which made the last financial crises in sub prime loans?

“Buying landscapes, protecting landscapes, accumulating new landscapes-it’s a phenomenal opportunity.” -Steve Morgan, CEO, Wildlands Inc.

BANKING NATURE is a film about the growing movement to monetize the natural world: to turn endangered species and threatened areas into instruments of profit.

It’s a worldview that posits capital and markets as the planet’s salvation-turning nature into “natural capital.” In this view, the best way to protect endangered species and habitats is to assign them dollar values and measure the “ecosystem services” they provide. These services can then be converted into securitized financial products.

The results can be grotesque. In Uganda, we meet men who measure trees to determine how much carbon they store-and a banker from the German firm that sells the resulting carbon credits. Meanwhile, in Brazil, steel giant Vale destroys rainforest, replaces it with tree plantations, and reaps the benefits of environmental credits.

Can we trust the same people whose mismanagement of the mortgage market led to a global economic meltdown to safeguard nature, by turning it into financial instruments for speculators?

“Successfully outlines the theory behind ‘financializing nature’… making this complex aspect of the modern market system comprehensible… Does a real service. Recommended.”—Video Librarian

“This is a fascinating work, investigating an inventive plan to protect nature… The portrayal of both sides of this impalpable concept is laudable. Huge assembly of opponents gives this film a distinct objectivity. The work has brilliant foresight into the issues, turning points, dangers, and ethical dilemmas of the proposal. Highly recommended.”—Educational Media Reviews Online

“A beautiful and very challenging and provocative treatment of the current effort to save nature and the planet by applying market economics, models, and tools to global environmental crises such as species extinction, the loss of biodiversity, degradation and loss of whole ecosystems like the world’s rainforests, and global warming.”—Science Books and Films

Privatization Of Nature (2015)
Director: Sandrine Feydel, Denis Delestrac
Stars: Bertrand Dussy, Framboise Gommendy, Laurent Jacquet
Genre: Documentary
Country: France
Language: English (with subtitled German, French and Spanish)
Also Known As: Banking Nature
Release Date: February 3, 2015 (France)

Synopsis:
We investigate the commercialization of the natural world. Protecting our planet has become big business with companies promoting new environmental markets. This involves species banking, where investors buy up vast swathes of land, full of endangered species, to enable them to sell ‘nature credits’. Companies whose actions destroy the environment are now obliged to buy these credits and new financial centres have sprung up, specializing in this trade.

Many respected economists believe that the best way to protect nature is to put a price on it. But others fear that this market in nature could lead to companies having a financial interest in a species’ extinction. There are also concerns that – like the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 – the market in nature credits is bound to crash. And there are wider issues at stake. What guarantees do we have that our natural inheritance will be protected? And should our ecological heritage be for sale?

Also Known As (AKA):
(original title) Nature, Le Nouvel Eldorado de la Finance
France Nature, le Nouvel Eldorado de la Finance
Germany Natur – Spekulationsobjekt Mit Zukunft
Norway Naturens Kapital
United Kingdom Banking Nature
United States Banking Nature
World-wide Banking Nature (English)

Why is so much English countryside being taken out of family hands, out of management and out of access? Private equity lurks…

Following a recent petition to save the now 85% reduced Dartmoor ponies from potential extinction by DEFRA bureaucratising  common rights, its becoming clear this is by no means an isolated land grab.

Demands to take farming, forest and moorland out of production by ‘rewilding campaigns’ is leading to non-productive land being gleefully snapped up by multi-billion dollar private equity funds for ‘carbon offset’ schemes.

Four articles presented here illustrate DEFRA’s snuffing out some of England’s last remaining common rights, in the New Forest, Dartmoor and elsewhere. Then Forestry England’s new programme to take 20,000 acres out of management is further evidence of an unannounced government programme to regulate tenants, contractors, rights holders and private owners off the land.

Finally, for now, something similar is happening across the pond as campaigners are trying to protect wild horse habitat for in the US which is being eroded.

Do please share your theories, suggestions, related stories about this common rights and  land grab… and links in the comments at the bottom. Thanks

1. For 800 years, commoners have nurtured the forest. Now they are being forced out

Rob White March 31, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/new-forest-commoners-pushed-out-second-homes/

Gemma Hobbs began directing ponies around the New Forest from her grandfather’s shoulders when she was small. It’s been a part of her life ever since – she started saving at nine, and bought her first pony aged 11.

Now 16, she has become a commoner, the third generation to take on this ancient mantle as it is passed down through families. Several times a week, she rides into the forest to check on the animals that roam freely and preserve a National Park.

New Forest commoners are people who live in properties, rent or own land that have rights of common attached. Among them are the right to graze livestock like ponies, cattle and donkeys, the ability to let out pigs to feed, and to cut down trees for fuel, although Forestry England now provides the firewood in order to protect the forest.

In exercising these rights, commoners are crucial in preserving the forest. Their cattle, ponies and donkeys eat gorse, grass and other greenery so animals and plants can thrive. Their pigs hoover up acorns, saving livestock from internal bleeding and even death. Without them, it would be a wilderness.

“The New Forest ponies and cattle are known as ‘the architects of the Forest’,” explains Paul Walton, of the New Forest National Park Authority. “The commoners have been grazing their animals on the open Forest since before the Norman Conquest in 1066, and play a vital role in maintaining the landscape and rare wildlife which makes the New Forest so special.”

But their way of life is under threat. Because the right to common is tied to property and the land itself, the practice is directly affected by rising house prices and rents, and the influx of second homeowners. If commoners – who have been there for centuries – can’t afford to live there, then it can no longer exist.

An ancient right

One night, a neighbour called about a pony who had given birth. Gemma and her mother immediately rode in, only to discover an abandoned, orphaned foal. They adopted Velvet and bottle fed him from birth.

If that was commoning in its purest form, it’s a world away from the blindings and beheadings that these same forest floors bore witness to a millennium before.

At the start of the 11th century, the New Forest was a dangerous place. William the Conqueror declared it a Royal Forest in 1071, with a strict set of laws to ensure nothing interfered with the hunt.

Suddenly, the people who’d lived there for generations could be blinded for the crime of “disturbing a deer”. Shooting at one meant being blinded by law enforcement, while killing one attracted the death penalty. It was illegal to gather wood or build a fence, even on your own property. Centuries of tradition changed overnight.

As the early thirteenth century began, England was a febrile place under the widely unpopular King John. In trying to reclaim land he’d lost to the French, he hiked taxes and alienated the rich landowners he relied on to govern. When Magna Carta followed in 1215, it couldn’t prevent all out civil war and a legitimate threat to the monarchy.

Following his death a year later, many landowners switched sides to back King Henry III, who was just nine when he inherited the throne. A plan was needed for rural England and in 1217 the Charter of the Forest arrived and New Forest commoning began.

It would be another seven centuries before these ancient rights were even updated and they remain in place today. There are now around 650 commoners, with Gemma among the latest recruits.

“My grandparents and parents were commoners, so it started through that,” she says. “I remember sitting on my grandad’s shoulders, waving my arms and directing ponies so they didn’t run us over.”

She looks in on the ponies every few days, then in the autumn helps round them all up, check their collars, get their tails trimmed and give them a routine health check. It means she has little time for the usual socialising and hobbies of a 16-year-old.

“Animals get the time most of the time,” she says. “It’s unpredictable when you have animals out in the forest, particularly when we have sick animals. That’s twice a day every day, making it a priority. Commoning is more of a lifestyle than just a hobby.”

It’s an ever-changing, sometimes harsh environment. So far, she’s had a pony, Duchess, go missing – two years later she still hasn’t been found. Velvet, the orphaned foal, turned out to have a sibling, so they now have Whizz for company too.

Her mother, Sally Marsh, says she’s delighted to see Gemma following in the tradition.

“It’s lovely. Obviously I had a big passion for it as a child. You never know with the kids these days. With social media, the world has changed so much, but it’s still in the blood and from an early age, she’s wanted to be on a pony and help.”

The threat to commoning

Commoners’ rights are irrevocably tied to houses and land, but that is what is putting their lifestyle at risk. Wealthier people are now moving to the area and buying the land and property. In doing so, they take it away from commoners but have no intention of commoning themselves.

The average house price in the New Forest is over £600,000, higher than in any other National Park. According to Rightmove, the average rent is over £1,600 a month. Many commoners see this as an existential threat.

Andrew Parry-Norton, chair of the Commoners Defence Association (CDA) and a commoner himself, is one of them.

“We’re facing money coming down from London, paying £42,000 to £45,000 an acre. That means properties of over a million pounds. These new people aren’t going to common and most wouldn’t even understand how to look after the land.

“For younger generations of commoners [who inherit land and property], the temptation is there to take the money. Unless we can offer them a financially viable future, with properties they can afford, they’re not going to stay and do this.”

This isn’t a new problem – the CDA itself was set up in 1909 in response to people coming to the area wanting to buy land.

“All the commoners got together as it was a collective problem,” he adds. “There’s nothing like a collective enemy to bring people together. It’s like a trade union to preserve commoning and their rights.

“It’s a constant battle, but it’s our livelihood and it creates what we see in the landscape of the forest right now.”
An accidental commoner

Dr Gale Pettifer is also a commoner, albeit inadvertently. When she bought her property in 2012, she didn’t realise it had common rights until she saw the deeds. She’s enjoyed it so much since that she’s completed a PhD on the politics of “inclosure” in the New Forest.

“This is a completely different way of interacting with livestock,” she says. “You can’t pet them, so I know my ponies, they don’t necessarily know me. Lots of my friends ask what’s the point, but it’s about the conservation of the New Forest and carrying on the tradition. I absolutely love it. It’s taken over my life.”

She agrees that commoning is facing challenges and it’s part of the reason she’s joined in

“It is hugely under threat from the encroachment of leisure and recreation. It was primarily a working landscape; now there’s more and more pressure to become profitable with more and more leisure activities. Housebuilding brings pressures, more cars, more speeding, more pony deaths.

“I realised there must be other properties like mine, and people buy them and don’t exercise these rights. If I don’t, that’s how these things get lost, the rights and the knowledge.”

Inevitably, house prices are part of the conversation.

“If you’re on an average income, you’ve got no chance of buying anything in the Forest.”

That is vital to the preservation of commoning, because the rights are linked to property and land: once you sell up or leave, you relinquish your rights. There are programmes such as the Commoners Dwelling Scheme, which allows genuine commoners the right to apply to build a home outside the New Forest and carry on commoning.”

She adds: “If you want to save the forest, you have to save the commoners. If the commoners are under threat, so is the forest.”

As part of the next generation, it’s a very real fear for Gemma. She wants to set up on her own one day, but worries she won’t be able to.

“That’s the goal, but it’s really impossible. The prices have gone up because of Covid and people having second homes. Younger generations are more involved as they’ve grown up, but the price of land and housing has become extortionate.

“It’s always been part of my life, it would be like a big chunk of me missing.”

Sally says the family could only afford their current property because of the Government’s Right to Buy scheme.

“It’s growing increasingly frustrating for us. The bugbear is people from London and Cheshire buying these second homes which they barely use and using paddocks as glorified gardens. Bit by bit the forest has been eaten away. None of it would be here without the commoners.

“I haven’t got the money to buy these places and we can’t compete. Commoners are becoming a rare breed, like the ponies, because we’re being forced out of it.”

Priced out

The idea of a local tradition under threat from rising house prices isn’t unique to the New Forest. Young people in Cornish towns like Newlyn, St Mawes and Padstow are being priced out of their home towns, putting older industries like fishing at serious risk.

It’s a familiar story – an influx of tourists leads to the purchase of seaside boltholes and money-spinning holiday lets, pricing the locals out and leaving age-old traditions on life support.

Tim Bonner, CEO of the Countryside Alliance, says rising property prices is one of the countryside’s biggest drivers in social change.

“Incomers can have a positive impact on the local economy, but increased demand for rural housing has created an affordability crisis in some areas. This is not just about the increased cost of housing, but also rural wages which remain stubbornly low. The result is that young people in particular cannot afford to live in the communities that they were born and brought up in.”

Back in the New Forest, rising house prices may be both a past and present danger, but another ominously clouds the horizon of post-Brexit Britain. In the EU, commoners were paid annually for every animal under the Basic Payment Scheme. It was around £200, but it has already been halved, and will keep falling until 2026 when it stops completely.

There are options for future funding, but not until 2028 – and it will still depend on a consensus between various groups with a stake in the forest. Even if a solution is found, there’s a two-year funding gap to survive.

Seemingly under threat from all sides, can commoning survive? Andrew is convinced it can, and that it will.

“Commoners are resilient and we will get through this. We turn a negative into a positive, like when they built the A31 through the middle of the forest. Now, if disease breaks out among the animals, you have a barrier between the two sides and we can contain it.”

He adds: “I don’t feel there’ll be many full time commoners left, but people will carry on. We’ve got some who are nurses or lawyers and keep a few ponies and cows as a hobby. And there are also die-hard commoners who will work in a factory if they have to, just to subsidise their commoning.”

However, he does say it needs to be monetised.

“The Government should pay for it. But when people pay for something, they appreciate it more. If people had to make a contribution to visit here, not much, just 50p or £1, that ought to be put back into the forest.”

2. Petition launched to save the Dartmoor Hill Pony as 85% in two decades

Campaigners worry if no action is taken, the Dartmoor Hill Pony could become extinct

Ella Sampson 05 Apr 2024  Petition website

https://www.themoorlander.co.uk/news/home/1466616/petition-launched-to-save-the-dartmoor-hill-pony.html

A plea to preserve the Dartmoor Hill Pony has gained significant momentum as a petition garners close to 100,000 signatures.

The petition, titled Save the Dartmoor Hill Pony, was launched by concerned campaigners.

It urges the government to intervene and halt the alarming decline in the population of Dartmoor Hill Ponies, a distinct breed known for their resilience and adaptability to the rugged terrain of Dartmoor in Devon.

Campaigners have stated that if no action is taken, the breed is at risk of extinction.

Shockingly, statistics reveal that two decades ago, there were approximately 7,000 Dartmoor Hill ponies grazing the moors, but today, only around 1,000 remain.

Charlotte Faulkner, representing the Dartmoor Hill Pony Association, expressed grave concern saying: “The Semi Wild Pony are unlike any other ponies in the world, their rare genetics enable them to thrive and survive on Dartmoor in all weathers. If the ponies are gone, so much more will be lost, impossible to replicate what we have now.”

She also said: “As the dodo was the wrong animal in the wrong place at the wrong time, it became extinct. The ponies are the right animal in the right place so let’s make sure they do not become extinct.”

The petition calls upon the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to ensure that Natural England refrains from taking any actions that could further diminish the Dartmoor Hill Pony population, echoing recommendations from an independent review.

The petition stresses the urgent need for protective measures to safeguard these cherished animals.

Recent developments within DEFRA have shed light on the government’s recognition of the Dartmoor Hill Pony Association as the official breeders’ association for the semi-wild Dartmoor Hill Pony population.

The association has been carefully compiling a register of Dartmoor Hill Ponies on the commons, with over 700 ponies already registered, microchipped, and undergoing genetic testing.

Furthermore, in late 2023, DEFRA acknowledged the endangered status of the Semi-wild Dartmoor Hill Ponies, adding them to the Native At-Risk list.

The Dartmoor Review, published in late 2023, emphasised the genetic importance of Dartmoor’s pony population and highlighted the necessity of conservation grazing. Recommendations from the review stress the need for protective policies to prevent further decline in Dartmoor Hill Pony numbers.

3. More than 8,000 hectares ‘left to nature’ under new forest management approach

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/environment/northumberland-dorset-north-yorkshire-somerset-government-b1158820.html

Forestry England said the nature restoration project will be rolled out across areas in Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Dorset and Somerset.

Rebecca Speare-Cole 20 May 2024

More than 8,000 hectares of land will be left to nature as part of a new forest management approach to boost wildlife and biodiversity.

Forestry England, which manages more than 250,000 hectares of land across the country, said the restoration project will be rolled out in areas of four forests.

The land managers will carry out a mix of activities to help nature recover in Kielder Forest in Northumberland, Newtondale in North Yorkshire, Purbeck in Dorset and Neroche in Somerset.

Andrew Stringer, Forestry England’s head of environment, said: “We will intervene less in these four wild areas, giving nature the time and space to reshape the forest landscape.”

We are confident that whatever happens these areas will become more nature-rich, with benefits for neighbouring landscapes

The Kielder Forest, the biggest new wild area, covering at least 6,000 hectares, will be restored to a fully-functioning upland ecosystem, with the expansion of native woodland and scrub and the creation of more open habitats like peatland and natural water courses, the organisation said.

Other activities in the areas could include reintroducing lost wildlife including butterflies, rare plants, pine martens and beavers as well as wild cattle or moving fungi to restore soil.

The areas will welcome visitors but will continue to be a source of sustainable timber through an innovative model of productive forestry, Forestry England added.

“There is an exciting unpredictability about this work in our four wild areas,” Mr Stringer said.

“We simply don’t know exactly how each of them will change over time or the detail of what they will look like.

“But this uncertainty is a positive part of being experimental and allowing natural processes to shape each landscape in the years ahead.

“We are confident that whatever happens these areas will become more nature-rich, with benefits for neighbouring landscapes.”

He added that forestry will “still be an essential activity” but that over time the benefits of less intervention “will be enormous in terms of climate resilience, reversing biodiversity loss, providing greater natural capital benefits to society such as natural flood mitigation, soil health, air quality and carbon storage”.

Forestry England said the project is being funded by the Government and Forest Holidays and its teams will work alongside nature restoration and scientific data-gathering experts to analyse progress.

The soil eDNA baseline data gathered in all four wild areas will be free to access as part of Forestry England’s commitment to open data sharing, collaboration and building a strong evidence base for wilding activities, the organisation said.

4. ACT NOW: Tell Congress to Support Wild Horse and Burro Protection Reforms in 2023

https://americanwildhorse.org/act-now-tell-congress-support-wild-horse-and-burro-protection-reforms-2023-0

Late last year, U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D, AZ-03) and U.S. Representatives David Schweikert (R, AZ-06), Joe Neguse (D, CO-02), Steve Cohen (D, TN-09), Dina Titus (D, NV-01), and Brian Fitzpatrick (R, PA-01) introduced a comprehensive bipartisan bill, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Protection Act of 2022 (H.R. 9154), which would protect wild horses and burros from slaughter, prioritize their humane management, restore western habitat, promote partnerships with American veterans and nonprofit organizations, and increase transparency within the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS) Wild Horse and Burro Programs.

This bill promoted much-needed humane, commonsense, and fiscally responsible reforms that would stop the endless cycle of removals and keep these beloved symbols of freedom in the wild where they belong. While we work to ensure this legislation is again introduced in 2023, please take a moment to keep the pressure on your U.S. Representative by asking them to support messaging in line with 2022’s H.R. 9154, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Protection Act!

Petition launched to save Dartmoor ponies from ‘extinction’ after new rules introduced

The petition, titled Save the Dartmoor Hill Pony, was launched by concerned campaigners.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/petition-launched-save-dartmoor-ponies-32366117

Over 100,000 signatories are calling on the government to halt the decline in the number of ponies that have freely roamed for centuries. Natural England has recently introduced new rules on the moorland

The petition, titled Save the Dartmoor Hill Pony, was launched by concerned campaigners.

A petition has been launched to save the famous Dartmoor ponies – which campaigners claim are at risk of ”extinction”, and some are asking ‘are Extinction Rebellion interested?’

Nearly 100,000 signatures are calling on the government to halt the decline in the number of ponies that have freely roamed for centuries. Figures show 20 years ago there were 7,000 Dartmoor Hill ponies roaming free on Dartmoor in Devon – today there are only 1,000.

Natural England has introduced new rules on the moorland – which mean farmers will now have to pay for grazing the ponies on common land. But a petition launched by Joceline Hibbs is urging people to save the Dartmoor hill ponies from ”extinction”. Joceline said: “The DoDo became extinct through no fault of its own, just the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“This is true of the the Dartmoor hill ponies, except they are the right animal in the right place, for at least over 4,000 years, probably far longer. Help us make sure this government protects them for future generations. Defra must ensure that Natural England do not take actions likely to result in a decline in pony numbers’ as recommended by an Independent Review.”

”We are at a critical point where it is possible that they will disappear completely.” Joceline and 95,320 others are asking Steve Barclay, the secretary of state for Defra, to make sure that pony numbers do not decline. Natural England, the government’s adviser for the natural environment, has assured it has not called for a cull of Dartmoor hill ponies and that the importance of maintaining the herd has been recognised.

The petition, titled Save the Dartmoor Hill Pony, was launched by concerned campaigners.

Dartmoor ponies have lived on the moor for centuries – there are records dated back to 1012 AD. All of the moor’s ponies belong to different pony keepers, who ensure that each herd is healthy and the species are vital for the eco-system. But in January this year, Natural England published details of new moorland rules that could pose a threat to them, campaigners say.

These include payments for grazing with ponies and cattle as opposed to solely sheep. Animal welfare groups say this would also mean many Dartmoor Hill pony owners would no longer be able to continue grazing on common land (because of payments and land restrictions) – and the slaughter of the creatures could well follow.

Joceline explains how there are not many semi-wild Dartmoor ponies remaining in the area. She said: “On average there is only one in an area of Dartmoor equivalent to 40 football pitches. We must not let Defra miss this last opportunity to secure a future for England’s only remaining semi-wild pony population the Dartmoor Hill Pony herds on the commons of Dartmoor.

“The semi-wild Dartmoor hill pony is native, rare and endangered, genetically important to the equine species worldwide and a positive contributor to enhancing Dartmoor’s biodiversity in the way that they graze. But Defra’s agent, Natural England, still seeks to catastrophically reduce their numbers. We ask that government, Defra stop this happening.”

Those who have signed the petition are urging for the protection of these now-vulnerable species. One commented: “It is a scandal and frankly outrageous that the body charged with protecting biodiversity is responsible for decimating it including and especially our native ponies.

“Natural England must be investigated because I cannot believe that they serve the UK’s natural environment as they are charged with doing and for which they are handsomely paid by the taxpayer.” Another said: “These animals are native to the moorland, unlike the sheep, and they enhance the ecology, unlike the sheep. We need them to maintain the diversity of our moorland, and because they’re incredible to have around.”

A Natural England spokesman, who insisted on remaining anonymous, told Devon Live: “Natural England has not called for a cull of Dartmoor Hill Ponies. We have always been clear that ponies make an important contribution to conservation grazing on the Dartmoor commons as part of the balance of grazing animals. ”Indeed, some agri-environment agreements on the Dartmoor commons include a rare breed supplement specifically for their native pony herds.

”While these supplements have to date been available for Dartmoor ponies now that semi-wild Dartmoor hill pony have also been included on to the Rare Breed Survival Trust (RBST) watch list we await advice from Defra as to whether the rare breed supplement would also be available for hill ponies.

“The importance of maintaining the Dartmoor hill pony herd has also been recently recognised in the independent Dartmoor Review. ‘Our advice to agreement holders includes encouraging them to include sufficient ponies and/or cattle during the period May to October and to also consider the option of having year-round low level pony grazing.

“While we can advise on the grazing framework for each agreement the agreement holders themselves will need to decide how they accommodate ponies in delivering a balanced approach to the grazing animals they use on the agreement land.”

The petition, titled Save the Dartmoor Hill Pony, was launched by concerned campaigners.

https://www.change.org/p/save-the-dartmoor-hill-pony-last-chance

UK housing is worst value for money of any advanced economy, says thinktank

British properties are expensive, cramped and ageing compared with other similar economies, says Resolution Foundation

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/25/uk-housing-is-worst-value-for-money-of-any-advanced-economy-says-thinktank

Mon 25 Mar 2024

The UKs expensive, cramped and ageing housing stock fares poorly compared with other advanced countries, analysis by a thinktank suggests.
Households are paying more than other countries but getting less in return, the Resolution Foundation said.

When it comes to housing, UK households are getting an inferior product in terms of both quantity and quality, the thinktank said.

The Foundations housing outlook used OECD data to compare the UKs housing issues with other similar economies.

It said that while there was limited cross-national data on floor space, homes in England had less average floor space per person (38 sq metres) than many similar countries, including the US (66 sq metres), Germany (46 sq metres), France (43 sq metres) and Japan (40 sq metres).

The UKs housing stock is also relatively old, with 38% of homes built before 1946, the report said, compared with around a fifth (21%) in Italy and one in nine (11%) in Spain.

Older homes can be poorly insulated, leading to higher energy bills and a higher risk of damp, according to the Foundation, which is focused on improving the living standards for those on low to middle incomes.

Researchers also considered what it would cost to rent all homes incorporating what owners would pay if they rented their home at market rates to show how the market price of housing varies across different countries.

The report said: If all households in the UK were fully exposed to our housing market, they would have to devote 22% of their spending to housing services, far higher than the OECD average (17%), and the highest level across the developed economies with the solitary exception of Finland.

Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: Britains housing crisis is likely to be a big topic in the election campaign, as parties debate how to address the problems of high costs, poor quality and low security that face so many households.

Britain is one of many countries apparently in the midst of a housing crisis, and it can be difficult to separate rhetoric from reality. But by looking at housing costs, floor space and wider issues of quality, we find that the UKs expensive, cramped and ageing housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy.
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Britains housing crisis is decades in the making, with successive governments failing to build enough new homes and modernise our existing stock. That now has to change.

A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities spokesperson said: Housebuilding is a government priority and despite global economic challenges we remain on track to meet the manifesto commitment of delivering one million homes this parliament, and have introduced reforms to improve the planning system.

At the same time as increasing the quantity of homes we are driving up quality, with the number of non-decent homes down by 2 million since 2010.

Our landmark renters reform bill is progressing through parliament and will give tenants more security in their homes, while our 11.5bn investment in the affordable homes programme and 1.2bn local authority housing fund will help build a new generation of affordable and social housing.

Tony Blair agreed to ban fox hunting after a £1 million donation to Labour from an animal rights group, Peter Mandelson claims

The former business secretary said the group got ‘pretty transactional’

By Jason Groves – published 14 December 2023

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12866059/tony-blair-ban-fox-hunting.html

Tony Blair agreed to ban fox hunting ‘under pressure’ because of a £1million donation to Labour from an animal rights organisation, Peter Mandelson has claimed.

The former business secretary said the group got ‘pretty transactional’ and it demanded the ban ‘in return’ for the cash – which at the time was the party’s biggest ever donation.

The Labour peer, who is now an adviser to Sir Keir Starmer, did not name the group involved. However, his comments appear to be a reference to a £1million donation given by the late animal rights campaigner Brian Davies, who founded the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Lord Mandelson revealed the pressure Mr Blair was facing during a discussion about political funding on the Times Radio podcast How To Win An Election.

Asked about whether donors had ever tried to buy influence, he said: ‘I can offer you an example from 1997 when an organisation – it was a fund to do with the welfare of animals – got pretty transactional with us. It was the first and last time I can remember this.

‘They wanted a ban on hunting in return for a very sizeable amount of money. And Blair and Co were sort of reluctant obviously to enter into some sort of trade over this policy.

‘However, there were a lot of people in the party who wanted that ban – there were a lot of MPs coming and demanding it – and we got into a difficult situation where frankly we went a little bit too far – further than Blair wanted – in making this commitment in our manifesto.

‘It was, frankly, under not duress but under some sort of pressure. It wasn’t attractive and it’s not been repeated.’

His comments will raise fresh questions about political sleaze. Labour has been trying to woo wealthy donors in the same manner as it did in the run-up to the 1997 election.

Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, which led the campaign against the ban on hunting, said: ‘Tony Blair has already admitted that the hunting ban was one of the legislative measures he most regrets.

‘The Hunting Act has failed at every level, not least in the damage it has caused to the countryside and biodiversity. A future Labour government should right the wrongs of the past and remove this running sore in Labour’s relationship with rural communities.’

But a spokesman for Sir Tony said it was a ‘misinterpretation’ of Lord Mandelson’s comments to suggest that Labour’s policy had been influenced by the donation.

They added: ‘There was no such agreement, he is clearly saying there were a lot of people who had passionate views on the subject.’

Labour’s 1997 manifesto pledged to facilitate ‘a free vote in Parliament on whether hunting with hounds should be banned by legislation’.

Legislation to ban hunting was not finally introduced until 2003 and did not come into force until 2005 following a titanic parliamentary battle.

In his political memoir, Sir Tony voiced regret about the ban and revealed that he had deliberately left loopholes in the legislation that would allow hunting to continue provided certain steps were taken to prevent cruelty.

He said he had not realised the ‘primeval’ passions that the ban would cause among rural communities.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare did not respond to a request for comment. The Labour Party has yet to comment on the matter.