Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake

At this time amid exaggerated climate crisis media narratives, Green and Blue Bonds are being marketed as an opportunity” to kill two birds with one stone (pardon the poor pun), through so-called debt reduction and carbon sequestering in Sri Lanka. The local corporate media routinely and uncritically promotes Disaster Capitalism –from Covid-19 to climate crisis and debt with famine narratives, while advertising antidotes.

Evidence from other countries that have entered into blu-green bondage or Debt for Nature Swaps (DFNS),  however shows that such bonds would actually deepen poverty and debt in the strategic island at the center of the Indian Ocean, and force it to pay for the West’s carbon emissions at a time when the rest of the Global South has called for the OECD countries to pay for their own carbon emissions and climate change.

At the United Nation’s CoP-27 Anthropocene Climate Catastrophe show in Egypt last month, countries of the Global South called for the industrialized North which is currently responsible for over 92 percent of cumulative carbon emissions to pay up for Loss and Damage” to the environment.[i]

An IMF and Paris Club Green and Blue bond deal in Sri Lanka would hence mean debt induced disaster capitalism and asset stripping of strategic lands, marine areas, as well as, energy, telecom, transport infrastructure privatization with the un-bundling and fire sale of strategic SOEs. This would ensure dismantelling of the Welfare State which was once the envy of the developing world given the island’s high human development and social indicators. on the eve Sri Lanka’s 75^th year of Lost Independence – in the name of Debt Restructuring!

The Green and Blue Bonds business is promoted by the usual suspects in the international arena that thrive on colonial trade and economic structure of dependency and Disaster capitalism: from hedge fund and multi-national corporation funded UN agencies (WHO, FAO, UNICEF, UNDP) and IFIs (IMF, WB, ADB), to selected Environmental I/NGOs, all funded gravy train style by transnational and multinational corporations including big and Dirty oil companies like Shell Oil that are rapidly re-branding as clean green energy and green tech companies. Locally, the Ranil Rajapakse Government backed by US Secretary for South and Central Asia, Donald Lu’s ‘Force’ with successive bondscams at the CBSL under his belt, and of course bond traders once again see a business opportunity in the Blue-Green Transition. Blue-green tech Disaster capitalism is a reality as big oil companies re-brand as clean, green, technology giants amid an Anthropocene climate catastrophe media blitz.

Climate Hypocrisy: Is Sri Lanka bound for the Chagos Island?

However, Sri Lanka like other debt-trapped Global South countries where DFNS are pending– from Belize to Ecuador– did NOT cause climate change and may even benefit from it! Hence, the call at CoP-27 was for Climate Justice and the Industrialized West that caused the problem and whose bond traders led by BlackRock have debt trapped countries to pay up!

Mounting evidence shows that in countries where DFNS have been implemented, farmers, fishers and indigenous communities have been deprived of access to traditional lands, marine areas and livelihoods in the name of ‘environmental conservation’, and have deepened the debt. However, increasingly, DFNS are being sugar coated as the solution to a post-Covid-19 Global Debt crisis as a corporate capture of lands and marine resources via Green and Blue Bonds is implemented with a Green Mask and CoP 15 30 into 30 advertizing of the need to save endangered species by 2030 by demarcating Marine Protection Areas (MPA), like the US and UK occupied Chagos Island which houses a massive and envrironmentally polluting Military Base called Diego Garcia.

Thus, there are growing concerns about climate hypocrisy” and ‘climate colonialism” with questions being raised about the science, Data, datafication and climate models, media and experts regarding the Anthropocene climate story: This climate skepticism is not to be confused with Donald Trump’s climate denial however. Who collects the data, how and where, as much as how are the climate change models and narratives generated and crafted are a valid questions[ii]

Above all, qui bono –who benefits from the blu-green transition given the billions and trillions sought? What is increasingly clear is that advanced industrialized green and blue technology producing countries stand to benefit from the Great Green Global Reset. They produce electric cars, boats, solar panels etc. and their multi-national companies, and bond holders, as well as, a host of environmental NGOs on the conservation gravy train are due a windfall if the green and blue bondscam that the IMF, PC and GoSL are preparing passes muster amid so many climate disaster narratives.

ENSO and Gaming the Narrative with AI for Global Governance: Eroding Self-determination

The world is currently in a La Nina or climate cooling phases with high rainfall, precipitaion and floods and snowstorms. But who talks or cares about the real scientific data or the indeterminacy principle and what cannot be modeled and gamed with Artificial Intelligence (AI)?!

Increasingly, Global Catastrophe narratives, from Covid-19, to climate change, and Debt with Famine stories, are gamed to suit the interests of the Global 1 percent with the DAVOS clique creating the message to advance the Global Governance agenda, and never mind any  incongruence with  long-term historical and longitudinal patterns. The Green Nobel Prizes have been already dished out much like President Obama’s Nobel Prize for Peace before he authorized drone killings in Afghanistan.

 The ENSO climate phenomenon which is notoriously hard to model and predict given many variables and variability is never mentioned in the newsfeed while the narrative is gamed to promote the Great Reset for Global Governance with AI in a world of Big Data Fetishism (Datafication), algorythms of unknown variables and aeteology in our Virtual Realty created with AI and Gaming Culture and Cognitive Dissonance as the Covid pancidemic, climate and debt anxiety level ramps up. Thus, narratives patently counter to the local, national and regional facts on the ground increasingly hold sway in a world of alternative facts and virtual reality of gamed narratives.

The climate change narrative has achieved global cataclysmic proportions promoted by the United National specialized agencies which like the World Health Organization promoted the Covid-19 Pandemic with a confusing infodemic to erode the founding principles of the UN Charter – the Right to Self-Determination of Peoples of the Colonized world, the Soverignty of States including Economic Policy autonomy.

Over-generalized Global catastrophe narratives –f rom Covid-19 to Climate Crisis- which also turns social science and the demand for context specific analysis increasingly enables Over the Horizon operations for Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD), and Global Governance, by the few, with the few for the few (global 1 percent), in this era of hybrid cyber war. This is of course not to deny climate change since all things change but the question is where are the climate change hotspots and who benefits from climate change and what is the cycle of time –Anthropocene is doubtful- that we are talking about weather that changes in minutes or in the earths geological evolution from plystocene to myocene to anthropocece.

The maps and AI generated air flows that show Colombo affected by poisoned air from distant land-locked New Delhi, rather than coastal Chennai where air is not as poisoned, and that Cold weather only targeted cattle who died in the Easter Province and not in other area which were affected by the same cold weather gives rise to questions. Of course it is well know that New Delhi which is land locked and affected by proximate deseart storms has very high air pollution at danger levels every year in December also in the wake of Divali fireworks and burning fields.

AI enables a deapth-less Virtual Realty to intersect tangentially with empirical realty as those with the technology tools and toys to game our realities seek to control the masses. At the other end of the gamed news spectrum in Sri Lanka we have salacious stories about bed and bestiality among parliamentarians and the sexual preference of the President to distract from his High Crimes and succeeding Ranil Rajapakse regime.

Climate Hypocrisy: Blocking Industrialization promoting colonial economic dependency with a Green Mask

The good news is that many climate change models and empirical reality show that Sri Lanka at the center of the Indian Ocean which receives two monsoon seasons, may actually benefit relatively speaking, from climate change due to the so-called El Nino-La Nina Southern Oscillation (ENSO), weather pattern– with increased rain. The arable land extent would expand into the dry zone regions. So too, there is the possibility of more green hydro-power electric energy generation. Of course, there is a chance of coastal erosion due to sea level rise.

However, while the good news remains repressed, the climate disaster ‘poisoned fog’ story recently stymied Trade Union’s protests against the privatization of SOEs as part of an IMF inspired Firesale to benefit bond traders, primary being BlackRock.

The fact that the so called El Nino Southern Oscillation” (ENSO), a weather pattern familiar to human kind for centuries, whereby there is an oscillation from global warming to cooling with climate swings from drought to floods in 7-10 years cycles is never mentioned.

Simultaneously, the Climate change narrative is increasingly used to block industrialization and perpetuate Colonial Economic Dependency in Global South and countries like Sri Lanka that have high value Rare Earth Minerals (REE), and Ocean resources, which are being mined and exploited by TNC corporations of industrialized donor” countries without Transfer of Technology or local value addition. Environmental protection against ‘polluting’ industries is the paternalistic narrative used to prevent processing of Graphite, Zircon, Titanium etc. which is sold cheap as unprocessed mineral sand”.

Questions about Debt Justice, Climate Justice and climate hypocrisy also arise regarding several well-funded climate change ‘activists’, lobbyists, NGOs and indeed Green Political Parties in the West given failure to focus on the environmental costs of the West’s own military business industrial complex, related war games, war economies and infrastructure, or the environmental impact of a costly war being fought in Europe at this time. After all, the US led NATO war machine with over 800 military bases around the world is the biggest consumer of energy and greenhouse gas emitter on the planet!

As the Committee to Abolish Illegitimate Debt (CDTM) noted: At the UN Biodiversity Conference, or COP-15, the post-2020 framework will likely endorse the target of declaring 30% of the world’s land and oceans as protected areas by 2030. In delivering on ‘30×30’, a rushed approach to gazetting large areas of the oceans as protected areas for nature could be extremely harmful. Governments must therefore recognise the rights of people, including their free, prior and informed consent to any decisions that deny them access to their historical fishing grounds, in line with the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on sustainable small-scale fisheries, as proposed in the Artisanal Fishers Call to Action.

---

[i] https://www.fairplanet.org/story/understanding-climate-colonialism/

[ii] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/enso-and-climate-change-what-does-new-ipcc-report-say