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Mark Carney Backs His Little Green Carrot with a Big Stick in Africa

April 26 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Two days before Biden’s April 22-23 Earth Day summit, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney expanded on his green vision for Africa in a feeder session for the Nov. 1-12 COP26 in Glasgow. Sponsored by the Group of 30 financiers and South Africa’s Absa Group financial services network, “The Road to COP26: Opportunities, Challenges and the African Transition to Net-Zero” was held virtually April 22, with four financial representatives, led by Carney (formerly the longtime Bank of England governor), tripping over each other on their way to the elusive carbon offset jackpot.

Carney’s job is to continually widen and deepen the pool of green finance, that already growing speculative bubble he called the “core” of the entire Paris Climate Agreement now leading to the Glasgow meeting. Meeting that core—$100 billion per year transfer from developed to developing countries in exchange for “carbon credits”—will require a “massive” investment by private capital, he said, but only as a leverage to unleashing 10 times that from public capital sources (governments). Carney thinks $30 trillion of private capital is now “committed,” ready to be mobilized.

Since Africa has none of that, to encourage the skeptics he has one carrot: the carbon offset fund. In this way Africa will get even for the years of (colonialist) looting: by auctioning off (committing to not utilize) their resources and instead offer them as collateral for the carbon-addicts of the developed world in the form of carbon offsets, a market he fancied “could grow to $100 billion per annum” [and be the mega-speculator’s dream]. Carbon offsets are going to be key to “directing” that capital flow, he said, meaning, those countries which agree to cut their development the most, and the fastest, will get the cash. To an honest observer, this is paying African nations to kill off their populations.

However, “We won’t get to Net Zero in a niche,” he said,

“Climate Finance must mainstream. That’s why it’s so significant that the world’s largest asset owners, controlling over $30 trillion, have joined the Race to Zero, the gold standard for the Net Zero Plan to target. We need even more to join these standards, including ambition from insurers and banks. We can expect progress very soon.”

The next “milestone” on that carnival ride will be the July G20 meeting in Venice, where developed countries and public finance will be expected to “define” their contributions to the swirling green maelstrom. Ultimately, Africa could look forward to “$3 trillion in new investment in the next decade, alone,” the UN Envoy for Climate Action and Finance Carney speculated.

That is provided the African countries give up the infrastructure they now want capital invested in.

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