By Matthew Scully
NATIONAL REVIEW

Dr. Anthony Fauci attends a Senate committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., March 18, 2021. For good or for ill, Fauci has become the default face of the corporatised medical establishment. (Anna Moneymaker/Reuters)

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OpEds
Scandals come and go quickly these days, but you will surely remember one from last month, a story filed under the odd assortment of keywords “Tunisia,” “Fauci,” “sand flies,” and “de-barked.” Though not an uplifting story, or a short one, it offered a glimpse into problems that don’t ordinarily catch our attention.

A nonprofit called the White Coat Waste Project is devoted to investigating the precise uses of federal money in animal experimentation, making heavy use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to unearth evidence of both profligacy and cruelty. In July, the group zeroed in on research that might have been authorized by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and in October publicized some of the disturbing details.

Fauci's @NIAIDNews forced you to pay $375K to have #beagles eaten alive by flies in a foreign lab ????????#Beaglegate

RT if you oppose this sickening spending???????? https://t.co/JmAKsXefzV pic.twitter.com/UCUEvOdVgV

— White Coat Waste Project (WCW)????????️ (@WhiteCoatWaste) September 2, 2021

These included a lab in Tunisia that had reported receiving grants from our National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the division of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) that Fauci directs. At that lab, beagle puppies were force-fed an experimental drug, then left to be eaten alive by hundreds of sand flies — the flies starved in preparation for this test. In an experiment elsewhere, funded by NIAID, similar tests were conducted: the puppies drugged, surgically silenced — “de-barked,” to spare researchers from hearing the cries of pain — and killed.

In most big-name newspapers, these studies were deemed unsuitable reading, while in the New York Post, Daily Mail, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, and at Fox News, and elsewhere, other revelations followed about “Fauci’s Kennel of Horrors,” as one headline put it. No evidence of the NIAID director’s other failings had ever broken through what writer Glenn Greenwald calls the “shield of liberal veneration.” Maybe these dog stories would be the end of him.

Considering the sweet nature of beagles, their despicable treatment also amounts to a gross violation of trust.

In their #ArrestFauci, Twitter-mob version as the controversy played out, the allegations were needlessly personal, suggesting depravity when only truthfulness and judgment were at issue. A proper statement of the case, conveying “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs,” came in a letter to Fauci from Republican representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina and 15 of her colleagues, who requested a reply by November 19. Just what had been going on in the experiments, they wanted to know; why were the labs using dogs at all; and could the doctor explain the need for “cordectomy,” which “involves slitting a dog’s vocal cords in order to prevent them from barking, howling, or crying.”

Fact-checking sites inspected the claims, and in the short of it the accounts from White Coat, though disputed in some respects, were true. No, said NIAID, it had not underwritten the sand-fly experiment in Tunisia; this was funded by other, unnamed sources, and therefore, though critics had described it accurately, was not attributable to Fauci. But, yes, NIAID had funded other experiments on dogs by the same people at the same lab in Tunisia. And it had supported a very similar experiment on beagles, done at a contract lab in California, in which 44 puppies were subjected to severe methods, including “cordectomies” to muffle the irksome yapping that can fill a room when dogs are tortured.

A picture accompanying news stories had showed puppies strapped down, their heads in mesh cages as parasites fed on them. That photo, said NIAID, was of the other study, supposedly done with other funding. How the dogs in its own experiment looked, we don’t know, and NIAID didn’t volunteer other pictures to help clarify the difference. In any event, whatever Fauci’s knowledge of the business in Tunisia — and the funding source still remains murky — all concede that he has for decades overseen funding for many such experiments on dogs and other animals.

To reporting from Greenwald, we owe the definitive fact-check on all of this. In a 2018 Intercept piece, he explored “a largely hidden, poorly regulated, and highly profitable industry in the United States that has a gruesome function: breeding dogs for the sole purpose of often torturous experimentation, after which the dogs are killed because they are no longer of use.” In any given year, we learn, some 60,000 dogs in the United States are condemned to this fate, spending “their entire, often short, existence locked in a small cage” — at corporate research centers, at universities, at NIH labs in Bethesda, Md., and elsewhere. They are “bred to suffer,” in tests that often serve purely commercial interests, and that keep the federal appropriations and grant money coming, while yielding hardly anything of value to medicine, and nothing that could not be gained by other means.

The [Greenwald] Intercept * piece is an unflinching work of journalism, and after reading it one can easily recognize the opposite, in the form of an October 25 defense of the dog experiments by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. The column reads like an exhibit in some other kind of study, supporting the hypothesis that, when their icons are threatened, liberals can be made to believe and parrot anything.

NIH and NIAID say their research guidelines follow only the highest standards in animal welfare; Milbank considers that assurance sufficient, and he resents it when others bother to inquire further — when the NIAID director’s “foes file Freedom of Information Act requests and search for material that could embarrass him.” The Post’s former White House reporter has been told “it is mandatory that the dogs be euthanized,” and when something is federally mandatory that should be final; only the “anti-science forces” arrayed against Fauci, so “bitter about his aggressive fight against covid-19,” don’t get that.

“Beagles,” he continued, “are used because of their uniform size.” In truth, beagles are promoted by laboratory dog breeders as ideal for experiments because they’re so compliant and trusting — undone, in the wrong hands, by their sweet temperament — traits that NIAID criteria term their “docile nature.” Even “de-barking,” Milbank had convinced himself, is really for the puppies’ own good. Awful as the practice sounds, and despite being a criminal offense in some jurisdictions, in laboratories, he informed us, “the dogs undergo cordectomies to reduce anxiety.”

WaPo scribbler Dana Millbank. Status quo apologetics is one of his specialties.

Complacent, gullible, and, in closing his piece, even juvenile with a line about critics “barking triumphantly” at Fauci’s awkward situation, Milbank at least acknowledged the kennel-of-horrors controversy, which otherwise remained confined mostly to the conservative press. This happened to be around the same time that a key element in the Wuhan-lab investigation was confirmed by NIH, in a letter regarding gain-of-function objectives in coronavirus experiments it had supported at Fauci’s direction. And even that revelation, wrote Milbank, was “not of great consequence.”

In general, the scandal was a case of excuse-making on the left as it contended with selective outrage on the right. And you have to wonder why it took the Fauci angle for our media to get on a story that’s compelling enough on its own merits. Among the hundreds of reporters on science, medicine, and congressional-appropriations beats, at least some might have made FOIA inquires of their own about NIH experiments. But other than Greenwald, who’s been on the case? Why did it take an advocacy group, White Coat, to do the journalists’ work for them? Why must they be handfed evidence of misconduct that the public should be learning about as a matter of course? And why does it require an FOIA request at all to obtain facts about the many harsh and invasive animal experiments done or paid for by NIH and other federal agencies?

Dutiful reporting would discover that in animal research, and also in the federally mandated testing of chemicals and drugs — involving the travails of millions of creatures, large and small — various aspirational guidelines and frameworks, such as the three R’s of “replacement, reduction, and refinement,” have little effect. The goals for reform get polished in committee meetings and commended in professional journals; in practice they are usually meaningless. There’s no accountability, no enforcement of standards, and one reason for that is negligible media attention to a pervasive animal-welfare problem.

Perhaps nothing says more about the mindset governing the use of animals in science than this: When they’re done with surviving dogs, cats, rabbits, primates, and other subjects, most government and private labs refuse to turn them over to rescue groups, such as the Beagle Freedom Project, or to sanctuaries where the creatures can heal and be in the care of people who aren’t trying to hurt them. Instead, whether mandatory or not, the labs either kill or ship them off for further use elsewhere. Because of this practice, a federal bill was introduced this year — with co-sponsors Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Gary Peters (D., Mich.) in the Senate, and Representatives Mace and Brendan Boyle (D., Pa.) in the House — to require that retired animals be made available for adoption. To elicit just one little scrap of sympathy from the people running these labs, it takes an act of Congress.

Though the mere mention of Scientific Research can give animal experiments an aura of humanitarian endeavor, this belongs to our imagination only; the impression quickly passes on direct encounter. It’s a multibillion-dollar enterprise, driven largely by federal money and mandates, or else by scholastic credentialing in an insular world dominated by animal-use dogma, and is undeserving of inclusion when we praise the great and benevolent works of modern science and medicine. As White Coat’s Devin Murphy explained recently at National Review Online, the work with animals typically involves novel experiments laboring to prove academic theories. Project ideas abound and there are none so redundant, pointless, or merciless that some intriguing thesis and attention-getting grant application cannot be produced to make it happen.

What researchers who have just burned through millions in public funds, studying fear in animals, or pain tolerance, or addiction and obesity, or emotional deprivation, or whatever, are going to report back that nothing of much value has been learned? There is always some prospective stride forward in the quest for knowledge, some elusive insight still to be gained, if only they just keep doing it and getting paid for it again and again.

For such supposedly inquisitive and innovative people, too, it never seems to occur to the experimenters that they’re operating on the least empirical premise of all — that animals are just things, raw material — or that the more coercive and violent methods they employ are little different, as experienced by the victims, from the barbarities that once drew street crowds to public vivisections.

Researchers themselves, as they sometimes admit, grow numb to grotesque and unnatural scenes, much as happens to workers in factory farms, and they don’t make the best judges of fairness and need. Objectivity is likelier to come from outside the labs where the animals are hidden. And to reasonably weigh what is essential and what is not, we need to know the details.

Consider, for example, another feature of the NIAID scandal, reported by Breitbart under the headline “Fauci’s Freakshow: NIH Conducted Psychological Torture Experiments on Monkeys,” and by the Daily Beast with a rebuttal titled “Health Agency Debunks Wild Claim That Fauci Carried Out Experiment to Terrify Monkeys.” The way this one works is that they take rubber spiders and mechanical snakes and use these to sneak up on and frighten the monkeys — about 150 of them, bred or captured — who are caged and chained. The researchers destroy part of the monkeys’ brains — with acid — to intensify the experience of fear.

It’s ongoing and is overseen not by NIAID but by a division called the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), at a cost, White Coat tells us, of some $46 million. The NIMH assured an Associated Press fact-checker that such research is “critically important” to obtaining “insights into the neural regulation of defensive responses to threat and inform the etiology and treatment of anxiety disorders in humans.” What’s more interesting is NIMH’s own defensive response to White Coat requests for some 50 hours of videotape documenting the experiments. It took not only an FOIA filing but also a lawsuit to make this publicly funded, “critically important” research public. And if there are insights to be gleaned from watching the videos, they concern the mental health of people who spend millions to torment primates in secret while imagining that they are doing humanity a service. Anyone with an anxiety disorder would feel worse after learning what his or her supposed benefactors at NIMH were up to.

Having confirmed with NIMH that Fauci “is not involved and has never been involved in this study,” the Daily Beast dismissed the whole “ridiculous claim.” The Associated Press fact-checker was likewise relieved to find that “the nation’s top infectious disease expert had no part in the research.” Everyone writing about, commenting on, or fact-checking the primate experiment was acting on the assumption that it would be troubling, and perhaps ruinous to his reputation, if he had been involved. But since the experiment itself is a fact in any case, shouldn’t someone at NIMH still answer for it? How many horror-house routines like this are going unreported, at the expense of the 68,000 or so other primates held captive in laboratories in the United States — not counting the 40,000 more who are captive but not currently in use? Isn’t such cruelty worth investigating, reproaching, and ending, even if it cannot be laid at the door of Anthony Fauci?

Greenwald, in a Substack piece on November 3, observed an emerging storyline in the NIAID scandal. Having disclosed upsetting information about Fauci, White Coat, founded by Republican consultant Anthony Bellotti, was under suspicion by the media as “an anti-science MAGA organization.” Washington Post reporters were suddenly calling the group in search of donor information, evidently hoping to prove that it was financed by right-wing detractors of the inerrant Dr. Fauci.

And if you were following the scandal at the time, maybe you noticed another recasting, surely for the good. Placed by the lab revelations in the role of defenders of animals against institutional abuse, prominent Republicans found themselves on the right side of a moral issue with broad public support. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Tucker Carlson on his show, and other conservatives, spoke with force and eloquence about what DeSantis called “despicable” treatment of the dogs, undoubtedly conveying the bipartisan sentiments of most listeners as well. Now that the appalling facts of animal exploitation were widely known, after all, what political leader would want to be out there defending “science” as practiced with devocalized beagles or mechanical snakes?

Here we might reflect on what further possibilities the issue holds. It’s not as though exposing two or three demented experiments has exhausted the subject. There was a day when deference seemed due to our class of medical and public-health experts in Washington. In late 2021, however, if one is told in connection with any kind of experiment or policy that “Dr. Fauci has determined it’s necessary,” that doesn’t have quite the ring of finality it might once have carried. Indeed, some of the tendencies that he and others have displayed during the pandemic — groupthink, a preference for coercion, a refusal to admit error — no doubt help explain the plight of animals in labs. We’ve seen how unyielding scientific officialdom can be, how heavy-handed, attached to false assumptions, dismissive of dissent, and prone to ordering and prolonging untenable practices even when urgent human interests are at stake. It only completes the picture to find like-minded authorities justifying and mandating the costly and medically worthless exploitation of animals in research and testing.

Along these lines, President Trump’s director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, wrote movingly during his tenure about the needless suffering of dogs and other animals in the EPA’s mandatory testing of pesticides and other chemicals. Wheeler sought (with legislative support from Democratic senator Cory Booker of New Jersey) to replace that archaic practice with “ethically sound science” and humane testing alternatives, setting a target year of 2035. Though this switch to alternatives was set in motion in 2016 by long-overdue amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act, the main obstacle to reform here has been the environmental lobby, as usual sacrificing animals to its own relentless demands and regulatory manias. All the more reason to make ending the toxicity testing on animals a Republican-led effort, and not wait a decade to do it.

Mandates often spell trouble for animals, as Senator Paul and the advocacy group Animal Wellness Action have argued in advancing another change to rid us of abuse in labs. With Republican co-sponsors Mike Braun of Illinois and John Kennedy of Louisiana, and Booker along with Democrat Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, Paul last month introduced the FDA Modernization Act to amend a Depression-era law requiring that all experimental drugs be tested on animals, including primates and dogs. Almost invariably, in about 19 of every 20 cases, drugs that pass animal screening end up failing, or actually doing harm, in human clinical trials. And it’s the current mandate of the Food and Drug Administration that accounts for many thousands of NIH-funded tests like the ones that gave us last month’s scandal. There are testing methods that better predict human biological responses — computer models, cell-based assays, machine-learning software, among others — though even to list these as alternatives to force-feeding drugs to animals is, as science writer and animal advocate Jeremy Beckham points out, like citing “alternatives to astrology.” Paul’s bill would free drug companies to use other techniques, and also eliminate the animal-use requirement in NIH-funded experiments for new drugs and vaccines. The mandated animal testing, imposed since 1938, was never sound or rational in the first place.

If the misery of 44 beagles in one NIAID contract lab is distressing and heartbreaking, a public concern in need of addressing, then such measures as Wheeler’s and Paul’s to spare, in many labs, millions of dogs and other creatures from fates no better would be a good way to turn our passing indignation into consistent moral action. Everyone deplores the random, isolated cases of cruelty; for some reason it’s the systematic, never-ending ones that are easiest to ignore. A political party needs to break from form now and then, escape comfortable patterns, and discern neglected issues, and it may be that public abhorrence of animal abuse presents such an opportunity. The cause would certainly suit our antiestablishment instincts and newfound knack for defying prediction — although, of course, once consistent action and humane alternatives are the aim, other questions follow. For example, what about other kinds of institutional abuse? What about modern “agricultural science” as applied in the intensive, mass-confinement farming of animals, with all that it entails?

Fordham theology professor Charles Camosy, in an October 27 commentary for Religion News Service, doubted the sincerity of Fauci’s critics in suddenly pouncing on accounts of the goings-on at NIH, wondering, “Have conservatives, who in response to many issues raised about animal protection often respond by invoking how much they like bacon, done a 180?” It’s a fair point, worth thinking over before we rule out the 180.

Stories about “de-barked” dogs and the like catch us with our guard down, allowing for unreserved condemnation. Much as we might admire and love dogs, however, it’s make-believe to act as though abusing them is an outrage while the massive, standardized, and carefully concealed abuse of other animals is an acceptable fact of life, just the way things are. We don’t need to run them through an NIMH lab to prove that pigs, cows, lambs, fowl, and all other farmed animals also suffer. They have minds, emotions, and needs. They’re not nothing. If most humans feel no special connection to them, that is no verdict on these creatures and their worthiness. They can hardly be expected to attract our sympathy from across a chasm of willful ignorance between the animal products we use and the factory farms, which themselves resemble an elaborate torture experiment.

Here too our major media rarely dig deep into the issue, perhaps mindful of advertisers, or else too caught up in their easy and overwrought climate coverage to focus on a moral calamity in the here and now. So it was again Greenwald who, last year in the Intercept, captured the extreme torment inflicted by industrial-scale farming, with an account of the pandemic-driven “depopulation” and mass burial of pigs, some of them while still alive. Video and audio recorders had been hidden at one farm in Iowa. As “ventilation shutdown” begins, we hear “the piercing cries of pigs as they succumb.” No less sensitive and smart than dogs, these creatures were “suffocated and roasted to death,” by the millions, across Iowa and other states. Ruthless measures, taken in an emergency, to remind us of ruthless measures taken every day as the norm. New horrors, as he writes, “in an industry that was already suffused with them.” That exposé can be read as a companion piece with Greenwald’s work investigating the breeding, agonies, and disposal of dogs and other laboratory animals. Fundamentally, it’s all the same story. It’s the same problem, the same deep moral disorder, complete with the same sort of people who won’t take it seriously and who resent those who do.

As Camosy points out, some conservatives meet the issue with habitual contempt, brushing it off with their boorish “bacon” talk and the like. But the cruelty problem and its remedies do not follow any narratives of the Left or of the Right. We can leave animals and efforts to protect them out of our culture wars. There’s nothing strictly liberal about concern for factory-farmed animals, nothing conservative about indifference, nothing partisan at all in simple fellow-feeling for these afflicted creatures, cursed for our sake. As a moral cause, it is a category all its own, not about anything else, not trying to rewrite your worldview or reorder your life. Whether progressive, MAGA, or something in between, you can be for protecting animals, including farmed animals — and even for alternatives to animal products — without giving an inch on any front. As Greenwald writes, this is “a movement that can attract people from all ideologies, who identify with either or neither of the two political parties, but unite in defense of universally held values and principles.”

Be careful before discounting the drawing power of those values among many conservatives. When Camosy writes that animals share with us “the breath of life,” as our companions in Creation, with a dignity of their own, that’s language we know, a dog whistle of the best kind. He could also have mentioned ancient ideals such as the moral restraint of the strong toward the weak and lowly, or our Judeo-Christian duty to be lenient and merciful to other creatures — truths that still speak to all but the hard of heart. Even when it’s inconvenient, even when conventional opinion makes no objection, conservatives are supposed to stand against things that are degrading to life, vicious, tyrannical — all of which describes the deliberate abuse of great masses of innocent creatures in the name of efficiency and profit, no matter how much factory farmers might try to sanitize their image. Of course we should strive for and welcome alternatives to all of that — call them vegan, plant-based, or whatever you want. In an age when, at any given moment, some 50 or 60 billion farmed animals worldwide know nothing of life but pain, dread, and despair, what are those alternatives but an acceptance of personal responsibility for the consequences of our own actions? Do rules for living get any more conservative than that?

It’s true that some interest groups with conservative leanings are deeply invested in exploitative industries, above all the meat industry, and are catered to in Republican policies as if enjoying their own shield of veneration against doubt or challenge. The other party hears from them too; that’s one reason animal-protection issues in general never receive the earnest, consistent treatment they warrant, even though public support could often be assumed. Against the cause of animals we will always have such formidable interests and their apologists, who specialize in what C. S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, called “that covert propaganda for cruelty that tries to drive mercy out of the world.” The best refutation of such propaganda is always the sight of the practices in question. Like those scenes of man’s best friend and next of kin trapped in nightmare laboratories, they leave any conscientious observer nearly as helpless as the creatures themselves to grasp the why of their misfortune. Ideally, it would not have taken Dr. Fauci and his kennels to set off alarms and call attention to wicked things. But if the scandal makes all of us think and care a little more, about those animals and others, then we can put at least one NIH experiment down as an enlightening and successful test of empathy.

Notes
* In general, we do NOT trust The Intercept, certainly not after Glenn Greenwald left the outfit, but the quoted piece is one penned by Greenwald when he was still affiliated with The Intercept, so it is obviously fully credible.

Obviously a man of great compassion and even greater contradictions, Matthew Scully is the author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. He served as literary editor of National Review and—here's the biggest contradiction, so typical of so many conservatives—as a senior speechwriter to war criminal and oligarchic tool President George W. Bush.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience. 

Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before leaving, please take a moment to reflect on these mind-numbing institutionalized cruelties.  The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. And meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits and those around you in this regard.

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PATRICE GREANVILLE

Ever since the Paris Accords, signed, after grotesque delays, in 2015 by 196 countries, representing almost the totality of politically organized humanity, I have denounced this treaty as being more a case of window-dressing and cynical p.r. than a serious attempt to push back against the dreadful consequences of capitalogenic climate change and its usual correlate, unrelenting ecological destruction. It is therefore a pleasure that a man whose work I esteem highly, historian Eric Zuesse, has now produced something that is as conclusive about this topic as the gravity of the situation requires. In 2010, in the wake of the BP Gulf disaster, I wrote an essay that sought to raise awareness about the deep cultural and systemic roots of the problem. Below a passage from that essay:

BP's oil blowout in the Gulf Coast is a tragedy of truly incalculable dimensions, in all likelihood a far more severe reminder than the Exxon Valdez of humanity's malignant connection with oil. The global corporate class --which has effectively blocked and coopted humanity's advance toward a more democratic and probably "ecofriendlier" world for many decades--had ample warning about the high probability and ecological cost of its short-term profit policies. Mostly unreported or downplayed by the corporate media, which every day that passes lengthens its record of complicity in its masters' crimes (and I'm not even thinking here of Fox News, which is by design a criminal enterprise), the oil industry has seen thousands of accidents injurious to the environment just in the last quarter-century. Many of these in the Gulf Coast, on platforms similar to BP's Deepwater Horizon, which now threatens to wipe out a huge and critical ecosystem in a single blow. How could anything so despicable, affecting at least four states, the health of the world's oceans, countless animals, and precious swamplands, happen so easily?

The short answer that few want to hear is that with this incident the Gulf Coast was at last predictably sacrificed to capitalism on the scaffolding of political chicanery it has erected over many decades to hide its pestilential control of all political institutions in America.  It was bound to happen. As far as the Earth is concerned, a business firm operating in the merry Reaganesque/Thatcherite universe of unregulated capitalism is an insidious cancer engaged in obsessive expansion till its host collapses. And harbor no illusions: regulated capitalism can only delay the inevitable, for even under "best behaviour" a capitalist entity that indulges its central defining obsession to grow continually at all costs in a very finite and increasingly fragile planet is clearly on a collision course with nature.—PG

The Paris Climate Agreement Is Pure PR, A Fraud.

By Eric Zuesse

The Wikipedia article on the 2015 “Paris Agreement” says that “Negotiations in Paris took place over a two-week span, and continued throughout the three final nights.[10]” and that:

The negotiations almost failed because of a single word when the US legal team realised at the last minute that "shall" had been approved, rather than "should", meaning that developed countries would have been legally obliged to cut emissions: the French solved the problem by changing it as a "typographical error".[13] [That statement — that France instead of America raised the objection to “shall” — is false. Actually, it was the chief American negotiator, Todd Stern, who labelled it that and demanded it to be eliminated from the text.] At the conclusion of COP21 (the 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties), on 12 December 2015, the final wording of the Paris Agreement was adopted by consensus by the 195 UNFCCC participating member states and the European Union.[14] Nicaragua indicated they had wanted to object to the adoption as they denounced the weakness of the Agreement, but were not given a chance.[15][16] In the Agreement the members promised toreduce their carbon output "as soon as possible" and to do their best to keep global warming "to well below 2 degrees C" (3.6 °F).[17]

U.S President Barack Obama announced on 12 December 2015 that,

In my first inaugural address, I committed this country to the tireless task of combating climate change and protecting this planet for future generations.
Two weeks ago, in Paris, I said before the world that we needed a strong global agreement to accomplish this goal -- an enduring agreement that reduces global carbon pollution and sets the world on a course to a low-carbon future.
A few hours ago, we succeeded.  We came together around the strong agreement the world needed.  We met the moment.
I want to commend President Hollande and Secretary-General Ban for their leadership and for hosting such a successful summit, and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius for presiding with patience and resolve.  And I want to give a special thanks to Secretary John Kerry, my Senior Advisor Brian Deese, our chief negotiator Todd Stern, and everyone on their teams for their outstanding work and for making America proud.

It was nothing but theater, to fool the public. It succeeded in doing that.
Here is how Britain’s Guardian,  under the headline “How a ‘typo’ nearly derailed the Paris climate deal”, phrased the matter: this Agreement was,
confirmed by US secretary of state, John Kerry, that the US had objected to Article 4.4 on page 21 of the 31-page final agreement. US government lawyers had found, it was said to their horror, that they had unwittingly approved a vital word which could make the difference between rich countries being legally obliged to cut emissions rather than just having to try to: “shall” rather than “should”.
Here is global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright on the significance of the two words:
This article requires developed countries to undertake economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets but developing countries to only “continue to enhance” their mitigation efforts. In the draft that was presented for adoption there were two critical words - “shall” and “should”. The expression “shall” applied to the developed countries’ obligation and the word “should” applied to the developing countries’ obligation.

There was a crisis.
According to some, it had always been intended that both rich and poor countries should have the same obligation, namely “should”, not “shall”. This was of huge importance to the US especially, which, it said, would have had difficulty signing up to any legally binding obligation to implement its reduction target.

One reporter, at the time, Lisa Friedman, of Climate Wire, said that when “the Americans spotted the ‘shall’, word began to spread that the United States had a problem.” It was the Obama-appointed chief U.S. negotiator, Todd Stern, who noticed the word, called it “a clerical error,” and demanded that it be replaced by the legally empty “should.” It wasn’t the French Government that raised the objection and gutted the text, but, instead, Obama’s negotiator, who did this gutting of the text.

In other words: the U.S., which had contributed far more to creating climate-change than had any other single country, and which had reaped the vast economic benefits from all of that fossil-fuels burning, was demanding that the poor countries, which were only beginning to industrialize, must be obligated just as much as the U.S. would be obligated, to reduce fossil-fuels-burning, or else the U.S. wouldn’t sign the Agreement — and neither would its allies, such as France.

In order to understand Obama’s motive in this, one must understand his motive in a certain key phrase that he used throughout his Presidency but which was downplayed by the press and therefore never attracted the public’s attention as it should have done.

Barack Obama repeatedly referred to the United States as being the only indispensable nation — that all others are “dispensable” — such as when President Obama addressed America’s future military leaders, at West Point, on 28 May 2014, by telling them:

The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

In the age of oil, and due to capitalism's moral myopia, animals have always paid an enormous price for human miscalculations.

He was telling the military that America’s economic competition, against the BRICS nations, is a key matter for America’s military, and not only for America’s private corporations; that U.S. taxpayers fund America’s military at least partially in order to impose the wills and extend the wealth of the stockholders in America’s corporations abroad; and that the countries against which America is in economic competition are “dispensable” but America “is and remains the one indispensable nation.” This, supposedly, also authorizes America’s weapons and troops to fight against countries whose “governments seek a greater say in global forums.” In other words: Stop the growing economies from growing faster than America’s. There is another name for the American Government’s supremacist ideology. This term is “fascism.”

It is natural that a person who wants to keep America on top by all means including by keeping down the nations that are rising would be viscerally opposed to the original draft’s application of “should” to the poor countries while applying “shall” to the rich ones — especially to the one nation (America) that alone had contributed more than a quarter of all of the greenhouse gases that have been added to the global atmosphere since the year 1850 — the effective start of the industrial revolution.

So, Obama’s representatives demanded that the word “should” would apply not only to the poor countries (as in the original draft) but to the rich countries, including the U.S. — and Obama got his way, at the very close of the conference, in order to have the PR benefit of seeming, to the gullible throughout the world, to be in favor of halting global warming. It was pure PR (for Obama, and also for leaders of the other highly-developed countries; and, thus, global warming won’t be affected, at all, by the Paris Climate Agreement, nor by the other, similarly insincere, mouthings by billionaire-financed ‘environmentalist’ ‘charities’. It is all theater.

However, this does not mean that there is no possible way that humans might be able to  halt and to undo the catastrophic harm and terminal danger that we have perpetrated upon the biosphere. There might be such a way, but it has nothing to do with any international agreements, and it also has nothing directly to do with suppressing the consumption of fossil fuels, but it is instead entirely focused upon outlawing the purchase of investments in fossil-fuels-extraction corporations such as ExxonMobil.

The way to stop global warming (if it still can be stopped) is to ban purchases of stocks and of bonds — i.e., of all forms of investment securities (corporate shares and even loans being made to the corporation) — of enterprises that extract from the ground (land or else underwater) fossil fuels: coal, oil, and/or gas.

For example: in 2017, the world’s largest fossil-fuels extractors were, in order: 1. Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia billionaires); 2. Chevron (U.S. billionaires); 3. Gazprom (Russia billionaires); 4. ExxonMobil (U.S. billionaires); 5. National Iranian Oil Co. (Iran billionaires); 6. BP (UK billionaires); 7. Shell (Netherlands billionaires); 8. Coal India (India billionaires); 9. PEMEX (Mexico billionaires); 10. Petroleos de Venezuela (Venezuela billionaires); 11. PetroChina/CNPC (China billionaires); and 12. Peabody Energy (U.S. billionaires). (NOTE: U.S. billionaires, allied with Saudi, UK, Netherlands, and India, billionaires, are trying to absorb, into their team, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Venezuela, and China, each of which latter nations had actually nationalized their fossil fuels, so that those nations’ Government, instead of any billionaires, would own those assets, in the name of all of the given nation’s residents. Though Russia ended its side of the Cold War in 1991, the U.S.-and-allied side of the Cold War secretly continued, and continues, today. Consequently, the U.S.-led team failed to achieve total conquest of the Russia-led team, and is now increasingly trying to do that: achieve total global hegemony, so that the entire world will be controlled only by U.S.-and-allied billionaires. This explains a lot of today’s international relations.)  All fossil-fuels extractors compete ferociously, as producers of a basic global commodity, but the proposal that is being made here will affect all of them and all countries, even if it is done by only one country.

It needs to be outlawed (in some major country, perhaps even just one) in order to save our planet. Here’s how and why doing that in even just a single country might save the planet (this is a bit long and complicated, but avoiding global catastrophe is worth the trouble, so, you might find it worth your while to read this):

These companies exist in order to discover, extract, refine, and market, fossil fuels, in order for these fuels to be burned — but those activities are killing this planet. Buying stock in, and lending money to, these firms doesn’t purchase their products, but it does incentivize all phases of these firms’ operations, including the discovery of yet more fields of oil, gas, and coal, to add yet more to their existing fossil-fuel reserves, all of which are discovered in order to be burned. Unless these companies’ stock-values are driven down to near zero and also no investor will be lending to them, all such operations will continue, and the Earth will therefore surely die from the resulting over-accumulation of global-warming gases, and increasing build-up of heat (the “greenhouse-effect”), from that burning.

To purchase stock in a fossil-fuel extractor — such as ExxonMobil or BP — or to buy their bonds or otherwise lend to them, is to invest in or fund that corporation’s employment of fossil-fuel explorers to discover new sources of oil, gas, or coal, to drill, and ultimately burn. Such newly discovered reserves are excess inventories that must never be burnt if this planet is to avoid becoming uninhabitable. But these firms nonetheless continue to employ people to find additional new places to drill, above and beyond the ones that they already own — which existing inventories are already so enormous as to vastly exceed what can be burnt without destroying the Earth many times over. To buy the stock in such corporations (or else lend to them) is consequently to fund the killing of our planet. It’s to fund an enormous crime, and should be treated as such. To invest in these companies should be treated as a massive crime.

The only people who will suffer from outlawing the purchase of stock in, and lending to, fossil-fuel extractors, are individuals who are already invested in those corporations. Since we’ve already got vastly excessive known reserves of fossil fuels, discovering yet more such reserves is nothing else than the biggest imaginable crime against all future-existing people, who can’t defend themselves against these activities that are being done today. Only our government, today, can possibly protect future people, and it will be to blame if it fails to do so. The single most effective way it can do this, its supreme obligation, is to criminalize the purchase of stock in fossil-fuels extractors, and to bar loans to them. Here’s why (and please follow this closely now):

The IMF says that “To limit the increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius — the more conservative of the goals agreed to by governments at the 2015 climate change talks in Paris — more than two-thirds of current known reserves, let alone those yet to be discovered (see Table 1), must remain in the ground (IEA 2012).” Obviously, then, what the oil and gas and coal companies are doing by continuing exploration is utterly idiotic from an economic standpoint — it’s adding yet more to what already are called “unburnable reserves.” Thus, waiting yet longer for a technological breakthrough, such as fossil-fuels corporations have always promised will happen but nobody has ever actually delivered (and such as is exemplified here), is doomed, because if and when such a real breakthrough would occur, we’d already be too late, and the uncontrollably spiraling and accelerating feedback-loops would already be out of control even if they weren’t uncontrollable back then. We’d simply be racing, then, to catch up with — and to get ahead of — an even faster rise in global temperatures than existed at that previous time. Things get exponentially worse with each and every year of delay. Consequently, something sudden, sharp, and decisive, must happen immediately, and it can happen only by a fundamental change becoming instituted in our laws, not in our technology. The solution, if  it comes, will come from government, and not even possibly come from industry (technological breakthroughs). For governments to instead wait, and to hope for a “technological breakthrough,” is simply for our planet to die. It’s to doom this planet. It’s to abandon the government’s obligation to the future (its supreme obligation). The reason why is that what’s difficult to achieve now (preventing the murder of our planet), will soon be impossible to achieve.

On 13 November 2019, the International Energy Agency reported that “the momentum behind clean energy is insufficient to offset the effects of an expanding global economy and growing population,” and “The world urgently needs to put a laser-like focus on bringing down global emissions. This calls for a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else who is committed to tackling climate change.” Obviously, we are all heading the world straight to catastrophe. Drastic action is needed, and it must happen now — not in some indefinite future. But the IEA was wrong to endorse “calls for a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else,” which is the gradual approach, which is doomed to fail. And it also requires agreement, which might not come, and compromises, which might make the result ineffective.

I have reached out to Carbon Tracker, the organization that encourages investors to disinvest from fossil fuels. Their leader, Mark Campanale, declined my request for them to endorse my proposal. He endorses instead “a new fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty supported by movements calling to leave fossil fuels in the ground.” When I responded that it’s vastly more difficult, for states (individual governments) to mutually pass, into their respective nation’s laws, a treaty amongst themselves (since it requires unanimity amongst all of them instituting into each one of their legal systems exactly that same law), than it is for any state ON ITS OWN to institute a law (such as I propose), he still wasn’t interested. I asked him why he wasn’t. He said “I’ve chosen a different strategy for my organization.” I answered: “All that I am seeking from you is an ENDORSEMENT. I am not asking you to change your ‘strategy’ (even if you really ought to ADD this new strategy to your existing one).” He replied simply by terminating communication with me and saying, without explanation, “We don’t always agree.”

Here is that “treaty supported by movements calling to leave fossil fuels in the ground”. As you can see there, it was posted in 2012, and as of now (nine years later) it has been signed by 8 individuals, no nations (and not even by any organizations). Mark Campanale isn’t among these 8.

Carbon Tracker is secretive of the identities, and size of donations, of its donors, but its website does make clear that it’s a UK organization that has designed itself so as to be as beneficial for tax-write-offs to U.S. billionaire donors as possible, and “Our UK organisation has an Equivalency Determination (‘ED’) which allows it to be recognised by the IRS as a 501(c)3 US Public Charity.  We have held the ED since February 2016 and is maintained annually by NGO Source on behalf of our major US donors.” In short: it’s part of the U.S.-led team of billionaires. Perhaps this organization’s actual function is that (since the nations that have nationalized their fossil fuels haven’t yet been able to be taken over as outright colonies or vassal-states controlled by the U.S.-led group) the residents inside those outside countries will be paying the price (in reduced Government-services, etc.) from a gradual transition to a ‘reduced carbon’ world. (Everybody but those billionaires will be paying the price.) This mythical aim, of a ‘reduced-carbon’ ‘transition’, would then be a veiled means of gradually impoverishing the residents in those nations, until, ultimately, those people there will support a coup, which will place U.S.-and-allied billionaires in charge of their Government (such as happened in Ukraine in 2014). This appears to be their policy regarding Venezuela, Iran, and several other countries. If it is additionally influencing the ‘transition to a low-carbon economy’, then it’s actually blocking the needed change in this case (which isn’t, at all, change that’s of the gradual type, but is, instead, necessarily decisive, and sudden, if it is to happen at all). However, Carbon Tracker is hardly unique in being controlled by U.S.-and-allied billionaires, and there are, also, many other ways to employ the gradual approach — an approach which is doomed to fail on this matter. A few other of these delaying-tactics will also be discussed here.

Some environmental organizations recommend instead improving labeling laws and informing consumers on how they can cut their energy-usages (such as here), but even if that works, such changes, in consumers’ behaviors, are no more effective against climate-change than would be their using buckets to lower the ocean-level in order to prevent it from overflowing and flooding the land. What’s actually needed is a huge jolt to the system itself, immediately. Only systemic thinking can solve such a problem.

Making such a change — outlawing the purchase of stock in, and prohibiting loans to, fossil-fuel extractors — would impact enormously the stock-prices of all fossil fuels corporations throughout the world, even if it’s done only in this country. It would quickly force all of the fossil-fuel extractors to eliminate their exploration teams and to increase their dividend payouts, just in order to be able to be “the last man standing” when they do all go out of business — which then would occur fairly soon. Also: it would cause non-fossil-energy stock-prices to soar, and this influx of cash into renewable-energy investing would cause their R&D also to soar, which would increasingly reduce costs of the energy they supply. It would transform the world, fairly quickly, and very systematically. And all of this would happen without taxpayers needing to pay tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars, or for governments to sign onto any new treaties. And if additional nations copy that first one, then the crash in market-values of all fossil-fuels corporations will be even faster, and even steeper.

As regards existing bonds and other debt-obligations from fossil-fuels extractors, each such corporation would need to establish its own policies regarding whether or not, and if so then how, to honor those obligations, since there would no longer be a market for them. Ending the market would not be equivalent to ending the obligations. The law would nullify the obligations, but the corporation’s opting to fulfill those obligations wouldn’t be illegal — it would merely be optional.

This would be taking from individuals who have been investing in what the overwhelming majority of experts on global warming say are investments in a massive crime against future generations, and we are now in an emergency situation, which is more than merely a national emergency, a global one, so that such governmental action would not be merely advisable but urgently necessary and 100% in accord with the public welfare and also in accord with improving distributive justice.

The only way possible in order to avoid getting into the uncontrollable feedback-cycles (feedback-loops) that would set this planet racing toward becoming another Mars is to quickly bring a virtual end to the burning of fossil fuels. That can happen only  if fossil fuels become uneconomic. But common methods proposed for doing that, such as by imposing carbon taxes, would hit consumers directly (by adding a tax to what they buy), and thereby turn consumers into advocates for the fossil-fuel industries (advocates on the fossil-fuels-companies’ side, favoring elimination of that tax upon their products). In this key respect, such proposals are counterproductive, because they dis-incentivize the public to support opposition to fossil-fuel extraction. Such proposals are therefore politically unacceptable, especially in a democracy, where consumers have powerful political voice at the ballot-box. Any carbon tax would also anger the consuming public against environmentalists. Turning consumers into friends of the fossil-fuels extractors would be bad. What I am proposing is not like that, at all. Investors are a much smaller number of voters than are consumers. Everyone is a consumer, but only a relatively tiny number of people are specifically fossil-fuel investors. To terminate the freedom those investors have to sell their stock, by making illegal for anyone to buy  that stock, is the most practicable way to prevent global burnout (if it still can be prevented). This needs to be done right now.

How was slavery ended in the United States? It became illegal for anyone to own slaves — and the way that this was done is that it became illegal for anyone to buy a slave. The same needs to be done now in order to (possibly) avoid runaway global heat-up.

Once it’s done, those firms will go out of business. (First, these firms will increase their dividend-payouts to their stockholders while they lay off their explorers, but then they’ll cut their other costs, and then they’ll fold. But the objective isn’t that; it’s to make their products uneconomic to produce, market, and sell; and this will do that, even before all of those firms have become eliminated.) All of today’s existing economies-of-scale in the fossil-fuels-producing-and-marketing industries will then be gone, and will become replaced by new economies-of-scale that will rise sharply in non-carbon energy, as R&D there will be soaring, while the fossil-fuels producers fade out and fade away.

This is the only realistically possible way to avoid global burnout. It must be done. And even some top executives in fossil-fuels extractors harbor personal hopes that it will be done. For example:

Shell CEO Says Governments, Not Firms, Are Failing on Climate Change

On Monday, 14 October 2019, Reuters headlined “Exclusive: No choice but to invest in oil, Shell CEO says” and reported:

Ben van Beurden expressed concern that some investors could ditch Shell, acknowledging that shares in the company were trading at a discount partly due to “societal risk”.
“I am afraid of that, to be honest,” he said.
“But I don’t think they will flee for the justified concern of stranded assets ... (It is) the continued pressure on our sector, in some cases to the point of demonisation, that scares asset managers.”
“It is not at a scale that the alarm bells are ringing, but it is an unhealthy trend.”
Van Beurden put the onus for achieving a transformation to low-carbon economies on governments.

He didn’t suggest any specific policies which governments should take, but he did say “that not enough progress had been made to reach the Paris climate goal of limiting global warming to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.” Furthermore:

Delaying implementation of the right climate policies could result in “knee-jerk” political responses that might be very disruptive to society, he said. “Let the air out of the balloon as soon as you can before the balloon actually bursts,” van Beurden said.

He is, in a sense, trapped, as the head of one of the world’s largest fossil-fuel extractors. He doesn’t want to be “demonised,” but he is professionally answering to — and obligated to serve — investors who are still profiting from destroying the world. Though he acknowledges that consumers cannot initiate the necessary policy-change, and that investors aren’t yet; and though he doesn’t want government to do anything which “might be very disruptive to society,” he does want governments to “Let the air out of the balloon as soon as you can before the balloon actually bursts,” and he’s therefore contemplating — and is even advising — that governments must do the job now, and not wait around any longer to take the necessary decisive action.

Here’s what that type of governmental action would be (and unlike the Paris Climate Agreement, it doesn’t require an international consensus — which doesn’t actually exist among the nations).

Why is this the ONLY way? No other proposals can even possibly work:

The concept of “bridge fuels,” such as methane as being a substitute for petroleum, is a propaganda device (another delaying-tactic) by the fossil-fuels industry and its agents, in order to slow the decline of those industries. For example, on 16 November 2019, Oil Price Dot Com headlined “Why Banning Fossil Fuel Investment Is A Huge Mistake”, and Cyril Widdershoven, a long-time writer for and consultant to fossil-fuel corporations, argued against an effort by the European Investment Bank to “put more pressure on all parties to phase out gas, oil and coal projects.” Widdershoven’s argument is that “experts seem to agree that the best way to target lower CO2 emissions in the EU is to substitute oil and coal power generation in Eastern Europe with natural gas.” He says, “Even in the most optimistic projections, renewable energy options, such as wind or solar, are not going to be able to counter the need for power generation capacity. If the EIB blocks a soft energy transition via natural gas, the Paris Agreement will almost certainly fail.”

The unstated “experts” that Widdershoven cited are, like himself, hirees of the fossil-fuels industries. Furthermore, this go-slow approach is already recognized by the IMF and IEA to be doomed to fail at avoiding global burn-out.

Furthermore — and this is perhaps the most important fact of all — government-support has largely been responsible for the success of fossil-fuel corporations (especially now for natural gas), and, if fully replaced by government-support going instead to non-fossil-fuel corporations, there will then be a skyrocketing increase in R&D in those non-fossil-fuel technologies, which skyrocketing R&D, there, is desperately needed, if any realistic hope is to exist, at all, of avoiding global burn-out.

On 17 December 2019, I had sent this argument (emailed, under the “Subject” line of “Here is the way to avoid happening again what just happened in Madrid:”) to the:

Dear EU Climate Commissioners:
Re:
He [Timmermans] said right wing countries like Canada, the USA and Brazil were preventing the EU from reiterating the Paris Agreement requirements in the COP conclusions.

What is needed is a method which (unlike international agreement on carbon-trading credits) won’trequire agreement among nations, which are too corrupt to take the necessary collective action to avert catastrophe. Here’s the solution which could be implemented by, say, the EU, or even just by Germany, or just by India, or just by China, alone, if not by any of the far-right countries (such as U.S. and Brazil), which action, taken by any one of them, would create the necessary cascading-effect among all nations, that could transform the world and perhaps save the future (and please do follow closely the argument here, and click onto any link here wherever you might have any questions, because this is a truly new idea, and every part of it is fully documented here):

—

Then came the argument that I’ve just presented. On 8 April 2020, I received back a reply that was full of the usual platitudes and said “Europe will continue to lead the global low-carbon transition we have agreed. I hope on your continued support for reaching the common climate objectives.”

I also emailed the entire argument to all of the lawyers on the staffs of all of the billionaires-funded ‘nonprofits’ or ‘charities’ that are active supposedly against global warming, and not a single one of those persons even responded, at all.

I also contacted both of my U.S. Senators and communicated with the Senator’s specialist staffer on environmental issues. One of them never replied, but the other said that outlawing purchases of investments in something might be “unconstitutional.” I asked how that could even possibly true, because narcotic drugs are illegal to purchase, and many other types of purchases also are illegal in America. The staffer never replied.

In other words: the entire ‘movement’ against global warming is controlled by the same tiny fraction of the global population who own the stocks and bonds that are invested in and control the fossil-fuels-extraction corporations, the same group of people who donate most of the money to the political campaigns of America’s successful politicians.

The entire ‘movement’ against global warming is fraudulent. It’s not ONLY the Paris Climate Agreement that’s fraudulent.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.