“Ecuador is planning to auction off three million of the country's 8.1 million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, Jonathan Kaiman of The Guardian reports.
The report comes as oil pollution forced neighboring Peru to declare an environmental state of emergency in its northern Amazon rainforest.”
Yeah, I mean it doesn't seem very different to me what the US and Europe has been doing through the WTO, IMF and World Bank. China is getting more powerful and it is behaving like the other empires we are dealing with. Using monetary might, and sometimes military might (more Russia's MO), to get what they want.
The difference is that European/Western Nations at least (these days) try to keep an air of ethicality since they are mostly democracies and are mostly accountable to their own ppl. Shit like wiping out entire rainforests for oil and using their military to land grab from their neighbors just don’t look so good in the world stage and to their own populace. China though? They don’t give a sh!t and they don’t really worry about their ppl voting them out.
I get what you mean, but I think that's mostly a distinction without difference. You are right that western countries try, and sometimes succeed, in portraying an air of ethicality. (I am not tuned into Chinese sphere of influence, I suspect they are trying to do the same for the parts where they are stranger, but can't tell whether they are succeeding).
But whether Exxon, BP, Shell, Nestle, Unilever are doing the destruction with the de-facto backing of the American and European governments, or Chinese companies are doing it with a more transparent connection between the company and the government seems at best secondary.
They do similar things here, all over Africa. Get countries into loan agreements they are never realistically going to be able to pay back, and then claim land and/or part of the infrastructure in those places once the countries inevitably default on the loans. And then go to town, regardless of the long-term damage it does to the land.
__________________ Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.
There is a huge difference though. Chinese companies need not follow any kind of international law or ethical/environmental standards and can pretty much act without restraint.
Here is an example of the type of environmental damage Chinese companies are willing to do with little/no repercussion (at least I didn’t hear any news about specific Chinese companies being penalized) from their own governments:
These type of actions would destroy even the largest Western companies if they did this even by accident. These Chinese companies do this on purpose. And not only that, their own government joined them in their coral reef destruction by building artificial islands on the very reefs they are wiping out.
That’s what awaits Ecuador and a third of its Rainforest.
That is awful, but I don't think you are correct in your assessment that US companies are being punished for similar. European industrial fishing uses trawl fishing all over the world, destroying vast swaths of coral. Not just in front of their own coasts but in many other places as well. There's some good developments recently, trying to protect more of course, but immense damage is still being done and has historically been done by Western nations. Additionally most of the protectionism is focussed on their home turf, while the damage to the environment is outsourced to other nations (including China).
And that doesn't go into things like the privatization of water, or the immense damage of Avocado to the water supply or the harm that Palm Oil and Coconut growing to the world's rainforests is done, mainly in the service of Western societies.
This isn’t bottom trawling, though. They are using propellers to literally tear apart the coral reefs. Intentional destruction. 40 square MILES of intentional coral reef destruction within a short period of time that is not penalized or regulated by their own government.
From what I’m seeing (correct me if I’m wrong, of course) this is the equivalent of driving a car over sand dunes vs running a bulldozer over to flatten the entire surface. There is damage on both sides but one is far worse than the other.
And they do this with impunity. And impunity, I feel, is the great differentiator here.
Yeah, I guess from my point of view the West gets away with just as much with impunity as well, but I don't want to downplay China's destruction of the environment, it is on a grand scale. I'd much rather it all got punished and stopped.
I just want to put China in focus because they have the potential to do the most damage and has the least potential to be stopped at the moment (w/c can change if more and more attention is brought to their actions in the world stage).
And this one act is huge. And huge things need to be brought into our attention.
They also screw over the locals by promising they'll have jobs in whatever mining operation they've purchased in Africa, only to build a town and import Chinese labor.
When all is said and done, they leave a wasteland behind and the local economy got little to nothing in return. Only the top African leaders who were paid off.
We all lose in the end considering how much CO2 the Amazon takes out. Humanity really deserves whatever it gets when the world is too polluted for us to live in. Hopeless
__________________ "Happiness is a lie. Life is horror. The light is always dying all across the universe. The last star will flicker out someday, when it does, all that remains is shadow. And I will be its king!"'-Amahl Farouk
No, it's not. It's the opposite of capitalism because it is not the interactions of two private entities. It's the interactions and corruption of two government entities.
Capitalism would be if I, completely independent of the US and Chad (the country), found some villagers that were sitting on some rare earth metals and I bought their land for $5,000 an acre but made $2 billion from the next 5 years of mining operations. The villagers might be upset that they did not get a fair price for their land but if I made the agreement directly with them, that's capitalism.
Then a Nation-State does the same thing as I did, that's the opposite of capitalism. It immediately ceases to be capitalism when these actions are taken by a nation. Even if they operate through proxies. Those agents of the CCPs are CCP simulacrums.
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Apr 16th, 2020 04:49 AM
