BY Brian Berletic

The early August visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took place amid heavy protests from Beijing. The visit was a blatant violation of Washington’s bilateral agreement with Beijing regarding the “One China” policy as well as a violation of international law regarding political independence and territorial integrity.

As was pointed out by many analysts, US provocations over Taiwan mirror a similar pattern by Washington used to cross Moscow’s “red lines” regarding Ukraine, done deliberately to threaten Moscow’s national security concerns. These provocations eventually resulted in now ongoing Russian military operations in neighboring Ukraine. A similar conflict could potentially stem from ongoing US provocations over Taiwan.

China’s Other Military Means

In addition to very public protests by Beijing, Chinese military forces followed Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan with large-scale exercises, crossing the Taiwan Strait median line and into Taiwan’s self-declared “air defense identification zone” (ADIZ). Initially the US and its allies along with the Western media dismissed these exercises as a “tantrum” thrown by a highly displeased Beijing. However, shortly after, US representatives and the Western media began discussing a “new normal” being incrementally established by Beijing.

Articles like CNN’s, “’New normal’ across the Taiwan Strait as China threat looms ever closer,” would note:

China is attempting to establish a “new normal” across the Taiwan Strait, eroding self-ruled Taiwan’s territorial control and increasing the threat of a strike with each military sortie, officials and analysts say.

Chinese military exercises also included firing missiles over Taiwan. The BBC in its article, “US ‘must contest’ Chinese missiles over Taiwan, says admiral,” would note:

“It’s very important that we contest this type of thing. I know that the gorilla in the room is launching missiles over Taiwan,” Vice Admiral Thomas told reporters in Singapore. “It’s irresponsible to launch missiles over Taiwan into international waters.

“If you don’t challenge it… all of a sudden it can become just like the islands in the South China Sea [that] have now become military outposts. They now are full functioning military outposts that have missiles on them, large runways, hangers, radars, listening posts.”

US Vice Admiral Thomas did not suggest any measures the US could use to “contest” Chinese military activity around and now over Taiwan, and in actuality, there is little the US could do in order to do so.

US Provocations Help Beijing Justify “New Normal”

Lacking any sort of ability to “contest” Chinese military activity around Taiwan, the US appears instead committed to further provocations. Following Speaker Pelosi’s early August visit to the island, a group of US Congressmembers likewise touched down in Taiwan in mid-August, the BBC would report.

Just as Speaker Pelosi’s visit allowed Beijing to justify military exercises around and over Taiwan, this more recent visit by US Congressmembers gave Beijing an opportunity to stretch out and expand its military activity. The Associate Press in its article, “China announces new drills around Taiwan as a US delegation visits the island,” would note:

The exercises are intended as a “resolute response and solemn deterrent against collusion and provocation between the US and Taiwan,” the ministry said.

The United States, having provoked Russia into launching military operations in Ukraine mistakenly believing Moscow would not (and for some reason couldn’t) escalate, is now putting Beijing up to a similar test. Beijing’s strategy of increasing military control of territory around and now in the skies above Taiwan appears to be a strategy that could eventually give Beijing an advantage in this growing crisis without requiring hostilities.

In hindsight it seems reasonable to believe Washington’s best decision to preserve an advantage over Russia regarding Ukraine would have been to encourage Kiev to uphold the Minsk Agreements. Russian forces would have remained within Russian territory, the Donbass region would have remained under Kiev’s control, and the US would be able to move forward with a pro-Western administration in power in Kiev into the foreseeable future.

Instead, Washington is now watching Russia absorb Ukraine, demilitarize not only the Ukrainian armed forces but also the inventories of Ukraine’s Western sponsors. Myths of Western military superiority are blowing away with the smoke on Ukrainian battlefields, revealing destroyed Western military hardware falling far short of their previously vaunted capabilities.

A very similar process is about to take place over Taiwan and the US appears incapable of stopping it let alone reversing yet another self-destructive strategy aimed at provoking near-peer or peer military powers – a strategy that was most likely conceived long ago when the US enjoyed much greater military superiority over its adversaries.

Indeed, far from stopping or reversing, the US transited the Taiwan Strait with two of its warships. Articles like CNN’s, “Why China’s response to US warships in Taiwan Strait surprised analysts,” claims Western analysts believed Beijing would have reacted visibly and directly to the transit and were surprised when they didn’t.

The only actual surprise is that Western analysts have not identified a clearly materializing pattern where Beijing refuses to react directly to provocations like unauthorized travel to Taiwan by US representatives or the violation of Chinese territory by US warships and instead is investing further into military activity around Taiwan to de facto establish control over the island.

As Beijing pursues this strategy, establishing a new normal on its own terms around and over Taiwan, the West is openly preparing more provocations to give Beijing precisely what it needs, continued justification to do so. Canada has now announced it will join the US in provoking China over Taiwan, the Guardian reported in its article, “China warns Canada over planned Taiwan visit by parliamentarians.” It doesn’t require much imagination to foresee Beijing will use this upcoming provocation as yet another justification to expand ongoing military operations.

The US-backed administration in Taipei is also fuelling this crisis. The Guardian in another article titled, “Taiwan fires warning shots at Chinese drone,” would report:

Taiwan fired warning shots at a Chinese drone that buzzed an offshore islet shortly after President Tsai Ing-wen said she had ordered Taiwan’s military to take “strong countermeasures” against what she termed Chinese provocations.

Rather than “counter” Beijing’s military activities, such actions will only justify Beijing’s military activities further as well as possibly give Beijing the ability to take more drastic and also much more permanent measures to cement full control over territory the administration in Taipei attempts to claim as its own.

Taiwan’s Economic Weak Points Offer Beijing Other Means

For an administration that attempts to pose as “independent” of Beijing, Taiwan’s economy is heavily dependent on the rest of China, providing Beijing with the ability to easily enhance its military superiority over and operations against separatist elements in Taipei through economic measures.

According to Harvard University’s Atlas of Economic Complexity, the Chinese mainland represented 22.92% of all the island’s imports followed by Japan at 16.97%. Over 49% of Taiwan’s total exports are shipped to the rest of China with the US following as the second largest export market at 12.65%.

Gradual reunification between Taiwan and the rest of China has already been taking place for many years, primarily through economic integration. Trade, tourism, and investment from the rest of China keeps Taiwan’s economy afloat. When the flow of any of these factors is cut it creates major disruptions.

CNN in their article, “China flexes military muscles, then targets Taiwan’s citrus fruits,” attempts to connect August bans on agricultural goods from Taiwan by the mainland to the ongoing tensions created by visits by US representatives. Regardless of whether there is a connection, the article helps illustrate just how disruptive it is to Taiwan’s economy when Beijing adopts policies impacting Taiwan’s exports. Other articles from across the Western media like the New York Times’, “How China Could Choke Taiwan,” discuss the impact of a Chinese military blockage of Taiwan from all trade. However, similar results could be achieved simply by stopping all trade to and from Taiwan by the rest of China alone.

Such disruptions in trade between Taiwan and the rest of China serve as warnings of just how detached from reality Taiwan “independence” really is from reality and how divergent it is from Taiwan’s actual best interests. They also demonstrate the power the mainland has over Taiwan should the administration in Taipei continue working with foreign interests to divide and destabilize China.

Taiwan’s Vulnerability Reveals the Malice of its “Allies”

It is in the economic realm that Taiwan’s Western backers reveal their lack of true commitment and vision for Taiwanese “independence.” It is a shortsighted and highly self-destructive policy that would lay waste to Taiwan’s economy and population in ways much worse than Ukraine suffered from 2014 onward when the US-installed client regime in Kiev irrationally cut many essential economic ties with Russia at the cost of Ukraine’s economic viability.

Why then would Washington and others across the West encourage Taiwan to pursue separatism and eagerly provoke Beijing, including now through military provocations? Taiwan is being encouraged to fight a war it cannot possibly win against the rest of China it cannot economically survive without. The answer is simply that the US and its allies do not care about Taiwan or its future. It is being cynically used to advance US foreign policy objectives in terms of encircling, containing, dividing, and destroying China. While mainland China will likely prevail, Taiwan which is part of China will suffer tremendously in the event of even a short-term conflict.

Beijing, understanding this fully, is attempting to extend control over Taiwan militarily without waging war, incrementally expanding military activities around Taiwan with each provocation provided to it from the US and its allies. Beijing is also fully prepared for a military confrontation either with armed forces in Taiwan or against an attempted intervention by foreign powers like the United States.

The fact that Taiwan is so vulnerable militarily and economically yet is still encouraged to adopt provocative policies toward Beijing demonstrates just how little Washington cares about Taiwan and its future. The idea of Washington intervening to “defend” Taiwan is highly unrealistic. “Defending” Taiwan would only be used as a pretext for the US to wage war against China or, what is much more likely, attempt to disrupt Chinese commercial shipping worldwide.

Washington, according to the US State Department’s official website, acknowledges Beijing’s stance that there is only one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. Washington’s goal is to divide and destroy all of China – including Taiwan.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

READ MORE:

https://journal-neo.org/2022/09/02/us-provocations-over-taiwan-and-beijing-s-steady-remedy/

READ FROM TOP.

SEE ALSO:

... and fools seldom differ..."

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW......................

BY

RISHIKA PARDIKAR

US and EU officials recently suggested targeting livestock and agriculture in Asia and Africa to reduce methane emissions. Far more emissions, however, come from oil and gas production in the US — but reducing them requires taking on fossil fuel companies.

At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow last year, President Joe Biden called methane “one of the most potent greenhouse gasses” and said that the United States and Europe would work collectively to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Since then, more than a hundred countries worldwide have signed on to the Global Methane Pledge.

To help meet that pledge, US and European officials at a side event on the matter at a United Nations climate change conference in Bonn, Germany last month targeted one culprit in particular: the agriculture and livestock sector, particularly in African and Asian countries. That’s because manure, certain cultivation techniques, and gastroenteric releases account for a significant portion of methane emissions.

But these officials failed to address one of the largest and easy-to-fix sources of methane: emissions from the oil and gas sector, both from production of oil and gas as well as leaks across the supply chain.

Leaks, in fact, are responsible for 60 percent of oil and gas methane emissions. Because plugging these leaks would result in more product for oil and gas companies, the International Energy Agency (IEA), an autonomous intergovernmental organization, has said that nearly half of all fossil fuel methane emissions “could be avoided with measures that would have no net cost,” and that reducing oil and gas–derived methane is “amongst the lowest of low-hanging fruit for mitigating climate change.”

What’s more, a new congressional investigation has found that oil and gas companies have likely been underreporting the amount of methane leaking from much of their US-based operations. And while the Supreme Court’s recent West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling limited the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse emissions, legal experts say it likely doesn’t impede a proposed plan at the agency to address oil and gas methane emissions on a wide scale for the first time.

In response to questions from the Lever about addressing fossil fuel leaks, speakers at the Bonn conference floundered, vaguely stating that the oil and gas sector is a “sticky issue” and that there are “some barriers” to curbing the sector’s methane emissions.

But experts disagree — arguing that curbing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, especially actions like plugging leaks, is easily achievable. Even reports by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) clearly state that oil and gas is “the only sector for which the majority of emissions can be reduced in a cost-effective manner with technologies that exist today.”

While livestock and farming is also a significant driver of methane emissions, addressing these sources is likely less cost-effective, since low-carbon agricultural techniques are still in the development phase. In contrast, technologies designed to address oil and gas–derived methane emissions already exist — such as the International Methane Emissions Observatory that was launched by the UNEP with support from the European Union in October 2021.

Plus, as some observers point out, tackling oil and gas–related methane emissions in developed countries is a matter of global equity.

“The burden of [climate] action should not be unequally distributed.” said Arvind Ravikumar, professor in Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas. “It makes practical sense that developed countries with high oil and gas production tackle their methane emissions first, while methane mitigation solutions for other sectors become more affordable.”

Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have acknowledged that methane is responsible for at least a quarter of the warming we are seeing today. Other reports show that cutting methane by 45 percent this decade would avoid warming of 0.3 degrees Celsius by the 2040s.

Such reductions would also prevent 255,000 premature deaths, 775,000 asthma-related hospital visits, 73 billion hours of lost labor from extreme heat, and 26 million tons of crop losses every year.

“Because methane is a short-lived pollutant, if you reduce methane now, you will see benefits right now, as opposed to carbon dioxide where there are prolonged effects from accumulated carbon dioxide,” said Vaishali Naik, scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and lead author of a chapter on “Short-lived Climate Forcers” in the seminal IPCC report on climate change published late last year. “This makes methane very attractive for addressing climate change and near-term warming, especially.”

Methane is also a particularly potent greenhouse gas, with a warming potential thirty-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

No wonder, then, that 117 countries have so far signed on to the Global Methane Pledge, committing to “work together in order to collectively reduce global anthropogenic methane emissions across all sectors by at least 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030.” But despite such bold words, the pledge lacks specifics in terms of how each of the countries plan to meet the targets by 2030.

“The pledge is important but it can be effective only if it includes guidelines and specificity in terms of commitments,” said Collin Rees, senior campaigner at Oil Change International.

The vaguely worded methane pledge stands in contrast to other undertakings like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA), an international coalition of governments that touts specific actions like members committing to “end new concessions, licensing or leasing rounds and to set a Paris-aligned date for ending oil and gas production.” The United States is not a member of BOGA.

The fact that the Biden administration is currently opening up public lands to new oil and gas drilling shows how the methane pledge lacks binding obligations. “The pledge is clearly not as stringent as it needs to be if the US is pouring more money into new oil and gas infrastructure,” said Rees. “So the danger is that the pledge can actually become a distraction.”

Joeri Rogelj, director of research at London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and a lead author of several IPCC reports, has another concern about the methane pledge: Does it go beyond what countries already committed to as part of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement?

As Rogelj noted, “It is unclear how additional the pledged emissions reductions are to overarching, national economy-wide pledges [made under the Paris Agreement].”

The specifics of reducing methane emissions is also a matter of climate justice. Emissions linked to agriculture and livestock in the developing world are routinely termed “survival emissions,” because they’re intrinsically linked to livelihood in poorer parts of the world, as opposed to the profits of large oil and gas corporations.

“Where and how greenhouse gas emissions are addressed is definitely an issue of equity,” said Naik at NOAA.

Around 80 percent of farmlands in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are managed by smallholder farmers. Methane emissions from such sources therefore stand in contrast to not just methane from the oil and gas sector, but also from industrialized forms of agriculture in developed countries in Europe and in the United States.

Fossil fuels account for 35 percent of human-derived methane emissions — although researchers have found that oil and gas methane emissions could be understated by as much as 70 percent. Oil and gas operations are responsible for 65 percent of fossil fuel–derived methane, while coal companies produce the rest.

Interestingly, a day after the climate conference in Bonn, the US State Department released a statement acknowledging that “tackling methane emissions in the oil and gas sector is critical to achieving the Global Methane Pledge target.”

The EPA already has some targeted programs designed to address methane emissions, including in the oil and gas sector. In November 2021, however, the EPA went further, proposing a rule to directly regulate methane emissions from existing sources in the oil and gas sector “nationwide for the first time,” and to strengthen existing reduction requirements for methane emissions from new, modified, and reconstructed oil and natural gas sources.

The proposed rule reflects “a clear need for robust federal regulations to ensure that the oil and gas industry moves swiftly towards large-scale reductions in methane emissions from its operations,” noted an internal report by the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology released last month. The report added that the rule could be “an essential pillar of America’s drive to achieve the targets set forth in the Global Methane Pledge.”

And while the Supreme Court’s recent West Virginia v. EPA ruling limited some of the environmental agency’s regulatory powers, Daniel Farber, law professor at the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, said there’s no reason to believe that the judgment would impact proposed methane rule because it is “a very routine exercise of EPA’s power to impose emission limitations on pollution sources.”

According to Farber, the Supreme Court ruling is intended to curb the EPA’s regulation of carbon dioxide from power plants, which is different from regular EPA regulations. “In the court’s view, instead of regulating emissions at individual sources, EPA was asserting authority to control what energy sources would be used on the US electricity grid,” said Farber. “The methane regulations, on the other hand, are much closer to business as usual for EPA.”

A spokesperson for the EPA declined to weigh in on whether the proposed rule would be impacted by the West Virginia ruling. They noted, however, that the agency is also working on a supplemental proposal on the matter. “The supplemental proposal is an important step in developing a final rule, which we expect to finalize within the next year,” they explained.

Addressing oil and gas–related methane emissions is also an environmental justice issue within the United States. A recent study published in Nature found that more racially diverse neighborhoods had twice the number of oil and gas wells as those that were mostly white. “Addressing methane leaks does nothing for communities who are suffering from oil and gas extraction and pipelines bursting in their backyards,” said Rees at Oil Change International.

The EPA agrees. According to the agency spokesperson, the draft oil and gas methane emissions rule “is a crucial step in fighting climate change and protecting public health in areas of oil and gas development, especially in communities located near oil and gas facilities and that all too often suffer disproportionately from pollution and poor air quality.”

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here. This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

READ MORE:

https://jacobin.com/2022/07/methane-emissions-oil-and-gas-companies-fossil-fuel-ipcc-cop26-climate-crisis

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW................