The Real Cause For The War on Mining Exposed! China’s FDIs Includes Huge Mining Investments; The War on Mining Has Ended!

Here is a juicy insight into the roots of the “war on mining”.

Once again from Mr. Duterte’s keynote address at the Philippines-China Trade and Investment Forum (Philstar October 21)

You know, I have yet to hear Americans going to my office for the 23 years that I’ve been mayor,expressing good intentions and about going to business that would help the food and everything. They go there not really for the basics, importation of fruits and everything just what China is doing.

But they go for the mining and all of these things that are really very detrimental to your country. And that is why I am leaving Gina Lopez on her own because there are really minings owned by the Americans or in consortium with Americans and Filipinos who are wreaking havoc on our planet earth.

To condense as deductive logic: Americans didn’t consort with or genuflect on Mr. Duterte, hence they are evil. Since Americans (who are evil) are into domestic mining, thus, mining is evil!

One just can’t help but observe of the multitude of egregious fallacies (ad hominem, reduction ad absurdum, poisoning the well, red herring, composition and etc…) engaged here by the leadership to condemn Americans, which unfortunately, eventually spilled over into the hapless mining industry.

Nota Bene: This is NOT to defend the Americans, but to reveal the source of the war on mines.

To repeat the quote: “they go for the mining and all of these things that are really very detrimental to your country… I am leaving Gina Lopez on her own because there are really minings owned by the Americans or in consortium with Americans and Filipinos who are wreaking havoc on our planet earth”

So by Mr. Duterte’s logic, it has not been that mining is inherently evil or “detrimental” to the country. Instead, since the Americans are evil, and since they are engaged in mining, hence mining by Americans must be stopped.

The crux of which, mining is a RACE or NATIONALITY issue.

So THE environment has served as nothing more than a ploy to EXPEL Americans out of the industry.  We can, therefore, deduce that the war on mining has NOT been about the protection of the environment, but about Mr. Duterte’s VITRIOL or HOSTILITY against AMERICANS. In short, it is about the compulsive obsessive politics of REPRISAL.

The audience for this speech matters. Remember, Mr. Duterte presented this argument as part of his plea for investments from Mainland CHINESE investors and politicians!

Yesterday, I talked about China’s FDIs.

And if you noticed the quotes from Mr. Mark Esposito and Mr. Terence Tse and from the legal industry’s Ms.Catherine Elkemann and Prof. Oliver C. Ruppel, China’s FDIs have initially been concentrated on the extractive industry, or the mining industry.

China’s FDI has flowed into in Africa with mining as key recipient whether in 2009* or 2013**

*World Economic Forum What China’s economic shift means for Africa March 11, 2016

**World Resources Institute Where Are Chinese Investments in Africa Headed? May 15, 2014

It’s not just in Africa. Mining has played a significant role in China’s Outbound M&A investment globally. As explained by the KPMG (China Outlook 2015 p.11):

 

As China shifts the emphasis of its economic growth model from ‘quantity growth’ to ‘quality development’, Chinese companies are investing in ‘new’ sectors beyond resource extraction. These sectors include high technology, agriculture and food, real estate, and services. Of the top 10 outbound merger and acquisition (M&A) deals, there was only one large mining deal in 2014, while five years ago in 2010, there were six oil and gas deals and one mining deal.

Despite the reduction of ‘quantity growth’ to ‘quality development’, mining and oil remain one of the top investments for the Chinese.

While the mainstream reads or interprets the shift in investment as mainly trend change to quality, this may partly be the case but there may be more to it.

In my humble opinion, the collapse in commodity prices has signified as the PRINCIPAL reason for why Chinese investments in mining and oil have diminished. Because there has been less demand for commodities, given China’s present economic conditions, investments declined too. But down does not entail zero. And Chinese investors appear to be positioning for the future.

Back to the Philippines.

Prior to the controversial speech, Mr. Duterte’s seeming hatchet (wo)man against the Americans in the field of mining, Ms. Gina Lopez declared, the other week, that new mining activities will be stopped.

From Reuters/Interaksyon/MSN (Gina Lopez wants to ban new mines as clampdown deepens, October 15)

Environment Secretary Regina Lopez wants to prolong a ban on new mines and will review all environmental permits previously granted to the minerals industry, ramping up a campaign to clamp down on damage from the sector.

Miners criticized the proposals made on Friday by Lopez, saying she seemed determined to put the "industry to sleep."

The Philippines is the world's top nickel ore supplier and an environmental audit that has halted a quarter of its 41 mines, and the risk that 20 more maybe shuttered, has spurred a rally in global nickel prices.

"I want to put a moratorium on any new mining," Lopez told a media briefing.

However, part of the $24 billion bonanzas brought home by Mr. Duterte from China includes mining investments!

From Bloomberg: (China Visit Helps Duterte Reap Funding Deals Worth $24 Billion October 21, 2016)

China will provide $9 billion in soft loans, including a $3 billion credit line with the Bank of China, while economic deals including investments would yield $15 billion, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez told reporters in Beijing on Friday. Preliminary agreements in railways, ports, energy and mining worth $11.2 billion were signed between Philippine and Chinese firms.

So Ms. Lopez would have to revise or requalify her claims to perhaps:  “The prolonged ban on new mines will be imposed STRICTLY to non-mainland Chinese investors.”

But for mainland Chinese investors…wink, wink, wink…it IS party time!!!

Or, Ms. Lopez would have to say goodbye to her (fleeting) post.

Sorry.

Like FVR, Ms. Lopez appears to have been used as convenient tools for the ochlocratic dictatorship propaganda agenda.

Again, from Mr. Duterte’s perspective, the politics of mining has hardly been about the environment, but about anti-Americanism.

So this means that to get their projects back on stream, domestic mining should or must invite mainland Chinese investors as partners!

The cat is out of the bag!

The war on mining has ended!

Quote of the Day: The Global Warming Theory has Failed. Money, Politics and Ideology have Replaced Science

In celebration of Earth Day, the Weather Channel founder John Coleman vented: (source USA Today/ht zero hedge)

The environmentalists, bureaucrats and politicians who make up the U.N.’s climate panel recruit scientists to research the climate issue. And they place only those who will produce the desired results. Money, politics and ideology have replaced science.

U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres has called for a “centralized transformation” that is “going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different” to combat the alleged global warming threat. How many Americans are looking forward to the U.N. transforming their lives?

Another U.N. official has admitted that the U.N. seeks to “redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” The former head of the U.N. climate panel also recently declared that global warming “is my religion.”

When all the scare talk is pushed aside, it is the science that should be the basis for the debate. And the hard cold truth is that the basic theory has failed. Many notable scientists reject man-made global warming fears. And several of them, including a Nobel Prize winner, are in the new Climate Hustle movie. The film is an informative and even humorous new feature length movie that is the ultimate answer to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It will be shown one day only in theaters nationwide on May 2.

As a skeptic of man-made global warming, I love our environment as much as anyone. I share the deepest commitment to protecting our planet for our children and grandchildren. However, I desperately want to get politics out of the climate debate. The Paris climate agreement is all about empowering the U.N. and has nothing to do with the climate.

Quote of the Day: The Worst Environmental Calamity Is The Absence of Capitalism

Filth, hunger, short life expectancy, illiteracy, subjugation of women, sanguinary conflicts over scarce resources – these horrors are not the recent consequences of climate change. They are the ages-old consequences of persistent and widespread poverty. This poverty and its accompanying miseries were eliminated only when and only where people embraced the very economic system that so many of today’s environmentalists wish either to abolish outright or to jeopardize with unprecedented government-fashioned fetters: entrepreneurial capitalism.

This excerpt, an expose and rebuff of media's false attribution (cause and effect) of society's ills on the environment, was extracted from Prof Don Boudreaux's post at his blog Cafe Hayek.

Volkswagen scandal: Unintended Consequence from Climate Change Politics

Prolific science author Matt Ridley explains why the Volkswagen scandal represents the unintended consequence from the politicization of Europe's auto industry due to climate change politics. [bold mine]

The Volkswagen testing scandal exposes rotten corruption at the core of regulation. Far from ushering in a brave new world of cleaner air, the technologies adopted by European car makers, driven by policy makers in Brussels, have been killing thousands of people a year through an obsession with lowering emissions of harmless carbon dioxide, at the expense of creating higher emissions of harmful nitrogen oxides. 

There is a lesson here that goes much wider than the car industry, the clean-air debate and even the regulation of business. The scandal is a symptom of the political world’s obsession with directing and commanding change, rather than encouraging it to evolve.

The great European switch to diesel engines was a top-down decision as a direct result of exaggerated fears about climate change. Convinced that the climate was about to warm rapidly, and extreme weather was about to get much worse, European governments signed the Kyoto protocol in 1997 and committed to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide in the hope that this would help. In the event, the global temperature stopped rising for 18 years, while droughts, floods and storms also showed no increase.

But in 1998, urged on by EU transport commissioner Neil Kinnock, welcomed by environment secretary John Prescott and acted on by chancellor Gordon Brown, Britain happily signed up to an EU agreement with car makers that they would cut carbon dioxide emissions by 25% over ten years. This suited German car makers, specialists in Rudolf Diesel’s engine design, because diesel engines have 15% lower CO2 emissions than petrol engines.

The EU agreement was “practically an order to switch to diesel”, says one clean-air campaigner. As subjects of Brussels, Britain obediently lowered tax on diesel cars, despite knowing that they produce four times as much nitrogen oxides as petrol, and 20 times as many particulates, both bad for human lungs.

The story is almost a textbook case of why top-down regulation can be so dangerous. It lets single-issue pressure groups set targets with no thought to collateral damage, and imposes regulation that inevitably gets captured by those with a vested interest. Regulation also often stifles innovation. We may never know just how much innovation in cleaner petrol engines was prevented.

Pls read the rest here

I can't resist a good quote when I see one...more from Mr. Ridley 

Dirigisme often does real harm. Telling people to eat less fat, based on a few dodgy studies in the 1950s that purported to find a link to heart disease, has probably worsened obesity by encouraging high-carbohydrate food. Discouraging electronic cigarettes, in the demonstrably wrong belief that they increased rather the decreased smoking, is slowing progress in the fight against smoking. Deliberately mandating that banks and government-sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) make or purchase sub-prime loans, as Bill Clinton and George Bush both did as a way of trying to raise home ownership among ethnic minorities, was a major contributor to the crash of 2008.

Equating order with control retains a powerful intuitive appeal, as the American social theorist Brink Lindsey has pointed out: ‘Despite the obvious successes of unplanned markets, despite the spectacular rise of the Internet’s decentralized order, and despite the well-publicized new science of “complexity” and its study of self-organizing systems, it is still widely assumed that the only alternative to central authority is chaos.’

That's because economic and political myths are popularized by media, political agents and their cronies.

Matt Ridley: Whatever Happened to Global Warming?

Writing at the Wall Street Journal, the prolific writer Matt Ridley asks “whatever happened to global warming?” (ht+ chart from AEI’s Mark Perry) Why has warming turned into cooling?

Here is the opening: (bold mine)

On Sept. 23 the United Nations will host a party for world leaders in New York to pledge urgent action against climate change. Yet leaders from China, India and Germany have already announced that they won't attend the summit and others are likely to follow, leaving President Obama looking a bit lonely. Could it be that they no longer regard it as an urgent threat that some time later in this century the air may get a bit warmer?

In effect, this is all that's left of the global-warming emergency the U.N. declared in its first report on the subject in 1990. The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades. Last September, between the second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from 1.3). 

Even that is likely to be too high. The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.

First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed, noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories. Now they say there is a pause (or "hiatus"), but that it doesn't after all invalidate their theories.

Alas, their explanations have made their predicament worse by implying that man-made climate change is so slow and tentative that it can be easily overwhelmed by natural variation in temperature—a possibility that they had previously all but ruled out.

Read the rest here

Saving Rhinos Through Property Rights

IN terms of preservation of endangered species, which is more effective...prohibition mandates or free markets?

Conversational economist blogger Tim Taylor shares a study in which shows how the Rhino population has been thriving mostly from property rights and from the markets compared with the alternative:

South Africa is the home for 75% of the world's population of black rhinos and  96% of the world's population of white rhinos. There must be some lessons for conservationists behind those statistics.

Michael 't Sas-Rolfes tells the story in "Saving African Rhinos: A Market Success Story," written as a case study for the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC).

The story isn't just about markets. In 1900, the white rhinoceros had been hunted almost to extinction, with about 20 remaining in a single game preserve in South Africa. The population slowly recovered a bit, and by the middle of the 20th century, there were enough to start relocating breeding groups of white rhinos to other national parks in South Africa, as well as private game ranches. In 1968, the first legal hunt of a white rhino was authorized.

But by the 1980s, Sas-Rolfes reports, a strange disjunction had emerged. In 1982, the Natal Parks Board had a list price for a white rhino of about 1,000 South African rands, but the average price paid by a hunter for a rhino trophy that year was 6,000 rands. Private game preserves were quick to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity. The Natal Parks Board soon began auctioning its rhinos. In 1989, it was selling rhinos for 49,000 rand, but the average price to a hunter for a rhino trophy had risen to 92,000 rand. There were obvious questions about whether this system of raising and hunting rhinos was a useful tool from a broader environmental perspective.

But property rights and markets enter the story in a different way in 1991.

Before 1991, all wildlife in South Africa was treated by law asres nullius or un-owned property. To reap the benefits of ownership from a wild animal, it had to be killed, captured, or domesticated. This created an incentive to harvest, not protect, valuable wild species—meaning that even if a game rancher paid for a rhino, the rancher could not claim compensation if the rhino left his property or was killed by a poacher. . . . Recognizing the problems associated with the res nullius maxim, the commission drafted a new piece of legislation: the Theft of Game Act of 1991. This policy allowed for private ownership of any wild animal that could be identified according to certain criteria such as a brand or ear tag. The combined effect of market pricing through auctions and the creation of stronger property rights over rhinos changed the incentives of private ranchers. It now made sense to breed rhinos rather than shoot them as soon as they were received.

For a sense of how much difference these issues of property rights and incentives can make to conservation, consider the difference in populations between black and white rhinos. Sas-Rolfes explains: "Figure 2 shows trends in white rhino numbers from 1960 until 2007. Contrast those numbers with the black rhino, which mostly lived in African countries with weak or absent wildlife market institutions such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. In 1960, about 100,000 black rhinos roamed across Africa, but by the early 1990s poachers had reduced their numbers to less than 2,500. . . . Unprotected wild rhino populations are rare to non-existent in modern Africa. The only surviving African rhinos remain either in countries with strong wildlife market institutions (such as South Africa and Namibia) or in intensively protected zones."

Read the rest here

The Foundations of Man Made Global Warming are Crumbling as More Scientists Defect

Cracks in the pedestal of anthropogenic global warming have increasingly become evident.

The former leader of global warming alarmism, James Lovelock continues to pound against the green advocacy.

Writes Austrian economist Gary North at the Tea Party Economist: (bold mine)

Green guru and geophysicist James Lovelock, considered one of the pioneering scientists of the 20th century, has officially turned his back on man-made global warming claims and the green movement’s focus on renewable energy. Lovelock conceived the Gaia theory back in the 1970s, describing the Earth’s biosphere as “an active, adaptive control system able to maintain the earth in homeostasis.”

In an April 3, 2014 BBC TV interview, Lovelock has come out swinging at his fellow environmentalists, accusing the new UN IPCC global warming report of plagiarizing his now retracted climate claims from his 2006 book ‘The Revenge of Gaia.’

“The last IPCC report is very similar to the (now retracted) statements I made in my book about 8 years ago, called The Revenge of Gaia. It’s almost as if they’ve copied it,” Lovelock told BBC Newsnight television program on April 3.

BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman noted to Lovelock during the April 3 program:  ”Sure. But you then, after publishing these apocalyptic predictions, you then retracted them.”

The newly skeptical Lovelock responded: ”Well, that’s my privilege. You see, I’m an independent scientist. I’m not funded by some government department or commercial body or anything like that. If I make a mistake, then I can go public with it. And you have to, because it is only by making mistakes that you can move ahead.”

Lovelock dismissed the entire basis for global warming concerns in his BBC television interview. “Take this climate matter everybody is thinking about. They all talk, they pass laws, they do things, as if they knew what was happening. I don’t think anybody really knows what’s happening. They just guess. And a whole group of them meet together and encourage each other’s guesses,” Lovelock explained.

I have earlier posted James Lovelock’s proselytism here and his continued bashing of the environmental politics of global warming here.

And Mr. Lovelock has now been joined by Dr. Richard Tol, a former lead author for the IPCC.

Writes the New American: (bold mine)

Professor Richard Tol, a prominent climate researcher from Sussex University and a coordinating lead author of an important chapter of the IPCC report has also drawn negative attention to climate frenzy — in more ways than one. First of all, he has embarrassed the UN/IPCC by refusing to sign the report, which he says is an “alarmist” concoction of “scare stories.” However, perhaps even more damning than his original criticism of the report are his subsequent claims that climate change mafia have retaliated against him with smears aimed at destroying his professional reputation and credibility.

But even then, politicians keep drumming up the global warming bogeyman. Nevertheless more scientists have reportedly been defecting

Again from the New American

To that end, they are ramping up the dire climate forecasts, even as more and more scientists jump off of the global warming bandwagon and leading alarmists admit there is no evidence of global warming over the past seventeen years.

However, even many of the veteran AGW activists are acknowledging that their fellow alarmists have cried wolf too often, and that the new wave of fright peddling is failing. In an April 3 Bloomberg News column entitled, “Scare Tactics Fail Climate Scientists, and Everyone Else,” AGW advocate Clive Crook asks: “Why aren't climate scientists winning the argument on climate policy? It sure isn't for lack of effort.”

“I take seriously the harms that man-made climate change might cause,” says Crook. “Action does make sense: It's a question of insuring against risk…. But this cause isn't advanced by exaggerating what is known in order to scare people into action, nor by denouncing everybody who disagrees with such proposals as evil or idiotic.”

Well the increasing revelation of the “emperor has no clothes” in the environmental politics of global warming reminds me of the great libertarian Henry Louis Mencken (From HL Mencken’s 1918 book In Defense of Women)

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants…

A politician normally prospers under democracy, not in proportion as his principles are sound and his honour incorruptible, but in proportion as she excels in the manufacture of sonorous phrases, and the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defences against them. Our politics thus degenerates into a mere pursuit of hobgoblins…

Daily Earth Hour: North Korea

Popular wisdom holds that celebrating Earth Hour has been about the preservation of the environment.

But popular wisdom doesn’t even attempt to scrutinize on the possible agenda behind Earth Hour, except to swallow hook, line and sinker about the supposed truism of Earth Hour/Earth Day advocacy.

Yet there is a living example of Earth Hour/Day. 

And that country is North Korea

Fantastic photograph from National Geographic (as of February 2014) depicting a predominantly light deprived North Korea. From National Geographic

Since the mid-1990s, when fuel stopped flowing from the defunct Soviet Union to North Korea, the famously hermetic country has descended into darkness.

Newly released photos taken from the International Space Station last month reveal just how energy bankrupt North Korea has become. The photos, and a time-lapse video of the region, show the country as almost completely black, in contrast to the bright lights of neighbors like South Korea and Japan.

In South Korea, each person consumes 10,162 kilowatt hours of power a year. North Koreans each use just 739. Other than several small spots of light, including the brightly illuminated capital of Pyongyang, the country just about blends in with the surrounding black ocean.

And North Korea has not been an environmental paradise. To the contrary North Korea has been an environmental disaster. From Wikipedia.org…

Air pollution

According to the United Nations Environment Programme in its 2003 report on North Korea, titled DPR Korea: State of the Environment 2003, air pollution is a perplexing problem. Owing to more coal being burnt to cater to the growing population's needs, the rate of air pollution in the country has been growing.

Water pollution

An unidentified river in North Korea, photographed in September 2008. The North Korean waters are heavily polluted and thereby unfit for human consumption.

Industrialisation and urbanisation causes the water to be polluted and unsanitary for human use.

Urbanisation

North Korea's bid to become an urban nation has seen it sacrifice the tranquil environment of the country. Wildlife is scarce in the country, and "[t]he landscape is basically dead", according to Joris van der Kamp, a Dutch scientist who visited the communist nation after being invited to. This situation is described as "so severe it could destabilize the whole country".

Deforestation

To satisfy ever-growing demands, more and more trees in the country have been chopped down to produce fuel for the people. Without these trees, soil erosion easily occurs when the wind blows or when the rain flows. This in turn burns a big hole in the North Korean government's pocket.

This PBS March 2013 report says North Korea have been at the verge of an environmental collapse

North Korea has been hiding something. Something beyond its prison camps, its nuclear facilities, its pervasive poverty, its aching famine, its lack of energy—electrical, fossil, or otherwise. What the hermit kingdom has been covering up is perhaps more fundamental than all of those: an environmental collapse so severe it could destabilize the entire country. Or at least, it was hiding it.

To achieve “earth hour” hardly means about the environment but rather to embrace poverty and despotism.

So before you celebrate Earth Hour think of North Korea.

Watch the late great comedian George Carlin deal with the hypocrisies of "Saving the Planet"