18 January 21
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17 January 21
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Charles Pierce | Rod Rosenstein Feels Very Bad About Family Separation Now So It's All Good
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "It is important to remember in the current cacophony of heavily armed political action that this administration* never stopped having terrible people do terrible things as a perfect mission statement of what this administration* was all about."
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, meanwhile, was Just Following Orders—or, as is more accurate, Just Following Psychopathy.
If we needed a reminder of that fact, the Department of Justice's inspector general is happy to oblige. On Thursday, the IG released a report that pretty much ships former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions and everyone else involved in the administration*'s inhumane immigration policies off to The Hague for a lengthy stay. From CNN:
At one point, Sessions emphasized to US attorneys that "we need to take away children," according to notes from the call cited in Thursday's report."[T]he Department's single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact that prosecution of family unit adults and family separations would have on children traveling with them and the government's ability to later reunite the children with their parents," the inspector general wrote.
Sessions, of course, was Just Following Orders—or, as is more accurate, Just Following Psychopathy. And so were a lot of other people. From the New York Times:
On May 14, just days after Mr. Sessions met with his prosecutors, Stephen Miller, the chief White House architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, forwarded an email to Mr. Hamilton noting a newspaper article indicating that U.S. attorneys were at times refusing to prosecute migrants who were crossing the border illegally, in part because the migrants were crossing with young children. Mr. [White House adviser Gene] Hamilton responded, “This article is a big problem.”
Eight days later, on May 22, Mr. Rosenstein again met with U.S. attorneys who handle border issues to insist that they prosecute every case of illegal crossings that were referred to them from the Border Patrol. He dismissed concerns from at least one prosecutor that children under 5 would be separated from parents if the adults are prosecuted. He dismissed concerns from at least one prosecutor that children under 5 would be separated from parents if the adults are prosecuted.“IF THEY ARE REFERRING, THEN PROSECUTE. AGE OF CHILD DOESN’T MATTER,” Mr. Rosenstein said, according to the notes of one person at the meeting, who wrote in all capital letters.
On Thursday, of course, when the report was released, Rosenstein was brimming with regret and apologies. From NBC News:
"Since leaving the department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy. It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better."
I wish we'd never placed human lives into your clammy little bureaucratic hands, nor into the sucker-tipped tentacles of Stephen Miller.
A former DOJ official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, responded to the report by telling NBC News: "I think the most important thing from this is the very deep premeditation and intentionality for the entire family separation effort regardless of known harm that would come to parents and children. And a strong belief in the actors here, and one presumes other parts of the government, that cruelty was the intent and that was an acceptable way for the government to operate for four years."
It was always the point. It was the administration's single most consistent political political philosophy. But Rod Rosenstein feels really bad about it now, so I guess that settles things.
National Guard members stand guard outside the U.S. Capitol ahead of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, in Washington, U.S., January 17, 2021. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Law Enforcement Officials Brace for Pro-Trump Protests at State Capitol Buildings
Brendan O'Brien and Nathan Layne, Reuters
Excerpt: "Law enforcement officials battened down statehouses across the country on Sunday in anticipation of potentially violent protests by Trump supporters who believe the baseless claim that electoral fraud robbed the president of a second term."
More than a dozen states have activated National Guard troops to help secure their capitol buildings following an FBI warning of armed protests, with right-wing extremists emboldened by the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6.
Security officials have eyed Sunday as the first major flashpoint, as that is when the anti-government “boogaloo” movement made plans weeks ago to hold rallies in all 50 states.
Capitals in battleground states, where Trump has directed his accusations of voter fraud, were on especially high alert.
But by midday, only a few demonstrators had taken to the streets alongside hundreds of law enforcement officers and media personnel.
Four protesters with long rifles stood outside Michigan’s capitol in Lansing on Sunday, one wearing fatigue pants, a brown tactical vest and a blue Hawaiian shirt and another wearing a Trump t-shirt and fatigue pants as he held a “Don’t tread on me” flag.
One of them was Duncan Lemp, a cook from Michigan who is involved with the boogaloo boys movement and was wearing an American flag face mask. He said he believed the election was fraudulent, but he had not come on Sunday to start a fight. Instead, he said he wanted to encourage a peaceful, unified anti-government stance and to stand up for his right to bear arms.
“The goal is unification of left and right, both sides, no reason to fight,” Lemp said. “Why can’t the people, left and right, get along and stop the government from overreaching, oppressing us?”
Nearby, crews had blocked off streets and office buildings in Lansing had boarded up their windows in anticipation of potential violence.
In Atlanta, several hundred law enforcement officers and National Guard troops milled around Georgia’s state house early Sunday. Chain-link fences and cement barriers protected the Capitol grounds and multiple armored vehicles were stationed nearby.
In addition to increasing police presence, some states, including Pennsylvania, Texas and Kentucky, have taken the further step of closing their capitol grounds to the public.
It is just days until Wednesday’s Inauguration Day, when Democrat Joe Biden will be sworn in as president amid extraordinary security efforts in Washington, D.C.
The nationwide security scramble followed the attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington by a mix of extremists and Trump supporters, some of whom called for the death of Vice President Mike Pence as he presided over the certification of Biden’s election victory.
POTENTIAL VIOLENCE
The FBI and other federal agencies have warned of the potential for future violence leading up to the inauguration, as white supremacists and other extremists look to exploit frustration among Trump supporters who have bought into falsehoods about electoral fraud.
It was not clear whether the FBI warning and ramped up security presence around the country might lead some protesters to stay at home.
Following the Jan. 6 violence in Washington, some militia members said they would not attend a long-planned pro-gun demonstration in Virginia on Monday, where authorities were worried about the risk of violence as multiple groups converged on the state capital, Richmond.
Some militias and extremist groups have told followers to stay home this weekend, citing the increased security or the risk that the planned events were law enforcement traps.
Bob Gardner, leader of the Pennsylvania Lightfoot Militia, said his group had no plans to be in Harrisburg this weekend, where the Capitol has been fortified with barricades and will be protected by hundreds of members of its National Guard.
“We’ve got our own communities to worry about,” Gardner said earlier this week. “We don’t get involved in politics.”
President-elect Joe Biden acknowledges the crowd at a rally for Georgia's Democratic candidates for the US Senate, Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, on December 15, 2020, in Atlanta. (photo: Joshua Lott/WP/Getty Images)
How Biden Hopes to Use Executive Actions to Address America's "Compounding Crises"
Cameron Peters, Vox
Peters writes: "President-elect Joe Biden may already have an ambitious legislative rescue plan, but he isn't waiting for Congress to begin addressing what his team calls the 'four overlapping and compounding crises' facing America."
Eviction moratoriums, a mask mandate, and an end to Trump-era policies: what Biden has planned for his first 10 days in office.
Biden also plans a sweeping set of executive actions to address the four crises — the coronavirus, the economy, climate, and racial justice — according to a memo outlining the president-elect’s first 10 days in office, sent by Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain to incoming White House senior staff on Saturday.
According to Klain, an Obama administration alum who also served as Biden’s chief of staff during his vice presidency, Biden’s day-one priorities include extending freezes on federal student loan payments, evictions, and foreclosures; implementing a national mask mandate on federal property and during interstate travel; and rolling back several Trump-era actions, including the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries.
The memo, which was sent just days before Biden’s January 20 inauguration, also touches on immigration, criminal justice, and health care issues and emphasizes there will be more executive actions to come.
“These actions are just the start of our work,” Klain writes. “Much more will need to be done ... But by February 1, America will be moving in the right direction on all four of these challenges — and more — thanks to President-elect Joe Biden’s leadership.”
What Biden plans to do in his first 10 days
The president-elect’s list of planned executive actions is both “partly substantive and partly symbolic,” as the New York Times’s Michael Shear and Peter Baker put it.
Some of the measures, like extending restrictions on evictions, will impact millions of people who are out of work and unable to pay rent due to the coronavirus pandemic, as Vox’s Jerusalem Demsas explained in December.
Congress extended the federal eviction moratorium through the end of January in its most recent Covid-19 relief package, which Trump signed into law in December, but the pandemic isn’t close to being over — and in lieu of large-scale rent relief from Congress, which Biden has also proposed, extending the eviction freeze is an important step to prevent the crisis from growing even worse for as many as 40 million Americans.
Biden’s plan to require mask wearing on federal land, meanwhile, is considered more symbolic, as his authority to impose a broader mandate is limited. The memo describes the proposed rule as part of Biden’s “100 Day Masking Challenge,” which has included working with state and local officials to “implement mask mandates in their towns, cities, and states.”
On his first day in office, Biden will also reverse Trump’s 2017 decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and put an end to Trump’s travel ban, which has targeted primarily Muslim-majority countries (as well as Venezuela and North Korea) and suffered a string of court defeats early in Trump’s presidency.
In addition to rejoining the Paris accord, Biden promised in December to “[convene] the leaders of major economies for a climate summit within my first 100 days in office” and reaffirmed plans to “put the country on a sustainable path to achieve net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
All told, Klain’s memo says Biden will take “roughly a dozen actions” on his first day in office to “make government function for the people.”
On subsequent days, Biden will sign executive actions addressing the reopening of schools and businesses by “taking action to mitigate spread [of Covid-19] through expanded testing, protecting workers, and establishing clear public health standards.
The memo also highlights plans to “strengthen Buy American provisions,” “advance equity and support communities of color,” “expand access to health care,” and “restore dignity to our immigration system and our border policies” using executive actions, memos, and Cabinet directives.
“President-elect Biden will demonstrate that America is back and take action to restore America’s place in the world,” Klain writes.
For as much ground as the memo covers, however, there is at least one notable absence on the executive-action front: There’s no specific mention of the World Health Organization, which Biden has previously pledged to rejoin “on my first day as President.”
In July 2020, Trump formally notified the United Nations that the US would withdraw from the WHO and no longer provide funding, accusing the organization of favoring China and mishandling the coronavirus pandemic. But that withdrawal has yet to take effect, leaving Biden a window of time in which to quickly rejoin the agency.
Biden is also preparing an ambitious legislative agenda
Early in the Biden presidential transition, his team was staring down the possibility of a presidency without unified control of government, which would have left executive action as one of the primary levers of power available to him.
Following a pair of Democratic victories in the Georgia Senate runoffs on January 5, however, things are looking somewhat brighter for Biden’s legislative agenda. With Sens.-elect Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the chamber, each party will have 50 votes — and once Vice President-elect Kamala Harris becomes the tie-breaking vote on January 20, Democrats will have the majority.
Though such a slim margin won’t make things easy for Biden, particularly as moderate Democrats such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin continue to oppose ending the filibuster, it does mean Biden’s agenda has a real chance.
With the filibuster rule in place, legislation requires a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority to pass the Senate, meaning Biden and Senate Democrats will need at least some Republican support for their agenda — or pursue some policies through an obscure Senate loophole known as “budget reconciliation,” which allows certain legislation that affects primarily taxes and spending to pass with a simple majority. (Vox’s Dylan Matthews previously wrote an in-depth explainer on what Biden can accomplish with this method — including actions that could “transform American life dramatically.”)
But Biden’s ambitions are larger than those policies he could pass without GOP support. According to Klain’s memo on Saturday, Biden will push Congress to act on a day-one immigration bill, a recovery and jobs plan, and “legislation related to voting rights, the minimum wage, combatting violence against women, and more.”
Already this week, Biden proposed a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus and Covid-19 relief plan — described as “a bridge toward economic recovery” — that calls for $400 billion in funding for the US coronavirus response and $1 trillion in direct relief.
The same plan would also hike the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and expand the child tax credit, among a slew of other actions.
Details also emerged this week about Biden’s immigration plan, which would create a path to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented immigrants and an expedited path for DREAMers, recipients of Temporary Protected Status, and essential workers. The proposal is ambitious, but like Biden’s Covid-19 relief plan, narrow margins in the Senate could make it difficult to pass.
A crowd of supporters of President Donald Trump after they stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: ProPublica)
"Where They Countin' the Votes?!": New Video Details Capitol Mob Seeking Out Lawmakers
Jack Gillum, Lucas Waldron and Maya Eliahou, ProPublica
Excerpt: "As the just-under-two-minute recording begins and the door is opened, cheers are heard from crowds of demonstrators gathered outside. Once inside, the mob fans out, passing a Senate appointments desk and heading toward a bank of elevators."
New video, found in an archive of data uploaded to Parler, includes a fresh look at the mob’s confrontation with Eugene Goodman, the officer credited for luring rioters away from senators during the early moments of the Capitol riot.
ore than 10 million people have seen the video shot by HuffPost reporter Igor Bobic showing a Black Capitol Police officer leading pro-Trump rioters away from where senators were holed up in the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Now, ProPublica has uncovered new footage — amid a trove of content archived from the now-shuttered social platform Parler — that reveals the raw moments before Officer Eugene Goodman’s actions. The clip, recorded minutes after crowds breached a barrier outside, allows the public to see and hear new details from a turbulent day that ultimately led to President Donald Trump’s second impeachment.
As the just-under-two-minute recording begins and the door is opened, cheers are heard from crowds of demonstrators gathered outside. Once inside, the mob fans out, passing a Senate appointments desk and heading toward a bank of elevators.
Half of the video depicts the showdown between Goodman and the angry mob, and lets viewers see more clearly the size of the crowd and its rage. “Where they countin’ the votes?!” yells a man in the crowd repeatedly after rioters approach Goodman, who was blocking a corridor and stairs that lead to the Senate floor and other key offices.
Goodman had been guarding the entrance before demonstrators broke open a door moments earlier on the west side of the Capitol. After a loud crack, rioters are seen streaming into the building to the sound of glass breaking. Some chanted “U-S-A” as they sought out lawmakers.
The video also shows the brief, but tense, standoff with Goodman as he keeps his hand on his gun holster. Goodman — eyes wide and mask sliding below his face — continues trying to keep the crowd at bay. “Don’t do it!” someone shouts.
It soon became clear that Goodman was outnumbered. He turns and heads up the stairs he had been blocking moments earlier.
“Are you going to beat us all?” a man in the crowd says. Seconds later, the camera pans to the floor and cuts out.
The Justice Department said this week that at least 30 people have been charged for crimes committed at the Capitol.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced a bill to award Goodman the Congressional Gold Medal for luring the mob away from lawmakers. Goodman is a 40-year-old U.S. Army veteran and deployed with the 101st Airborne Division to Iraq for a year, The Washington Post reported.
Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. (photo: J Scott Applewhite/AP)
'Not Going to Lose My Son and My Republic': Jamie Raskin on Trump Impeachment
Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes: "Jamie Raskin, the House Democrat leading the impeachment of Donald Trump, remembered his son Tommy on Sunday and said: 'I'm not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021. It's not going to happen.'"
Tommy Raskin, a Harvard law student who struggled with depression, died on New Year’s Eve. He was 25.
His father, a constitutional law professor and representative from Maryland, was this week named as lead impeachment manager for Trump’s second Senate trial. The president was impeached for the second time for inciting the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, in which five people died, to further his baseless claim that the election was stolen.
Trump’s trial could start immediately after Joe Biden takes power on Wednesday. Raskin discussed the impeachment on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. He was also asked about his son.
“Tommy was a remarkable person,” he said. “He had overwhelming love for humanity and for our country, in his heart, and really for all the people of the world. We lost him on the very last day of that God awful year, 2020, and he left us a note, which said ‘Please forgive me, my illness won today, look after each other, the animals and the global poor for me, all my love Tommy.’
“And that was the last act in a life that dazzled.”
People were asking, he said, why he agreed to take on such a senior role in the impeachment trial at such a difficult time.
“First of all,” he said, with a laugh, “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to say no to Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi about anything. She’s actually been very sensitive and thoughtful but she wanted me to do it because she knows that I’ve devoted my life to the constitution and to the republic. I’m a professor of constitutional law, but I did it really with my son in my heart, and helping lead the way. I feel him in my chest.
“When we went to count the electoral college votes and [the Capitol] came under that ludicrous attack, I felt my son with me and I was most concerned with our youngest daughter and my son in law, who is married to our other daughter, who were with me that day and who got caught in a room off of the House floor.
“In between them and me was a rampaging armed mob, that could have killed them easily and was banging on the doors where they were hiding under a desk with my chief of staff, Julie Tagen.
“These events are personal to me. There was an attack on our country, there was an attack on our people.”
Asked how he could deal with such “trauma on top of trauma”, Raskin said: “I’m not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021. It’s not going to happen.
“And the vast majority of American people, Democrats, Republicans and independents, reject armed insurrection and violence as a new way of doing business in America. We’re not going to do that.
“This was the most terrible crime ever by a president of the United States against our country. And I want everybody to feel the gravity and the solemnity of those events at the same time of course that all of us are deeply invested in President-elect Biden, and Vice-President-elect [Kamala] Harris, moving the country forward.”
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four Americans under the age of 25 have considered suicide since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Raskin was asked if he had a message for people dealing with depression either personally or in family members.
“We don’t want to lose anybody else,” he said. “We’ve been hearing from thousands and thousands of people across the country and if any of them are out there, thank you for your kindness to our family.”
He added that the family had “set up the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund for People and Animals, which now has more than $400,000 in it, his classmates at Harvard Law School raised $5,000 or $6,000 so that the causes he believed in would keep going.
“But we don’t have to wait for people to die for people to listen to them. We can listen to you right now.”
Alexei Navalny said 'everything will be absolutely fine.' (photo: Reuters)
Russia Navalny: Poisoned Opposition Leader Held After Flying Home
BBC
Excerpt: "Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been detained after flying back to Moscow five months after he was nearly killed by a nerve agent attack last year."
r Navalny, 44, was seen being led away by police at passport control.
His flight from Berlin was diverted from one of Moscow's airports to another after crowds gathered there.
The activist says the authorities were behind the attempt on his life, an allegation backed up by investigative journalists but denied by the Kremlin.
"I know that I'm right. I fear nothing," Mr Navalny told his supporters and the media at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport just minutes before his detention.
He added that all criminal cases against him had been "fabricated".
Earlier on Sunday, metal barriers were erected inside Moscow's Vnukovo airport, where the plane was originally scheduled to land, and Russian media reported that several activists - including key Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol - were detained there.
Mr Navalny's spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh posted on social media pictures of police cars at the airport.
Mr Navalny - who had been treated in Germany - earlier urged supporters to meet him off the flight, and a "Let's meet Navalny" page was set up on Facebook (in Russian). Thousands of people said they would go or expressed an interest, despite forecasts of extreme cold and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
Mr Navalny collapsed on an internal flight in Siberia last August, and it later emerged he had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent.
Russian authorities have consistently denied any role in the poisoning, and the Kremlin has rejected Mr Navalny's claims that President Vladimir Putin himself ordered it.
The Putin critic has said he misses Moscow, is almost fully recovered from the attack, and that there was never any doubt he would return.
Why was he detained?
The Russian authorities earlier warned Mr Navalny could face imprisonment after missing a prison service deadline in December to report at an office in Moscow.
The prison service accuses him of violating conditions imposed after a conviction for embezzlement, for which he received a suspended sentence. He has always condemned the case as politically motivated.
Separately, Russia's investigative committee has launched a new criminal case against him on fraud charges related to transfers of money to various NGOs, including his Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Mr Navalny has asserted that Mr Putin is doing all he can to stop his opponent from coming back by fabricating new cases against him.
News media from around the world gathered at Berlin airport to record the activist's departure from Germany - but Russian federal TV channels and news agencies are ignoring his return.
What happened to Navalny last year?
In August, the opposition leader collapsed on a plane flying home from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow and the pilot diverted the flight to the city of Omsk, from where he was eventually allowed to fly on to Germany in an induced coma.
He was released from hospital in Berlin in September to continue his recuperation.
Mr Navalny said recently he was able to do push-ups and squat exercises, and therefore had probably almost fully recovered.
Last month, investigative reporters named three FSB agents who had travelled to Tomsk at the time Mr Navalny was there, and said the specialist unit had tailed him for years.
Mr Navalny then, in a phone call, duped an FSB agent named Konstantin Kudryavtsev into revealing details of the operation against him, according to the Bellingcat investigative group.
The agent told him that the Novichok used to poison him was placed in his underpants.
Mr Kudryavtsev said during the phone call he had been sent to Omsk later to seize Mr Navalny's clothes and remove all traces of Novichok from them.
President Putin has dismissed the investigation by Bellingcat and others into who poisoned Mr Navalny as "a trick" and said that he was backed by US intelligence services.
Baby Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. (photo: Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
More Than 50 Countries Commit to Protecting 30% of Earth's Land and Oceans
Fiona Harvey and Patrick Greenfield, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "A coalition of more than 50 countries has committed to protect almost a third of the planet by 2030 to halt the destruction of the natural world and slow extinctions of wildlife."
The High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People, which includes the U.K. and countries from six continents, made the pledge to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans before the One Planet summit in Paris on Monday, hosted by the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
Scientists have said human activities are driving the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, and agricultural production, mining, and pollution are threatening the healthy functioning of life-sustaining ecosystems crucial to human civilization.
In the announcement, the HAC said protecting at least 30 percent of the planet for nature by the end of the decade was crucial to preventing mass extinctions of plants and animals, and ensuring the natural production of clean air and water.
The commitment is likely to be the headline target of the “Paris agreement for nature” that will be negotiated at COP15 in Kunming, China later this year. The HAC said it hoped early commitments from countries such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Nigeria, Pakistan, Japan, and Canada would ensure it formed the basis of the U.N. agreement.
Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, welcomed the pledge but cautioned: “It is one thing to commit, but quite different to deliver. But when we have committed, we must deliver. And with concerted efforts, we can collectively deliver.”
The announcement at the One Planet summit, which also saw pledges to invest billions of pounds in the Great Green Wall in Africa and the launch of a new sustainable finance charter called the Terra Carta by Prince Charles, was met with scepticism from some campaigners. Greta Thunberg tweeted: “LIVE from #OnePlanetSummit in Paris: Bla bla nature Bla bla important Bla bla ambitious Bla bla green investments…”
As part of the HAC announcement, the U.K. environment minister Zac Goldsmith said: “We know there is no pathway to tackling climate change that does not involve a massive increase in our efforts to protect and restore nature. So as co-host of the next Climate Cop, the U.K. is absolutely committed to leading the global fight against biodiversity loss and we are proud to act as co-chair of the High Ambition Coalition.
“We have an enormous opportunity at this year’s biodiversity conference in China to forge an agreement to protect at least 30 percent of the world’s land and ocean by 2030. I am hopeful our joint ambition will curb the global decline of the natural environment, so vital to the survival of our planet.”
However, despite support for the target from several countries, many Indigenous activists have said that increasing protected areas for nature could result in land grabs and human rights violations. The announcement may also concern some developing countries who are keen for ambitious commitments on finance and sustainable development as part of the Kunming agreement, not just conservation.
Unlike its climate equivalent, the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity covers three issues: the sustainable use of nature, sharing benefits from genetic resources, and conservation. The three pillars of the treaty can clash with each other and richer, developed countries have been accused of focusing too much on conservation while ignoring difficult choices on agriculture and providing finance for poorer nations to meet targets.
The HAC, currently co-chaired by France, Costa Rica, and the U.K., was formed in 2019 following the success of a similar climate body that spurred ambitious international action before the Paris agreement. By promoting action on biodiversity loss, it is hoped early commitments from the HAC will ensure a successful agreement for nature.
Over the last decade, the world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems.
On Monday, leaders from around the world met in person and virtually at the One Planet summit in Paris to discuss the biodiversity crisis, promoting agro-ecology and the relationship between human health and nature. Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, and Justin Trudeau addressed the event, which also included statements from U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, and the Chinese vice-premier Han Zheng .
The U.K. government has also committed about $407 billion of U.K. international climate finance to supporting nature and biodiversity over the next five years.
Johnson told the event: “We are destroying species and habitat at an absolutely unconscionable rate. Of all the mammals in the world, I think I am right in saying that 96 percent of mammals are now human beings or livestock that human beings rely upon.
“That is, in my view, a disaster. That’s why the U.K. has pledged to protect 30 percent of our land surface and marine surface. Of the 11.6 billion [$14.95 billion] that we’ve consecrated to climate finance initiatives, we are putting £3 billion [$4.08 billion] to protecting nature.”
The funding was welcomed by conservation and environmental organizations, including the RSPB and Greenpeace, but there were questions about the scale of the funding and whether it came at the cost of international aid.
“Increasing funds to protect and enhance nature is critical to help secure success at the global biodiversity conference in China this year. Siphoning off cash from funds already committed to tackling the climate crisis simply isn’t enough,” said Greenpeace U.K.’s head of politics, Rebecca Newsom.
“This announcement raises concerns that the U.K.’s shrinking aid budget is being repurposed to pay for nature and biodiversity. As important as these are, the first priority of overseas aid should be the alleviation of poverty,” said Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on Climate Change, Tracy Carty.
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