A summit can’t save the world, but it can make things worseWhile an estimated one million species face a risk of extinction, a United Nations biodiversity summit being held in Montreal this week says it’s working on a plan to preserve life on Earth. Inside a downtown conference centre, thousands of representatives from civil society and governments are debating the details of a sprawling set of proposals spanning resource extraction, genetic engineering, and controversial financing schemes. Outside, thousands are sounding the alarm to denounce an approach they say in effect will fuel corporate profits but degrade biodiversity globally. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was signed in 1993, and has been adopted by 196 countries. The United States is one of only four UN member states that has not opted in. The CBD holds Conference of Parties (COP) meetings every few years, where decisions can influence legislation worldwide. The current COP session will run until December 19. Experts and civil society groups denounced the CBD’s reliance on financing schemes like offsets, and worry that the growing presence of corporate lobbyists will result in loopholes, watered-down targets and dead-end technofixes. Critics also say parts of the framework ignore Indigenous title and create a “perverse conflict of interest” for governments who are heavily invested in resource extraction.
https://breachmedia.ca/a-summit-cant-save-the-world-but-it-can-make-things-worse/Venezuela: why the rift between its communists and the Maduro government?Events since February 2018 have turned Communist Party criticisms of Maduro’s PSUV government into the outright condemnation voiced at the PCV’s 16th congress in early November this year. With much of the country’s oil wealth draining away in low-price subsidies to the private sector, interest payments on unproductive loans, rising rents and royalties to big landowners and in fraud and corruption, workers had the value of their wages slashed and labour rights suspended as prices, living costs and unemployment rocketed. …. Since seeing off the pretend president, President Maduro has launched a national “reconciliation and peace” process with some right-wing parties and employers, culminating in a “social agreement
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.