September 18, 2023

• SDG Summit 2023 is going on today and tomorrow
• The 78th General Assembly opened Sept 5.
• The World Investment Forum starts Oct 16

The UN is meeting under an onslaught of news that the organization is not meeting challenges it sets as targets.

It is hard to argue that the UN is actually meeting its objectives. Mostly because it isn't meeting any of them.

The UN has acknowledged the world is nowhere close to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It is not really on track for any of them—and these were rather low-end goals.

Fights continue about funding for SDG, climate action, and support for disasters. Money drives these changes and it has been increasingly left to the private sector to solve this problem.

Unfortunately for the UN's economic policy folks, there has been a 12% decline in global foreign direct investment in 2022.

The UN's new productive capacity index has shown that most countries are not meeting their expectations when investing in private sector support and economic growth—even when there is investment.

The question for the left is how long can the UN live in the economics of the 1990s when faced with the overwhelming evidence that they have failed?

The issue for the targets set for the UN's SDGs, the IPCC, the anti-war programs, poverty, and disaster responses is that they are now completely dependent on private capital investment.

But, private capital is more worried about how the rise in global interest rates is going to affect their underlying profitability.

The UN's economics are based on a low interest rate environment and a financial system that existed before 2008. That private money isn't cheap any more, and it is now (and has always been) put to use in the opposite direction than the stated goals of the UN.

The state is going after ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and others for some of the costs for dealing with climate change. The issue is the decades of hiding and lying about the science of climate change that has been exposed recently.

The argument is that there is a heavy state spending burden that needs to be covered and should be covered by the previous and current profits from the oil and gas sector.

There are now more than 40 lawsuits in the USA against the oil and gas companies.

Last week California passed a law to disclose carbon emissions.

All this goes to calculating just how much of an historical subsidy has been paid to the oil and gas sector for producing what everyone uses on a daily basis.

The question that folks should be asking is if the state has the power to regulate these industrial giants and shift economies, why sue them? The answer has more to do with targeted regulations and taxation. The state cannot easily pass legislation taxing some industries. So, lawsuits are the easy answer.

The Union of Concerned Scientists have supported the effort as a last ditch attempt to extract some money out of oil and gas.

The recent disasters are a direct result of climate change and the argument is that we could have done something different if the net revenues from burning fossil fuels was not put into hiding facts about climate change.

A new peer-reviewed analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), for example, found that 19.8 million acres burned—37% of the total area scorched by forest fires in the Western United States and southwestern Canada since 1986, including those in California—can be attributed to heat-trapping emissions traced to the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.

The lawsuit comes on the heels of a recent exposé in The Wall Street Journal based on damning documents that offer an inside look at how ExxonMobil strategized to downplay climate change.

I think it is rather lazy and probably not going to work. Capital is rather good at not paying these fines. Unlike the tobacco industry, it is not that we are addicted to oil and didn't know it was bad for us. We can not say that we do not know that burning fossil fuels is bad for the planet now and we are still barely doing anything about it.

The interconnectedness of oil and gas profits, capital investment, and economic growth was a choice. Things always looked good for everyone if we just ignored all of the negative environmental effects. After all, isn't this how capitalism works in the first place?

If you are not worried about the prospects of a far-right take-over of politics, then I suggest you watch the entire day of the Global Progress Action summit.

The talkfest was put on by the liberal Progressivist groups Canada2020, the Center for American Progress Action and Tony Blair's Institute for Global Change. It is surprising that the three organizations continue to exist. And, it is obviously not because they are energetic or interesting.

Starmer is worried that the UK government "has lost control of its borders", Trudeau thinks he will win the next election because the issues that he was elected to fix are worse now than when he was in office, and Ardern could not have looked more bored while Trudeau was talking and insisted that the rest of them stop ignoring the "dumpster fire" raging just behind them.

If ever there was a need for the socialists to push these folks aside, it has to be now.