A few Tweets from club de cordeliers to Consider

“A phalanx of billionaires are backing a new mining initiative in Greenland, in what they hope will boost access to minerals used to manufacture electric cars. It’s significant news in a country that has not always celebrated natural resource exploration. And it has some environmental scientists concerned.

The source of the billionaire money is an initiative founded by Bill Gates, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, whose investors include Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Jack Ma, Ray Dalio, and Michael Bloomberg. Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 as a vehicle for combating climate change, and it has raised $2 billion to date, including a $1 billion funding round completed earlier this year. The organization has invested in dozens of startups in the sustainable energy space.” […]

“As The New York Times reported in May, consumers often greatly underestimate the environmental toll required to produce electric vehicles. One lithium mine in Nevada that the newspaper highlighted has drawn scrutiny because it will pollute some groundwater for up to three centuries, “while leaving behind a giant mound of waste.” […]

“As The New York Times reported in May, consumers often greatly underestimate the environmental toll required to produce electric vehicles. One lithium mine in Nevada that the newspaper highlighted has drawn scrutiny because it will pollute some groundwater for up to three centuries, “while leaving behind a giant mound of waste.”

Natural resource extraction has been hugely controversial in Greenland as well. Last spring, the nation of 56,000 people headed to the polls in part to weigh in on the future of an enormous mineral deposit. In the end, the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party carried the day, a boon for environmentalists. Authorities reportedly plan to ban uranium mining in the country, and have stopped issuing new licenses for offshore oil exploration.”

“In 2020, Gates made headlines for becoming the largest private farmland owner in the U.S. He had accumulated more than 269,000 acres of farmland across 18 states in less than a decade. His farmland grows onions, carrots and even the potatoes that are used to make McDonald’s french fries.

“It’s an asset with increasing value,” American Farmland Trust CEO John Piotti said. “It has great intrinsic value and beyond that, it is a limited resource.”

Wanna bet they’re Genetically Modified potatoes?  Related: ‘One Empire Over Seed: Control Over the World’s Seed Banks ‘, 11/01/2020, by Vandana Shiva, regeneration international (a compilation of sources)

“A great seed and biodiversity piracy is underway, not just by corporations — which through mergers are becoming fewer and larger— but also by super rich billionaires whose wealth and power open doors to their every whim. Leading the way is Microsoft mogul, Bill Gates.

“A great seed and biodiversity piracy is underway, not just by corporations — which through mergers are becoming fewer and larger— but also by super rich billionaires whose wealth and power open doors to their every whim. Leading the way is Microsoft mogul, Bill Gates.

When the Green Revolution was brought into India and Mexico, farmers’ seeds were “rounded-up” from their fields and locked in international institutions, to be used to breed green revolution varieties engineered to respond to chemical inputs.¹ […]

“The Seed Freedom movement has been calling for the CGIAR gene banks to return these stolen farmers varieties back to the farmers. The lessons of the Green Revolution since the 1960’s have shown us that the chemical path of monocultures has undermined Earth’s capacity to support life and food production by destroying biodiversity, soil and water^6, 7 as well as contributing to climate change.⁸ It has dispossessed small farmers through debt for external inputs. And it has undermined food and nutritional security.⁹ The experience of the last half century has made clear that Seed Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty and Knowledge Sovereignty is the only viable future of food and farming.”

Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in the CGIAR seed banks, Gates (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic archipelago – aka the Doomsday Vault – created to collect and hold a global collection of the world’s seeds. It is in association with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Crop Trust.¹⁰

It should come as no surprise that Gates is also funding Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global project launched in 2015 to map the genetic data of the peasant diversity of seeds held in gene banks to then take patents on these seeds through genomic mapping.¹² Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks.

Biopiracy is carried out through the convergence of information technology and biotechnology where patents are taken on seeds through “mapping” their genomes and genome sequences.”

Pinned at the top, from Dec. 2020:

(cross-posted at caucus99percnt.com)