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June
28
2022

G-7 to Throw Out Another $200 Billion for Third-World ‘Green’ Boondoggles
Monica Showalter

Amid all the partying and gladhanding and making Vladimir Putin a figure of fun, the G-7 summit in Germany managed to avoid the important topics, such as where the hell greenie Germany is going to get energy from and just what it means when it says it's going to support Ukraine forever.

Instead, it moved into its comfort zone, which was "infrastructure" and greenie energy for the Third World, as if the Third World needed more corruption and energy shortages, as greenie Germany is experiencing.  Naturally, its idea was to throw money — mostly American money — at the problem.  Doddering Joe Biden was all in for this idiocy and has touted this bad idea as some kind of success story.

According to Fox News

The United States is pledging $200 billion to a G7 infrastructure project intended to counter's China's multi trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.

The "Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment" was relaunched by President Biden and other Group of Seven leaders on Sunday at their annual gathering being held this year at Schloss Elmau in Southern Germany.

Altogether the G7 leaders pledged to raise $600 billion in private and public funds over five years to finance needed infrastructure in developing countries.

The U.S.' $200 billion portion will come from grants, federal funds, and private investment over that time period to support projects are intended to tackle climate change, improve global health, gender equity and digital infrastructure.

Biden went at lengths to insist the money was not "aid or charity."

"It's an investment that will deliver returns for everyone," he said, adding that it will allow countries to "see the concrete benefits of partnering with democracies."

Ostensibly, it's to provide an alternative to third-world countries finding themselves in a pickle for taking China's money in its Belt and Road Initiative and finding themselves unable to repay China for its infrastructure investments, leaving China free to expropriate critical infrastructure such as ports as the world's greediest repo man.  I wrote about one example of that in 2018 here:

If there was ever an example for nations worldwide of What Not To Do, take a look at what socialist Ecuador has done to itself in dumping the U.S. and turning to align its interests to China. The New York Times has a superb (albeit stomach-churning) report about how Ecuador sold itself out as a vassal of China, getting for itself a junk dam that is already collapsing, and turning over 80% of its oil production to the communist behemoth in order to pay its massive, massive debts from it. That, in exchange for scrapping its military ties to the U.S. and skipping out on its tab with western banks.

...and several other places in the same predicament here.

There's no doubt that this is a problem, given that China is using these expropriations to extend its strategic influence, the carrot from hell, to reel in one militarily useful lily pad after another (to mix a lot of metaphors).  But instead of discouraging third-world countries from allowing themselves to get into these situations, and encouraging them to reform their crony capitalist systems for authentic economic growth, the G-7 is offering these places that can't attract investment the normal way a second credit card, hoping theirs will undercut China's. 

What they will end up with is these places defaulting to the West instead of China, since there isn't a lot of capitalism going on with all these infrastructure projects.  

Worse still, a lot of them billed as "infrastructure" aren't infrastructure projects at all, but greenie boondoggles.  Consultant contract bait.  Solyndras, with a side of third-world corruption.

You know, like the kind of Full Greenie–ism that Sri Lanka embraced, prompting the entire country to collapse.

More like that, right?

Greenie energy is a farce.  It's not sustainable.  Not even an advanced country like Germany can make it work — its insane devotion to greenie-ism prompted it to shut down its very emissions-friendly nuclear power plants in favor of unreliable trash like wind and solar power, pockmarking its landscape with ugly whirring windmills, and, worse still, left it dependent on Russia to power its batteries and true energy necessities.  Now it's looking at natural gas shortages and economic ruin as a result, and...all Germany and Joe Biden want to do...is export this failed model to the Third World, shelling out $200 billion to do it.

Joe Biden's stupid statement about this not being "charity" is nonsense.  If third-world countries could make greenie energy work better than fossil fuels, you can bet they would have been investing in it themselves.  But they can't — they can't any more than Germany can.  Biden justified the claim that this cash shell-out from the West was an "investment," but that calls to mind that investments can fail — and given that they haven't been done already by people with real money in the private sector, they probably will, by the guys who rely on the printing press for their big-government cash-shovelings.

It's obnoxious stuff, given that the G-7 has some serious issues to look at right now — the failed unsustainability of green policies that have left Europe bereft of energy, and the even bigger failure of the shutdowns of authentic fossil fuel industries that have left the big Western powers in debt to petrotyrants, including one who is blowing up apartment buildings in a European capital, and did a demonstration for the G-7 over the weekend, with a renewed attack on civilian housing in Kiev.

Neither of those problems is being seriously looked at by the G-7.  All they are trying to do is make the Third World as failed an area as the West in its still religiously bizarre greenie obsession. 

What a spectacular load of trouble this is.  Meanwhile, Boris Johnson and Justin Trudeau (neither of whom is a stranger to ridicule) will join Joe Biden in trying to laugh at Vlad Putin. 

Hard reality here: It's Putin who will have the last laugh.


 




 

My name is Monica Showalter, and I am a writer in San Diego.

Beginning as a college and community writer, I earned an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and went on to work in financial, international and editorial news. I began as a copy editor at Dow Jones & Co. in New York, and moved to a Singapore post, just in time for the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-8 – writing stories for the newswire, the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review. Returning to New York, I covered bonds for The Bond Buyer, and billionaires for Forbes. In 2006, I became an editorial writer at Investor’s Business Daily in Los Angeles, and am now Deputy Editor at American Thinker.

 


 

 

www.zerohedge.com

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