[Diggers350] Debt From Above: The Carbon Credit Coup, building a green power monopoly
Tony Gosling
tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Mon Aug 12 00:00:40 BST 2024
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Debt From Above: The Carbon Credit Coup
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/04/investigative-reports/debt-from-above-the-carbon-credit-coup/
SEE ALSO
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/08/investigative-series/the-chain-of-issuance-the-people-and-patents-that-built-the-financial-surveillance-network/>
The Chain of Issuance: The People and Patents
That Built The Financial Surveillance Network
Latin America is quietly being forced into a
carbon market scheme through regional contractual
obligations enforced by the satellites of a US
intelligence-linked firm which seeks to create
an inter-continental smart grid, erode national
and local sovereignty, and link carbon-based life
to the debt-based monetary system via a Bitcoin sidechain.
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/author/mark-goodwin/>byMark
Goodwin and and <https://unlimitedhangout.com/author/whitney-webb/>Whitney Webb
48 minute read
[]
Sweeping across the shores of Latin America comes
a scheme from some of the most predatory figures
in the venture capital ecosystem of the United
States. It is a brazen attempt to assert foreign
influence across Latin America and threatens to
reshape the very fabric of the region and the day
to day lives of its people. At its core is a
serpentine set of contractual obligations, held
at the municipal level, cast throughout Central
and South America, upheld by an
intelligence-linked satellite company, and
controlled by a private sector consortium of
green-washed financiers aiming to turn the
regions forests into equity and carbon credits.
At the same time, it obliges local governments to
spend conservation funds on projects that
further financialize nature and aid the
construction of an inter-continental smart
grid. One of its key ambitions appears to be
further entrenching the debt load of the region
through the multi-lateral development banks and
the dollarization of the continent from the
subnational level up through carbon markets
upheld by a digital ledger. What seems like a
technological marvel aimed at progress and
connectivity harbors a darker agenda one that
intertwines planetary surveillance, financial
predation, geopolitical maneuvering, and the
domination of a resource-rich continent buried in debt.
This grand design, known by the acronym GREEN+
and conceived by stalwarts of the digital dollar
and debt schemes of the private sector, has
quietly taken root through a web of political
entanglements at the local level. Even a key
figure in the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond
scandal plays a role. Astonishingly, every
capital city of Latin America has eagerly signed
on, apparently unaware of the strings attached to
these seemingly benign partnerships, while a
majority of municipalities in the region have
also made commitments with these same groups that
will push them to join GREEN+, potentially in a
matter of weeks. The (hopefully) well-meaning
regional governments have unwittingly paved the
way for a sweeping surveillance apparatus tied to
American intelligence that threatens to erode
privacy and civil liberties under the guise of
progress and combating the climate crisis.
Upon further observation, GREEN+s connections
reveal a disturbing narrative of financial
interests melding with geopolitical ambitions.
The backers of the satellite company share ties
with former members of the highest offices of US
financial policy and regulation alongside the key
architects and profiteers of private capital
creation, aiming to consolidate control over
monetary flows in Latin America within the
redistribution of distressed government debt from
the public to the private sector. As this
two-part series will show, this concerted effort
is not merely about surveillance its a
calculated move towards further dollarization,
tightening the grip of corporate and
technological monopolies over the economic landscape of the Americas.
The schemes proponents also speak of how it will
significantly advance the economic and
regional integration of the Americas, invoking
visions of unity while obscuring the true nature
of their agenda for economic domination and
stronger regional governance. Their model, eerily
reminiscent of the EUs transition from a free
trade union to a bureaucratic behemoth yoked to
the US through the Eurodollar, sets the stage for
unelected entities to enforce policies through
programmable money, enabled by smart contracts on
blockchains and designed to benefit the few at
the expense of the many. What materializes before
us is not just a technological evolution but a
quiet banker coup one that lays the groundwork
for land grabs and invasive surveillance under
the guise of progress and conservation. Its a
narrative that echoes throughout history, where
intelligence-linked figures and predatory
financial interests converge to prey upon the
Global South, leaving a trail of economic
exploitation and geopolitical manipulation in
their wake. What masquerades as progress for
individuals and the environment at large may very
well be the harbinger of a new era of subjugation and control.
THE GREEN+ PROGRAM
In 2022, several groups came together
<https://programme.green/index.html>to launch the
GREEN+ (Government Reduction of Emissions for
Environmental Net + Gain) Jurisdictional
Programme, the first program that will monitor
by satellite all subnational protected areas of
the planet and through contracts with numerous
local and state governments propel and deepen
the economic integration of the Americas through
the quiet imposition of a continent-wide,
<https://bitcoinmagazine.com/guides/what-is-blockchain>blockchain-based
carbon market.
GREEN+ <https://carbonparks.cc35.city/>has been
piloted in a handful of Latin American cities
since its founding and is due to launch globally
in just a few weeks time. Most of the GREEN+
agreements with subnational governments have
remained focused on Latin America.
<https://carbonparks.cc35.city/>Per the program,
the subnational agreements have established the
rules and requirements to enable accounting and
crediting with GREEN+ policies and measures
and/or nested projects, implemented as GHG
mitigation activities, with GREEN+ being
described as the planets new subnational government advisory mechanism.
Key to the program are the services provided by
GREEN+ founding member
<https://satellogic.com/company/partners/>Satellogic,
an Argentina-founded company
<https://satellogic.com/news/press-releases/satellogic-announces-strategic-partnership-with-palantir-technologies/>closely
aligned with Peter Thiels Palantir and
<https://satellogic.com/news/press-releases/satellogic-announces-multiple-launch-agreement-with-spacex-for-its-next-68-sub-meter-resolution-earth-observation-satellites/>Elon
Musks SpaceX that specializes in sub-meter
resolution satellite surveillance. Satellogic,
<https://spacenews.com/satellogic-relocating-to-the-united-states-in-search-of-government-growth/>a
contractor to the US government and whose
founders were also
<https://satellogic.com/company/about-us/>previously
contactors for the US DHS, NSA and DARPA, will
provide surveillance data of the entire worlds
protected areas to GREEN+s governing
coalition, composed of the NGOs CC35, the Global
Footprint Network, The Energy Coalition and other respected stakeholders.
According to
<https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/satellogic-announces-exclusive-agreement-with-green-jurisdictional-programme-to>the
press release that details Satellogics alliance
with GREEN+, the satellite surveillance data
will enable individuals, organizations, and
global markets to accurately monitor the
compliance of signatory jurisdictions to avoid
deforestation. However, other information in the
press release reveals that forests will actually
be monitored for the purpose of generating
credible carbon credits to be traded on
exchanges by GREEN+ on behalf of subnational
governments. The press release also states that
the GREEN+ alliance with Satellogic will advance
the future measurement of energy emissions in the
most populated areas of the planet, i.e. the
surveillance of carbon emissions from space.
Satellogic launched some GREEN+-affiliated
satellites in 2022 as part of its pilot and is
due to launch the remainder this April during
Miami Climate Week. Satellogics past and
upcoming launches of GREEN+ satellites were/will
be conducted
<https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/satellogic-announces-exclusive-agreement-with-green-jurisdictional-programme-to>in
collaboration with Elon Musks SpaceX, also a
contractor to
<https://www.wsj.com/tech/musks-spacex-forges-tighter-links-with-u-s-spy-and-military-agencies-512399bd>the
US military and US intelligence agencies.
Though framed as a way to develop economic
incentives to mitigate climate change, the
program is based on Californias
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-22/what-has-california-cap-and-trade-accomplished>controversial
and
<https://time.com/6264772/study-most-carbon-credits-are-bogus/>grift-prone
cap and trade program and has been created (and
is being implemented by) individuals and
companies that are seeking to covertly dollarize
Latin America and/or have deep ties to US
intelligence. Its ultimate ambitions go far
beyond carbon markets and seek to use satellite
surveillance to enforce carbon emission levels in
both urban and rural areas. It also seeks to
impose a new financial system centered around
energy, commodity, and natural resource credits
that are underpinned by extensive and invasive
surveillance, underscored by the motto:
<https://issuu.com/satelliteevolution/docs/satelliteevolutionglobal-february2023-download/s/19101555>Earth
observation is preservation.
The alliance that created GREEN+
<https://web.archive.org/web/20220427141745/https://www.cercarbono.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/GREEN-Jurisdictional-Programme-Description.pdf>includes
the NGOs CC35, the Global Footprint Network
(GFN), Arnold Schwarzeneggers Catalytic Finance
Foundation (CFF, formerly R20) and The Energy
Coalition (TEC); the Gibraltar-based law firm
Isolas; the global insurance giant Lockton; the
satellite company Satellogic; the green
blockchain company EcoRegistry; the dominant
carbon credit certifier in Latin America,
Cercarbono; and Rootstock (RSK), the bitcoin
side-chain protocol responsible for smart BTC.
Several members of the alliance, though how many
is unclear,
<https://guatediario.com/2022/01/24/global-carbon-parks-firma-contrato-de-u200mm-para-comercializar-creditos-de-carbono-vinculados-a-la-descarbonizacion/>now
<https://guatediario.com/2022/01/24/global-carbon-parks-firma-contrato-de-u200mm-para-comercializar-creditos-de-carbono-vinculados-a-la-descarbonizacion/>operate
as part of a consortium linked to a company
called Global Carbon Parks, which is discussed in
greater detail later in this article and now
manages <https://carbonparks.cc35.city/>major
aspects of GREEN+. The NGOs (i.e. CC35, GFN, CFF
and TEC) involved in founding GREEN+ are those
who actually govern the GREEN+ program from California.
As previously mentioned, the program takes carbon
in effectively conserved protected areas of a
sub-national jurisdiction, i.e. a city, county,
province, or state/region, and converts them into
carbon credits.
<https://nomadsembassy.com/fbi-background-check-from-abroad/>Per
the program, these credits are traded on the
[carbon] offset market, and income is deposited
in a trust fund that is controlled by GREEN+ and
is known as the GREEN+ Trust. That trust is
<https://nomadsembassy.com/fbi-background-check-from-abroad/>run
by unspecified individuals who work for Lockton,
Isolas and Rootstock.
<https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/satellogic-announces-exclusive-agreement-with-green-jurisdictional-programme-to>Alejandro
Guerrero, head of Locktons Argentina & Uruguay
branch, is the only publicly acknowledged member of the trust.
<https://carbonparks.cc35.city/>Another website
tied to the GREEN+ initiative describes the initial process as follows:
* Public and private agreements between [a
subnational] government and custodians are signed with zero upfront cost.
* Custodians trade the carbon units that are
produced by the subnational governments (the
public sector) signing contracts with the private
sector in voluntary carbon markets.
* Those contracts signed by the subnational
governments become smart contracts and carbon
credits are then tokenized for traceability.
* The GREEN+ Trust holds government funds in escrow.
Subsequently,
<https://web.archive.org/web/20220427141745/https://www.cercarbono.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/GREEN-Jurisdictional-Programme-Description.pdf>a<https://web.archive.org/web/20220427141745/https://www.cercarbono.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/GREEN-Jurisdictional-Programme-Description.pdf>
partial release of trust funds is made
periodically during the crediting period of the
jurisdictional initiative. From this partial
release, a percentage operational fee is
deducted (the percentage is undisclosed in the
programs documents) and paid to the GREEN+
program while a separate (and also undisclosed)
fee is also deducted for the operation of the
GREEN+ Trust. Disbursements of what remains are
made annually over a ten year period and,
<https://web.archive.org/web/20220427141745/https://www.cercarbono.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/GREEN-Jurisdictional-Programme-Description.pdf>per
graphs produced by GREEN+, those payments remain
the same, fixed value even if the value of the
carbon credits of the protected areas grows.
Between 40% and 60% of the funds actually
received by subnational governments
<https://nomadsembassy.com/fbi-background-check-from-abroad/>can
be used to design and execute projects aimed at
conservation, while the rest is allocated for
new jurisdictional decarbonisation initiatives
that can produce additional or consequential
carbon credits. These consequential credits are
then offered as a preferred option to the
investors who initially purchased the
conservation credits at a 50% discounted price
calculated at the current market price. However,
later in the
<https://nomadsembassy.com/fbi-background-check-from-abroad/>same
document, the program says that the amount
required for the initial implementation of
conservation projects may not exceed 20% of the
funds allocated [from the GREEN+ Trust] to the
jurisdictional initiative. Clearly, the amount
of funds actually being generated for
conservation-related projects is minimal and,
even in the best case scenario, is less than half
of the capital generated by the carbon credits
themselves. However, as we shall see, these
conservation projects must be done in
conjunction with approved partners of Global
Carbon Parks, which like the organization
itself are tied to predatory financial
interests and oligarchs with questionable motives.
Of the funds that governments actually receive as
part of GREEN+, half are officially meant to go
toward conservation-related projects while the
other half are meant to go toward
decarbonization-related projects. However, on
<https://carbonparks.cc35.city/>the Global Carbon
Parks-<https://carbonparks.cc35.city/>GREEN+
website, it notes that the decarbonization
projects must be conducted alongside Community
Electricity, which forms part of Global Carbon
Parks and is closely connected to the GREEN+
alliance member The Energy Coalition (TEC). As
will be discussed later, TEC and Community
Electricity are together attempting to build an
inter-continental smart grid in the Americas
and are also involved in efforts to develop smart cities and suburbs.
As for GREEN+s conservation projects, the
website states that 50% of the resources
received by the capital [city as part of GREEN+]
must be used for social and environmental impact
in protected urban areas with partners such as
Cities4Forests. Cities4Forests was founded by
the World Resources Institute (WRI), a World
Economic Forum affiliate and
<https://www.wri.org/about/history>contractor to
<https://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/4/is_usaid_the_new_cia_agency>suspected
CIA front USAID that is focused on resource
sustainability. WRI is
<https://www.wri.org/annual-report/2022-23/donors>funded
by the US and several European governments,
billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mike
Bloomberg as well as Google, Meta/Facebook, the
Soros familys Open Societies Foundations, the
UN, Walmart, the World Bank and the World
Economic Forum, among others. WRIs
Cities4Forests shares many of
<https://cities4forests.com/about/founders-funders-partners/>the
same<https://cities4forests.com/about/founders-funders-partners/>
funding
<https://cities4forests.com/about/founders-funders-partners/>sources,
such as the governments of the UK, Germany,
Denmark and the US as well as the World Bank and
the Caterpillar Foundation. Other funders include
the Wall Street giant Citi Group, the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Inter-American Development
Bank (IDB). Notably, the Rockefeller Foundation
and the IDB recently
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/wall-streets-takeover-of-nature-advances-with-launch-of-new-asset-class/>teamed
up to create the Intrinsic Exchange Group, which
has spearheaded the financialization of nature
via the creation of Natural Asset Corporations
(NACs). As Unlimited Hangout
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/wall-streets-takeover-of-nature-advances-with-launch-of-new-asset-class/>previously
reported, NACs create corporations that take
control of natural assets that were previously
part of the commons, such as forests, rivers
and lakes, and then sell shares of those assets
to Wall Street asset managers, sovereign wealth
funds and other financial institutions in order
to generate profit under the guise of conserving the asset they target.
Unsurprisingly, most of Cities4Forests projects,
such as those that would be built with GREEN+
funds, are similar to NACs in that they focus on
using natural assets and natural capital to
produce new financial and insurance products.
Examples of Cities4Forests conservation
projects include the development of a
<https://cities4forests.com/project/forest-resilience-bond/>Forest
Resilience Bond and
<https://www.nbs4india.org/partners/>the India
Forum for Nature-based Solutions. One of the
India-based forums core partners is the Nature
Conservancy, which has been run by Wall Street
bankers for years and
<https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/tokenized-inc-blackrocks-plan-to-own-the-fractionalized-world->has
pioneered the modern iteration of the
controversial debt for conservation swap among
other nature-based solutions. The funders of
Cities4Forest and its creator the WRI are also
deeply affiliated with groups like
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/un-backed-banker-alliance-announces-green-plan-to-transform-the-global-financial-system/>the
Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and
UN-backed climate finance initiatives that
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/09/investigative-reports/sustainable-debt-slavery/>openly
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/09/investigative-reports/sustainable-debt-slavery/>seek
to use debt imperialism to herd the global
economy, with a focus on emerging markets, into
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/un-backed-banker-alliance-announces-green-plan-to-transform-the-global-financial-system/>a
new system of global financial governance.
Thus, the conservation and decarbonization
efforts that subnational governments must enact
as part of their contractual agreements with
GREEN+ will go towards projects tied to either
the smart grid/smart city developer Community
Electricity or a conservation organization
backed by Western oligarchs, multi-national
corporations and banks that seeks to financialize
and monetize nature under the guise of conserving it.
CC35 AND THE SUBNATIONAL PIVOT
CC35, or Ciudades Capitales de las Americas
frente al Cambio Climático (American Capital
Cities Facing Climate Change), is the most
visible organization behind the GREEN+ program
and one of the members of its governance
committee. CC35s goal is the economic
integration of the Americas (North, South and
Central) through coordinated climate change
policies, specifically the creation of an
Inter-American carbon market, with GREEN+ being
the means of implementing that market. The group
focuses on subnational governments, namely
capital cities of the Americas, thereby
circumventing national governments with respect
to Climate Change-related policy.
Regarding GREEN+, Sebastián Navarro, the
secretary general of CC35,
<https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/satellogic-announces-exclusive-agreement-with-green-jurisdictional-programme-to>stated
of the program that: We will be relentless from
the governance of the GREEN+ program with those
who want to continue playing with the future of
humanity, adding that their relentless
approach would be greatly aided by Satellogics
satellite surveillance capabilities, which would
also generate unprecedented credibility among
investors of the carbon credits produced by
conservation. Navarros promise to be
relentless in governing a satellite
surveillance regime of American forests for the
purpose of producing high-credibility carbon markets.
While framed as an initiative born out of Latin
America, CC35 is
<https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/SearchResultDetail?inquirytype=EntityName&directionType=Initial&searchNameOrder=CC35CAPITALCITIESSECRETARIAT%20N240000006600&aggregateId=domnp-n24000000660-0a290665-91f4-4f89-b294-a5de1eebafda&searchTerm=cc35&listNameOrder=CC35CAPITALCITIESSECRETARIAT%20N240000006600>registered
in Miami; Florida (Coral Gables, specifically)
and has long been funded and partnered with
US-based interests. For instance, CC35s
<https://www.elcomercio.com/tendencias/ambiente/dicaprio-schwarzenegger-proyectos-descarbonizar-planeta.html>first
partners were R20 (Regions of Climate Action, now
the Catalytic Finance Foundation), a group
created by former California governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger in partnership with the UN, and
the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. From there,
CC35
<https://cc35.city/partnetariat-alliances.html>partnered
with UN and UN-linked organizations as well as
Pegasus Capital Advisors, which also
<https://www.pcalp.com/about/>finances CC35 and
Schwarzeneggers R20/Catalytic Finance
Foundation. R20/Catalytic Finance, like CC35,
focuses its attention on subnational governments.
Pegasus Capital is the firm
<https://www.pcalp.com/about/>created by Craig
Cogut,
<https://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/24/business/ex-drexel-executives-arrange-aid-for-fruit-of-the-loom.html>a
key figure in the junk bond financial scandal
at the now defunct Drexel Burnham Lambert.
Drexels junk bond department, led by Michael
Milken, engaged in blatantly illegal activity and
used junk bonds to help fuel the takeovers of
major corporations by the eras infamous
corporate raiders before the banks collapse.
Specifically, Cogut was the lawyer
<https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-10-23-fi-3113-story.html>who
advised the
<https://www.chicagotribune.com/1991/10/13/the-definitive-account-of-the-insider-trading-scandals/>Milken-run
and scandal-ridden junk bond department on the
legality of transactions, including those that
saw Milken become a convicted felon. Following
Drexels collapse, Cogut teamed up with a group
of Drexel alumni led by Leon Black now
<https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/04/business/leon-black-settles-virgin-islands-jeffrey-epstein-claims/index.html>best
known for
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein.html>his
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein.html>close
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein.html>association
<https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein-senate-investigation/index.html>with
<https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein-senate-investigation/index.html>the
deceased sex trafficker and financial adviser
<https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein-senate-investigation/index.html>Jeffre<https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein-senate-investigation/index.html>y<https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/business/leon-black-jeffrey-epstein-senate-investigation/index.html>
Epstein to co-found Apollo Advisers (now Apollo
Global Management) in 1990. Cogut left Apollo to
found Pegasus in 1996 and Pegasus has since
became <https://www.pcalp.com/about/>a key player
in several UN-supported green finance
initiatives. Cogut is also financially entangled
with Satellogics co-founder, Emiliano Kargieman, as will be discussed later.
Cogut subsequently became a board member of
Arizona State Universitys Global Institute of
Sustainability, which was created by Michael Crow
(and who served on the board alongside Cogut).
Crow is chairman of the board of trustees of
In-Q-tel, the CIAs venture capital arm. Cogut
also served on the board of ASUS McCain
Institute, named for the late Senator John
McCain, which has links to Ashton Kutchers
CIA-linked charity Thorn. Current board members
of the McCain Institute include both Crow and
former CIA director David Petraeus, as well as
Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who co-created the
Council for Inclusive Capital with the Vatican.
Cogut was also on the board of the Clinton Health
Access Initiative (CHAI), part of the Clinton
family philanthropies, and CHAI was largely
shaped and influenced by notorious sex trafficker
and financial advisor for billionaires Jeffrey
Epstein, having been the chief reason for former
president Bill Clintons flights on Epsteins plane in the early 2000s.
Notably, Cogut is not the only Drexel alum to be
involved in green finance. The field of green
finance itself was
<https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30carbon.html>essentially
invented by Richard Sandor, who made millions at
Drexel during the 1980s, pioneering innovative
products like the collateralized mortgage
obligation (CMO), which would later contribute to
the 2008 financial crisis. Sandor had previously
been deemed the father of financial futures and
is also credited with helping create derivatives.
After Drexels collapse, Sandor
<https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30carbon.html>moved
on to pioneering carbon emissions trading and
carbon markets with the vision of creating an
all-electronic exchange for carbon trading, a
vision that has since taken shape.
CC35 has long been led by Sebastián Navarro.
Under his leadership, CC35 helped broker the
creation of the Subnational Climate Fund, which
is
<https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Sub-National_Climate_Fund_Initiative_Instrument_Analysis.pdf>backed
by Coguts Pegasus Capital along with BNP
Paribas, the Rockefeller Foundation, the
Bloomberg Philanthropies and the governments of
Germany, the UK, Australia and the Netherlands.
That fund focuses on financing infrastructure
projects in the Global South at the subnational
(e.g. city, state) level, again bypassing
national governments. Indeed, the main modus
operandi of CC35 is brokering contracts between
small, subnational governments and green
finance entities that are tied to centers of
US/European political or financial power.
Navarro is listed as
<https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/CorporationSearch/SearchResultDetail?inquirytype=EntityName&directionType=Initial&searchNameOrder=CC35CAPITALCITIESSECRETARIAT%20N240000006600&aggregateId=domnp-n24000000660-0a290665-91f4-4f89-b294-a5de1eebafda&searchTerm=cc35&listNameOrder=CC35CAPITALCITIESSECRETARIAT%20N240000006600>a
director of CC35 as are two prominent,
right-leaning Latin American politicians: Felipe
Alessandri Vergara, mayor of the Chilean capital
Santiago from 2016 to 2021, and Nasry Asfura
Zablah, former mayor of the Honduran capital
Tegucigalpa and former Honduran presidential
candidate. Alessandri is a well-known figure in
Chilean center-right politics and an ally of the
recently deceased former Chilean president
Sebastián Piñera. Alessandri is controversial
within the Chilean right for his covert support
of initiatives generally favored by the left and
publicly shunned by his party while serving as
Santiagos mayor, such as climate
finance/regional economic integration
(<https://www.munistgo.cl/santiago-asume-la-presidencia-de-alcaldes-por-el-clima-de-cc35/>via
CC35) and his
<https://www.cnnchile.com/pais/audio-filtrado-alessandri-hassler-explicacion-dar-personas-involucradas_20240224/>financing
of
<https://www.cnnchile.com/pais/audio-filtrado-alessandri-hassler-explicacion-dar-personas-involucradas_20240224/>initiatives
related
to<https://www.cnnchile.com/pais/audio-filtrado-alessandri-hassler-explicacion-dar-personas-involucradas_20240224/>
illegal
immigra<https://www.cnnchile.com/pais/audio-filtrado-alessandri-hassler-explicacion-dar-personas-involucradas_20240224/>tion.
Alessandris
<https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2024/02/26/hassler-apunta-a-alessandri-y-pinera-por-abandono-profundo-del-centro-de-santiago.shtml>successor
and supposed
<https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2024/02/26/hassler-apunta-a-alessandri-y-pinera-por-abandono-profundo-del-centro-de-santiago.shtml>political<https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/region-metropolitana/2024/02/26/hassler-apunta-a-alessandri-y-pinera-por-abandono-profundo-del-centro-de-santiago.shtml>
nemesis, Irací Hassler of Chiles Communist
Party, has since taken over for Alessandri as
CC35s Vice President for South America. As for
Nasry Asfura, he was the subject of a Honduran
political scandal due to his appearance in the
Pandora Papers and his alleged involvement in
suspicious
<https://www.elclip.org/nasry-tito-asfura-pandora-papers-honduras/?lang=en>offshore
finance activities. He was also indicted on money
laundering and fund embezzlement, but charges
were dropped under Asfuras successor Jorge
Aldana, who is now president of CC35.
The current vice president of CC35 for Central
America is Mario Durán, the mayor of San Salvador
and a close ally of El Salvadors president
<https://bitcoinmagazine.com/tags/nayib-bukele>Nayib
Bukele as well as a member of Bukeles Nuevas
Ideas party. Durán is poised to take over the
leadership of CC35 per
<https://diarioelsalvador.com/alcalde-mario-duran-liderara-la-iniciativa-ciudades-capitales-de-las-americas-frente-al-cambio-climatico/413808/>a
recent announcement from the group. In 2021,
Durán
<https://diariolahuella.com/alcalde-mario-duran-firma-convenio-para-capacitar-alcaldias-de-san-salvador-en-el-uso-del-bitcoin/>signed
a contract with CC35 regarding education about
the use of Bitcoin in all metropolitan region
municipalities in El Salvador, and is the only
mention of CC35 promoting the use of Bitcoin. As
will be noted again later on, the CC35-led GREEN+
initiative is partnered with Rootstock, which
created and develops a Bitcoin sidechain that
enables smart contracts on the Bitcoin
blockchain. Presumably, the goal is to run
GREEN+s digital carbon market on the same blockchain.
While it may seem odd to an American audience
that regional integration efforts under the
guise of climate change would be led largely by
right-leaning politicians, it is important to
point out that such integration efforts have
historically been led by both left and right
factions in Latin America, who compete for
dominance over the region. For instance,
right-leaning efforts at economically and/or
politically integrating the Americas include
Mercosur (the Southern Common Market, now
<https://www.a24.com/politica/javier-milei-recibio-al-presidente-paraguay-y-hablaron-del-vinculo-bilateral-y-la-agenda-del-mercosur-n1293077>championed
by the anti-globalist Javier Milei) and Prosur
(Forum for the Progress and Integration of South
America, launched by Chiles center-right
Piñera). Left-leaning efforts include ALADI
(Latin American Integration Association) and
UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). All of
these efforts have failed due to geopolitical
disagreements mainly centered around whether to
grant membership to countries like Venezuela,
Cuba and others with governments estranged from
the so-called Washington consensus or, more
recently, efforts to forge closer ties to Russia
and/or China. Given that several important Latin
American countries can suddenly change what side
of the consensus they are on depending on
presidential election results, such as recently
happened in
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/03/latin-america-currency-union-argentina-brazil-el-sur/673449/>Brazil
and
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/03/latin-america-currency-union-argentina-brazil-el-sur/673449/>Argentina,
these regional integration efforts have failed to
gain significant traction over the last several
decades. Nevertheless, the end goal of economic
integration begetting political integration
<https://www.globe-project.eu/en/institutional-design-what-do-aladi-mercosur-and-unsaur-have-in-common-and-what-does-it-tell-us-about-south-american-regional-organizations_15379>remains
the same. Thus, as CC35 shows, the push to
regionally integrate Latin America has now, very
quietly, pivoted away from engagement at the
national level to the subnational level.
THE CLUB OF ROMES GLOBAL FOOTPRINT
While CC35 is the most visible face of GREEN+s
governing body, it is actually chaired by a group
called the Global Footprint Network (GFN). The
GFN exists to promote
<https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/>the
Ecological Footprint, which tracks how much
nature we use and how much we have, as an
accounting tool for green finance initiatives
and originated the concept of ecological debt
based on that metric. Elsewhere, the GFN calls
for one-planet prosperity and emphasizes
climate finance, a field dominated by predatory
Wall Street banks and billionaires, as an
economic imperative. They work with governments
at both the national and subnational level and
establish the carbon emissions limits for
localities, states and countries that programs
like GREEN+ seek to enforce with satellite
surveillance and binding contractual obligations.
The GFN is intimately connected to the Club of
Rome. For instance, GFNs founder and a member of
its board, Mathis Wackernagel, who also
co-created the Ecological Footprint concept, is
<https://www.clubofrome.org/member/wackernagel-mathis/>a
member of the Club of Rome. Wackernagels former
mentor and the
<https://www.footprintnetwork.org/about-us/our-history/>other
developer of the Ecological Footprint, William
Rees, was
<https://canadiancor.com/dr-william-rees-on-the-virtues-of-self-delusion-or-maybe-not/>a
member of the Club of Rome until 2018. Heiko
Specking, a GFN
<https://www.footprintnetwork.org/about-us/people/>board
member, is also
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/zinnkraut/details/experience/>affiliated
with the Club of Rome as is another GFN board
member, <http://akenji/>Lewis Akenji.
The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by the
Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish
chemist Alexander King. Its earliest success was
the 1972 report and later book
<https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/>The
<https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/>Limits
to Growth, which was based on an MIT study and
claimed that if the worlds consumption patterns
and population growth continued at the same high
rates of the time, the earth would strike its
limits within a century. The book was heavily
promoted by the earliest annual meetings of the
World Economic Forum, particularly in 1973.
Peccei, who spent a large part of his life living
in Argentina, had previously been a member of
ADELA, the Atlantic Community Development Group
for Latin America. ADELA was composed of powerful
Western companies that pooled money to invest in
Latin American companies of their choosing,
essentially king-making the titans of the Latin
American corporate
world.<https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/15/archives/private-aid-to-private-enterprise-financing-businesses-in-latin.html>
ADELAs backers
<https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,875701,00.html>included
Bank of America, IBM, Fiat (where Peccei was an
executive), and the Rockefeller familys Standard
Oil. The group was part of
<https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/15/archives/private-aid-to-private-enterprise-financing-businesses-in-latin.html>the
Rockefeller-dominated network in Latin America,
which also included the
<https://radio.uchile.cl/2017/03/21/a-los-101-anos-muere-david-rockefeller-el-gran-amigo-americano-de-agustin-edwards/>International
Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), which
<https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2017-04-25/agustin-edwards-declassified-obituary>has
been linked to the 1973 CIA-backed military coup
in Chile through the Chilean Rockefeller
associate Agustín Edwards, and Deltec, best known
today as
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2023/12/investigative-reports/unmasking-farmington-ftx-fluent-finance-and-the-coming-digital-dollar/>a
main bank for the failed crypto exchange FTX and
its
<https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/deltec-bank-implicated-in-alleged-tether-manipulation-scheme/ar-BB1it1h7>close
relationship with the stablecoin Tether. Modern
iterations of this network include Endeavor and
the Council of the Americas (CoA), which will be
discussed in the second part of this series.
Notably, it was Pecceis speech at an ADELA
conference that
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/abs/born-in-the-corridors-of-the-oecd-the-forgotten-origins-of-the-club-of-rome-transnational-networks-and-the-1970s-in-global-history/0441CA6588F99F0825D8FF5F45401FC0>spurred
his partnership with Alexander King and led to the Club of Romes formation.
At the time he got involved with Peccei and made
the Club of Rome, King was head of the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD). The OECD was originally
established as the OEEC to help administer the
post-WWII, US-developed Marshall Plan and was
later expanded to become a global organization in
1961. The US remains the OECDs
<https://www.oecd.org/about/budget/member-countries-budget-contributions.htm>main
funder by a significant margin. The group has
<https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_191-1>long
claimed to promote sustainable economic growth
and consistently improving standard of living in
its member countries, but in practice it
routinely favors neoliberal policies that enrich
Western-based multi-national corporations. It is
<https://www.oecd.org/global-relations/oecdpartnershipswithinternationalorganisations/>closely
partnered with entities like the IMF, the World
Bank and the broader multi-lateral development
banking system that
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/09/investigative-reports/sustainable-debt-slavery/>has
used debt slavery sold as economic development
to privatize state-owned assets and sell them off
to privileged corporate interests. That system
has also been considered by the US military to be
part of its arsenal of
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/02/investigative-reports/tokenized-inc-blackrocks-plan-to-own-the-fractionalized-world/>financial
weapons used to protect US interests abroad.
The Club of Rome was criticized for many decades
for embracing
<https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/33719>neo-Malthusian
thought (i.e. eugenics and specifically
population control measures in the developing
world) as well as for promoting
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/11/investigative-reports/the-club-of-rome-and-the-rise-of-the-predictive-modelling-mafia/>greater
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/11/investigative-reports/the-club-of-rome-and-the-rise-of-the-predictive-modelling-mafia/>global
governance. Some of its members have championed
the imposition of
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojK05pVOlhs&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Funlimitedhangout.com%2F&feature=emb_imp_woyt>a
benevolent global dictatorship. Criticisms of
the Club of Rome have been voiced by
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/3985399>academia as
well as
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/11/investigative-reports/the-club-of-rome-and-the-rise-of-the-predictive-modelling-mafia/>independent
and
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/population-control-movement-climate-malthusian-similarities/673450/>mainstream
media. The groups attempt to rebrand as an
environmental group in order to gain popular
support for those same policies was discussed in
their 1991 book
<https://archive.org/details/TheFirstGlobalRevolution/page/n85/mode/2up?q=the+real+enemy>The
First Global Revolution, which states:
In searching for a common enemy against whom we
can unite, we came up with the idea that
pollution, the threat of global warming, water
shortages, famine and the like, would fit the
bill. In their totality and their interactions
these phenomena do constitute a common threat
which must be confronted by everyone together.
But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we
fall into the trap, which we have already warned
readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for
causes. All these dangers are caused by human
intervention in natural processes, and it is only
through changed attitudes and behaviour that they
can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.
The Global Footprint Networks methods, products
and ideology are very much aligned with the
neo-Malthusian Limits to Growth view of the
Club of Rome as well as the efforts to
incorporate nature into financial markets via
so-called nature-based solutions. Indeed, the
GFNs ecological footprint metric is promoted by
groups like the World Economic Forum and the
World Wildlife Fund (where Peccei served on the
board and which has long been tied to
<https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/dec/03/guardianobituaries.monarchy>European
oligarch and
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/04/wwf-international-selling-its-soul-corporations>corporate
interests). GFN also provides the statistical
means of imposing Limits to Growth-style models
that control both population levels and
industrialization levels on governments by
developing ecological budgets that, as
evidenced by GREEN+, are now interfacing directly with carbon markets.
BUILDING A GREEN POWER MONOPOLY
The other member of the GREEN+ governing
committee that will control the program as well
as Satellogics surveillance data is The Energy
Coalition (TEC). Notably, it was TECs executive
director Craig Perkins who said that GREEN+ would
also enable the surveillance of carbon emissions
of populated areas, presumably via satellite. TEC
was founded by John Phillips, who ran
<https://phillipsoilandgas.com/services>Phillips
Energy an oil and gas company, in 1975. Since
1979, it has been closely partnered with local
California governments via its Community Energy
Partnership program. Currently, TEC is
<https://energy-is-everything.org/about>partnered
with, and some of its key initiatives are
financed by, major California gas companies,
referred to by TEC as Californias
investor-owned utilities. These include Pacific
Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison, SDGE and SoCalGas.
With the backing of these major oil and gas
companies, TEC assures us it is creating the
building blocks for a new energy economy. One of
its main partners in doing so is Community
Electricity, which claims to be building the
NASDAQ of the clean energy field. TEC and
Community Electricity, which is
<https://www.communityelectricity.io/>backed by
Google, have co-designed a master plan financed
by the California Energy Commission to implement
the largest and first-of-its-kind decarbonization
by electrification protocols using DERs
[<https://www.energy.gov/femp/distributed-energy-resources-resilience>distributed
energy resources], carbon emissions management,
blockchain, AI and IoT [internet of things] all
connected under one plug-and-play platform.
Community Electric designs, funds and develops
this technology for GluHomes (formerly
GluEnergy), its parent company which shares the
same founder as Community Electricity Felipe
Cano. The program is
<https://www.smart-energy.com/smart-grid/los-angeles-hosts-worlds-largest-blockchain-enabled-advanced-energy-community/>being
piloted in the poorest neighborhoods of Los
Angeles as well as in disadvantaged communities
in Colombia. The goal,
<https://medium.com/energy-web-insights/community-electricity-and-energy-web-announce-partnership-to-bring-decentralized-tech-to-2f105150a3db>per
Cano, is to bring the Americas together through
an inter-continental, clean smart grid.
The blockchain
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/08/07/california-agency-backs-green-energy-pilot-using-rsks-bitcoin-smart-contracts/>involved
in these efforts is RSK, the smart
contract-oriented sidechain that runs on top of
the Bitcoin network. As previously mentioned, RSK
is a founding member of GREEN+. The initiative
involving TEC, Community Electricity,
Californias government, and RSK
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/08/07/california-agency-backs-green-energy-pilot-using-rsks-bitcoin-smart-contracts/>also
see<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/08/07/california-agency-backs-green-energy-pilot-using-rsks-bitcoin-smart-contracts/>ks
to digitize carbon credit reporting and to
create opportunities for businesses to redeem
credits. The Community Electricity/TEC program
also uses the RSK blockchain to record a persons
energy usage with the help of RIF, an identity
product [i.e. digital identity] developed by RSK
Labs. The Community Electricity system requires
a digital ID tied to
<https://web.archive.org/web/20240313092108/https://gluenergy.io/en/new-glu-energy/>a
digital wallet that is embedded to store daily
profits derived from surplus energy sales that
allow electricity consumers to trade energy
credits and become what the company calls
prosumers, with the goal of creating an energy
social network. The Community Electricity
hardware
<https://web.archive.org/web/20240313092226/https://gluenergy.io/en/technology/>produced
with GluHomes also utilize[s] AI and machine
learning to transform any home intro a smart
micro electricity generation utility.
The group is partnering with real estate
developers to develop smart homes connected to
their energy-related technology, with a focus on
social housing and affordable housing, i.e.
housing for lower income families. The goal is to
connect together retro-fitted existing homes, new
smart homes, a neighborhood co-op of electric
vehicles and a reward-payment system called
<https://web.archive.org/web/20240313092220/https://gluenergy.io/en/glu-pay/>GluPay,
which is partnered with Mastercard and
<https://www.contigo-global.com/>Contigo, which
designs products for the unbanked, immigrants,
homeless and disadvantaged population, with a
focus on remittance payments. Contigo is
<https://www.contigo-global.com/>currently in
talks with El Salvadors government to have the
companys Payments Wallet tied into the
Salvadoran financial inclusion products. Contigo
is run by
<https://chavez.ucla.edu/person/raul-hinojosa-ojeda/>Raul
Hinojosa, an academic at UCLA who wrote a book
entitled Convergence and Divergence between
NAFTA, Chile, and MERCOSUR: Overcoming Dilemmas
of North and South American Economic
Integration, which focuses on the impact of a
potential Free Trade of the Americas Agreement.
The creator of Community Electricity and
GluHomes, Felipe Cano has also spent most of his
career attempting to economically integrate large
swathes of the world. For instance, in 1998,
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/felipe-cano-12459224/>his
vision was to unify both European and US stock
exchanges under one platform and protocol, the
create the smart grid of the equity market and
stock trading in a bilateral, single network.
This vision led him to create ECN Access, which
was the first tech hub in Europe to route the
first block of institutional order flows from a
European Bank directly to the NASDAQ electronic
exchange without intermediaries, creating what
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/felipe-cano-12459224/>Cano
calls the first smart grid every built. He then
sought to create a digital market for the energy
sector, which has since culminated in his
creation of Community Electricity and GluHomes.
Cano is an adviser to TEC and is also a senior
partner at
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/felipe-cano-12459224/>Silverbear
Capital, where he focuses on investments related
to smart cities. According to
<https://sbcfinancialgroup.com/meet-our-team/>his
bio at Silverbear, Cano is also CEO of Olidata
Smart Cities LLC, a market-maker platform which
uses nano-grids and microgrids as the underlying
strategy to deploy the Internet of Things Protocol of the future.
Cano was also, until recently,
<https://sursantiago.com.ar/politica/2021/12/07/zamora-se-reunio-con-el-presidente-de-la-global-carbon-parks-felipe-cano>the
president of
<https://carbonparks.cc35.city/>Global Carbon
Parks, which is a consortium of companies, the
only known members of which all happen to be
<https://carbonparks.cc35.city/>companies that
founded GREEN+, with the one exception being
Canos Community Electricity. Global Carbon
Parks, unsurprisingly, is now
<https://globalcarbonparks.com/services.html>one
of the main implementers of the GREEN+ program.
Global Carbon Parks is also partnered with
<https://www.aclima.io/about>Aclima, a start-up
backed by Microsoft and the foundation of former
Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Global Carbon Parks
stated mission is to transform protected areas
into natural equity via public-private
partnerships, essentially admitting that the
GREEN+ program it now helps manage is about
financializing protected natural assets and resources.
Global Carbon Parks transforms these forests
into natural equity by measuring, certifying
and trading carbon credits in conjunction with
the carbon credit certification Cercarbono
(discussed later in this article). Their
<https://globalcarbonparks.com/services.html>partnership
with Satellogic, which goes beyond but also
includes the GREEN+ program, uses satellite
surveillance to ensure the integrity of the
preserved area which contains the carbon
represented by the carbon credits. The company
<https://globalcarbonparks.com/services.html>also
promotes their integration with The Energy
Coalition and Community Electricity to develop
advanced electricity communities that develop
renewable energy credits, which the company
claims will contribute to local wealth
creation. The company is partnered with a
financial firm, which does the actual trading of
carbon credits for both Global Carbon Parks and
presumably GREEN+. However, Global Carbon Parks
declines to reveal their identity, merely stating
that They are a financial firm that integrates
technical, economic, and environmental solutions.
In summary, the governance of the GREEN+ program
and the group with control over its satellite
surveillance data; are tied to or funded by
groups that have long used debt as a form of
control over the Global South in particular; seek
to control the population size and the degree of
industrialization in countries; are tied to
globalist efforts to economically and politically
integrate the Americas; are building a Bitcoin
blockchain-based smart grid that surveils and
limits energy usage and links energy usage to
currency; and are integrating and tokenizing the
natural world, including endangered or protected
areas, into the financial system under the guise
of conservation. Through CC35s Alcades por el
Clima (Mayors for the Climate) initiative, over
15,000 local governments in Latin America
<https://www.alcaldesporelclima.org/>have signed
agreements with CC35 related to carbon emission
trading schemes and limits, led by Brazil (5,564
local governments), Argentina (2,457 local
governments), and Mexico (2,481 local
governments). Presumably, those carbon
neutrality/trading agreements will allow CC35 to
push those municipalities into the GREEN+
program, if they arent already planning to participate directly (many are).
In other words, the vast majority of Latin
America, unbeknownst to the vast majority of its
populace, is already contractually yoked to one
of the main organizations behind the GREEN+
program run by interests tied to foreign banks,
corporations and even intelligence services. The
program is set to launch continent-wide in a
matter of weeks. As this article and subsequent
article will show, what has transpired is a
brazen attempt to conduct a silent coup of the
continents natural resources, energy production,
local governments and economy.
THE GREEN+ TRUST AND THE BITCOIN CARBON MARKET
The GREEN+ Trust, which is to hold and handle the
profits from the carbon credits produced and then
disburse them to governments if certain
conditions are met, is to be
<http://web.archive.org/web/20220427141745/https://www.cercarbono.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/GREEN-Jurisdictional-Programme-Description.pdf>managed
by individuals selected from the members
institutions of the [GREEN+] Executive Board as
well as from Isolas, Lockton and Rootstock (RSK).
According to GREEN+, the Trust is not only
responsible for fund custody, but also the
regulation of smart contracts, in coordination
with the certification standard [Cercarbono] and
the monitoring of mitigation initiatives
[conducted by Satellogic]. The only known member
of the Trust, as previously mentioned, is
Alejandro Guerrero, the head of Locktons branch in Argentina and Uruguay.
Lockton, a founding member of GREEN+ and also of
Global Carbon Parks, is the worlds largest,
privately held insurance brokerage firm that also
provides risk management services, employee
benefits and retirement services. They are owned
by the Lockton family and the company and the
family behind it are rather secretive. However,
the company has been overt about the
opportunities they see in the type of carbon
market that initiatives like GREEN+ will create.
In a 2023 article, Locktons head of Digital
Integration and Special Projects, David Briscoe,
<https://global.lockton.com/gb/en/news-insights/making-carbon-dioxide-credits-a-strong-currency>wrote
that making carbon credits a stable and trusted
currency would require the support of the
insurance market. This is because, as Briscoe
notes, voluntary carbon markets come with
risks, particularly because of the financial
values involved. Per Briscoe, these risks
include non- or under-delivery of forward
purchased carbon removal credits, start-ups
involved in the voluntary carbon market may face
insolvency risks, and fraud and negligence.
Indeed,
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/24/carbon-credit-speculators-could-lose-billions-as-offsets-deemed-worthless-aoe>mismanagement
and fraud has been
<https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/02/1082765/the-growing-signs-of-trouble-for-global-carbon-markets/>a
major driver of why carbon markets have failed to
catch on despite relentless promotion and the
adoption of ESG and climate change plans by many
of the most powerful names in finance and
industry. Instead of addressing the rampant fraud
in carbon credits directly, it appears that the
high probability of fraud and insolvency has been
seen as an opportunity to create a new market for
the insurance industry, with carbon credit
insurance being framed as the only feasible
means of de-risking the
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/27/australias-carbon-credits-system-a-failure-on-global-scale-study-finds>fraud-prone
world of carbon markets, which
<https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/reuters-impact-greenpeace-calls-end-carbon-offsets-2021-10-06/>have
been criticized by environmental groups and
<https://www.kpbs.org/podcasts/kpbs-midday-edition-segments/2019/05/28/propublica-carbon-credits-dont-fight-climate-chang>have
been shown to have a negligible impact on climate.
Lockton offers a variety of products related to
carbon credits and so do its competitors, with
the first such insurance having been issued by
the UK-based insurance company Howden in 2022.
That product was
<https://www.howdengroup.com/news-and-insights/Howden-launches-World-First-voluntary-carbon-credit-insurance-product-to-help-scale-the-market>designed
to increase confidence in the Voluntary Carbon
Market and was incubated in collaboration with
the Insurance Task Force of the Sustainable
Markets Initiative; an initiative led by His
Royal Highness The Prince of Wales [now King
Charles]. Industry publications have
<https://www.theinsurer.com/news/carbon-credits-the-next-1bn-insurance-market/>openly
posited that carbon credits are likely to be the
next $1 billion insurance market. Some
companies, like <https://www.kita.earth/>Kita and
<https://www.reinsurancene.ws/cloverly-and-oka-launch-a-new-suit-of-insured-carbon-credits/>Oka,
were created specifically to insure carbon
credits. Presumably, Locktons involvement with
GREEN+ means that Lockton will be insuring the
mass of carbon credits to be produced by the
program, which plans to harvest carbon credits
from all of the worlds subnational protected
areas. In addition, Locktons role as the carbon
credits insurer means it will be involved in
ensuring that those cities/regions that are to
become part of GREEN+ comply with the programs
stipulations in order to receive funds from the trust.
Another member of the GREEN+ Trust is RSK, or
Rootstock. RSK is a
<https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/federated-sidechains-bitcoin-original>federated
sidechain built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain
that allows smart contract functionality akin to
the Ethereum blockchain, leveraging the same
programming language known as Solidity. In
effect, this means that any smart contract that
can be designed and authored on Ethereum, such as
identity systems, dollar-pegged stablecoins, or
tokenized carbon credits, can be trivially
ported to Bitcoin. The concept of Bitcoin
sidechains was first introduced in
<https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf>October
2014 by a group of Bitcoin developers mainly
employed by Blockstream, whose
<https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/blockstream-seed--3fcfe8a5>November
2014 seed round was led by Reid Hoffman, that
gives bitcoins and other ledger assets the
ability to be transferred between multiple
blockchains giving new functionality to assets
they already own without compromising any of the
security innate to Bitcoins blockchain. RSK
works by allowing
<https://dev.rootstock.io/rsk/architecture/>users
to deposit funds sent using traditional bitcoin
transactions into a wallet controlled by a
federation (in this case, a known group of
Rootstock-selected key signers) that issues a 1:1
token called Smart Bitcoin, represented by RBTC,
which fuels the RVM (Rootstock Virtual Machine),
a forked version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual
Machine). RBTC is the native currency of
Rootstock, and is used to pay for the fees
required to complete and settle the smart
contracts or transactions that take place on the RSK sidechain.
RSK was launched in 2015 by RSK Labs, which was
<https://blog.rootstock.io/noticia/iov-labs-launch/>acquired
by RIF Labs before becoming IOV (internet of
value) Labs. IOV labs, as of last week, has
rebranded once again to become
<https://www.rootstocklabs.com/>RootstockLabs. It
was co-founded by Sergio Lerner, who
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2014/12/05/bitcoin-foundation-hires-developer-sergio-lerner-for-full-time-security-role/>became
the Bitcoin Foundations bitcoin core security
auditor the same year he conceived of RSK, and
Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar. Gutierrez is the
<https://www.iovlabs.org/about-us.html>current
chairman of RootstockLabs, while Lerner is its
chief scientist and they are the president and
vice president, respectively, of the
<https://www.iovf.org/about-us/>IOV Foundation,
which enables interventions that contribute to
sustainable development, specifically the UN
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a
focus on emerging markets and territories. A
major goal of the SDGs is
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/un-backed-banker-alliance-announces-green-plan-to-transform-the-global-financial-system/>to
create a new global financial governance system.
That system
<https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2019/the-growing-challenges-for-monetary-policy-speech-by-mark-carney.pdf>has
been described in recent years by top UN climate
finance official, central banker, and ex-Goldman
Sachs executive Mark Carney, as relying largely
on programmable, surveillable digital currencies
(namely central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs) and a global carbon market.
According to RootstockLabs and its affiliated
foundation, the groups
<https://www.iovf.org/about-us/>mission is to
harness the power of digital technology,
blockchain, and collaboration to break down
barriers and create a more equitable society.
They also state that Rootstock Labs
<https://www.iovf.org/about-us/>was created with
the intent of creating a new open financial
ecosystem, while
<https://rif.technology/about/>RIF Labs states it
(along with RootstockLabs) is creating a global
financial system that works for everyone.
Diego Gutierrez is a long-time associate of
Wenceslao (Wences) Casares, an Argentine tech
entrepreneur sometimes referred to as the
<https://www.inc.com/articles/201112/argentine-entrepreneur-750-million-mistake.html>Peter
Thiel of Latin America. Gutierrez
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/diegogutierrezzaldivar/details/experience/>worked
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/diegogutierrezzaldivar/details/experience/>with
Casares at Argentinas first Internet service
provider, which Casares had launched, and then
helped create the Casares-founded Argentinian
online brokerage firm Patagon that was later sold
to Spanish banking giant Santander. Casares, like
Gutierrez, is a long-time promoter and early
adopter of Bitcoin and is allegedly responsible
for pitching the promise of Bitcoin to elites,
like Bill Gates and LinkedIn/PayPals Reid
Hoffman. Hoffman
<https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2015/06/11/wences-casares-the-bitcoin-obsessed-serial-entrepreneur/>once
referred to Casares as Bitcoins patient zero
in terms of
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2018/01/15/paypals-wences-casares-i-can-imagine-a-world-in-which-bitcoin-becomes-a-global-standard-of-value/?sh=78220b2063b5>Silicon
Valleys interest in Bitcoin. Forbes
<https://archive.md/Bvtfe>has
<https://archive.md/Bvtfe>even
<https://archive.md/Bvtfe>referred to Casares as
crypto royalty who ran with the original gang of
Bitcoin OGs. Casares subsequently became
<https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/PayPal-Appoints-Wences-Casares-to-its-Board-of-Directors>a
board member of PayPal and also part of
Facebooks failed stablecoin project Libra/Diem.
He is also a World Economic Forum
<https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/PayPal-Appoints-Wences-Casares-to-its-Board-of-Directors>Young
Global Leader.
Casares was formerly a partner at NXTP Ventures,
one of the oldest venture capital firms in Latin
America, and he is credited with introducing the
firms founders to crypto. NXTP subsequently
became a major investor in Gutierrezs RSK as
well as another Gutierrez-founded company,
Koibanx, a Latin America-focused asset
tokenization company that
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/18/blockchain-protocol-algorand-leads-22m-investment-round-in-tokenization-firm-koibanx/>per
its CEO is at the forefront of redefining
Latin Americas financial system. Gutierrezs
Koibanx has been instrumental in developing
Bitcoin products and services
<https://koibanx.medium.com/el-salvador-signs-a-cooperation-agreement-with-koibanx-to-develop-the-governments-blockchain-6506f30564fe>sponsored
by El Salvadors government as well as enabling
the role of Algorand as
<https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/reporting-on-bitcoin-adoption-in-el-salvador>an
intermediary in El Salvadors Bitcoin ecosystem.
Algorand is also a
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/08/18/blockchain-protocol-algorand-leads-22m-investment-round-in-tokenization-firm-koibanx/>major
investor in Koibanx and is currently run by
<https://www.algorand.foundation/news/staci-warden-ceo>Staci
Warden, who aided the cronyist privatization of
Russia while at Harvard, oversaw J.P. Morgans
division of emerging market government debt and
led crypto-related initiatives and global market
development for the Institute of the mastermind
of the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond scandal, Michael Milken.
Gutierrezs Koibanx
<https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nigeria-to-launch-major-crypto-initiative-ip-exchange-marketplace-and-wallet-on-algorand-in-partnership-with-developing-africa-group-and-koibanx-301553306.html>has
also launched a blockchain-based digital ID in
Colombia with over 12 million users and is
partnered with Nigerias government on a crypto
initiative where Nigerians can exchange their
intellectual property (IP) for a stable token
considered equivalent to the Naira, Nigerias
currency that has been completely taken over by
the governments central bank digital currency
(CBDC) project. Both of those projects have also
been conducted jointly with Algorand. Algorand is
<https://www.sicpa.com/news/sicpa-joins-digital-monetary-institute#:~:text=Members%20of%20the%20DMI%20include,Six%20Digital%20Exchange%20and%20SWIFT>a
member alongside PayPal and Amazon of the Digital
Monetary Institute, which
<https://www.omfif.org/dmi-symposium-2023/>works
with central banks, major commercial banks, and
Big Tech firms to examine the distribution and
use cases of both retail and wholesale central
bank digital currencies, tokenised assets,
deposits and capital markets, cross-border
payments and domestic interoperability. The DMI
<https://www.omfif.org/dmi-symposium-2023/>also
focuses on crypto assets and stablecoins.
NXTP is also an investor in Ripio, an
Argentina-based crypto firm
<https://www.weforum.org/organizations/ripio/>partnered
with the World Economic Forum. Rootstock
co-founder Sergio Lerner
<https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ripio-credit-network/people>sits<https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ripio-credit-network/people>
on the board of Ripios P2P lending subsidiary,
the Ripio Credit Network (RCN). Ripio is
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/09/20/latin-american-crypto-firm-ripio-raises-50m-to-accelerate-regional-expansion/>backed
by
<https://bitcoinmagazine.com/tags/tim-draper>Tim
Draper, who is
<https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/06/12/150-million-tim-draper-backed-bancor-completes-largest-ever-ico/>on
the board of the
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-court-battle-blockchain-firms-reveal-ties-to-banned-binary-options-industry/>Netanyahu
family-founded crypto company Bancor,
<https://bitcoinmagazine.com/tags/barry-silbert>Barry
Silberts Digital Currency Group, and Argentinas
richest man Marcos Galperín. Galperín also sits
on the board of GREEN+ partner and
intelligence-linked satellite surveillance firm
Satellogic (discussed in greater detail later in
this article). Galperín is intimately connected
to the emerging market entrepreneurial network
known as Endeavor, the board of which is
<https://endeavor.org/about-us/global-board/>chaired
by Edgar Bronfman Jr. and includes Reid Hoffman.
Both
<https://archive.org/details/one-nation-under-blackmail-vol-1-2-whitney-alyse-webb>the
Bronfman family and
<https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12046383/Billionaire-Reid-Hoffman-spent-night-Jeffrey-Epsteins-pedophile-island-conviction.html>Hoffman
have considerable ties to sex trafficker and
financial criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Wences
Casares was
previously<https://www.endeavor.org.ar/emprendedores/sebastian-serrano/>
on Endeavors board and still maintains ties with
the group. Ripio is also
<https://www.endeavor.org.ar/emprendedores/sebastian-serrano/>an
Endeavor-backed company.
Galperíns company, Mercado Libre, is considered
the
<https://endeavor.org/stories/mercado-libre-becomes-first-endeavor-company-to-surpass-10-billion-market-value/>first
Endeavor success story, and Galperín sits
<https://www.endeavor.org.ar/equipo/>on the board
of Endeavors Argentina branch alongside
controversial Argentinian oligarchs, like former
George Soros protégé
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-owner-the-rise-of-eduardo-elsztain-and-the-coming-end-of-argentinas-democracy/256959/>Eduardo
Elzstain. Galperíns Mercado Libre is
<https://www.pymnts.com/news/2019/paypal-mercado-libre-pago-ecommerce-payments/>deeply
interconnected
<https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/paypal-makes-strategic-investment-in-mercadolibre>with
PayPal as well as
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/12/02/e-commerce-giant-mercado-libre-taps-paxos-to-power-crypto-service-in-brazil/>Paxos,
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/21/e-commerce-giant-mercado-libre-invests-in-crypto-firms-paxos-2tm/>the
stablecoin issuer creating PayPals stablecoin,
PYUSD. Mercado Libres Mercado Pago subsidiary,
Ripio and Brazils Mercado Bitcoin (another
<https://news.bitcoin.com/2tm-mercado-bitcoins-holding-company-raises-50-3-million-in-second-closing-of-series-b-funding-round/>Endeavor/<https://web.archive.org/web/20230324093224/https://investor.mercadolibre.com/news-releases/news-release-details/mercado-libre-announces-investments-mercado-bitcoin-and-paxos>Mercado
Libre-connected company) collectively dominate
crypto use in South America, especially its
biggest markets Argentina and Brazil.
Diego Gutierrezs RSK and Wences Casares Xapo, a
crypto-focused bank founded in 2014 with a
long-standing interest in Bitcoin and stablecoin
providers, share a common tie in Joey Garcia, who
is on the board of both companies. Garcia is
<https://www.xapobank.com/about-us>also listed as
being Xapos Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer.
Garcia is
<https://gibraltarlawyers.com/people/joey-garcia/>a
lawyer
<https://gibraltarlawyers.com/people/joey-garcia/>for
and head of the fintech team at the
Gibraltar-based law firm Isolas, which is also
part of the GREEN+ group and manages the GREEN+
Trust alongside RSK and Lockton. Both Xapo and
RSKs parent, Rootstock Labs, are based in
Gibraltar a UK overseas territory, where Garcia
<https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/85755/gibraltar-extends-regulatory-guidelines-for-digital-asset-exchanges>helped
develop and lobby for crypto regulations with
hopes of having that regulatory regime influence
coming regulations in the US and Europe. Garcia
is also
<https://gibraltarlawyers.com/people/joey-garcia/>connected
to UN initiatives on digital currencies, with a
focus on regulation and law enforcement.
The involvement of this network in GREEN+ speaks
to an effort to utilize the Bitcoin blockchain in
the creation of a new global financial system
centered around digital currencies and carbon
markets. As carbon markets have developed, it
<https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/04/21/unleashing-the-green-economy-how-blockchain-can-transform-climate-friendly-investment-opportunities/>has
become clear that the carbon market which central
and commercial bankers wish to build (with UN
backing) will be blockchain-based and that carbon
credits will be tokenized and traded on digital
exchanges, such as the Goldman Sachs and
<https://xpansiv.com/blackstone-announces-400-million-investment-in-xpansiv/>Blackstone-backed
Xpansiv, which is
<https://xpansiv.com/partnerships/>partnered with
GREEN+ members Cercarbono and EcoRegistry.
There are efforts to make Bitcoin the blockchain
on which these markets (or at least key parts of
them) will run, hence the relatively recent
effort to create a more sustainable and net
zero Bitcoin. RSK is clearly part of this
effort, as evidenced by their involvement in
GREEN+, where they are managing the smart
contracts of GREEN+ carbon credits, as well as
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/08/07/california-agency-backs-green-energy-pilot-using-rsks-bitcoin-smart-contracts/>their
partnership with the California Energy Commission
and GREEN+ member The Energy Coalition on
creating an experimental market for carbon credit trading on top of Bitcoin.
The importance of RSK within the maturation of
the carbon credit market in the blockchain era is
two-fold; the direct and immediate
interoperability between tokenized assets
representing green finance instruments and
bitcoin, and the leveraging of the most
distributed and most secure blockchain in the
world, Bitcoin, as a universal ledger for the
execution and settlement of otherwise impossible
smart contracts. Rootstock allows Bitcoin the
protocol to become the enabling and enforcing
environment for all aspects of climate capitalism
green bond authoring and settlement, parametric
insurance clauses, the tokenization of carbon
emission offsets, and the
<https://blog.rootstock.io/noticia/stablecoins-on-bitcoin-mitigating-volatility/>issuance
of dollar stablecoins that denominate the entire
system and globalize the US Treasury market.
As recently mentioned, Diego Gutierrez of RSK was
a very early adopter and promoter of Bitcoin and
today runs Bitcoin Argentina while also being a
co-founder of Latin Americas largest and oldest
Bitcoin conference. In
<https://www.lavoz.com.ar/negocios/diego-gutierrez-zaldivar-latinoamerica-puede-ser-pionera-en-tener-el-sistema-financiero-del-futuro/>an
interview with Argentinian outlet La Voz early
last year, Gutierrez stated that, in order for
Bitcoin to become part of the global financial
system that is emerging, there would have to be a
trade off that would mean stripping Bitcoin of
its ethos and part of its disruptive
potential. In other words, in Gutierrezs view,
Bitcoin must cease to be a threat to central and
commercial banks as it integrates into the system
those banks have designed and uphold and will
become their tool. There is perhaps no greater
evidence of this than the recent pivot of
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/02/investigative-reports/tokenized-inc-blackrocks-plan-to-own-the-fractionalized-world/>BlackRocks
Larry Fink on Bitcoin and its promise as a
technology for asset storage and the wild
success of BlackRocks Bitcoin ETF. Gutierrez
also tellingly stated in the same interview that
there would soon be a move away from fiat and
fiat-backed stablecoins to commodity-backed
stablecoins that would make the companies and
entities that control those commodities (which
would include carbon in this emerging financial
paradigm) more powerful than central banks and
eliminate the need for central banks entirely.
Wences Casares, Gutierrezs close associate,
created his bank Xapo
<https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2014/03/underground-vault-offers-bitcoin-protection-with-armed-guards-biometric-scanners/>to
help solve the disjointed nature of our world
economy and to act as the bridge between
bitcoin, US dollars and stablecoins. As a
consequence, Xapo has been a key player in
efforts to dollarize bitcoin and has developed
close relationships with
<https://finance.yahoo.com/news/xapo-bank-becomes-first-fully-171000537.html>Circle
(USDC),
<https://u.today/tether-usdt-replaces-swift-for-usd-operations-of-xapo-bank-details>Tether
(USDT) and
<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/03/02/xapo-bank-integrates-bitcoins-lightning-network-partners-with-lightspark/>Light<https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/03/02/xapo-bank-integrates-bitcoins-lightning-network-partners-with-lightspark/>spark,
whose founder David Marcus
<https://bankautomationnews.com/allposts/payments/david-marcus-bitcoin-paypal-ceo/>invested
in Xapo while head of PayPal. Marcus
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/technology/david-marcus-facebook-libra-diem-novi.html>also
previously worked for Facebook and co-created
Facebooks Libra/Diem stablecoin project, where
Casares was on the board and which was allied
with Xapo. Xapos
<https://archive.is/xxuLt>initial advisory board
was composed of former longtime head of Citibank
John Reed, Visa founder Dee Hock and former
Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry
Summers. Summers is best known for
<https://archive.org/details/one-nation-under-blackmail-vol-1-2-whitney-alyse-webb>his
close association with Jeffrey Epstein and his
role in
<https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/the-comprehensive-case-against-larry-summers/279651/>repealing
key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act at
<https://www.pogo.org/investigations/how-clinton-team-thwarted-effort-to-regulate-derivatives>Citis
behest, which is widely believed to have provoked
the 2008 financial crisis. While on Xapos board,
Summers became a leading voice behind the effort
to
<https://www.climatechangenews.com/2015/01/05/larry-summers-its-time-the-us-placed-a-price-on-carbon/>put
a price on carbon and implement
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/oils-swoon-creates-the-opening-for-a-carbon-tax/2015/01/04/3db11a3a-928a-11e4-ba53-a477d66580ed_story.html>carbon
taxes and carbon markets. In 2015, together with
these men, <https://archive.is/xxuLt>Xapo
claimed, they would build the global bitcoin ecosystem.
THE GREEN+ REGISTRY
Working closely with the GREEN+ Trust is the
carbon credit certification standard chosen by
GREEN+, Cercarbono. In addition to certifying the
carbon credits produced by the program,
Cercarbono also has a role in choosing which
initiatives participating jurisdictions can
implement with funds received and are also
involved in fund custody alongside the GREEN+
Trust. Cercarbono
<https://allcottrading.com/uncategorized-en/cercarbono/>was
launched in 2016, shortly after Colombia where
Cercarbono was formed passed a law establishing
a carbon tax. Cercarbonos founders created the
company because the law created a need for a
national certifying entity that would provide
solutions to the climate problem. Further
Colombian legislation in 2017 spurred the company
to expand into carbon markets. It has since
become a leading voluntary carbon credit certifier in Latin America.
In 2018, Cercarbono
<https://allcottrading.com/uncategorized-en/cercarbono/>formed
a partnership with
<https://www.ecoregistry.io/>EcoRegistry, a
blockchain registry that is also part of GREEN+
and develops services and platforms for
reporting, monitoring and registering
environmental assets and carbon units. The
program says the company also addresses the
issuance, monitoring and cancellation of the
carbon credits generated by the jurisdictions in
close coordination with the certification
standard and the Trust Fund. EcoRegistry
<https://www.ecoregistry.io/how-it-works>provides
a unique serial number to each carbon credit
issued and allows for close monitoring of that
credit on-chain. As a consequence, it works
closely with the lead of GREEN+s monitoring
unit, the intelligence-linked satellite
surveillance firm Satellogic. EcoRegistry is also
a part of the
<https://climateactiondata.org/>Climate Action
Data Trust, or CAD Trust. The CAD Trust was
discussed in
<https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/tokenized-inc-blackrocks-plan-to-own-the-fractionalized-world->previous
reporting from Bitcoin Magazine and Unlimited
Hangout and is an effort led by the World Bank
and funded by Google (among others) in an effort
to construct what they refer to as climate
wallets. IETA, discussed below, is
<https://carboncredits.com/xpansiv-cbl-to-trade-cercarbono-carbon-credits/>also
a member of the CAD Trust.
The World Bank has been exploring tokenization
and digital ledger technology in order to create
a modular and interoperable end-to-end digital
ecosystem for the carbon market. Through the
Digital for Climate (D4C) working group, the
World Bank aims to build the next generation of
climate markets by directing governments to
create National Carbon Registries reliant on
blockchain technology. The
<https://www.theclimatewarehouse.org/work/digital-4-climate>data
produced by these registries will be link[ed],
aggregat[ed] and harmoniz[ed] by the CAD Trust.
D4C itself leverages the Chia blockchain,
developed by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen. Part
of the D4Cs Climate Tokenization Suite
includes the aforementioned Climate Wallet to
facilitate the exchange of carbon credit tokens,
requiring an active connection to a Climate Action Data Trust node to function.
EcoRegistry is also part of the Climate Chain
Coalition, whose other members include disgraced
WeWork CEO Adam Neumanns new venture Flowcarbon,
the Cardano Foundation, the Google-backed oracle
service Chainlink, and
<https://www.sustainablebtc.org/>the Sustainable
Bitcoin Protocol (SBP), which seeks to encourage
[bitcoin] miners to utilize environmentally
friendly energy sources using tokenization. The
SBP aims to turn sustainability into an
investable asset when they create what they
refer to as
<https://www.sustainablebtc.org/sustainable-bitcoin-certificate>a
Sustainable Bitcoin Certificate (SBC), a verified
on-chain environmental asset representing bitcoin mined using clean energy.
The SBP website further specifies the
incentivized opportunity for additional revenue
streams for Bitcoin miners, stating that unlike
carbon credits or RECs which are retired, each
individual SBC is a tokenized asset which
permanently represents the sustainability of one
bitcoin. Due to an upcoming 50% reduction in the
rate of bitcoin issued per block referred to as
a halving alternative sources of income for
miners can be the difference between thriving and
barely surviving in such an unforgiving market.
While initially issued alongside the mining of
every new bitcoin, the SBC itself can later be
sold to other investors. Depending on future
regulations of energy in relation to Bitcoin
mining operations in the United States,
non-mining businesses might look to purchase
these certificates from miners as a means to
offset the carbon footprint of their bitcoin holdings.
In effect, the SBP aims to incentivize carbon
neutrality for Bitcoin miners while
simultaneously allowing investors to meet ESG
goals while holding bitcoin on their balance
sheet, the latter exemplified in
<https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230323005663/en/Sustainable-Bitcoin-Protocol-partners-with-BitGo-to-Launch-the-First-Sustainable-Custody-Solution-for-Bitcoin>their
partnership with Bitcoin custodian BitGo. Their
website explains that they believe Bitcoin has a
unique potential to expedite the clean energy
transition and due to being the worlds first
commodity derived from a network, every bitcoin
mined is fully fungible in both price and also
carbon footprint culminating in a
sustainability opportunity unlike any other
industry. If a large company with a large carbon
output due in large part to the sheer energy
demands of being a multi-national company
traveling employees, large scale data centers,
and simply offices that require electricity was
holding bitcoin on their balance sheet, they
could purchase large amounts of SBCs to source
yield on the appreciating certificate token while
also generating accounting opportunities to reach
metric-based ESG goals faster.
The co-founder of SBP,
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-twomey-32247028/>Matthew
Twomey, previously worked at Goldman Sachs, OSL
and Deutsche Bank, while Head of Climate Strategy
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliot-david-101/details/experience/>Elliot
David previously held positions at the US
Department of Energy, as well as worked with the
Clinton Foundation within their Clinton Climate
Initiative on their Island Energy Program. Listed
among the
<https://www.sustainablebtc.org/about>SBP
Advisors are Natasha Barrientos (S&P Global and
the United Nations), Dr. Julia Nesheiwat (the
Atlantic Council), Emma Todd (World Economic
Forum) and Kelvin Chang (Coinbase and Microsoft).
Cercarbono and EcoRegistry share several
noteworthy partners and affiliations. For
example, both are members of
<https://asocarbono.org/membresias/>Asocarbono,
an alliance of different companies and actors
running or supporting Colombian carbon markets,
that has written about the issue of
<https://asocarbono.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/documento-concepto-juridico-derecho-de-carbono-en-Colombia.pdf>carbon
rights within voluntary carbon markets.
According
to<https://www.un-redd.org/post/carbon-rights-and-importance-benefit-sharing>
the UN, carbon rights comprises two
fundamental concepts: 1) the property rights to
sequester and store carbon, contained in land,
trees, soil, etc. and 2) the right to benefits
that arise from the transfer of these property
rights (i.e. through emissions trading schemes).
The issue itself portends the possibility that
those who purchase carbon credits will obtain the
property rights of the carbon sequestered in
trees and other natural elements found in the
area tied to those carbon credits, opening the
door to land grabs through carbon markets.
Notably, there is no clear definition of carbon
rights and it is unclear, due to the fact that
their contracts with jurisdictions/governments
are not publicly available, how GREEN+ views the
issue of carbon rights in relation to property rights.
EcoRegistry and Cercarbono are also both
<https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/acx-partners-with-ecoregistry-and-cercarbono-to-promote-carbon-offsetting-through-the-use-of-technology-and-innovation-301873769.html>partnered
with AirCarbon Exchange (ACX), the worlds first
fully digital carbon exchange, established in
2019 with the Singapore Sustainable Energy
Association subsidized by the Singapore
governments Enterprise Singapore and
<https://unfccc.int/news/unfccc-partners-with-the-aircarbon-exchange-to-promote-carbon-offsetting>backed
by the UN. ACX was founded by
<https://acx.net/team-showcase/thomas-mcmahon/>CEO
Thomas McMahon, an over 30 year veteran of the
commodities and derivatives industry, having
spent over 20 years at the New York Mercantile
Exchange before establishing himself in
Singapore, where ACX is based. ACX is Singapores
first international carbon credit exchange,
<https://d1qfwzw6aggd4h.cloudfront.net/about/NICMR-SG-Carbon-Credit-Trading-A4_2022-10-19-145836_qzqc.pdf>chosen
by McMahon due to demand for carbon credits from
the airline industry. The exchange uses
distributed ledger technology, specifically the
Ethereum blockchain, to trade six different
tokenized carbon credits, boasting settlement for
as low as $3 per 1,000 CO2 tonnes. While ACX
began mainly by focusing on the airline industry,
the exchange now has over 160 clients ranging
from financial institutions to project
developers. Between January and August 2021, over
5.7 million CO2 tonnes were traded on the
exchange. Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign
wealth fund,
<https://carboncredits.com/abu-dhabi-wealth-fund-mubadala-invests-acquires-stake-acx/>acquired
a 20% stake in the company, with the intent to
build a carbon exchange in the UAE. ACX is
<https://acx.net/about-us/>also partnered with
IETA (more on them below), as well as the Carbon
Business Council, and the International
Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC). It
can be assumed that ACX will be the exchange on
which GREEN+ carbon credits will be traded due to
its partnerships with GREEN+s credit certifier and registry.
Both Cercarbono and EcoRegistry were also
recently integrated into Xpansiv, which operates
the leading multi-registry, multi-asset
environmental portfolio management system and
market data service as well as
<https://xpansiv.com/xpansiv-to-license-key-intellectual-property/>CBL,
the largest spot exchange for environmental
commodities, including carbon credits and
renewable energy certificates. Xpansiv is backed
by Blackstone, which poured
<https://xpansiv.com/blackstone-announces-400-million-investment-in-xpansiv/>$400
million into the company, with other investors
including British Petroleum (BP) Ventures, Bank
of America and Goldman Sachs. Xpansivs CBL
<https://xpansiv.com/geo/>has partnered
<https://xpansiv.com/n-geo/>extensively with CME
(Chicago Mercantile Exchange) Group, which is one
of the worlds main derivatives exchanges, and
together they have produced several futures contracts on carbon markets.
Cercarbono and EcoRegistry also both share an
affiliation with the International Emissions
Trading Association, or IETA. Founded in 1999
<https://unctad.org/press-material/international-emissions-trading-association-established-unctads-help>under
the auspices of the UN, IETA is dedicated to the
establishment of linked trading systems to ensure
efficient and competitive GHG [greenhouse gas]
markets. Its inaugural members included the
titans of the oil and manufacturing industries.
<https://www.ieta.org/memberships/#members>Current
members include AngloAmerican mining, Saudi
Aramco, Bank of America, Bayer/Monsanto, Cargill,
Chevron, Citi Group, Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil,
Goldman Sachs, Koch Industries, PetroChina and
the
<https://www.thejc.com/news/world/billionaire-trader-who-funded-mossad-buried-in-israel-1.46339>Mossad-linked
commodities company Glencore. Another company
that is a member of IETA is StoneX, which is
partnered with the aforementioned exchange ACX
and is sponsoring the launch of GREEN+ satellites
in Miami later this month. IETA is also
<https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221206005837/en/IETA-and-Founding-Partners-Announce-the-Launch-of-Climate-Action-Data-Trust>part
of the aforementioned Climate Action Data Trust,
along with EcoRegistry, the World Bank and others.
IETA is also
<https://www.ieta.org/initiatives/icroa/>notably
behind the ICROA accreditation program, which
Cercarbono and most other carbon credit
certification standards of note have received.
These include the worlds leading carbon credit
certifier Verra, which was recently embroiled in
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe>a
major scandal when it was revealed that 90% of
their most common category of carbon credits were
worthless despite being ICROA (and IETA) approved.
SATELLOGIC OBSERVATION IS PRESERVATION
As the digital carbon credit industry grows into
a multi-trillion dollar market upheld by smart
contracts on a distributed ledger, so too does
the need for participants to access
metric-specific data to insure the eventual pay
outs of green bonds. For example, the company
Atos, best known for its
<https://olympics.com/ioc/partners/atos>Olympic
Games IT partnership since 1989, raised $916
million in sustainability-linked bonds at the end
of 2021. According to
<https://atos.net/en/2021/press-release_2021_11_04/sustainability-linked-bond>a
press release in November 2021, the bonds were
issued with an eight-year maturity and one
percent coupon, with a clause that the annual
interest rate paid during the last three years
will be unchanged if the company reduces its
annual GreenHouse Gas CO2 emissions (Scopes 1, 2
& 3) by 50 percent in 2025 compared to 2019.
While these particular bonds were not authored
using a blockchain, there remains the now-sudden
economic incentive a one percent coupon on
nearly $1 billion to deliver
<https://www.techuk.org/resource/guest-blog-how-satellite-imagery-can-support-a-net-zero-transition.html>verifiable
real world data to the participants, the state of
which determines the eventual payout. These bonds
were issued with BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and
J.P. Morgan acting as Global Coordinators and
with Joint Bookrunners such as HSBC, Morgan
Stanley, Banco Santander, Bank of America
Securities, and Wells Fargo Securities, among
others, with Rothschild & Co acting as financial
advisor to Atos SE. An
<https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/atos-raises-800-million-in-sustainability-linked-bonds/>article
from Data Center Dynamics on the raise makes note
of the common trend of sustainability-linked
financing among data center and communication
firms, referencing how
<https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ntt-announces-27-billion-green-bond-to-support-carbon-neutral-goals/>NTT,
<http://aligned/>Aligned,
<https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/airtrunk-converts-1545bn-financing-into-sustainability-linked-loans/>Airtrunk,
<https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/kpn-concludes-1-billion-sustainability-linked-loan/>KPN,
<https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/baidu-announces-1-billion-esg-bond-offering/>Baidu,
and
<https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nabiax-ties-320-million-financing-to-esg-targets/>Nabiax
all raised funds or converted existing debt to
include interest rates tied to sustainability and
ESG goals within the last year.
When the eventual payout of billions of dollars
in cleverly-authored green bonds comes down to
accurate measurements of carbon molecule density
over a vast land mass, such as a South American
rainforest, the market for reliable data service
providers has quite literally left the
atmosphere. As the debt instruments of the
private sector evolve alongside the proliferation
of blockchain technology, the data that makes
these smart contracts execute to eventually
settle the issued bond no longer goes to a human
arbitrator, but rather a consciousness-free
protocol that reduces a pair of potential
outcomes to a single output. In the case of a
sustainability-linked green bond, if the carbon
emissions of a business are not empirically
reduced beyond a relative metric at a certain
time both data points of which are determined
at the issuance of the smart contract and thus
willingly agreed-upon by both parties the
coupon on the bond is not paid out. With the
carbon credit market presenting itself as one of
the preferred debt instruments of the modern era,
the aforementioned Satellogic an
intelligence-linked company focused on
privatizing the data from satellite surveillance
with an advisory board full of key players in the
digital debt system finds itself ready to act
as a crucial pillar of the encroaching new financial system.
Satellogic was co-founded in 2010 by
<https://investors.satellogic.com/management/emiliano-kargieman>Emiliano
Kargieman, its current CEO, and
<https://investors.satellogic.com/management/gerardo-richarte>Gerardo
Richarte, its current CTO, after spending some
time at the NASA Ames Campus in Mountain View,
CA. According to press releases on
<https://satellogic.com/news/press-releases/satellogic-elects-tom-killalea-to-its-board-of-directors/>their
website, Satellogic is the first vertically
integrated geospatial company that is building
the first scalable, fully automated EO [Earth
Observation] platform with capabilities to
remap the entire planet at both high-frequency
and high-resolution in order to generate
accessible and affordable solutions for
customers. Their listed mission is to
democratize access to geospatial data through its
information platform of high-resolution images
and analytics to help solve the worlds most
pressing problems of which they list climate
change, energy supply, and food security. Other
Satellogic documentation reveals that by
democratize, they mean expand satellite
surveillance from the public sector (i.e.
governments and security agencies) into the
private sector. Due to their patented Earth
imaging technology, Satellogic unlocks the
power of EO to deliver high-quality, planetary
insights at the lowest cost in the industry.
Both Kargieman and Richarte previously worked for
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Security_Technologies>Core
Security Technologies, which Kargieman
co-founded, with clients such as Apple, Cisco,
Homeland Security, NSA, NASA, Lockheed Martin,
and DARPA. In 1998, Core Security was recognized
as an Endeavor Entrepreneur by the Endeavor
Foundation and in 2002, Morgan Stanley invested
$1.5 million into Core Security, with the bank
gaining a seat on the board. The company was also
funded by Bank of America in its
<https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/courion-corporation/company_financials/investors>Series
A. Kargieman later founded Aconcagua Ventures in
a joint venture with Craig Coguts Pegasus
Capital, and served as a Member of the Special
Projects Group at the World Bank. As previously
noted, Coguts Pegasus Capital is also a main
funder of CC35. Another Core Security
Technologies employee that migrated to Satellogic
with Kargeiman and Richarte is
<https://investors.satellogic.com/management/aviv-cohen>Aviv
Cohen, a former Israeli intelligence officer who
is now Satellogics head of special projects.
Satellogics
<https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/satellogic-seed--009729ec>seed
round raise was funded by Ariel Arrieta and NXTP
Ventures, Starlight Ventures which Kargieman
advises and Santiago Pinto Escalier of
Endeavor. As stated earlier in this article, NXTP
is a funder of GREEN+ member Rootstock as well as
the tokenization firm created by Rootstocks
co-founder, Koibanx. Chinese tech giant Tencent,
which owns a significant stake in Elon Musks
Tesla, invested in Satellogics
<https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/satellogic-series-a--ffe85943>Series
A as did Endeavor Catalyst, which is run by
LinkedIn/PayPals Reid Hoffman, and Valor
Capital. Valor Capital, whose partners include
<https://valorcapitalgroup.com/team/amb-clifford-sobel/>figures
tied to US military and intelligence activities
in Latin America as well as
<https://valorcapitalgroup.com/team/bruno-batavia/>CBDC
development on the continent, invested in
Satellogics Series B, again joined by Tencent,
with the Inter-American Development Bank
(mentioned more than once in this article)
joining in the companys Series C funding round.
In July 2021, Satellogic
<https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/06/satellite-imagery-startup-satellogic-to-go-public-via-spac-valuing-the-company-at-850m/>went
public with a $1.1 billion valuation through a
merger with Cantor Fitzgeralds CF Acquisition
Corp. V, with J.P. Morgan serving as the
exclusive financial advisor to Satellogic, with
a concurrent PIPE offering of $100 million led
by SoftBanks SBLA Advisers Corp alongside
Cantor Fitzgerald and other top-tier
institutional investors, including former US
Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchins
Liberty Strategic Capital. Mnuchins recently
created venture capital firm, along with
Softbank, are
<https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cybereason/company_financials/investors>major
investors in Cybereason, a controversial company
tied to Israeli intelligence that
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/cybereason/>previously
simulated the hacking of US critical
infrastructure in order to cancel a US
presidential election and spur the declaration of
martial law. Mnuchins firm also includes
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/us/politics/mnuchin-saudi-private-equity.html>Trumps
ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and
previously
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/mossad-head-could-join-mnuchin-fund-possibly-violating-waiting-period-report/>attempted
to recruit former Mossad director Yossi Cohen,
who instead went on to join Softbank. Joseph
Dunford, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff under Trump who is now senior managing
director of Mnuchins firm, is on the
<https://www.cybereason.com/press/cybereason-secures-275-million-in-crossover-financing-to-extend-global-leadership-in-xdr>advisory
board of Cybereason while Mnuchin is on its board
of directors. Both Mnuchin and Dunford
simultaneously sit on the board of Satellogic and
Mnuchin is Satellogics chairman.
Satellogics board also includes Howard Lutnick,
longtime head of Cantor Fitzgerald (as well as
Jeffrey Epsteins
<https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/unraveling-web-jeffrey-epsteins-manhattan-real-estate>neighbor
and a major
<https://nypost.com/2015/11/17/clinton-fundraiser-held-next-door-to-jeffrey-epsteins-house/>Clinton
donor);
<https://investors.satellogic.com/board-member/marcos-galperin>Marcos
Galperin, the founder and CEO of MercadoLibre who
is closely associated with Endeavor, a Satellogic
funder; Former Facebook and Twitter lawyer turned
venture capitalist
<https://investors.satellogic.com/board-member/ted-wang>Ted
Wang;
<https://investors.satellogic.com/board-member/tom-killalea>Tom
Killalea, former Chief Information Security
Officer and Vice President of Security for Amazon
who is also on the board of Capital One; and
<https://investors.satellogic.com/board-member/miguel-gutierrez>Miguel
Gutiérrez, a Partner and a Co Chief Investment
Officer at The Rohatyn Group. Gutiérrez
<https://therohatyngroupwebsite.webflow.io/team/miguel-gutierrez>previ<https://therohatyngroupwebsite.webflow.io/team/miguel-gutierrez>o<https://therohatyngroupwebsite.webflow.io/team/miguel-gutierrez>usly
worked with Nicholas Rohatyn at J.P. Morgan,
where Rohatyn positioned the bank to become a
leader in taking ownership of distressed
government debt in the 1980s and 1990s, with a
focus on Latin America. Gutiérrez was involved
with J.P. Morgans debt markets in Argentina,
before becoming its head of Latin America
Emerging Markets and later head of Global Emerging Market Sales.
The
<https://satellogic.com/news/press-releases/satellogic-a-leader-in-satellite-earth-imagery-to-go-public-through-merger-with-cantor-fitzgeralds-cf-acquisition-corp-v/>press
release about Satellogics SPAC paints a clear
picture of the hefty value proposition behind the
public offering, which boasts that Satellogic is
the proven leader in Earth Observation with 17
commercial satellites currently in orbit, more
than the next four Earth Observation companies
combined. The satellite companys vertical
product stack offers enhanced analytics
capabilities with commercial, sustainability,
and government applications by providing a live
catalog daily of every square meter of Earth,
providing vital information to power the
conversation around global challenges such as
climate change, water and energy use, and food supply.
In the SPAC press release, Cantors Howard
Lutnick stated that Satellogic is uniquely
positioned to dominate the Earth Observation
industry. Its technology, data, and analytics
have vast use cases across countless industries.
Kargieman echoed these remarks: We think this is
a winner takes most or winner takes all market.
This is a supply limited market governments
just cant get enough data today; theres not enough satellites out there.
This is also true for the private sector.
Satellogic showed CNBC a then-current investor
deck which exemplified the true economic
potential of dominating the Earth Observation
industry. Kargieman noted that the company had
completed a pilot program with a major oil and
gas corporation, in which the company required
surveillance data for about 1,800 miles of
pipeline every other week. Doing this visual
audit with airplanes cost about $750 per mile,
whereas Satellogic demonstrated similar
detection capabilities for less than $60 per
mile. While Satellogic failed to clear $0 of
revenue in 2020, the company was expecting to see
that tick up due to new contracts that began
generating revenue in the spring of 2021.
According to an investor slide deck, the company
had a backlog of about $38 million in signed
contracts around when they went public, but was
predicting $800 million in opportunities over the next two years.
In their
<https://stockhouse.com/news/press-releases/2023/04/27/satellogic-reports-full-year-2022-financial-results-and-provides-business-update>full
year 2022 financial results update, Satellogic
CEO Kargieman tallied 34 satellites in orbit
making the largest commercial fleet of sub-meter
resolution satellites and thus well positioned
to capitalize on the growing demand for Earth
Observation data and satellites. Kargieman
claimed their revenue grew 42% year-over-year
due in large part to their Asset Monitoring and
Constellation-as-a-Service businesses.
Satellogics new Space Systems, or satellite
sales business, creates a satellite purchase
program that aims to lower the financial barrier
to Earth Observation spacecraft ownership
according to CFO Rick Dunn. Space Systems is
designed to offer governments asset ownership to
enhance national geospatial intelligence (GEOINT)
with global tasking autonomy
Going forward,
revenue will be driven by our continued growth in Asset Monitoring.
Luciano Giesso, Sales Director for Satellogic has
stated that Latin America is an area of focus
for us. He explained a current trend of Latin
America being increasingly focused on space
technologies in order to create new
infrastructures that unlock the benefits of
satellite data throughout multiple industries.
The press release states Satellogics position is
informed by their view that countries unequipped
with their own satellites are thus limited in
their ability to meaningfully capture data
about their policy implementation and
infrastructure. Satellogics Dedicated Satellite
Constellation Program is specifically marketed as
a product for strategic national interests
allowing governments of all sizes to create
unique earth-observation programs to support
key decisions and manage policy impact, measure
investment and socio-economic progress, and
foster collaboration, data and information sharing, and innovation.
The stated mission of Satellogic is to privatize
and monopolize Earth Observation in the form of
satellite surveillance sold as a service to both
the public and private sectors. Palantir,
<https://web.archive.org/web/20140516035733/http://www.mausstrategicconsulting.com/1/post/2014/04/a-pretty-complete-history-of-palantir.html>a
private sector intelligence firm led by PayPal
founder Peter Thiel and created with
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/?sh=20d1118e7785>CIA
funds to replace a controversial
<https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/04/investigative-reports/the-military-origins-of-facebook/>DARPA
mass surveillance and data-mining program,
committed to a
<https://satellogic.com/news/press-releases/satellogic-announces-strategic-partnership-with-palantir-technologies/>five
year strategic partnership wth Satellogic.
Satellogics partnership with Palantir enables
its government and commercial customers, which
include
<http://pdf.secdatabase.com/2980/9999999997-06-049166.pdf.>the
CIA and
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/>J.P.
Morgan, access to Satellogics Aleph platform
APIs to feed raw satellite imagery to Palantirs
MetaConstellation and Edge AI. This partnership
builds on a previous collaboration between
Satellogic and Palantir to field unique AI
capabilities to the orbital edge, including
live upgrades to the satellites onboard AI
that enables an ultra-low-latency maritime
use-case. Palantir and Satellogic customers,
which include the
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-04/palantir-satellite-with-satellogic-puts-data-software-in-space>Pentagons
Space Systems Command,
<https://satellogic.com/news/press-releases/satellogic-launches-4-additional-satellites-on-spacex-falcon-9-rocket/>Space
Force,
<https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210630006018/en/Satellogic-Launches-4-Additional-Satellites-on-SpaceX-Falcon-9-Rocket>SpaceX,
the government of
<https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/india-s-first-spy-satellite-made-by-domestic-private-player-set-for-launch-124021900173_1.html>India,
and others, will soon have access to the Edge AI
platform running on Satellogic satellites to
offer customers tailored AI insights which is
expected to increase Satellogics business of
data products, streamline pipeline management,
and further scale customer delivery required for
weekly and daily world remaps.
The holistic capabilities of Palantirs Foundry
will be instrumental in helping Satellogic
realize our mission to improve life on Earth
through geospatial data, commented Matthew
Tirman, President of Satellogic North America.
Tirman later made note that within this
agreement, Satellogic will provide Palantirs US
government customers with access to
high-resolution satellite imagery which will
drive analytical insights across a range of
mission-oriented use cases. Other notable
private-public sector partnerships of Satellogic
include the
<https://www.mapeos.endeavor.org.ar/skyloom>Endeavor-funded
<https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230915295300/en/Skyloom-and-Satellogic-Sign-Agreement-for-Multipath-Optical-Comms-Data-Transmission>SkyLoom,
which in late 2021
<https://spacenews.com/honeywell-and-skyloom-to-produce-laser-crosslinks-for-military-and-commercial-satellites/>partnered
with Honeywell to produce laser crosslinks for
both commercial and military satellites,
including for the Pentagons Space Development
Agency, as well as with
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/>CIA
contractor
<https://spacenews.com/earth-observation-company-satellogic-expands-partnership-with-amazon-web-services/>Amazon
Web Services, to facilitate the 50 gigabytes of
data per day per satellite, which beams to
Earth with the help of the Amazon.com Inc. units AWS Ground Station service.
While it is surely a profitable venture, what
Satellogic truly enables is venture capital
access to high resolution data of every single
square meter on Earth. Space surveillance as a
service allows the operators themselves to fill
up on up-to-date information of the worlds
industry, energy use, transportation, commodity
storage, and asset consumption information that
could influence a firms decision while playing
in the private markets. It could also be used by
the public-private partnership engineering global
technocratic policies that seek to limit
consumption, industrialization and energy use by
the public and enforce them via space.
Outside of this metric-driven advantage, the
aforementioned transition to a universal ledger
upholding and settling the majority of financial
(including purely speculative) activity will
require obscene amounts of data. If the private
sectors so-called commodity-backed, Real World
Asset tokens are to take off in any meaningful
way, highly reliable satellite imagery will be
needed to uphold billions of dollars of value.
Any push towards smart contract-derived money
representing tangible objects will demand exactly
the data Satellogic intends to not only supply
but sell as a service to any firm, or government.
BLOCKCHAIN THE NEW ENABLING ENVIRONMENT
The idea of green finance, in which private firms
utilize data and physical elements from the real
world to create novel economic instruments such
as bonds based on carbon emissions, necessitates
government-upheld agreements and eventual
court-based litigation as the ability to find
consensus, thus acting as the enabling
environment, for the settlement of large values
of securities between the public and private
sector. Regulation and contractual agreements
between governments and their commercial sector
partners require not just the literal letter of
the law, but vetted insurance brokers, data
firms, legislative bureaucrats, and various other
accredited lawyers to dictate the grounds in
which business can be legally conducted. The
private-public partnership has become continually
blurred by the relaxing of regulation restricting
how corporations can influence current and
aspiring politicians via campaign fundraising. In
turn, this group of purchased public sector
employees must repay the corporations responsible
for their successful attempts at gaining office,
leading to the push for further dissolution of
certain laws that prevented their donors from
gaining footholds within a once-regulated market.
No longer is the public sector primarily beholden
to their constituents, but rather their corporate donors.
This ongoing dynamic has led to a runaway
feedback of legal corruption and conspiracy
between these ostensibly delineated sectors. The
net result of the public-private partnerships
that upholds the CC35, Green+ and Satellogic
collaborations is due to the calculated focus on
regional governments, thus finding their enabling
environment through pacts and treaties at the subnational level.
Once larger regulatory fish are fried, the
fight for further interoperability of digital
assets (such as dollar instruments) moves down to
the regional governments of the Global South. For
example,
<https://occ.treas.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2020/nr-occ-2020-125.html>the
regulation allowing US banks to custody digital
assets and stablecoins was put forth by former
OneWest official and Coinbase VP Brian Brooks
while he served as comptroller of the currency
under Mnuchin in the Trump administration. Once
world governments, local and national, are forced
onboard the universal ledger, the enabling
environment will trend towards the ledger itself
a product of the private sector and further
out of the hands of the public sector.
This capturing of the commons by the private
sector via a revolving door of
public-then-private operators has been done
before, such as during the Plaza Accord, the
creation of Brady Bonds, the dissolution of
Glass-Steagall, the demolition of Enron, the 2008
financial crisis, and the COVID-19 fiscal
response. The intended future of blockchain now
that US regulators have embraced Bitcoin as an
asset and universal ledger is to serve as the
new enabling environment, complete with its very
own digital dollar instruments, most likely backed by US government debt.
There are very few people in the world more
responsible for the digitization of the dollar
than Steve Mnuchin and Howie Lutnick the
formers VC firm now consists of
<https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/mnuchin-private-equity-firm-loads-up-on-former-treasury-lawyers>several
members from his stint at the Treasury, while the
latters firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds the
securities for Tether, the worlds largest
dollar-denominated stablecoin that recently
crossed $100 billion issued and here they are
partnering with the richest man in Argentina and
the founder of the largest online marketplace (as
well as crypto marketplace) in Latin America, Marcos Galperin.
The network of firms associated with Galperins
MercadoLibre Xapo, Paxos, Circle, Visa, among
others is rife with board members and venture
capital from the PayPal Mafia, as well as the
Argentine advisor group Endeavor. These powerful
organizations, successors to groups like ADELA
that spurred the creation of the Club of Rome and
chose the winners of Latin Americas corporate
landscape, have made it clear that they foresee
this fundamental market transition. They have
quietly positioned themselves to dominate the
main pillars of the new financial system in Latin
America and the world at large: regulated banking
services, global marketplaces, payment
processing, digital asset infrastructure, and
capital creation monopolies. As we will see, this
financial system is not about inclusion or
sustainability as professed, but about using
and deepening Latin Americas debt burden to
force policy changes while enforcing foreign
control over the regions economic activity and
governance, all under the watchful eyes of US intelligence-linked satellites.
To Be Continued.
[]
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And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them,
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<http://biblehub.com/luke/24-31.htm>31 And their
eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he
vanished out of their sight. http://biblehub.com/kjv/luke/24.htm
'Capitalism is institutionalised bribery' TG -
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Albert Pikes 1871
<https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/650822/Letter-WW3-200-year-old-islam-final-battle>WWIII
plan to cancel God
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in>Accelerationist
multicrisis: my schoolfriend
<https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/accelerationism-amphetamine-philosophy-and-the-death-trip>Nazi
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all democracy
Essentials:
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<http://www.itsuandi.org/itsui/downloads/Itsui_Materials/Albert_Pike's_Plan_for_Three_World_Wars.pdf>Plan
for three World Wars | Armageddonists I have
known:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXKz4uwZC_k>Nick
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<https://www.bitchute.com/video/pkIIeuailaUt/>George
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