2024-02-19
The fraudster was Clare Short, Britain’s Secretary of State for International Development. The victim was Japan once again…In Japan, the Catholic Church in Tokyo and the Asahi Shimbun spread Clare’s lies, calling on people to “stand with the vulnerable.”
February 13, 2020
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, which rounds off the issue of Shukan Shincho released today.
A friend who is exceptionally well-read once remarked that Takayama and I complement each other, and this article demonstrates that his assessment, too, was right on the mark.
With the formidable skill that makes Masayuki Takayama a journalist without equal in the postwar world,
he demonstrates the correctness of my recent, repeated criticisms of the United Nations, COP25, and Greta Thunberg, in which I confronted them with maps of PM2.5 pollution.
Not only the Japanese people but people throughout the world will surely marvel at how remarkable Masayuki Takayama is.
Not Stupid
China’s air is dirty.
It contains soot, exhaust fumes, and even the dreaded PM2.5.
What is remarkable about the Chinese, however, is that they wondered whether they could turn such pollution into money.
So China “teamed up with Maurice Strong,” a Canadian fraudster, as Soki Watanabe wrote recently in the Sankei Shimbun.
They first spread the theory that climate change, including the recent abnormally warm winters, was caused by “excessively high concentrations of CO₂.”
The concentrations had risen “because advanced industrial countries such as Japan had been emitting it for years,” so those countries should reduce their emissions.
If they could not, they should buy CO₂ emission rights from less-developed countries.
China, however, currently the largest emitter of CO₂, was deemed to bear no responsibility “because it is a less-developed country.”
Then, with China’s backing, Strong became chairman of the Rio Earth Summit and spread this fraudulent story in the name of the United Nations.
Chinese NGOs served as their arms and legs.
Japan, easily swayed by the United Nations, fell for it completely and pays China 100 billion yen every year in the name of emission rights.
Recently, Strong’s true nature came to light, and a warning also emerged from the biological community that any further reduction in CO₂ would cause plants, which depend on it for nourishment, to wither and die.
With the tide turning against it, China tried bringing forward the climate-change girl Greta Thunberg, but how effective has that been?
There was another international fraud of this kind in the same decade, the 1990s.
The fraudster was Clare Short, Britain’s Secretary of State for International Development.
The victim was Japan once again.
The setting was sub-Saharan countries, where HIV was then rampant.
Patients came one after another to former colonial powers such as Britain and France in search of better medical care.
Public healthcare spending in Britain and France would buckle under the strain.
They wanted to expel the HIV refugees, but doing so would make them look heartless.
Clare thought it over.
Why not cancel the debts arising from the loans that developed countries had extended as aid to sub-Saharan countries?
The poor countries could use the money they would otherwise repay to build hospitals at home.
They would no longer have to go to the trouble of traveling to Britain.
It was a beautiful story, except that Britain’s aid amounted to zero.
Japan was the largest donor, having provided as much as one trillion dollars.
If she wanted those debts canceled, she should have bowed her head to Japan, but instead she declared, “Japan provides tied aid. It is a merciless dinosaur that preys on the poorest countries.”
In Japan’s defense, tied aid accounted for only about a tenth of the total, in specialized fields such as medical care.
It was nothing more than a baseless accusation, but it was spread by the British-backed NGO Jubilee 2000.
In Japan, the Catholic Church in Tokyo and the Asahi Shimbun spread Clare’s lies, calling on people to “stand with the vulnerable.”
In the end, Japan relinquished a total of six trillion yen in aid loans and other claims falling due over the ten years beginning in 2003, and at the same time decided to abolish so-called tied aid.
Britain, meanwhile, used the debts Japan had canceled to build hospitals locally, played the role of a former colonial power standing with the vulnerable, and also managed to prevent an influx of medical refugees.
Speaking of standing with the vulnerable, Japan has Shinjiro Koizumi.
Immediately after becoming environment minister, he stood with Fukushima’s fishermen and declared, “Even if it is harmless, we will not discharge tritium.”
The fishermen receive their fishing rights free of charge.
Buying those rights from them would be one option.
But he cannot bring himself to do anything that might cause friction.
On top of that, at COP25 he was insulted by climate-change NGOs with the Fossil of the Day Award.
Could he not at least have said that China, their employer, deserved it more?
Shinjiro, who is hopeless at everything he does, recently raised an unusually loud objection to aid for the construction of a thermal power plant in Vietnam.
He was merely playing the good boy by saying that he would not permit exports of thermal power plants that emit CO₂, but he did voice the simple question, “Why do all the construction contracts go to China?”
In fact, after Japan abandoned tied aid, China has won the contracts for almost all of the nearly one trillion yen in annual ODA.
Japan has provided China with trillions of yen in ODA and has also purchased CO₂ emission rights.
On top of that, Chinese people were traveling abroad to carry out aid projects using Japan’s money.
China’s prosperity had blossomed on Japan’s foolishness.
Enough of China already.
If we take to heart the fact Shinjiro put his finger on, restore tied aid, and revive nuclear power plants, which do not emit CO₂, no one will be able to call us fools anymore.