By Monica Showalter
Amid all the partying and gladhanding and making Vladimir Putin a figure of fun, the G-7 summit in Germany managed to avoid the important topics, such as where the hell greenie Germany is going to get energy from, and just what it means when it says it’s going to support Ukraine forever.
Instead, it moved into its comfort zone, which was “infrastructure” and greenie energy for the third world, as if the third world needed more corruption and energy shortages, as greenie Germany is experiencing. Naturally, its idea was to throw money — mostly American money — at the problem. Doddering Joe Biden was all in for this idiocy and has touted this bad idea as some kind of success story.
According to Fox News:
The United States is pledging $200 billion to a G7 infrastructure project intended to counter’s China’s multi trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.
The “Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment” was relaunched by President Biden and other Group of Seven leaders on Sunday at their annual gathering being held this year at Schloss Elmau in Southern Germany.
Altogether the G7 leaders pledged to raise $600 billion in private and public funds over five years to finance needed infrastructure in developing countries.
The U.S.’ $200 billion portion will come from grants, federal funds, and private investment over that time period to support projects are intended to tackle climate change, improve global health, gender equity and digital infrastructure.
Biden went at lengths to insist the money was not “aid or charity.”
“It’s an investment that will deliver returns for everyone,” he said, adding that it will allow countries to “see the concrete benefits of partnering with democracies.”
Ostensibly, it’s to provide an alternative to third world countries which are finding themselves in a pickle for taking China’s money in its Belt and Road Initiative and finding themselves unable to repay China for its infrastructure investments, leaving China free to expropriate critical infrastructure such as ports as the world’s greediest repo man. I wrote about one example of that in 2018 here:
If there was ever an example for nations worldwide of What Not To Do, take a look at what socialist Ecuador has done to itself in dumping the U.S. and turning to align its interests to China. The New York Times has a superb (albeit stomach-churning) report about how Ecuador sold itself out as a vassal of China, getting for itself a junk dam that is already collapsing, and turning over 80% of its oil production to the communist behemoth in order to pay its massive, massive debts from it. That, in exchange for scrapping its military ties to the U.S. and skipping out on its tab with western banks.
.. and several other places in the same predicament here.
There’s no doubt that this is a problem, given that China is using these expropriations to extend its strategic influence, the carrot from hell, to reel in one militarily useful lily pad after another (to mix a lot of metaphors). But instead of discouraging third world countries to never to allow themselves to get into these situations, and encouraging to reform their crony capitalist systems for authentic economic growth, the G-7 is offering these places that can’t attract investment the normal way a second credit card, hoping that theirs will undercut China’s.
What they will end up with of course, is these places defaulting to the West instead of China, since there isn’t a lot of capitalism going on with all these infrastructure projects.
Worse still, a lot of them billed as “infrastructure” aren’t infrastructure projects at all, but greenie boondoggles. Consultant contract bait. Solyndras, with a side of third-world corruption.
You know, like the kind of Full Greenie-ism that Sri Lanka embraced, prompting the entire country to collapse.
More like that, right?
Greenie energy is a farce. It’s not sustainable. Not even an advanced country like Germany can make it work — its insane devotion to greenie-ism prompted it to shut down its very emissions-friendly nuclear power plants in favor of unreliable trash like wind and solar power, pockmarking its landscape with ugly whirring windmills, and worse still, left it dependent on Russia to power its batteries and true energy necessities. Now it’s looking at natural gas shortages and economic ruin as a result, and … all it, and Joe Biden want to do … is export this failed model to the third world, shelling out $200 billion to do it.
Joe Biden’s stupid statement about this not being “charity” is nonsense. If third world countries could make greenie energy work better than fossil fuels, you can bet they would have been investing in it themselves. But they can’t — they can’t any more than Germany can. Biden justified the claim that this cash shellout from the West was an “investment” but that calls to mind that investments can fail — and given that they haven’t been done already by people with real money in the private sector, they probably will, by the guys who rely on the printing press for their big government cash shovelings.
It’s obnoxious stuff given that the G-7 has some serious issues to look at right now — the failed unsustainability of green policies that have left Europe bereft of energy, and the even bigger failure of the shutdowns of authentic fossil fuel industries that have left the big western powers in debt to petrotyrants, including one who is blowing up apartment buildings in a European capital, and did a demonstration for the G-7 over the weekend, with a renewed attack on civilian housing in Kiev.
Neither of those problems are being seriously looked at by the G-7. All they are trying to do is make the third world as failed an areas as the West in its still religiously bizarre greenie obsession.
What a spectacular load of trouble this is. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson and Justin Trudeau, (neither of whom is a stranger to ridicule), will join Joe Biden in trying to laugh at Vlad Putin.
Hard reality here: It’s Putin who will have the last laugh.