Bosses refuse to raise wages to attract employees. Some employers in the USA are responding to worker shortages by pursuing cheap sources of labor. Employers and industry groups say labor shortages are stifling recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, though economists have noted the available jobs recovery data shows there is no economy-wide labor shortage.

The US Chamber of Commerce and Republican governors are blaming unemployment benefits. Some 26 states have cancelled federal extended unemployment benefits early.

A Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions, and other executives suggested using prison or work release programs to address perceived labor shortages in the sanitation, waste and recycling industry.

“The talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it’s all about exploitation, nothing else,” said Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters solid waste and recycling division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. “There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line.” Stiles said several prison work release programs targeted by the waste industry fail to provide decent wages and benefits in an industry where workers face significant safety risks, poor weather conditions, long hours and scarce time off for holidays.

Employers and business groups are using perceived labor shortages as a pretext to seek out cheap labor sources; employers are hiring teenagers to fill open jobs, automating some job roles to avoid raising wages, lobbying Congress to double the cap on work immigration visas and expanding the use of prison labor. In Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Delaware recently announced a prison work release program for the food service and hospitality industry.

In April, Russell Stover candy production facilities in Iola and Abilene, Kansas, began using prison labor through the Topeka correctional facility in response to staffing issues. 150 prisoners work at the plant, making $14 an hour with no benefits or paid time off, while other workers start at higher wages with benefits and paid time off. Kansas also deducts 25% of prisoners’ pay for room and board, and another 5% goes toward a victim’s fund. The prisoners also must pay for gas for the nearly two-hour bus ride to and from the plant.

Brandilynn Parks, president of the Kansas Coalition for Sentence and Prison Reform, said these programs are a way for employers and the prison system to take advantage of a vulnerable population while driving down wages and taking jobs from other workers in the community. She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration.

“Whenever we have private industries coming into the Kansas department of corrections, they sign a contract guaranteeing a certain number of people will be working there,” said Parks. “That means there has to be a certain number of people incarcerated, so we’re not working to lower the prison population, but instead building the prison industrial complex as a working machine where people become numbers – and we need a certain amount of numbers to keep them employed to uphold the contracts.”

Parks argued employers refusing to pay living wages is the primary factor driving perceived labor shortages, and that the expansion of prison workforce programs are not good faith efforts to solve the problem.

Hiring people “who are at their lowest in life and then throwing them crumbs is despicable,” Parks said. “The contract guaranteeing this amount of people makes it difficult to release people because they’re making the department of corrections money. So the DOC and private industry wins and they try to make it appear as though the incarcerated win, when really they’re being taken advantage of.”

The construction industry targeted prison labor sources amid what employers have claimed is a severe construction labor shortage that has only worsened under Covid-19. Construction is also one of the industries where significant numbers of formerly incarcerated people find work.

In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison. Thousands of workers in New York City are siphoned from prison into low-paying construction jobs with no benefits, no health insurance and unsafe working conditions. These job sites, known as “body shops”, use subcontractors so that employers can offload risk insurance liability. The practice has been spreading, but the New York city council is considering legislation to regulate these employers.

“Throughout the pandemic, body shop laborers left their homes and took trains and buses to crowded job sites, building the NYC skyline. They did this without health insurance, without an economic safety net and with the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refused to continue to work,’’ said Chaz Rynkiewicz, vice-president and director of organizing for Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79. “While other workers were called heroes for working during the pandemic, body shop workers are told that their criminal justice history sentences them to a lifetime of hard labor with negligible reward.”

Companies claim there’s a labor shortage. Their solution? Prisoners | US prisons | The Guardian

Haiti was the world’s first black republic and the first country to be founded by former slaves, Haiti declared independence from France in 1804. The new nation faced blockades, isolation and protracted interference over two centuries from white-majority powers, including France, which imposed a century of impoverishing reparations for the loss of its slaves, only paid off in 1947, in exchange for recognition.

 A week before the assassination of Moise, Haiti’s president, on the night of 29 June, 15 Haitians died in targeted killings, including political activists and journalists. Yet the world’s media became indignant at the murder of the top politician.

This blog sheds no tears for Moise. We share the same sentiments as a Haiti protester once explained.

“We’re fighting against a system where we can’t eat and we don’t get paid. That’s why we’ve taken to the streets,” Drelien explained then. “The president [Moïse] isn’t working for us. He’s no friend of the people – only of the bourgeoisie and businessmen, while we live in poverty.”

Despite receiving $13bn (£9.5bn) in international aid since the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 220,000 people, the situation for Haitians, by most indicators, continued to worsen.

The previous very modest gains in poverty reduction in Haiti, according to the World Bank, has gone into reverse.

60% of the country live in poverty with the richest 20% of the population holding more than 64% of its income,  a wealthy elite, which barely governs. Recent governments have been largely divorced from Haitians’ lives of poverty, nominated from within the same tight circle of politically connected oligarchs with the blessing of foreign powers.

Haiti is hugely dependent on remittances from Haitians living abroad.

Foreign aid and foreign intervention, far from helping, has helped undermine an almost nonexistent administration. Few can fully comprehend the absence of services and institutions, planning or state direction. Three years ago, Joël Boutrue, then deputy special representative for the UN stabilisation mission in Haiti, was blunt.

 “Haiti would be better off without aid,” he said. “Or at least, without the bad kind of aid that allows the administration and the elites to continue without changing.”

US historian Robert Taber wrote in the Washington Post last week, that the Clinton administration destroyed the Haitian domestic rice market in the mid-1990s. Later a UN peacekeeping force reintroducing cholera in the mid-2000s.

Jake Johnston, a researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, who coined the term “aid state” to describe Haiti, explains, “Economic policies have been imposed by multilateral banks, like the IMF, which has seen agricultural subsidies slashed. The education and health systems have been turned over to private actors like NGOs. All of which has created a separation between the people and a government that is not governing.” That hollowed out Haiti’s institutions.

Johnston went on to point out, “Aid to Haiti has been used for political purposes going back years. It is transactional. It has gone up under certain leaders and it has gone down when someone isn’t liked, or it goes to an organisation that shares the interest of the donor country.”

Jonathan M Katz, analysed how $3.5bn of foreign aid failed to improve Haiti in his book The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster.

“The thing is that I don’t think a lot people realise how aid has been used intentionally to weaken the Haitian state. There’s a long, if little-known, paper trail, going back to the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, particularly involving the US,” he said. “There are documents that very specifically talk about using private, voluntary organisations – now known as NGOs – to funnel money away from the Haitian government to recreate its functions elsewhere.” He goes on to say, “It happened again explicitly during the period of the Aristide government [the leftwing president who fell victim to a coup and was reinstated by a US military intervention] and there are public documents from USAid and other government agencies saying we were withholding money and giving it to private organisations to weaken the policies of Aristide.”

The $3.2bn PetroCaribe scheme was an alternative model to improve the Haitian situation, in which funds freed up by a deferred payment credit scheme for Venezuelan energy were then to be dispensed by Haiti’s government for large-scale development projects.  it was supposed to be the thing that the post-earthquake reconstruction was not. Venezuela was going to free up all this money for Haiti to spend on itself. About $2bn was stolen during the presidency of Michel Martelly.

Guns, gangs and foreign meddling: how life in Haiti went from bad to worse | Global development | The Guardian

From deluges of floods in Europe and now in China to conflagrations of forest wildfires climate change where a Siberian city is suffocating from the smoke are increasingly visible.

The world’s climate scientists hope it will be “a wake-up call” for governments. But growing evidence of climate risks is not necessarily driving swifter action to counter them, said Richard Black, a net-zero emissions expert at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute.

“We are now observing climate change with our own eyes in ways we did not broadly before,” said Corinne Le Quere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia. When it comes to acting on climate change, “the decisions today are political decisions”, Le Quere said.

A report due out next month is expected to confirm that the world is not on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. It will for the first time look at the growing possibility of “black swan” events. Those are low probability but high impact shifts, such as irreversible melting of major ice sheets that could lead to huge increases in global sea levels.

“The fact we’re starting to see some of the impacts of climate change… really ought to be a wake-up call for global governments that this isn’t something they can ignore,” said Emily Shuckburgh, a University of Cambridge climate scientist. “We’re seeing the impacts here and now today, and the impacts are going to get worse unless we take immediate action,” she explained.

Australia in 2019 saw devastating wildfires that affected many of its 25 million people, have so far done relatively little to spur the country’s lagging climate efforts.

Much of the technology needed to swiftly cut emissions and climate risks is now available and presents a huge opportunity, the scientists said – but the political will to make the changes is still missing, they added.

UN climate science report to examine ‘black swan’ events (trust.org)

 U.S. life expectancy fell by a year and a half in 2020, the largest one-year decline since World War II, public health officials said. 

The decrease for both Black Americans and Hispanic Americans was even worse: three years. Black life expectancy has not fallen so much in one year since the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression. Health officials have not tracked Hispanic life expectancy for nearly as long, but the 2020 decline was the largest recorded one-year drop. Other problems affected Black and Hispanic people, including lack of access to quality health care, more crowded living conditions, and a greater share of the population in lower-paying jobs that required them to keep working when the pandemic was at its worst, experts said.

 It is due mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which health officials said is responsible for close to 74% of the overall life expectancy decline. More than 3.3 million Americans died last year, far more than any other year in U.S. history, with COVID-19 accounting for about 11% of those deaths. Killers other than COVID-19 played a role. Drug overdoses pushed life expectancy down, particularly for whites. And rising homicides were a small but significant reason for the decline for Black Americans, said Elizabeth Arias, the report’s lead author.

U.S. life expectancy stalled in 2015, for several years, before hitting 78 years, 10 months in 2019. Last year, the CDC said, it dropped to about 77 years, 4 months.

Findings in the CDC report:

—Hispanic Americans have longer life expectancy than white or Black Americans, but had the largest decline in 2020. The three-year drop was the largest since the CDC started tracking Hispanic life expectancy 15 years ago.

—Black life expectancy dropped nearly three years, to 71 years, 10 months. It has not been that low since 2000.

—White life expectancy fell by roughly 14 months to about 77 years, 7 months. That was the lowest the lowest life expectancy for that population since 2002.

—COVID-19′s role varied by race and ethnicity. The coronavirus was responsible for 90% of the decline in life expectancy among Hispanics, 68% among white people and 59% among Black Americans.

—Life expectancy fell nearly two years for men, but about one year for women, widening a longstanding gap. The CDC estimated life expectancy of 74 years, 6 months for boys vs. 80 years, 2 months for girls.

“In 2021, we can’t get back to pre-pandemic life expectancy”, said Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University researcher. It could take years.

US life expectancy in 2020 saw biggest drop since WWII (apnews.com)

Global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to rise to record levels as governments fail to “build back better” from the Covid-19 pandemic. CO2 emissions have already rebounded strongly after their sudden plunge last spring, when governments around the world sent their countries into successive lockdowns. They are set to jump this year by the second highest amount on record.

Emissions will rise again this year and next year and 2023 is now on track to see the highest levels of carbon dioxide output in human history, according to forecasts released by the International Energy Agency. Such a rise would put the goals of the Paris climate agreement all but out of reach. The reason for the sharp rise is that governments have failed to invest in green energy as they have sought to rebuild their economies from the Covid-19 pandemic.

 Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA and one of the world’s foremost energy economists, said: “Of more than $16tn [£11.7tn, being spent on recovery from Covid-19] only 2% is going to clean energy investments. This is by far not enough. What we will see is that 2023 will reach an all-time record high [in emissions]. This is very worrying.”

Countries such as India, Indonesia, Latin American countries and other emerging economies are falling behind in clean energy investments. China, the world’s biggest emitter, has  been investing in renewable energy but also has strong and continuing investments in coal and high-CO2 infrastructure. About 90% of the forecast growth in emissions will come from the developing world. 

Birol said developing countries needed financial help to make the leap. “At the global scale, there is no lack of capital [available for investment in green energy] but that capital does not look at these projects in emerging economies,” he said. “There is a perception that the risk is higher.”

Rich countries must also fulfil their promises to ensure at least $100bn a year in climate finance flows to developing countries, to help them cut emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather, Birol said. 

“This $100bn should be a floor, not a ceiling,” he added. “We need to have as a purpose how to mobilise investment in clean energy,” he said. “We need this at Cop26 – there is no way out.”

Vivid Economics found that only about a tenth, or about $1.8tn, of all spending on recovery measures would have a beneficial impact on the climate and environment, while about twice that amount would have an environmentally harmful impact.

  Since the Paris climate agreement, G20 countries have provided more than $3.3tn (£2.4tn) in subsidies for fossil fuels.

The report, by BloombergNEF and Bloomberg Philanthropies described this backing for coal, oil and gas is “​​reckless” in the face of the escalating climate emergency. The $3.3tn could have built solar plants equivalent to three times the US electricity grid, the report says.

The report says all G20 member states continue to provide substantial financial support for fossil-fuel production and consumption. 

 The biggest subsidies came from China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India, which together accounted for about half of all the subsidies. Australia increased its fossil fuel subsidies by 48% over the period, Canada’s support rose by 40% and that from the US by 37%.

“On paper, global leaders and governments are recognising the urgency of the climate challenge and the G20 countries have all made ambitious commitments to scale down fossil fuel development and transition to a low-carbon economy,” said Antha Williams, the environment lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “But, in reality, the action taken by these countries up until this point is a far cry from what is needed. As a host of climate emergencies intensify around the world, the continued development of fossil fuel infrastructure is nothing short of reckless. We need more than just words – we need action.”

“New commitments and net-zero targets from some G20 countries are warmly welcome,” said Günther Thallinger, at the financial services firm Allianz and the chair of NZAOA. “However, pledges and targets alone will not be sufficient to change course.”

‘Reckless’: G20 states subsidised fossil fuels by $3tn since 2015, says report | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

Fed by hot, dry winds, America’s biggest wildfire burned through more acreage in a southern Oregon forest with more than 2,100 residents near the California border ordered from their homes. The fire named Bootleg grew by an additional 4,000 acres overnight to nearly 304,000 acres (123,020 hectares.) 2,200 fire-fighting personnel battling the fire. The Bootleg fire is the largest of 80 active wildfires that have burned nearly 1.2 million acres in 13 states and are being battled by more than 19,600 firefighters and support personnel.

“This fire is large and moving so fast, every day it progresses 4 to 5 miles,” said Oregon Department of Forestry Incident Commander Joe Hassel. 

In California, the Dixie fire has burned more than over 30,000 acres (12,140 hectares) as more than 1,900 fire-fighters attempted to contain it. The Dixie fire, the biggest in the state, prompted some evacuation orders for Plumas and Butte counties.

Meanwhile, in Russia’s Siberian region,  planes seeded clouds to bring rain to dampen huge wildfires. Amid a heatwave, forest fires have burned through over 1.5 million hectares of land in Yakutia, the worst-hit region. Around 123 fires raged on Monday over an area of more than 885,000 hectares, In less than two months, fires in the region have spewed out around 150 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – close to the 2017 annual fossil fuel emissions of Venezuela, according to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), part of a European Union observation programme.

Meantime, in Europe,  water-carrying planes battled to control a wildfire in Spain’s Costa Brava region that has forced 350 people to be evacuated from their homes.

The global meat industry is “borrowing tactics from tobacco companies” to downplay its role in driving the climate crisis and to “confuse and delay regulation” of their planet-harming activities, a major investigation the environmental investigations outlet Desmog has claimed.

Such tactics include routinely downplaying their own greenhouse gas emissions, attacking established science on how livestock farming is driving the climate crisis and casting doubt over the benefits of plant-based alternatives to meat, the investigation said.

“Tobacco didn’t challenge the existence of lung cancer, but they kept denying and deflecting the causal link [with smoking] – and that’s what we’re seeing with beef and dairy,” Dr Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor of environmental studies at New York University, explained, “Beef and dairy don’t deny that climate change exists, but they are carrying out actions to try to convince us that the causal chain isn’t there.”

The production of meat and dairy accounts for around 14.5 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock farming is particularly polluting because cattle belch out methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In addition, large areas of forest are razed to make space for grazing cattle and animal feed. The world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon, is particularly threatened by large-scale cattle ranching and animal feed production. The world’s leading scientists say diets must change if the world is to meet its target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. This message was reiterated in England’s recent National Food Strategy, which called for the country to cut its meat consumption by 30 per cent in the next 10 years. 

The investigation examines the “climate washing” tactics used by 10 of the world’s largest meat companies and their representative industry groups. Brazilian meat giant JBS was one of 10 companies and industry groups included in the investigation – controls UK companies that supply to many major British supermarkets and fast food outlets. JBS’s two UK subsidiaries alone account for 30 per cent of the UK market for chicken and pork.

Desmog claimed that four of the meat companies analysed underreported their annual emissions when compared to estimates from sustainable farming NGOs. These companies include the US-based Tyson Foods, pork and beef company Danish Crown, Vion and JBS.

“JBS’s environmental and social destruction became a global scandal in 2009 following our own investigation, and yet the company continues to get away with large-scale deforestation and face little or no consequences.” Anna Jones, head of food and forests at Greenpeace UK, said. “This important investigation brings to the fore a dangerous and systematic approach by the meat industry to cover up its role in the climate and nature crisis.” She went on to say, “But to end the climate crisis, protect forests and restore nature, we must transition to a more sustainable diet by reducing meat consumption – the science on that is clear. The age of big meat is over.”

Jonathan Elmer, a Green Party spokesperson, said the investigation should bring about “urgent action” from the government.

“This investigation throws a welcome spotlight on the environmental impact of the meat industry and offers more evidence that we must now see the end of factory farming for good. It’s a black hole of food waste, a huge threat to public health, and a key engine of the climate emergency,” he told The Independent. “What we are seeing here is akin to the historic efforts made by the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries to obfuscate the science and undermine a vital message, which in this case is that people need to eat much less meat.”

Dutch food giant Vion – one of the companies analysed by Desmog – publicly claims that “eating less meat will not necessarily contribute to more sustainability”. Meanwhile, two top meat industry groups – the US-based Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA) and France-based the International Meat Secretariat (IMS) – have publicly attacked leading scientific research on how eating less meat could benefit the planet and human health. A landmark report on how diet change could boost planetary and human health led by a top nutritionist at Harvard University was branded “elitist”, “biased” and “not scientifically well-founded” by the secretary-general of the IMS and “drastic” by the AAA. Hsin Huang, secretary-general of the IMS, told The Independent that he believed that “the health benefits of eating red meat are often ignored” and that “the livestock sector is too often unfairly represented” as a driver of the climate crisis.

 The meat industry also routinely attempting to paint itself as a solution to the climate crisis, the investigation finds. For example, the UK’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) – a levy board representing British farmers – is one of many groups promoting the idea that grazing cattle could help to tackle the climate crisis by stimulating soil to take up more carbon from the atmosphere. However, the idea that grass-fed beef can be a climate solution has been challenged by scientists. A report by researchers at the University of Oxford found that grass-fed cows release more greenhouse gas emissions through belching and manure than they are able to offset through boosting soil carbon levels. This means that grass-fed beef is still a net contributor to the climate crisis.

Global meat industry ‘using tobacco company tactics’ to downplay role in driving the climate crisis, investigation claims | The Independent

More than 500 organizations in an open letter called on political leaders in the United States and Canada to reject carbon capture and storage (CCS) and Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS)  as “a false solution” that has become “a dangerous distraction driven by the same big polluters who created the climate emergency.” They said, “CCS just makes dirty energy more expensive and energy-intensive.” 

 Nikki Reisch, Director of the Climate & Energy Program for the Center for International Environmental Law said, “CCS is life support for the fossil fuel industry — and a death sentence for the planet. We need to ditch fossil fuels, not ‘fix’ them with technologies that are dangerous, costly, unproven at scale, and at odds with environmental justice. 

‘A False Solution’: 500+ Groups Urge US, Canadian Leaders to Reject Carbon Capture | Common Dreams News

A letter has been sent from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to the central Government of Antigua and Barbuda, asking them to provide more information on the luxury Barbuda Ocean Beach Club development and a nearby international airport. The Barbuda Ocean Club will have 495 residences, including 175 oceanfront properties, along with numerous amenities including a beach club and golf course, on an island that is 14 miles (23km) by 7.5miles (12km).

OHCHR expressed “deep concerns” over a sprawling resort marketed exclusively to the uber-rich being built on Barbuda, a tiny Caribbean island and one of the last places on Earth to be communally owned.

The involvement of UN “Special Rapporteurs” – independent experts who monitor and publicly report on human rights violations around the world – places greater scrutiny on the foreign investors’ projects. Construction of the resort has continued in the wake of a devastating hurricane that hit the island in 2017, with the local community still reeling from the disaster and awaiting a fully functioning hospital, reliable power and home repairs. John Mussington, the high school principal on Barbuda and a marine biologist believed involvement of the UN human rights commission was crucial to Barbudans’ survival as a community. He said that since the 2017 hurricane, the local people had struggled to be heard, not just internationally, but on a local level.

The developments are facing multiple legal complaints which allege dismantlement of Barbudans’ historical legacy and legal rights, and significant harm to fragile ecosystems including internationally important wetlands.

The letter states that “we would like to express our deep concerns regarding the potential impacts of the Barbuda Ocean Club Project on human rights, including the rights to food, water and sanitation, housing, and a healthy environment, as well as cultural rights”. The UN asks, “Please explain the rationale for permitting such large and intrusive developments within a national park and internationally designated RAMSAR area, both of which are intended to protect and conserve biological diversity.” 

Mr Mussington said: “The whole atmosphere they are painting is one of limited access, which means that Barbudans are not in the picture. We cannot sit back and allow our entire way of life, culture, everything, to be eliminated for a real estate venture.” He added: “We intend to maintain our way of life and our culture because it’s not reasonable to ask us, as a unique people, to just disappear ourselves. We want the world to know that these billionaires, these persons who have the wealth, when you purchase one of these properties, you are actually buying the death of Barbudans as a culture.”

Barbuda is owned collectively by its 1,800 citizens, many the descendants of African slaves brought to the island by the British during the colonial era. Communal ownership means each Barbudan has rights to a plot of land.

“A cleaner can apply for beachfront property and get it, and so can a doctor. So there’s no great inequality in Barbuda,” one council member explained. 

In the past, foreign developers were granted leases and projects required the consent of a majority of Barbudans. Unlike on other Caribbean islands, including larger sister island Antigua, where the central government is located, Barbuda has avoided an overdeveloped, privatised oceanfront and flotilla of cruise ships.

    Four years ago, Hurricane Irma flattened virtually every structure, scattering the small community to Antigua and beyond. While Barbudans were displaced from their island, the 2007 Barbuda Land Act, which codified their communal ownership, was quietly changed by the central government. It was declared unconstitutional that the island belongs solely to Barbudans, as it had for more than 180 years. The changes also did away with requiring the obligatory consent of the Barbudan people for major development. The Barbuda Ocean Club appears to have taken advantage of these changes.  The ocean club’s plots are valued upwards of $3m and that does not include the price of the luxury villas that will be built upon the land.

The central government Prime Minister, Gaston Browne, a former banker, has made clear his disdain for Barbuda’s collective land rights, calling it a “glorified welfare system”, that has left the island dependent on wealthier Antigua. He is a cheerleader and ally for foreign developers. The island’s MP, Trevor Walker, who is also a member of Barbuda’s local elected council, called the prime minister’s changes to the Barbuda Land Act “an unforgiveable sin”. 

 He explained, “You cannot alienate assets of over a billion dollars, which, for example, is what PLH has now in terms of land – over 700 acres – and just give the people some jobs and think that we are going to be okay. It’s not okay.” Mr Walker also said that when the Barbudans voted approval of the original project it had no plans for a golf course or a marina: “all they came to ask for was some land in terms of developing a hotel.”  

Mr Mussington, who has been part of those meetings, told The Independent: “In 2016, what was put before the council and the people is definitely not the details of what is being done now.”

The local community were duped over its vast environmental and social toll.

The OHCHR human rights investigators have also asked for more details on how construction of Barbuda’s new international airport came about. Following Hurricane Irma, stretches of the island’s forest – habitat for indigenous deer and communal farming, grazing and hunting grounds – were destroyed to build airport strips by Bahamas Hot Mix, a company based in the Bahamas. Such development is supposed to require Environmental Impact Assessments. While two EIAs have been conducted, as the UN letter outlines, “there was no prior consultation with the population and, until today, the environment impact assessments are not publicly available”.  Barbuda currently has no direct commercial flights, so the new airport  large enough to accommodate flights from as far away as London importance is exclusively for the resort.

The UN Human Rights investigators also say they are “deeply concerned” about the resort’s location amid the fragile ecosystems at Codrington Lagoon and Palmetto Point. These are areas of national park and internationally important wetlands under RAMSAR – the only global treaty to focus on the protection of a single ecosystem – which help prevent climate-linked coastal erosion and flooding, enhancing water quality, sequestering carbon and providing habitat to endangered species.

Barbuda is a hotspot of biodiversity and home to the world’s largest breeding and nesting colony of the Magnificent Frigate Bird. The lagoon’s mangroves and seagrass protect the island during extreme weather, like hurricanes, which are exacerbated by the climate crisis.

Mr Mussington said, “The climate crisis is more a problem of unequal use of resources versus using up things that are not conducive to the sustainability of the planet. We want people to know that when you buy into this exclusive residential property on Barbuda, you actually against Planet Earth and living sustainably.”

Residents of hurricane-ravaged Barbuda hopeful as UN body signals ‘deep concern’ over resort for uber-rich (msn.com)