Links tagged “national security”

Energy analyst Tilak Doshi: On attaining office, President Biden immediately unleashed a series of executive orders to reverse his predecessor’s strategy of “energy independence”. At a stroke of his pen, he revoked permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, suspended oil leasing in Alaska, halted oil and gas leases on federal land, and even invoked the Endangered Species Act to block energy resource development on private lands in the West. ... 

The Biden administration implored foreign producers to ramp up oil exports while doing its best to stymie America’s own oil and gas industry. Scott Angelle, a former Republican lieutenant governor of Louisiana and secretary of natural resources, said bluntly: “The White House doubles down on favoring OPEC production while giving the middle finger to American energy jobs, American energy consumers [and] climate-advantaged American production.” ... 

After essentially calling for the most fundamental transformation of the global energy system since the advent of the Industrial Revolution over two centuries ago — to be completed within the next three decades — the IEA opined just weeks later that "OPEC+ needs to open the taps to keep the world oil markets adequately supplied". And, on cue, as Europe’s gas and power prices surged to record levels, the IEA called on Russia to be a “reliable supplier” and send more gas to Europe. ... 

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is calling for “urgent action” on climate change in a bid to tackle “abnormal” weather that he blames for the nation’s crippling food shortage. Kim ordered his officials to clamp down on climate change during a Politburo meeting last Thursday, according to the Korean Central News Agency. Kim said the “danger” of climate change had increased in recent years and “disastrous weather” was only getting worse. “Our country is also lying vulnerable to its danger,” Kim said.

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Flashback: Newsweek Headline Celebrates Taliban Vow to ‘Fight Terror and Climate Change’ & Seek ‘World Recognition’

But CBS News was singing a different tune 6 years ago when it blamed “opium profits” — not climate change — for strengthening the Taliban in a 2015 story headlined: “Taliban set to double opium profits this year?” CBS News said in 2015 that the Taliban derived 40 percent of its funding from the illicit opium trade, which “fuel[ed] their insurgency.” Climate change wasn’t even mentioned in the 2015 story. Talk about a whopping narrative shift. [Emphasis added.]

Korte ignored mentioning the “billions” in profits the Taliban made off of its illicit drug trade until the seventeenth paragraph of her story. But she blamed the opium trade on the false narrative that farmers were struggling to produce other crops and climate change. Korte said in the first paragraph of her piece that the Taliban derived its strength from three decades of “floods and drought” that have “destroyed crops and left people hungry.”

“Seeking World Recognition, Taliban Vows to Help Fight Terror and Climate Change.” The magazine’s headline read like a Babylon Bee joke: “Seeking World Recognition, Taliban Vows to Help Fight Terror and Climate Change.”

Newsweek Senior Writer of Foreign Policy Tom O’Connor pushed how Taliban Cultural Commission member Abdul Qahar Balkhi “told Newsweek that his group sought worldwide recognition of the Islamic Emirate.” Balkhi propagandized to the outlet how the organization's drive for “recognition” would be bolstered in part by the terror group’s commitment to “fight terror” and so-called climate change. “‘We hope not only to be recognized by regional countries but the entire world at large as the legitimate representative government of the people of Afghanistan,’” Balkhi said in part, according to Newsweek.