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<p><i><font size="+1"><b>November 25, 2020</b></font></i></p>
<br>
[following money]<br>
<b>The secret club for billionaires who care about climate change</b><br>
BY BEN STEVERMAN - BLOOMBERG<br>
Nov 17, 2020<br>
A few years ago, the hundreds of members of France's Mulliez family,
with a global retail empire worth more than $38 billion, decided
they should take climate change more seriously — or rather, their
investment portfolio should.<br>
<br>
But where to start? Climate change and the fight against it could
transform almost every sector of the economy as companies clamor for
ways to cut emissions and even pull carbon dioxide from the air.
"This space is very broad, and it's complicated," says Delphine
Descamps, managing director at Creadev, the Mulliez family office,
which has about €200 million ($236 million) to invest each year.<br>
<br>
Then she met Regine Clement, the head of a small, secretive
nonprofit called Creo Syndicate. An exclusive club of
climate-focused investors, Creo's mission is to speed up the flow of
capital into investments that can slow global warming. The group
focuses on the richest of the rich, working with about 200 families
and investment outfits with a total of more than $800 billion under
management. Prominent members include legendary investor Jeremy
Grantham and Nat Simons, the son of Renaissance Technologies'
billionaire founder James Simons. Members must pay dues — a "very
reasonable" flat fee, Clement says, that makes up about half the
nonprofit's revenue — and they must prove they're serious by
planning to make their first investment in climate and
sustainability within six months. Members must also have assets of
at least $100 million and get approved by the nonprofit's board...<br>
- -<br>
Although it's a nonprofit and doesn't have any money of its own to
deploy, Creo acts a little like an investment bank, vetting about
300 deals per year, connecting investors with possible partners, and
conducting research on technologies. Members have invested in
everything from batteries and hydrogen fuel to regenerative farmland
and greener product packaging. Portfolios include still unproven
technologies such as methods for carbon capture and true long shots
like fusion reactors.<br>
<br>
Creo members make a wide variety of bets that might make a
difference — and make money. "This is not philanthropy, this is
investment," Clement says. Superwealthy families, she says, have an
advantage over other players: Managing money for future generations,
they can afford to wait a decade or more for investments to bear
fruit. Some members in Europe have been rich for hundreds of years.
Families "are naturally inclined to think long term," she says...<br>
- -<br>
The key to Creo's success, members say, is how it gets very wealthy
investors in the same room — or on the same Zoom call. "You have
people with a decade of experience and people with a month of
experience," says longtime member Reuben Munger, a hedge fund
manager who founded Vision Ridge Partners as his family office and
later turned it into an investment firm. With more than $1 billion
under management, it specializes in sustainable assets.<br>
<br>
It helps that families generally aren't trying to pitch to each
other and that Creo makes no fees on any deals. "There's not a lot
of hidden agendas," Zabbal says. Creo has tried to unlock even more
capital by venturing beyond families to large institutional
investors that also want a head start on climate investing. The
nonprofit is working with CDPQ, a Quebec pension fund with $333
billion in assets, which launched a $500 million investment strategy
around climate and sustainability. The pension's goal is to invest
alongside families or firms in late-stage venture companies. The
first deal, announced in September, is with S2G Ventures, a Chicago
firm focused on food and agriculture that's backed by Lukas Walton.
An heir to the Walmart fortune, he has a net worth estimated to be
more than $22 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.<br>
<br>
Creo members have seen their investments pay off. QuantumScape
Corp., a battery tech company recently valued at $3.3 billion,
received early funding from Prelude Ventures, co-founded by Simons
and Capricorn Investment Group, both Creo members. Participants in
the nonprofit also invested in early rounds of Tesla Inc. and Beyond
Meat, two of 2020's best-performing stocks. This kind of success
helps convince skeptical family members and advisers of what Creo
can do.<br>
<br>
"The opportunities are tremendous, but it's also overwhelming for
someone who starts out," Zabbal says. "By investing in collaboration
with others who bring expertise, it allows more investors to take
the leap."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/11/17/world/billionaires-climate-change/">https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/11/17/world/billionaires-climate-change/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
[Perfect news for days of feasting]<br>
<b>Returning the 'three sisters' - corn, beans and squash - to
Native American farms nourishes people, land and cultures</b><br>
November 20, 2020 8.15am EST<br>
<br>
Historians know that turkey and corn were part of the first
Thanksgiving, when Wampanoag peoples shared a harvest meal with the
pilgrims of Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts. And traditional
Native American farming practices tell us that squash and beans
likely were part of that 1621 dinner too.<br>
<br>
For centuries before Europeans reached North America, many Native
Americans grew these foods together in one plot, along with the less
familiar sunflower. They called the plants sisters to reflect how
they thrived when they were cultivated together.<br>
<br>
Today three-quarters of Native Americans live off of reservations,
mainly in urban areas. And nationwide, many Native American
communities lack access to healthy food. As a scholar of Indigenous
studies focusing on Native relationships with the land, I began to
wonder why Native farming practices had declined and what benefits
could emerge from bringing them back.<br>
<br>
To answer these questions, I am working with agronomist Marshall
McDaniel, horticulturalist Ajay Nair, nutritionist Donna Winham and
Native gardening projects in Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin and
Minnesota. Our research project, "Reuniting the Three Sisters,"
explores what it means to be a responsible caretaker of the land
from the perspective of peoples who have been balancing agricultural
production with sustainability for hundreds of years.<br>
<br>
<br>
Gail Danforth, an Elder of the Oneida Nation in Northeast Wisconsin,
explains "three sisters" gardening.<br>
<b>Abundant harvests</b><br>
Historically, Native people throughout the Americas bred indigenous
plant varieties specific to the growing conditions of their
homelands. They selected seeds for many different traits, such as
flavor, texture and color.<br>
<br>
Native growers knew that planting corn, beans, squash and sunflowers
together produced mutual benefits. Corn stalks created a trellis for
beans to climb, and beans' twining vines secured the corn in high
winds. They also certainly observed that corn and bean plants
growing together tended to be healthier than when raised separately.
Today we know the reason: Bacteria living on bean plant roots pull
nitrogen - an essential plant nutrient - from the air and convert it
to a form that both beans and corn can use.<br>
<br>
Squash plants contributed by shading the ground with their broad
leaves, preventing weeds from growing and retaining water in the
soil. Heritage squash varieties also had spines that discouraged
deer and raccoons from visiting the garden for a snack. And
sunflowers planted around the edges of the garden created a natural
fence, protecting other plants from wind and animals and attracting
pollinators.<br>
<br>
Interplanting these agricultural sisters produced bountiful harvests
that sustained large Native communities and spurred fruitful trade
economies. The first Europeans who reached the Americas were shocked
at the abundant food crops they found. My research is exploring how,
200 years ago, Native American agriculturalists around the Great
Lakes and along the Missouri and Red rivers fed fur traders with
their diverse vegetable products.<br>
<br>
<b>Displaced from the land</b><br>
As Euro-Americans settled permanently on the most fertile North
American lands and acquired seeds that Native growers had carefully
bred, they imposed policies that made Native farming practices
impossible. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian
Removal Act, which made it official U.S. policy to force Native
peoples from their home locations, pushing them onto subpar lands.<br>
<br>
On reservations, U.S. government officials discouraged Native women
from cultivating anything larger than small garden plots and
pressured Native men to practice Euro-American style monoculture.
Allotment policies assigned small plots to nuclear families, further
limiting Native Americans' access to land and preventing them from
using communal farming practices.<br>
<br>
Native children were forced to attend boarding schools, where they
had no opportunity to learn Native agriculture techniques or
preservation and preparation of Indigenous foods. Instead they were
forced to eat Western foods, turning their palates away from their
traditional preferences. Taken together, these policies almost
entirely eradicated three sisters agriculture from Native
communities in the Midwest by the 1930s.<br>
<br>
<b>Reviving Native agriculture</b><br>
Today Native people all over the U.S. are working diligently to
reclaim Indigenous varieties of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and
other crops. This effort is important for many reasons.<br>
<br>
Improving Native people's access to healthy, culturally appropriate
foods will help lower rates of diabetes and obesity, which affect
Native Americans at disproportionately high rates. Sharing
traditional knowledge about agriculture is a way for elders to pass
cultural information along to younger generations. Indigenous
growing techniques also protect the lands that Native nations now
inhabit, and can potentially benefit the wider ecosystems around
them.<br>
<br>
Video <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://youtu.be/IooHPLjXi2g">https://youtu.be/IooHPLjXi2g</a><br>
Members of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network explain the cultural
importance of access to traditional seed varieties.<br>
<br>
But Native communities often lack access to resources such as
farming equipment, soil testing, fertilizer and pest prevention
techniques. This is what inspired Iowa State University's Three
Sisters Gardening Project. We work collaboratively with Native
farmers at Tsyunhehkw, a community agriculture program, and the
Ohelaku Corn Growers Co-Op on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin;
the Nebraska Indian College, which serves the Omaha and Santee Sioux
in Nebraska; and Dream of Wild Health, a nonprofit organization that
works to reconnect the Native American community in Minneapolis-St.
Paul, Minnesota, with traditional Native plants and their culinary,
medicinal and spiritual uses.<br>
<br>
We are growing three sisters research plots at ISU's Horticulture
Farm and in each of these communities. Our project also runs
workshops on topics of interests to Native gardeners, encourages
local soil health testing and grows rare seeds to rematriate them,
or return them to their home communities.<br>
<br>
The monocropping industrial agricultural systems that produce much
of the U.S. food supply harms the environment, rural communities and
human health and safety in many ways. By growing corn, beans and
squash in research plots, we are helping to quantify how
intercropping benefits both plants and soil.<br>
<br>
By documenting limited nutritional offerings at reservation grocery
stores, we are demonstrating the need for Indigenous gardens in
Native communities. By interviewing Native growers and elders
knowledgeable about foodways, we are illuminating how healing
Indigenous gardening practices can be for Native communities and
people - their bodies, minds and spirits.<br>
<br>
Our Native collaborators are benefiting from the project through
rematriation of rare seeds grown in ISU plots, workshops on topics
they select and the new relationships they are building with Native
gardeners across the Midwest. As researchers, we are learning about
what it means to work collaboratively and to conduct research that
respects protocols our Native collaborators value, such as treating
seeds, plants and soil in a culturally appropriate manner. By
listening with humility, we are working to build a network where we
can all learn from one another.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://theconversation.com/returning-the-three-sisters-corn-beans-and-squash-to-native-american-farms-nourishes-people-land-and-cultures-149230">https://theconversation.com/returning-the-three-sisters-corn-beans-and-squash-to-native-american-farms-nourishes-people-land-and-cultures-149230</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[movie on HULU]<br>
<b>"I Am Greta" isn't About Climate Change. It's About the
Elusiveness of Sanity in an Insane World</b><br>
BY JONATHAN COOK - Nov 20, 2020<br>
Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was
forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to
power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the
relationship between society and the individual.<br>
<br>
In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity
referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to adapt
to the society they lived in. Rather, society itself could become so
pathological, so detached from a normative way of life, that it
induced a deep-seated alienation and a form of collective insanity
among its members. In modern western societies, where automation and
mass consumption betray basic human needs, insanity might not be an
aberration but the norm...<br>
- -<br>
Our world is not one of the sane versus the insane, but of the less
insane versus the more insane.<br>
<br>
Which is why I recommend the new documentary I Am Greta, a very
intimate portrait of the Swedish child environmental activist Greta
Thunberg....<br>
<blockquote><b>I Am Greta - Official UK Trailer</b><br>
Sep 17, 2020<br>
Dogwoof<br>
In cinemas now: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.iamgreta.film">https://www.iamgreta.film</a><br>
The story of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is told
through compelling, never-before-seen footage in this documentary
following her rise to prominence and her global impact as she
sparks school strikes and protests around the world.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i74n4BUYgHI&feature=emb_logo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i74n4BUYgHI&feature=emb_logo</a>...<br>
</blockquote>
We are in an ideological bubble - and one that will burst as surely
as the financial kind. Thunberg is that still, small voice of sanity
outside the bubble. We can listen to her, without fear, without
reproach, without adulation, without cynicism. Or we can carry on
with our insane games until the bubble explodes.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/20/i-am-greta-isnt-about-climate-change-its-about-the-elusiveness-of-sanity-in-an-insane-world/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/20/i-am-greta-isnt-about-climate-change-its-about-the-elusiveness-of-sanity-in-an-insane-world/</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
November 25, 2006 </b></font><br>
The Washington Post reports:<br>
<blockquote>"While the political debate over global warming
continues, top executives at many of the nation's largest energy
companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate
change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions
as inevitable.<br>
<br>
"The Democratic takeover of Congress makes it more likely that the
federal government will attempt to regulate emissions. The
companies have been hiring new lobbyists who they hope can help
fashion a national approach that would avert a patchwork of state
plans now in the works. They are also working to change some
company practices in anticipation of the regulation."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112401361_pf.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112401361_pf.html</a><br>
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