Author: The Cayman Institute

The Cayman Institute Director-General of The Cayman Institute. Nicholas Robson has a rich background in the non-governmental (NGO) sector. He received his MA in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford. Nick has consulted for the British Red Cross in Disaster Management and is the founder of the Cayman Institute, a think tank doing policy research in areas such as global warming and climate change, energy security and economic sustainability for small island states. Nick also has a background in security and law enforcement. His geographical areas of interest are Central and South Asia and the Middle East as well as Small Island Developing States. He is also the Chief Coordinator of the South Asian Strategic Stability Institute (SASSI) based in London whose aims are to make a leading contribution to regional and international academic and policy-orientated research discourses about South Asian security. His publications include Cayman Islands Energy Policy: Background Advisory Report and Sea Level Rise and Its Implications for the Cayman Islands. See Specialties -Geopolitical, strategic and security implications of climate & energy security -Food and water security implications -Climate / Refugee problem -Global terrorism and climate change -Disaster management and climate change -Economic, political and social issues in the world's smallest countries and dependencies (including SIDS) Counter Terrorism. Disaster Response - IFRC. Human Rights - Int’l Human Rights Academy (University of Utrecht). UN training in Peace Keeping Operations (UNITAR)

Greta Thunberg calls out ‘forces of greed’ in surprise Glastonbury climate speech

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 Greta Thunberg called out “the forces of greed” as she made a surprise climate speech at Glastonbury on Saturday (25 June). The 19-year-old campaigner, from Sweden, spoke from the Pyramid Stage in front of a backdrop that shows how global temperature have risen. “We are at the beginning of a climate and ecological emergency. 
This is not the new normal, this crisis will continue to get worse… until we prioritise people and planet over profits and greed,” she said. 

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OfReg commissions Value Of Solar Study for the Cayman Islands

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OfReg commissions Value Of Solar Study for the Cayman Islands 

 OfReg Office has engaged RMI, https://rmi.org/ the renowned renewable energy consultants working to accelerate the transition to clean energy, to conduct a Value Of Solar Study specifically to address the unique aspects of the local distributed solar marketplace. The scope of the work is intended to assess the value of Photovoltaic (PV) generation from a utility and societal perspective in the Cayman Islands.
The study will include impacts on the transmission and distribution grid, energy costs, address rate design options, and the economic potential of local distributed solar energy systems. 

Young Europeans Sue to Stop Treaty That Fossil Fuel Giants Use to Foil Climate Action

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“It just can’t be that the fossil fuel industry is still more protected than our human rights,” said a 17-year-old German whose family was displaced during last summer’s deadly floods.

As The Guardian reported, five plaintiffs between the ages of 17 and 31, all of whom have recently endured disastrous hurricanes, floods, and fires, are trying to persuade the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) violates the right to life and the right to respect for private and family life—the second and eighth articles, respectively, of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case marks the first time the ECHR will be asked to consider the ECT, an obscure agreement whose investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism enables fossil fuel companies to sue governments over anticipated economic losses stemming from plans to move away from coal, oil, and gas.  

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Regenerative Rainmaking – How land management affects the soil and sky

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Rainmaking Microbes

Microbes are everywhere, including in the clouds. Scientific studies are now showing that they play an important role in creating precipitation (reference links to multiple related articles are provided at the end of this article). Microbes from the soil and plants can go airborne and facilitate a process called bio-precipitation. These microbes include bacteria, fungi and tiny algae.
For a cloud to produce precipitation that falls to earth as rain or snow, ice particle formation in the clouds is required. Just a decade ago it was thought that only small mineral particles, or other inert particles, could serve as nuclei for condensation to occur. However, we now know that aerosols in the form of microbes can catalyze ice particle formation that trigger precipitation.
The evidence is building that vegetation and soils are a crucial source of atmospheric biological ice nucleators in precipitation. They may, in fact, be the most efficient ice-forming catalysts in precipitation, not airborne mineral particles. These “rainmaking” microbes are significant influencers of the water cycle. They can also travel long distances in the atmosphere for dispersal on a global scale.

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Right-Wing Judges Say It’s “Harmless” to Label Climate Activist a Terrorist

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 A PANEL OF three Trump-appointed judges this week upheld an excessive eight-year prison sentence handed down to climate activist Jessica Reznicek, ruling that a terrorism enhancement attached to her sentence was “harmless.”
The terror enhancement, which dramatically increased Reznicek’s sentence from its original recommended range, set a troubling precedent. Decided by a lower court in 2021, it contends that Reznicek’s acts against private property were “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government.” The appellate justices’ decision to uphold her sentence, callously dismissing the challenge to her terrorism enhancement, doubles down on a chilling message: 
Those who take direct action against rapacious energy corporations can be treated as enemies of the state. 

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The BIOT: A judicial vacuum now consuming Tamil refugees

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The BIOT: A judicial vacuum now consuming Tamil refugees 
In October 2021, a group of 89 Tamil asylum seekers hoping to claim asylum in Canada was intercepted while traversing the
Indian Ocean and brought to a joint UK-US military facility on Diego Garcia, the only inhabited island in the Chagos
Archipelago, otherwise known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Nine months on – and after 30 other arrivals
this April – these people are still stuck on the remote Indian Ocean atoll, and dozens have begun a hunger strike.
Despite supposedly landing on a British Overseas Territory, these asylum seekers have no clarity about their future, because, in
legal terms, the BIOT is a “grey hole”, likened by one academic to Britain’s own Guantánamo. Simply put, a range of international
treaties do not apply to this territory, which allows British and American authorities to keep them in limbo.

Windrush scandal caused by ‘30 years of racist immigration laws’ – report

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The origins of the Windrush scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population, according to a leaked government report.

The stark conclusion was set out in a Home Office commissioned paper that officials have repeatedly tried to suppress over the past year.

The 52-page analysis by an unnamed historian, which has been seen by the Guardian, describes how “the British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function”, and sets out how this affected the laws passed in the postwar period. 

It concludes that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.  https://bit.ly/3Gvn3MW

Farm vehicles have become so heavy they’re affecting the world’s soils

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Vicki Robin—NYT best-selling author, Post Carbon board member, and host of our What Could Possibly Go Right? podcast—says:
“If global supply chains are disrupted, we need more local food and local energy. The question isn’t how can corporations feed the world, but how can our  laws and institutions increase the ability of regions to feed themselves?”

What do you think? How do we convince our lawmakers that building #communityresilience and investing in #localization efforts are our BEST avenues forward?

Farm vehicles have become so heavy they’re affecting the world’s soils
May 17, 2022: The total weight of farming machinery has increased tenfold in the last 40 years, as machines become bigger and stronger. As they operate across fields, these machines slowly crush the soil and make it harder for plants to grow, risking reducing harvests across global cropland in the next decades, a new study found.
The average weight of modern agricultural machinery (36,000 kilograms or 80,000 pounds) exceeds by far the heaviest living terrestrial animals (the African bush elephant, which has a maximum body mass of 8,000 kilograms). Modern tractors are even heavier than some of the sauropod dinosaurs, the heaviest land animals that ever walked on Earth. 

Cayman drops way down on TJN secrecy ranking

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Cayman drops way down on TJN secrecy ranking – 

 CNS): The Cayman Islands is no longer the Tax Justice Network‘s most secret jurisdiction. The British overseas territory was rated number one in 2020 and number two in 2021, but this year it has dropped way down to number 14. The United States is now number one, Germany is number seven and Britain itself is number 13. The TJN said that Cayman dropped to 14th place in this year’s rankings after disclosing data showing that the scale of financial services it provides to non-residents was lower than expected.
The TJN has turned its attention to the onshore larger economies and, as successive governments and the financial services sector here have consistently claimed, it found that they are just as secretive as offshore jurisdictions, which TJN has previously viewed as traditional tax havens. It also found that it is in those countries where the serious financial crime is occurring.  Read More