Tag: Billionaires

The UN’s ‘Human Rights’ Agenda Has Descended into the Politics of Envy

They’d rather have the poor poorer, provided the rich were less rich.

Margaret Thatcher

From The Daily Sceptic

By Dr David McGrogan

They’d rather have the poor poorer, provided the rich were less rich.

Margaret Thatcher

You are perhaps familiar with the early episode of The Simpsons in which we gain an insight into the thought-world of the family dog, Santa’s Little Helper. Unable to comprehend language, the dog simply stares blankly at human faces as they talk, hearing only “blah blah blah”. But just occasionally a word breaks through that it recognises: “blah blah ball, blah blah good boy!” and so on.

Well, this is what reading UN human rights materials is like. Your eyes begin to process the text but very soon you find them glazing over, and you enter a mental state a little like that of a canine half-dozing in the sun in the garden while a family gathering takes place around you. You are dimly aware of distant noises of human conversation, and of the fact that your whiskers are picking up slight movements in the breeze, but otherwise you are mentally empty – save perhaps for brief pangs of hunger that are insufficient to motivate you to make your way to your food bowl.

‘Blah blah fundamental values,’ the voices drone on. ‘Blah blah force for good, blah blah dignity, blah blah climate crisis, blah blah populism….’ The words wash over you and you are gradually lulled into a dreamlike state; the memory of what it is to be a human being, equipped with reason, recedes, and eventually you are reduced to a sort of empty senescence, ready only for a nice long nap in your basket where you can tune out for good.

Anyway, the other day, I noticed that the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights had just issued its annual report for 2025. I think the six month lag between the actual end of 2025 and the releasing of the report is a tacit admission by the OHCHR that absolutely nobody, except perhaps the criminally insane, reads the word salads it puts out. But I sat myself down to read the report in any case, fully expecting it to transition me into a semi-sentient fugue-state in short order.

For once, however, the first sentence of the report was arresting. Now, I want you to bear in mind that this is the apex of the UN human rights apparatus that we are talking about here, and that the person writing is the High Commissioner for Human Rights himself, Volker Turk. I want you to bear in mind also the many dozens of human rights-related things that he could have chosen as the initial hook to draw in the reader: incipient genocide in Sudan or Nigeria; disappearing Christians in China; the way women are treated in Afghanistan or Niger; the disallowed second goal Egypt scored in their last-16 tie against Argentina last week; and so on. Okay, now that you are bearing all that in mind, are you ready? Here is what Turk begins his report by saying – the very first sentence:

Inequality is reaching new heights – together with the profits reaped by billionaires.

That’s right. Of all the things to worry about, it is people being rich that concerns Turk most. Billionaires, it would seem, are a major human rights problem.

Billionaires are rather in the firing line at the UN these days, as they are in domestic politics in most countries too. A strange notion has crept into the heads of policy wonks, which is that there are untold billions of billionaires who are all sitting around on huge stockpiles of untapped wealth which the rest of us could simply seize and use to construct for ourselves each a five-bed detached house made from solid gold – if only we had the gumption to get up and do it. Hence, we are repeatedly told, what we really just need is a wealth tax; the figure that is often bandied around (for instance, in a report commissioned by the G20 Presidency of Brazil in 2024) is 2% of billionaires’ presumptively ill-gotten gains.

This, plainly put, is all arrant nonsense. I find that a good rule of thumb is that if somebody’s solution to anything is ‘more taxes on billionaires’ they should immediately be excluded from serious public discussion and, preferably, bundled onto the next helicopter to Rockall with a one-way ticket. Anybody who doesn’t understand why, and is interested in the best easy technical explanation, could do a lot worse than read this post (clue: it isn’t ‘because the billionaire would all go and live elsewhere’, the worst Telegraph columnist-style argument against a wealth tax ever invented). But the essence of the point is simple: it isn’t the billionaires who are the problem, and since this is the case, nor are they the solution. Take the Yookay. The interest on our national debt alone costs us £120 billion a year. The amount we paid out in social security last year was £344 billion.

There are not enough billionaires in the galaxy to solve the Yookay’s fiscal problems through wealth taxes, let alone the problem of global poverty. This is the beginning and end of the discussion from a common sense point of view.

But, of course, common sense is not the point and nor is solving fiscal problems – that isn’t why people object to other people being billionaires; it isn’t why they are being singled out by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as the most pressing problem facing the world today; it isn’t why wealth taxes are proposed either at the domestic or international level.

The point, rather, is envy. And it is a particular kind of envy that is important to specify. It is not the envy of the poor. No doubt the poor, like all of us, are indeed often envious of the lifestyles of billionaires. But the poor do not tend to crew the bridge of the think-tanks like the Resolution Foundation or stride the corridors of the palace in Geneva where the UN OHCHR is based. No: the type of envy we are talking about here is the most poisonous envy of all, because it hides itself behind platitudes and sanctimony. It is the envy of the privileged, those with higher status already, towards those who have higher status yet. It is the envy of the well-educated and propertied classes for those who have attained wealth through other means. It is the envy, in short, of old money for new money. And it cloaks itself in concern for the poor. It is the type of envy that says, ‘I am admittedly wealthy, but I don’t have as much wealth as that vulgar Elon Musk. And in any case, I care about poverty, which makes me a good person. So trust me when I say that, in taking people who are wealthier than me down a peg or two, it is all in the interests of the poor.’ It is an envy that is licensed and excused by the appearance of compassion.

This may sound like a cynical and harsh reading of things (as if I could ever be accused of being cynical or harsh!) but it is I think borne out by the ludicrous conceptual framework that lies behind Turk’s comment, which I cited earlier – a notion that has come to be called ‘post-growth’, but which can be better understood as a kind of bizarro world cakeism, in which nobody has cake and nobody can eat any of it, either.

Post-growth in the human rights context is the brainchild of a man called Olivier de Schutter, well-known in academic human rights circles partly because he writes and updates a very big textbook used in teaching undergraduates and postgraduates around the world. De Schutter was originally an EU apparatchik and academic, but gradually slid into the UN human rights world, ultimately becoming the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, a post he held from 2020-2026.

UN Special Rapporteurs and Independent Experts are, essentially, UN-funded activists. Each holds a particular mandate (arbitrary detentions; rights of people with albinoism; rights of the disabled; whatever) and uses his or her position to champion its particular subject in whatever way he or she sees fit. De Schutter used his mandate as Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty chiefly to champion the concept of a ‘post-growth’ economy, which he is now elaborating as Chair of something called New Economies for Eradicating Poverty, or NEEP. I say “something” advisedly, as it is not exactly clear what NEEP is – its website does not really specify its legal structure or tell us about its funders, or anything much at all from an organisational point of view. And its relationship to the UN is opaque; it is not a UN entity but most of its staff appear to have previously worked with De Schutter in his role as Special Rapporteur, and it is obviously informally connected in some way with the UN ‘family’, so to speak: in all of its materials we find thanks and acknowledgements being extended to various UN agencies, including the OHCHR itself, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, and so on.

What else we can infer, from some digging, is that NEEP’s budget may be largely or entirely underwritten by two big philanthropic entities, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and Partners for a New Economy (P4NE), who are named as having funded NEEP’s central activity, the ‘Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth‘, unveiled to much fanfare at a large shindig in Geneva in spring 2026. Robert Bosch Stiftung is well known (it is a charity founded off the back of the wealth of Robert Bosch, who would in today’s money no doubt have been one of those pesky billionaires we keep hearing about); P4NE is a ‘re-granting’ entity which distributes a pool of donations from other philanthropic organisations such as the Oak Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, the latter of which itself distributes funds for the Open Society Foundations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc. etc. etc.

The spectacle of foundations funded by billionaires funding projects designed to work against the interests of billionaires is itself curious, of course, but I think is readily explained by the fact that these people either don’t have the foggiest clue what their money is going towards or else simply do not themselves understand the underlying issues. They bung money to their own foundation and it is then distributed through complex ‘ecosystems’ which are almost impossible to properly untangle and almost seem designed that way (P4NE in particular seems to have been set up as a middle-man precisely to render opaque exactly how funds are being distributed – because grants are pooled and then re-granted, the original funders get plausible deniability if the money ends up anywhere dodgy). And the ultimate decisions about which projects get funded are then made by exactly the type of person you would expect – somebody very expensively educated, who comes from money him or herself and has developed a conscience, who has developed a career in the NGO world, and who is motivated by the ideological priors that are the inevitable outgrowth of that personal history.

But that is a digression and the subject for a future post; what I would like to draw your attention to today is the contents of the original mission statement which De Schutter delivered, when in his role as special rapporteur, to the UN General Assembly in 2024, and what it tells us about envy in particular. Here, we find elaborated the radical notion that it is possible to eradicate poverty beyond growth – that, indeed, not only is it possible to eradicate poverty without growth, but that growth is counterproductive to the goal of poverty-eradication.

Thus, we find De Schutter castigating as “growthism” the idea that the economy should grow and that the wealth produced through that growth should be to some extent redistributed through taxes and transfers. This, as you may have guessed, is bad for “the planet”, but also apparently is bad for human beings. What De Schutter wants to focus on is, rather, well-being. Waxing philosophical, he tells us that our problem is really that we are too keen to “equate economic growth with progress and improved well-being”. This, he says, suggests that we are obsessed with satisfying “limitless desires for more”, fuelled by “marketing” and “status competition” and the “search for ‘positional goods’”. What we need to do instead is focus on a “human rights-based norm of sufficiency” that would shift us away from “unrealistic expectations” and instead reconcile us to a “set of entitlements allowing individuals to flourish in a world of finite resources”. And in particular, we need to recognise that the “money-centric approach to poverty” needs to go. Rather, we need to think about “the reality of social exclusion”. Here is De Schutter, laying out this interesting theory (with my emphasis):

[The money-centric approach to poverty] fail[s] to capture the reality of social exclusion, which may result from the inability of certain households to meet social expectations, such as the need to organise decent funerals for their parents or decent weddings for their children, to pay for extracurricular activities for a child or to own a smartphone. Such social expectations change as overall affluence increases. As such [sic], economic growth (defined by an increase in GDP), if accompanied by rising income inequality, may ultimately prove counterproductive: by raising the bar within a particular society, it may in fact worsen social exclusion – the sense of shame and worthlessness that people in poverty will experience. In addition, if the rise in overall affluence leads to the increased commodification of certain services in areas such as health, education or transport, under the pretext that most people will now be able to afford paying for such services, the impacts of income poverty will be worsened. In that sense, economic growth can go hand in hand with the modernisation of poverty: even while extreme material deprivation is reduced, the number of socially excluded persons may increase.

There are two ‘tells’ here which you will I hope have noticed. The first is the emphasis on profoundly bourgeois concerns – organising ‘decent weddings’ for children, paying for extracurricular activities for offspring and affording the latest smartphones are almost the quintessential First World Problems: they are the stuff of school pick-up time conversations at primary schools in leafy suburbs, not the slums of Kinshasa. And it is almost painfully evident that the author and his advisors live in precisely the kind of milieu where this sort of thing matters: they obviously feel the sense of ‘social exclusion’ that comes from the relentless pressure of having to keep up with the Joneses viscerally and keenly. It is not the shame and worthlessness of people who are actually poor which bothers them, in other words. It is the shame and worthlessness of middle-class people looking at where their neighbours are going for their holidays this year.

The second is the extraordinarily cavalier way in which “extreme material deprivation” is treated, and the dismissiveness with which the dreadful notion that “most people” would be able to afford paying for health, education or transport is described. One can almost imagine De Schutter and his cronies walking the streets of a rougher neighbourhood Nairobi or Dhaka, stopping people to ask them about the concerns. ‘What bothers you isn’t extreme material deprivation, but social exclusion. I’m right, aren’t I?’

In scrupulous fairness, there is an acknowledgment in this document and in NEEP’s Roadmap that growth remains important in less development economies (although where the precise point at which growth ought to stop is never identified). But the snootiness is inescapable. What really exercises these people is not deprivation per se. It is the paradigmatic middle-class worry about being excluded, the bane of the bourgeoisie everywhere. The thing that haunts them is the idea, metaphorically, of not being invited to the right dinner parties. Having moved far beyond “extreme material deprivation” themselves, their concerns turn to social mobility. And so, lo and behold, social mobility become the central concern of their political economy – they lose interest in how to grow the pie, and worry themselves only with making sure they have a slice roughly the same size as everybody else.

Many years ago, Margaret Thatcher hit the nail on the head. There is a species of Leftist – these people, I’m afraid, must be categorised as being on the Left – for whom the important thing is not the poor getting richer but the gap between rich and poor getting smaller: “Provided that the gap is smaller, they’d rather the poor were poorer’” They would rather live in a world in which poor people lived happy, carefree, bucolic existences singing songs and frolicking about, fully reconciled to the “human rights-based norm of sufficiency” and unburdened by “unrealistic expectations”, and in which grubby nouveau riche types were put back in their place by the coercive power of the state and global institutions. And they would like to be lauded for their virtue and brilliance in imagining such a world into existence and carefully managing it in perpetuity. Not for them the vulgarities of ‘marketing’, but rather the wet dream of harried bourgeois people throughout the globe: liberation from “status competition” and a permanent focus on “well-being” –- a sort of operationalised version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Instagram, all the time, everywhere.

In the real world, meanwhile, the Yookay is leading the way in demonstrating exactly what a post-growth economy looks like in practice: less money to spend on goods and services, more debt, generalised despair and low-level angst, a sense of shabbiness, a feeling of deterioration, and destabilised politics. It is almost as though what works at the individual household level (more money = better for well-being, all else being equal) also works at the societal level, too. I am reminded, years ago, of having watched an interview with the multi-millionaire entrepreneur James Caan; asked whether money could make a person happy, he paused briefly and then said, with the smallest of smiles on his face, “Let me put it this way, I’d rather have it than not.” In other words, money may not buy love or happiness, but life is still a darned sight easier when you have a lot of it. And that applies to countries as much as it does to people. No doubt we could all do with focusing more on our well-being and being kinder and less greedy. But all else being equal, it is far easier to do that from a position of economic comfort than decline.

But then again we wouldn’t need billionaire-funded activist-officials like Olivier De Schuter, or Chief Panjandrums of the OHCHR like Volker Turk, to tell us such things. And here perhaps lies the central problem of our age. As I have observed before, being dominated by a professional managerial class means inevitably that we would rather manage problems than solve them, with the reason for this being straightforward to understand. When problems are solved there is no need for them to be managed anymore, and hence no need for managers. It is at this stage that I would normally start talking about Machiavelli, but regular readers will have gone down that avenue already. Suffice to say, being lavishly funded to dream up hare-brained schemes for running the world is probably very nice work if you can get it.

Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.

The Pandemic Treaty Fails Again: It’s Time to Talk About Replacing the WHO

Finalisation of the much-heralded Pandemic Agreement, the flagship of the World Health Organisation’s pandemic agenda, has just been postponed again after another failure to resolve disagreements. Despite heavy pressure from the WHO and European Union in yet another meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, a large bloc of African states is refusing to sign on to what the states consider a clear colonialist agenda. Which of course it is, aimed at putting Covid-era wealth transfers on a more permanent footing.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Dr David Bell

Finalisation of the much-heralded Pandemic Agreement, the flagship of the World Health Organisation’s pandemic agenda, has just been postponed again after another failure to resolve disagreements. Despite heavy pressure from the WHO and European Union in yet another meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, a large bloc of African states is refusing to sign on to what the states consider a clear colonialist agenda. Which of course it is, aimed at putting Covid-era wealth transfers on a more permanent footing.

The WHO, for reasons explained below, is doing what it is paid to do. Major financial sponsors of the WHO have much to gain from getting this agreement through. It has fallen on African leaders, attuned to the model of rich countries and their corporations imposing rules designed for wealth extraction, to protect the rest of us from the farce that the current public health approach to pandemics has become.

The fact that the agency tasked with building capacity and promoting sustainability of low-income health systems is instead doing the opposite now needs to become the central issue of this whole shabby episode. It is time for the international public health community to face itself and decide on which side – people or profit – it should stand.

The modern basis of multilateral health cooperation

There are obvious reasons for countries to cooperate in matters of health, as there are for neighbours in a suburban street: mutual interest in facing common threats where action by neighbouring states or access to their resources helps protect your own, as well as moral reasons based on the generally accepted ‘good’ of helping neighbours when they are in difficulty or lack resources through no fault of their own. Or because a stable and more prosperous neighbourhood (world) is good for business, and a sick one may not be.

Cooperation is not submission, and few self-respecting people would opt for that. Mutual interests and morality all dissolve fairly quickly when cooperation becomes coercion, and the interests of the most powerful player then become the goal. Health is well defined in the WHO’s constitution as physical, mental and social well-being. Accordingly, it rests on economics and social capital and is degraded by poverty and inequality. Neither aspect of wellbeing – mental, social or physical – is supported by forced compliance or slavery.

The basis of modern medical ethics hinges on Hippocrates’s assertions on physician conduct from around 400BC, commonly summarised as to do good rather than harm and respect a patient’s privacy (confidentiality). As a counter to fascism since the Second World War, we added voluntary informed consent, i.e., absence of coercion. This means the final decision in any aspect of medical care or intervention must rest with the individual concerned.

These basic medical ethics rest on the concept that all people are equal and their individual sovereignty (i.e., bodily autonomy) is inviolable. Accordingly, it is obviously unethical to force a person to be injected or undergo some other procedure just because someone else wants them to or for a third person’s benefit. Unethical, that is, outside a medico-fascist or similarly authoritarian approach that post-World War Two human rights law was supposed to suppress. There were very good reasons why we stopped all that, even if it made the streets look cleaner and we are assured it was for a ‘greater good’.

As the Hippocratic Oath and voluntary informed consent govern clinical medical practice, public health is consequently subject to the same requirements at a community, national and global level. Populations are the sum of individuals, each being imbued with equal rights and intrinsic sovereignty. Therefore, decisions made at a regional or global level can only be made by agencies over which those individuals, as a collective, exert control. This is the basis of the UN charter: sovereign states, being the best means we have of expressing the collective decisions of sovereign individuals. It is a massively flawed model – some states are dictatorships and many oppress minorities and ignore their individual sovereignty – but this is because we are working with flawed humans. Sovereign states are the basis of the modern world.

The alternative is a technocracy in which self-designated individuals make decisions and simply force or coerce others to obey – a form of fascism (an unpopular term for a relatively popular approach). This is the antithesis of modern understandings of human rights. It remains popular, including in the public health community, because it provides a sense of self-importance whilst also addressing the needs of wealthy sponsors. It also provides simple rules to live by and a group to belong to. But fundamentally fascism, like feudalism which served the same purpose in former times, relies on acceptance of inequality. This is why we need to name it when we see it, and insist on individual decision-making over any dictatorship of experts.

What should modern public health cooperation look like?

Once we accept basic human rights – individual sovereignty – as a prerequisite for legitimate public health, we can then decide what type of interventions might be useful. Given the heterogeneity of disease-risk related to differing population age structures and environments and the wide variation in human culture that influences what each of us define as important, such decisions would have to be taken at a decentralised level. Advice may be given from a distance, but action can only be decided in context or it is likely to be counterproductive. Subsidiarity rather than centralisation is therefore a prerequisite for effective decision-making, not just to protect individual rights but to achieve a meaningful and lasting impact on health. Though obvious to most people, this is really hard for many credentialled public health professionals to accept. We all have egos and think of ourselves as experts.

Fortunately, modern communications make decentralisation easy. Travel is easy, and we can meet instantaneously by digital means. Centralisation made sense for certain aspects of the Roman state – and in many ways for the WHO on its formation in 1948. The days of steam ships and elephants disrupting landlines are gone now, though the human desire for a comfortable life by a Swiss lake persists.

Decisions must also (rather obviously) be based on evidence and be amendable to change as new information emerges.  Efficiency dictates a focus on building systems and expertise that address overall health outcomes such as nutrition, sanitation and access to basic clinical care. It also suggests prioritising the largest disease burdens readily amenable to prevention or treatment such as endemic infectious diseases (malaria, tuberculosis etc.) rather than, say, diseases based on individual and deliberate lifestyle choice.

Evidence-based public health also emphasises the importance of building strong economies. Building national economies allows countries to maintain better health systems. Promoting impoverishment, such as through prolonged school closures, workplace closures or closing borders, sets everything back and so is expected to cause great long-term harm to health.

At a global level, diseases that cross borders and sudden crises such as epidemics are also good targets for cooperation. More time to prepare for an outbreak or better standards to collectively address it are a good thing. But such events are occasional and of low overall burden compared to the big killers of humankind. Addressing outbreaks in a way that undermines economies and the underlying determinants of health would obviously be foolish. As we saw during the Covid response, such poor public health responses promoted by WHO increased child marriage, child labour and deep poverty, and grew national debt. They did make some other people very wealthy, but had little impact on COVID-19 itself.

Why the WHO can no longer help

All the foregoing should be non-controversial. Some will push back on the Covid bit from a career or political viewpoint but in fact it’s orthodox public health. The agency meant to fill the role of coordinating all this today is the WHO. When the WHO started its work, colonial powers still admitted to being colonial powers and we gave Nobel Prizes for frontal lobotomies. However, WHO was supposed to help improve things. Its governance was based on one-country one-vote, and it was core-funded based on each country’s capacity. With its original intent of egalitarianism, evidence-based policy, prioritisation of low-income populations and contextual decision-making in mind, it is worth looking quickly at what the WHO has become:

  • The WHO is headquartered with over a quarter of its staff in headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, one of the most expensive cities on earth.
  • The bulk of the WHO’s work is dictated by individual funders who directly specify the use of their money – making the organisation a tool for those with the most money, rather than the populations who need more assistance).
  • The largest funder, Bill Gates, is from a wealthy United States background with no low-income country or hands-on public health experience but strong connections to the pharmaceutical and software industries.
  • The WHO’s second largest funder over the past two years was Gavi, a public-private partnership including multinational pharmaceutical corporations. The WHO acts as a de facto market development and access agency for those corporations (which enables executives from them to justify their involvement to their shareholders).
  • WHO staff receive good salaries, generous education subsidies for their children, good health insurance, are tax exempt and have a pension scheme structured to kick in after years of service and then rapidly accumulate, promoting longevity and institutional loyalty (i.e., to institution rather than mission).

The result is, as expected, a focus on commodity-heavy vertical programmes and a workforce incentivised to maintain such a model. Pharma company executives and their major investors are there to maximise return on investment, not ensure good nutrition. They may care, but their job is elsewhere. There are no large companies thriving off good diets or sanitation and accordingly no public-private partnerships to promote these. The WHO must comply with the priorities its funders dictate.

Time for a return to legitimacy

An international public health agency should prioritise building national health system capacity, independence and resilience. In contrast, the WHO has become a colonialist endeavour, serving the same partnership of powers and commercial interests while sanitising it as keeping the world ‘safe’.

The outcomes of the Covid response will be repeated: millions more children having prospects stolen and poverty ensured. Funding for nutrition – critical to build resilience against both endemic and epidemic disease – is falling while WHO and partners construct veritable fairytales to promote more profitable agendas. Resources diversion in public health is never value-neutral.

Advocating reform or replacement of the WHO is therefore not radical but intrinsically anti-colonialist, pro-human rights, pro-evidence and pro-public health. The Right to Health Sovereignty reports follow this model. But there is much invested in maintaining the status quo and a global health workforce strongly incentivised to support this.

The job of leaders of modern states is to ensure the welfare of their people, and this is the only legitimate mechanism from which meaningful change can come to international health. The United States’ withdrawal from the WHO offers an opportunity, but it is the low-income countries on the receiving end of the WHO’s capture who need to drive change. The pushback on the Pandemic Agreement suggests that this may be happening. The global health workforce needs to cease its subservience to vested interests and stop blocking progress. We need international health cooperation based on sovereignty, ethics and integrity, not a continued slide back to the failures of a bygone colonial era.

Dr David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was programme head for malaria and acute febrile disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.

BBC Hails Green Election Letter From “408 Climate Scientists” Signed by Psychologists, Accountants and Landscape Designers

An open letter to all political leaders currently fighting a General Election in the U.K. calling for an “ambitious” programme of green policies has been signed by 408 climate activists. The BBC refers to “the most distinguished of the country’s” climate scientists; Bob Ward, who organised the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham operation, tweeted, “be ambitious on climate, scientists urge parties”, while James ‘the climate clock is ticking’ Murray from Business Green stepped up a gear by referring to “top scientists“. Scientists, you say? The first ‘scientist’ in the alphabetical list is an Associate Professor of Accounting, the second is a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

An open letter to all political leaders currently fighting a General Election in the U.K. calling for an “ambitious” programme of green policies has been signed by 408 climate activists. The BBC refers to “the most distinguished of the country’s” climate scientists; Bob Ward, who organised the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham operation, tweeted, “be ambitious on climate, scientists urge parties”, while James ‘the climate clock is ticking’ Murray from Business Green stepped up a gear by referring to “top scientists“. Scientists, you say? The first ‘scientist’ in the alphabetical list is an Associate Professor of Accounting, the second is a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.

The green Grantham stunt is of course the latest in a long line of attempts to suggest that most ‘scientists’ believe humans control the climate. The letter refers to “growing damage to lives and livelihoods” in the U.K. caused by increases in the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events. This evidence-lite but ubiquitous assertion is not even backed up by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which finds there has been no human involvement in most natural events such as floods, droughts, wildfires and cyclones to date. Nor is human involvement detected in forecasts stretching to 2100.

There are some academics who have signed the letter who can be fairly described as scientists, but the vast majority would struggle to justify such a title. The list is littered with lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, landscape designers, engineers and computer modellers. One interesting take from the letter is to note how many ways a university Geography Department can be renamed to capitalise on the climate zeitgeist.  A similar ‘scientists’ stunt was pulled last month by Damian Carrington in the Guardian, who polled 400 so-called scientists and in an ocean of emotional guff concluded the world is heading towards a “semi dystopian” future. Signed up for both agitprop operations is Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who is described as the Director for U.K. Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation. A more enlightening CV might note that she is an “environmental psychologist” whose first degree was in theology and religious studies with French.

Perhaps Marco Silva, the BBC Verify climate ‘disinformation’ specialist, could cast a critical eye over the Ward letter when he returns at the end of the month from his six-month re-education sabbatical at the billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN). One or two signing names might be familiar to him, including Saffron O’Neill, described as a Professor of “Climate and Society”. She is a past speaker at the OCJN and is noted for speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science.

Would any scientist seriously sign up for such a policy knowing that it would destroy the ongoing scientific process? A process, it might be noted, that has served humanity so well, certainly since the time Pope Urban VIII played the ‘well supported’ argument and cut up rough with Galileo and his heretical view that the Earth orbited the Sun.

The Ward letter is a Grantham operation and is ultimately funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. Two Grantham Institutes are funded at the London School of Economics and Imperial, where a computer model ‘attribution’ operation is used to garner headlines with implausible claims that humans have caused individual weather events. Investigate science journalist Ben Pile has tracked some of the major contributions made by Grantham up to 2021.

As well as significant sums paid to LSE and Imperial, there are major contributions dispersed to other green foundations that crop up all the time when there are global Net Zero collectivisation narratives to be spun in the media, politics and academia. Jeremy Grantham has a long track record of preaching about the coming apocalypse, asking a 2019 meeting in Copenhagen, “what should I do, you say?” He met his rhetorical question by advising:

You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.

Ward is employed by Grantham at LSE to “communicate” climate science, notes journalist Matt Ridley. For years he complained to the newspaper industry’s self-regulator IPSO about climate articles that took a sceptical line. It was part of a campaign of “sustained and deliberate” pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line, states Ridley. Ward tied journalists down in a time-consuming process in the hope it deterred them and their editors from writing and commissioning work. It worked, observed Ridley, noting, “he has frightened away some journalists and editors from the vital topic of climate change, leaving the catastrophists with a clear field to scare children to their heart’s content”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

New Report Reveals Massive Scale of Green Billionaire Funding of ‘Climate Emergency’ Reporting in Mainstream Media

A massive global grooming programme aimed at mostly mainstream media involving climate catastrophism and Net Zero promotion is detailed in a recently published report from the green billionaire-funded Internews’s Earth Journalism Network (EJN). The work is a shocking insight into the corruption of independent, investigative journalism.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

A massive global grooming programme aimed at mostly mainstream media involving climate catastrophism and Net Zero promotion is detailed in a recently published report from the green billionaire-funded Internews’s Earth Journalism Network (EJN). The work is a shocking insight into the corruption of independent, investigative journalism. At one point the report observes “a concerning trend among journalists in some countries still seeking to ‘balance’ their climate change reporting”. The report shows clearly that the green billionaires are calling most of the shots in promoting stories of Net Zero-inspired climate collapse. It is noted that they may fund journalists “to cover stories in a particular subject area, determined by funder interests and goals”.

Over the last 20 years the tax-efficient billionaire foundations have stepped into the funding gaps left by declining circulation and advertising sales across mainstream media. It is noted by the EJN that journalists “overwhelmingly agreed” that support from external funding organisations was “essential” to enabling their climate and environmental reporting. Any journalist can apply to be a member of the EJN and the “primary benefit” is said to be access to grant funding for stories and “training opportunities”. The operation claims over 25,000 members in 200 countries.

The list of EJN funders is a long one and includes many well-known supporters of climate fear-mongering work. Included is the European Climate Foundation, heavily supported by Michael Bloomberg and Extinction Rebellion paymaster Sir Christopher Hohn. Other supporters include Tides, Gulbenkian, Oak, Packard, Climate Justice Resilience, MacArthur and Rockefeller. Helping out with taxpayer money are political and government organisations including the United Nations and the British Foreign Office.

The EJN report is said to provide a novel, truly global benchmark of the current state of climate and environmental journalism. Unhappily this would appear to be true. As we have seen in many past issues of the Daily Sceptic, very few ‘grassroots’ green operations can survive without elite billionaire funding. The same is true of media coverage. Much of the global barrage of climate catastrophe reporting would not exist without this vital outside lifeline. It is obvious that the cash handouts have a clear political agenda, namely an elite-mandated Net Zero global collectivisation made easier by the growth of supranational organisations.

The report makes the obvious point that climate and environmental journalists have long been criticised for lacking objectivity. However the “literature” is said to suggest that journalism as a whole “has been moving away from objectivity as a professional practice in the digital landscape”.  Some researchers are said to have pointed to a need to think ‘beyond journalism’ and to formulate a broader definition.

It might be argued that if you are being paid to be a poodle, you are already ‘beyond journalism’. As 1984 author George Orwell once wrote: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; anything else is public relations.”

Alas, it would seem that some climate scepticism remains, despite all the best funding efforts. The scientific opinion that humans control the climate thermostat by burning hydrocarbons is disputed by some of the finest scientific minds in the world. Fudged figures, pseudoscientific weather attributions and the huge downplaying of the role of natural variations do not convince everyone. According to the EJN, this means that in many countries, media audiences are being led to believe that the causes of climate change are not clear. Certainly it might be said that the causes of climate change are unclear to believers in the scientific discovery process, such as the 2022 winner of the Nobel physics prize Dr. John Clauser. He said recently that the link between temperature and carbon dioxide was a “crock of crap”. Or the distinguished Princeton Emeritus Professor William Happer, who when asked to choose between ‘climate scam’ or ‘hoax’, said he preferred ‘scam’, but could live with ‘hoax’.

For the billionaire-funded EJN this is “highly problematic”, since widespread public understanding of the causes and impacts of climate change “is so urgently needed to support climate action on a global scale”.

Alas, again, the report seemed to find some disturbing evidence that some Comrades are not fully on board with the wishes of Big Climate Brother and the ‘settled’ science promoted by the Ministry of Truth. Citizens are reminded that at the time of the Great COVID-19 Pandemic, “media in many countries clearly aligned with government positions on vaccine mandates and lockdown orders – often under the uniting phrase of ‘we are all in this together’”. On the basis of this example, it is suggested that journalists should be less hesitant to advocate the climate message in the ‘public interest’.

Given that the newsrooms of the world are full of journalists trying to hide their manic support for cloth mask wearing, implausible computer modelling, years of social distancing and school closures, untested and novel medicines, economy-destroying lockdowns and crippling public debt, there might be some concern that another science-lite campaign could eventually lead to more grovelling public accountability, laughable scorn and diminished credibility.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Profits of Doom

A mainstay of the green lobby in the face of its growing number of critics is that climate sceptics are funded by oil, gas and coal interests. By claiming that commentators such as yours truly are merely the PR front for Big Oil, green campaigners feel that they have excused themselves from the need to make rational arguments.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY BEN PILE

A mainstay of the green lobby in the face of its growing number of critics is that climate sceptics are funded by oil, gas and coal interests. By claiming that commentators such as yours truly are merely the PR front for Big Oil, green campaigners feel that they have excused themselves from the need to make rational arguments. Profit, not reason, they claim, drives scrutiny of the climate agenda. But not only do their accusations lack any evidence, they ignore the much greater flow of money between private interests and green lobbyists. So, what’s in it for them?

If only we were funded by Big Oil, perhaps I would be as wealthy as Britain’s top green officials, such as the outgoing Chief Executive of the U.K. Climate Change Committee (CCC), Chris Stark. The civil servant’s total salary and benefits for the financial year 2020-21 amounted to a whopping £400,000. That’s more than the annual total income for the organisation at number one in the green demonology – the Global Warming Policy Foundation – for four out of the last five years. The CCC’s former Chairman, John Gummer, restyled as Lord Deben, was revealed to have made £600,000 from his business dealings with green companies, which he failed to declare in the register of interests – profits that helped him employ a butler, no less, at his Suffolk mansion. Gummer’s predecessor at the CCC, Lord Adair Turner, saves the planet by heating the swimming pool at his country retreat using solar power.

But as it happens, our alleged fossil fuel overlords are really quite mean. According to green activist sleuths InfluenceMap, the biggest oil companies in the world spend approximately $200 million per year on climate-related propaganda. That’s a lot of money, right? However, despite this being framed as ‘denial’ by InfluenceMap’s coreligionists, the group’s investigations expose no such thing. Rather than finding receipts, InfluenceMap’s analysis merely estimates the costs of its enemies’ advertising and lobbying campaigns – mere guesswork, in other words, forms the backbone of its research. And rather than finding ‘denial’, that analysis includes lobbying in support of Net Zero policies and global agreements. Using actual receipts, not merely estimates, I counted the total grants made by the organisations that fund InfluenceMap to green campaigning organisations. It amounted to over $1.2 billion per year – six times more than InfluenceMap guesses their enemies allegedly spend. And that is not even a remotely exhaustive survey of the green blob.

With so much money sloshing between billionaire philanthropists and ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations, the question must be, what is the quid pro quo? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, after all. And if one can peddle misinformation on behalf of oil barons, one can peddle great big fat lies for green billionaires too.

Real estate is one of the under-explored issues at the centre of green blob business plans. Despite green claims to prioritise ‘efficiency’, green policies massively decrease the productivity of land. And there is nothing that a rent-seeker values more than scarcity. Consider, for instance, the 1.5km2 physical footprint of Hinkley Point C, the 3.2 gigawatt nuclear power station being developed in Somerset. An onshore windfarm with the same output, albeit unreliable (since the wind is variable), would occupy an area a thousand times larger. Even the Guardian recognises the swindle, reporting that the Crown Estate made £443 million in 2022, thanks in large part to the seabed it rents out to offshore wind farms. In the 2010s it was pointed out that the then-Prime Minister’s father-in-law, Sir Reginal Sheffield, made £600,000 per year from rents charged to two wind farms on his land. The upper classes are so keen on green because the relics of feudalism profit from neo-feudalism.

Zealots gotta zealot. And society has always had to deal with ideological zealots of one kind or another, who service the interests of their masters by confecting ideological imperatives. As Joel Kotkin, Martin Durkin and Vivek Ramaswamy have all documented in their analyses of the emerging political order, a new clerisy has been established as society’s moral guardians, standing between the eco-billionaires and the rest of us to enforce adherence to green diktats and other elite ideologies. Occupying countless positions across the non-wealth-creating sectors in the Civil Service, civil society, the ‘third sector’, academia and the news media, these culture war front-liners are nonetheless extremely well paid.

Greenpeace is currently hiring a Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-racism Lead for its London HQ, and will pay up to £66,192 per annum. Climb the greasy green pole to become a director of the ‘charity’, and you can expect renumeration of £95,000. Last year, the Telegraph revealed that the Vice Chancellor of Imperial College – the source of all dodgy air pollution, Covid and climate modelling – was paid a basic salary of £365,000, but earned as much as £527,400 for overseeing the prestigious institution’s crystal ball-ocks factory. The wellspring of green ideological garbage, the Guardian, claims to be supported by its readers, “not billionaire backed”, and its favourite green godfather, George Monbiot, routinely rails against mega-wealthy conspiracies that threaten to slow our slide into eco-austerity. But the newspaper is supported by a host of philanthropists directly and through its own ‘foundation’. Bill Gates’s donations to the newspaper total an equivalent of $116 per reader of the print edition. And the BBC’s role in reproducing official orthodoxy needs no rehearsal here, nor do its staffers’ generous renumeration packages.

Suffice it to say that not only are there great rewards available in the public and third sectors in roles advancing the green agenda, there are also significant punishments for those who question it. Don’t expect academic freedom to extend to scepticism of ‘climate science’ or politics. And don’t expect career advancement in the Civil Service if you believe that democracy is of greater importance than Net Zero targets. Aspiring journalists who express heterodox views won’t get anywhere near the BBC or the legacy news broadcasters, whose commitments to the agenda are plainly stated. And of course, nearly all of civil society is committed to silencing the idea that today’s society is built on affordable energy.

Hegemony is a complex idea, but put simply, political elites need to seem to be about something other than power for the sake of power. There is no mistaking the fact that intergovernmental agencies and the institutions of globalism are all aligned with the green agenda. As an earnest and aspiring young globalist wonk explained to me once, “global problems need global solutions”. But the reverse of such glibness is also true: global solutions need global problems. The World Bank and the IMF, the United Nations and its constellation of agencies, the European Union and more have all championed the cause of saving the planet, more to bolster or rescue their authority than to deliver any actual benefits. Stories that serve that political agenda are required, lest the rhetorical phrases of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, like “global boiling” and “code red for humanity”, be made to look like extremely ridiculous unscientific hyperbole.

ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance – is the successor to the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that businesses should be about more than profit. But more than CSR, ESG has become a tradeable commodity in its own right, as well as a near quasi-religious movement. In its simplest form, ESG is about rehabilitating the public image of billionaires, corporations and hyper-accumulations of capital – hedge funds. To me, at least, billionaire virtue-signalling was always implausible. The Rockefellers, for example, are alleged to have funded both Nazi eugenics research programmes and the United Nations’ Third World population reduction programmes in the early days of the green agenda, but now claim to “promote the well-being of humanity”. Similarly, currency speculator George Soros bet against the pound in the 1990s, leading to recession and a wave of unemployment, but now his foundation claims to help solve the world’s problems, including by funding the ironically-titled Open Democracy media platform. In the same vein, British billionaire hedge funder Christopher Hohn, with the assistance of a young Rishi Sunak, helped to bring about the collapse of RBS, leaving Hohn and Sunak with a fortunes in their pockets, and the public with a £45 billion bail out bill. But just four year later, he was knighted for services to philanthropy.

Such billionaires, and Michael Bloomberg and Richard Branson too, have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into funding organisations that promote ESG. For the most part, this involves generating hype around the idea that ESG products, being perfectly in tune with ‘nature’, are likely to yield a better return than investments in dirty brown hydrocarbon energy. But it also involves generating fear both of climate change itself and of the consequences of failing to respond obediently to the encroachment of ESG into policymaking. As a result, ESG campaigning organisations corral sheep-like investors into acting as a force for activism, in turn making corporations the instruments of ESG lobbyists. The most notable victim of this mobilisation was Nigel Farage, who was debanked by Coutts/RBS (the same RBS bailed out by the U.K. taxpayer) – a problem which has seen reported incidences increase by 44% over the last year, according to the U.K. Financial Ombudsman. Individuals, small businesses and even corporations are thus policed by financial institutions, a new and unaccountable form of governance, which is in turn able to decide who may and who may not make money, and on what basis.

So there we have it – four key ways in which the unimpeachable cause of saving the planet is in fact driven by the same old lust for money, power and influence. The stories are much deeper and broader than can be covered here, of course – this article could be 100 times longer. But what I hope it shows is that whereas green mythology posits a somewhat 19th Century view of climate sceptics defending particular interests against progressive policymaking, those same arguments can be held against the bastions of green ideology, too. That includes their favoured news media channels, institutional science, public broadcasters, charities, NGOs and think tanks. For if an oil baron may not fund a public project, why should an eco-billionaire be free to turn civil society into a constellation of corporate lobbying outfits?

The balance of evidence, as measured by pounds and dollars, suggests that the green lobby has been doing precisely what it has accused the reliable energy sector of doing. Meanwhile, there exists little more than unfounded conspiracy theory to back up green claims that private interests drive scepticism. After all, even those infamous deniers, the Koch Brothers, were revealed to have billions of dollars invested in green tech by Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs in Planet of the Humans. The world is not as simple as wacky green fear-mongers like Chris Packham would have BBC audiences believe.

Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.

The “Amazing Tale” of How Three Billionaires Plunged the World into Climate Catastrophism

Do you think that the constant catastrophising of weather and climate in the mainstream media, politics and science has just appeared by accident? Over the last few years, the BBC and the Guardian, as of one mind, decided to float improbable ‘tipping point’ scares under cover of ‘scientists say’, while UN officials concluded that we had two years to save a ‘boiling’ planet and the ubiquitous ‘Jim’ Dale has been given free rein to make it up as he goes along on Talk TV and GB News. Of course all this didn’t suddenly happen.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Do you think that the constant catastrophising of weather and climate in the mainstream media, politics and science has just appeared by accident? Over the last few years, the BBC and the Guardian, as of one mind, decided to float improbable ‘tipping point’ scares under cover of ‘scientists say’, while UN officials concluded that we had two years to save a ‘boiling’ planet and the ubiquitous ‘Jim’ Dale has been given free rein to make it up as he goes along on Talk TV and GB News. Of course all this didn’t suddenly happen. Each of these examples is testament to an extraordinary corruption of the true scientific process – an “amazing tale” according to political science writer Roger Pielke Jnr., “a story of how wealth and power sought to shape climate science in pursuit of political goals”.

The main culprit in this amazing tale will not be unknown to regular readers of the Daily Sceptic and it is the improbable scenario of RCP8.5. This has been promoted as a ‘business as usual’ set of scientific, economic and societal assumptions and it suggests temperature rises up to 4°C in less than 80 years. Although downgraded by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of late as “low likelihood”, it is still estimated to be behind about 50% of the climate modelled ‘impacts’ highlighted over the entire scientific literature. Almost all the claims of climate Armageddon and economic disaster peddled by those identified in our first paragraph are based on RCP8.5 input. It is a tale of how three wealthy men bankrolled a project to promote an extreme scenario to guarantee that the economic impact of climate change they projected into the future would be “eye-poppingly large”.

It will also not be a surprise to learn that the billionaire green activist Michael Bloomberg has played a key role over the last decade in lifting this implausible pathway to underserved prominence. Notes Pielke: “It’s a story of privilege and conceit – the privilege in American democracy that accompanies being mindbogglingly wealthy, and the conceit that climate policies can best be pursued by corrupting the scientific literature on climate change.”

In 2012, three wealthy men, Bloomberg, hedge fund manager Tom Steyer and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson chipped in $500,000 each to fund a project “making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world”. An early funded report was part-titled ‘Risky Business’ and it focused on RCP8.5 “as the pathway closest to a business-as-usual trajectory”. The pathway was said to be “closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming”.

In Pielke’s view, the authors of the ‘Risky Business’ report made two significant methodological mistakes. They characterised the extreme RCP8.5 scenario as ‘business as usual’ and suggested the world could move from one scenario to another.  As Pielke notes, the four different scenarios are independent with, for instance, RCP2.5 assuming a world with three billion people fewer than RCP8.5. Both of the mistaken methodological choices were said to be contrary to the appropriate use set by the people who created them.

The “genius” of ‘Risky Business’ was it undertook a “sophisticated campaign” to introduce its methodological ideas into mainstream scientific literature, “where they would take on a life of their own”. In 2016, a paper from the ‘Risky Business’ project was published in the prestigious journal Science featuring the erroneous notion of moving from one RCP scenario to another. Despite the obvious methodological flaw, notes Pielke, the paper passed peer-review with little or no criticism, and to date has been cited more than 1,100 times. “Hundreds, maybe thousands of papers followed similarly in adopting the same assumption of moving between incommensurate scenarios”, observes Pielke.

A year later, Science published another study from ‘Risky Business’ with the bizarre suggestion that the United States would see a 10% hit to its economy under the most extreme version of RCP8.5, with an incredible 8°C rise in temperature by the end of the century. This prominent paper has been cited more than 1,100 times in other studies and, noted Piekle, the 10% GDP loss would become the top line conclusion of the U.S. National Climate Assessment the very next year.

“Publishing papers in the academic literature based on the flawed ‘Risky Business’ methods was a formula that would be repeated time and time again. Like the introduction of a virus, the misleading reinterpretation of climate scenarios expanded throughout climate science,” states Pielke.

The work begun by Bloomberg-Steyer-Paulson was subsequently taken up by a group called Climate Impact Lab, a collaboration of ‘Risky Business’ leaders and several universities. According to Pielke, Climate Impact Lab has thrived on using RCP8.5 to generate a steady series of media-friendly studies projecting extreme climate impacts. Among them are stories suggesting rising sea levels could swamp major cities and displace almost 200 million people, while a rise in climate related deaths will surpass all infectious disease. All backed, of course, by ‘scientists say’.

Pielke concludes that there is no hidden conspiracy – “all of this is taking place in plain sight”. The political advocacy was “absolute genius” – a well-funded effort to fundamentally change how climate science was reported in the media, and ultimately how political discussion and policy options are shaped.

“This effort has been phenomenally successful,” says Pielke – or as we might put it, complete Dale-ification of most climate and Net Zero debate has been achieved.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

The Real Victors of the ECHR Climate Decision are Green Billionaires

The old ladies of Switzerland have had their day in the sun – treble Factor 50s all round – but the real plaudits for the recent idiotic climate change verdict from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) belong to the elite billionaire paymasters behind lawfare activists such as Greenpeace and Client Earth.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY CHRIS MORRISON

The old ladies of Switzerland have had their day in the sun – treble Factor 50s all round – but the real plaudits for the recent idiotic climate change verdict from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) belong to the elite billionaire paymasters behind lawfare activists such as Greenpeace and Client Earth. Greenpeace bankrolled the Swiss ladies and Client Earth supplied some of the legal arguments. The case is likely to throw a spotlight on the role that a few moneyed forces are playing in using the judicial system to enforce their insane Net Zero collectivisation on populations around the world. In Europe, the billionaires, who happily fund XR vandals as well as high-earning lawyers, are seeking to redefine the meaning of democracy. In the United States, as we shall see, extensive judge grooming is being undertaken to help the judiciary come to the correct political verdicts in the growing number of climate lawfare cases.

In its way, the ECHR verdict that politicians should somehow protect citizens from alleged human-caused climate change was a punishment beating handed down after a 2021 referendum in Switzerland rowed back on Net Zero. Jessica Simor KC represented the Swiss women and frequently acts for Client Earth. After the verdict she noted: “In Switzerland it’s particularly problematic because they have referendums… the people decided they didn’t want it. This is something that comes up all the time… the conflict between this idea of democracy as entailing… rights which matter irrespective of what the majority decides.”

The stupidity of the ECHR verdict need not detail us for too long since it has been widely discussed elsewhere. But it is surely relevant that most bad weather events have shown little discernible rise in frequency over the last 100 years, while mortality from these events has dropped by 99%. Quite why the United Kingdom is a member of this cultural dead-end of a court with its ‘jurists’ defining law to open borders and save us from the weather is a mystery, but again it need not detain us at this point. Suffice to say it suits Greenpeace, Client Earth and Jessica Simor KC to have a tame, like-minded body of legal social justice warriors to agree on their elite view of what matters, irrespective of how people actually vote.

Condemnation of the ECHR verdict has been widespread, with Net Zero Watch stating that climate catastrophism now represents a clear and present threat to the rule of law and democracy. Director Andrew Montford noted an astonishingly broad interpretation of existing human rights laws that had alarming parallels with what was seen in 1930s Germany. “The judicial activism of the European Court looks very much like the judicial activism under National Socialism,” he added.

As we have seen with attempts to groom journalists and politicians to catastrophise the weather and promote Net Zero, the same wealthy names crop up again and again. So it is with the growing number of lawfare outfits. Greenpeace bankrolled the Swiss case and it collects cash from wealthy donors and foundations around the world. It seeks to remove hydrocarbons from human energy supplies and it is against nuclear energy. It is not clear how the old ladies of Switzerland will survive winter when the wind stops blowing and the sun doesn’t shine in their icy mountain redoubt.

Client Earth has been heavily supported by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the activist vehicle of Sir Christopher Hohn, one time paymaster of eco-vandals and law-breakers Extinction Rebellion. Hohn is a big contributor to another funder, the European Climate Foundation. Contributions are also forthcoming from green billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Jeremy Grantham, while even the British taxpayer chips in with a contribution from the Foreign Office. Quite why the British Conservative Government is helping to fund an operation that is likely to sue it in the courts is, of course, another mystery.

But if it is bad enough in Europe, climate lawfare is rapidly escalating out of control in the United States. Numerous actions against oil and gas companies are ongoing in a judicial system that is more obviously political than its European counterparts. It might not be surprising to learn therefore that billionaires through their tax-efficient foundations are attempting to re-educate judges around the idea that the climate is collapsing due to the action of humans, and in particular the wicked actions of those that supply 80% of industrial society’s current energy needs. 

Washington D.C.-based Environmental Law Institute is backed by billionaire foundation money and, according to Influence Watch, it received $500,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to set up the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP). According to Influence Watch, by May 2023 more than 1,000 judges have participated in the CJP program, which includes 13 curriculum modules. According to the CJP website, the goal is to provide “neutral, objective information” to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”.

Needless to say, neutral and objective are not words that spring immediately to mind when examining some of the detailed curriculum notes. Misinformation is particularly rife in a module that suggests individual weather events can be attributed to longer term changes in the climate. The judges are told that it is now possible to use attributions techniques to link individual human-caused weather events to climate change. It is not, it is junk science from computer models and since any ‘results’ are unfalsifiable, they fail the first test of the true scientific process. The best known ‘attribution’ service is called World Weather Attribution and is partly funded by Jeremy Grantham. Despite this, CJP claims bizarrely that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change couldn’t hold the view that human influence has warmed the planet without the many attribution analyses that are said to underpin it.

The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. is unimpressed with weather attribution work, noting: “I can think of no other area of research where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by researchers in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits”.

Paymaster Larry Kramer, President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is more supportive: “With the growth in climate related litigation, judges need this kind of education to be prepared to weight scientific evidence and make better informed decisions.”

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Time for MPs to Come Clean About the Green Blob

For years, perhaps decades, the cross-party Westminster consensus on climate change has been a suffocating orthodoxy that limited debate about energy and other policy agendas, leaving Britain under-resourced and facing the consequences of energy prices that are out of control. But then, just a year and a bit after the U.K.’s hosting of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, and following energy price spikes caused by lockdowns the world over, a small number of MPs began to question green dogma.

From The Daily Sceptic

BY BEN PILE

In the wake of Boris Johnson’s exit from Number 10, Tory MPs, including former ministers, have created a sea change in the public conversation about U.K. climate policy. For years, perhaps decades, the cross-party Westminster consensus on climate change has been a suffocating orthodoxy that limited debate about energy and other policy agendas, leaving Britain under-resourced and facing the consequences of energy prices that are out of control. But then, just a year and a bit after the U.K.’s hosting of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, and following energy price spikes caused by lockdowns the world over, a small number of MPs began to question green dogma. This new energy and climate realism is a long overdue and welcome development. But if politicians want realistic policies, they are going to have to go much further.

The number of critics of the U.K.’s green agenda in Parliament has until now been very small. In the final Commons vote on the Climate Change Bill in October 2008, just five MPs, including the two Tellers, voted No. Outside, snow lay on the streets of Westminster for the first time in October in 74 years, in an ironic gesture from Nature herself that brought chaos to travel and power networks. The Bill, now an Act, would lock criticism of green ideology out of British politics for the next 12 years because what MPs had agreed to was in effect to hand what decision-making power they had not already transferred to the EU to the Committee on Climate Change that the Act created. In 2019, the Climate Change Act’s 80% emissions reduction by 2050 target was upped to ‘Net Zero’. But our democratic representatives had yet to find their feet. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2022 that a formal presence of the Nez Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) took the form of open letters to the Prime Minister and other briefings to the press.

Between Boris Johnson declaring that the U.K. would soon be the “Saudi Arabia of wind” and the formation of the NZSG, natural gas prices on European markets rose by around 1,000%, that is to say, 10-fold. Britain should lift the ban on fracking, urged the disobedient MPs. But the Government, and nearly the entire British political class, was still glowing from the buzz of Glasgow. The then Chancellor, now Prime Minister, declared at COP26 that financial institutions with $130 trillion in assets under management had been brought into alignment. “Make no mistake,” said former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney to the assembled delegates, “the money is here.” The great and the good cheered. The following year, thanks to the lifting of lockdowns increasing demand, gas prices nearly tripled, leaving Britain’s households and industries facing ruin.

The rising prices and inflation were blamed on Russia, which wasn’t where the blame belonged. The real culprits were the lockdowns and various green policies, including a commitment to ESG, which the Bank of England and successive U.K. Governments had used their power to promote. Both lockdowns and many years of green policy failure had created scarcity, with Britain and many other European governments taxing, restricting and even prohibiting oil and gas production. Green ideological utopianism thus rolled on, but this intransigence has finally produced a response, the NZSG. Finally, it was PM Johnson vacating Downing Street and his Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat, thereby triggering a by-election, that would be the first test of green ideology and a boost to the significance of this group.

The contest to select the constituency’s MP became something of a referendum on London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) expansion, championed by the Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan. Labour had signalled its even greater commitment to the green agenda. But it went down badly with voters, who in July last year narrowly returned an anti-Ulez Conservative candidate to Westminster – all the more surprising, given that Ulez was a policy introduced by Johnson when he was Mayor. Former Home Secretary Priti Patel became perhaps the most senior Conservative Party figure, albeit no longer in the Cabinet, to read the political runes. “Pause drive to Net Zero, the public are not ready,” she warned the new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Patel was followed by former Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Now a regular host on GB News, Rees-Mogg refers to Net Zero as a “fallacy” responsible for the U.K. having the most expensive energy prices in the world. The idea that Net Zero is “affordably achievable”, he argues, is a “fundamental untruth”.

These challenges to Net Zero have surely had a small but significant impact on Number 10’s decisions. The infectious realism has in the last year caused the Government to press pause, but not quite U-turn, on the gas boiler tax and the petrol/diesel car sales ban and to announce the commissioning of new gas-fired power stations. But though these are the first signs of the climate agenda suffering any meaningful setbacks in decades, they are clearly not enough. Worse, the next election is unlikely to be a referendum on Net Zero, and the Conservatives’ unpopularity is likely to bring in a Labour Government with a huge majority by default.

However, there is something that Conservative politicians with genuine concern for the future of this country can do to hasten the end of Net Zero. It may not save their Government or their seats. But it may change the debate far more radically than has so far been possible.

It is not enough merely to argue that Net Zero policies are wrong. What the public needs to hear is an explanation of how such bad policies, from Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and Ulez through to wind farms and car and boiler bans, came to dominate the political agenda, despite there being no clamour for them from the public and no test of the public’s willingness to accept the consequences. Regressive and anti-democratic policies have been imposed on the public through Westminster by what former Environment Secretary Owen Patterson a decade ago called the “green blob”.

Opposite the NZSG, but on the same benches, is a much larger caucus of green-ish Tory MPs, which includes the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Claire Coutinho. The Conservative Environment Network (CEN) was founded by Ben Goldsmith, brother of Lord Zac (whom Boris Johnson made a peer when he lost his seat, so he could remain in Government). And it is funded through the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and the Clean Air Fund (CAF) – both philanthropic foundations controlled by British billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn. Ben Goldsmith is also a trustee of Hohn’s philanthropic outfit, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is the major grantor to both the ECF and CAF. The Prime Minister himself was a partner at Hohn’s hedge fund, The Children’s Investment (TCI), where he, along with Hohn, was implicated in the collapse of RBS, with the public footing the bill for the £45 billion bailout.

The resources made available to green campaigning organisations by such billionaires are but a fraction of their net wealth, but well beyond what political parties or any other organisation can hope to raise from the increasingly hard-pressed public. In 2022, for example, CIFF made grants of £174 million to green organisations – a figure that vastly exceeds the total spending by all U.K. political parties each year, bar 2019 (as I point out here). And that’s just one billionaire. Another, Michael Bloomberg, spends about the same amount. Throughout the West each year, billions are pumped by the world’s wealthiest individuals into ersatz civil society organisations as seemingly diverse as Extinction Rebellion and the green-wet Tory caucus, but all in the service of the same agenda. It funds organisations like Carbon Brief – the green news outfit that came up with the lie that “wind power is nine times cheaper than gas“, which has been repeated in Westminster countless times.

Even the London Mayor is Chair of a Bloomberg-Hohn-funded outfit, C40 Cities, from where he and other politicians learn to put green ideology before the public interest and democracy, and no doubt secure future roles for themselves in the green blobocracy. Entire university research departments are funded by rich greens, such as Jeremy Grantham who funds the eponymous ‘institutes’ at LSE and Imperial College London, which enjoy direct working relationships with the Climate Change Committee. The effect of this money has been to make the Westminster parties ideologically indistinct and to align successive governments, state agencies and so-called ‘civil society’ with business agendas. The Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy Shirley Rodrigues came directly from CIFF, where she managed grants. Last year, Rodrigues was caught by the Telegraph instructing scientists at Imperial College – itself the beneficiary of more than £5 million in grants from City Hall – to try to silence critics of the Mayor’s policies.

The scandal is not merely that Net Zero policies are wrong; the scandal is green politics. It is anti-democratic and corrupting. At all levels of government, from the parish council, through Westminster and the European Union, to the United Nations, the limbs of the green blob shape the agenda. ECF grantees organise local lobbying for LTNs and candidly boast that they drafted both the EU’s climate policy roadmap to 2050 and the 2008 Climate Change Act. Once this is explained to the public, the zombie-like persistence of failed green policies is far more easily explained. The fact that even Conservative Cabinet members have been far more interested in meeting Extinction Rebellion for a sit-down than in hearing from the public about green issues, as well as the absurdity of wind farms, boiler bans and wet car prohibitions, would be far more readily understood.

Tory MPs have helped to shift the debate. The last year or so has seen conversations in the public square that were almost inconceivable in the late 2000s or early 2010s. But in order to bring realism and democracy back to policymaking, MPs must take an even bigger risk. They must explain how democracy, civil society and institutional science have been captured by the ‘green blob’ – in reality, a handful of billionaires. They were there. They saw the lobbying. They saw constituents, businesses and industries’ needs being ignored. And they saw their colleagues being brow-beaten into green utopianism. They saw billionaires’ cronies use state agencies – such as the Bank of England – to further their ideological and commercial interests. Now, if they mean what they say, it is time for them to explain what they have seen.

Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.

Time for Billionaires to Fund Climate and Social Realism

Many of your fellow billionaires contribute large sums to “cure” a
nonexistent climate crisis, falsely naming it an “existential threat.”

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

Wallace Manheimer provides the advice in his Daily Caller article Here’s A Better Way For Billionaires To Give Their Money.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. In the second part of this post Dr. Manheimer explains how philantropists and many others have been duped by Net Zero claims.

Many of your fellow billionaires contribute large sums to “cure” a
nonexistent climate crisis, falsely naming it an “existential threat.”

They wrongly claim that wind and solar can support modern civilization. For instance, Michael Bloomberg has proudly committed $500 million to eliminate coal. Jeffery Bezos has committed $10 billion to a variety of climate causes and “clean energy” efforts. These billions dwarf resources available to small groups fighting, for instance, degradation of their land by gigantic wind companies.

Furthermore, these philanthropists direct many dollars into foolishness like Critical Race Theory and a fabricated division of the world into oppressors and the oppressed. In addition to unnecessary climate panic, college campuses harbor harmful notions of “gender fluidity” and dangerous divisiveness among students that manifest as rampant antisemitism and hostility toward the deplorables du jour.

You know this is wrong but, despite your wealth, may feel powerless to stem the societal degradation. You make your own large contributions to hospitals, museums, medical schools, etc. Of course, that is very commendable. Still, you may be looking for other avenues for your generosity – perhaps actions that could not only help people but also challenge the promotion of negative forces.

Well, we have a few suggestions.

Let’s first consider possibilities within the U.S. As a private citizen or group of citizens, you can certainly place ads into major media to expose the fraudulence of scientifically invalid claims of a climate crisis. You could cite the mountain of scientific evidence that contradicts the popular apocalyptic narrative as well as the tens of thousands of prominent scientists attesting that there is no climate crisis. Sources include the CO2 Coalition, Global Warming Petition Project and CLINTEL’s World Climate Declaration. Furthermore, you could partially balance the scales by financially supporting local groups fighting installation of hundreds of gigantic wind turbines, each the size of the Washington Monument; or square miles and miles of solar panels, which will permanently scar their land.

If you’re more inclined to support universities, then we suggest financing a faculty position about Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Lincoln. Their accomplishments and documents are sources of inspiration worldwide. Alternatively, you might consider supporting nuclear science and engineering departments, or initiating an interdepartmental organization, for domestic and international students, in the disciplines of petroleum geology, engineering, and industry.

Internationally, there are many countries that suffer from a lack of energy. The less developed world is not giving up on fossil fuels regardless of pompous calls from the climate industrial complex for them to do so.  “I firmly believe that no African country can be asked to halt the exploration of its natural resources, including fossil fuels,” says Kenyan President William Ruto. 

Even the head of the United Nations’ most recent climate summit, Sultan Al-Jaber of the United Arab Emirates, said that use of fossil fuels cannot be discontinued “unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Perhaps nobody exhibited resentment of meddling in Third World energy policy more than did Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi: “The colonial mindset hasn’t gone. We are seeing from developed nations that the path that made them developed is being closed to developing nations.” 

Lesser developed countries will continue to advance in ways they see fit, employing fossil fuels (and hopefully also nuclear power). China and India are building coal-fired power plants at a furious pace, and Africa and other regions will soon as well. There is no stopping it! Rather than utter hypocritical and futile pieties, let’s help them and, while doing so, also help promote sensible, clean energy technologies developed in the U.S.

Coal promises to be the salvation of more than half of sub-Saharan Africans — the number who labor daily with inadequate supplies of electricity. Cooking, heating and lighting are done with a combination of wood, charcoal and dried animal dung. The World Health Organization estimates that about half a million die each year from the resulting indoor air pollution.

Ultra-super critical coal-fired generating facilities, recently developed in the United States, are cleaner and more efficient than traditional plants. American billionaires investing in these sources of clean, affordable, reliable electricity could save the lives of untold numbers of sub-Saharan Africans.  

Nigeria, once an important oil producer, never instituted effective pollution controls and, with the advent of hydrofracturing technology in the U.S., is hardly competitive on the world market. In fact, Exxon Mobil is considering pulling out of the country. The right investments could restore both Nigeria’s environment and oil industry.

There are many new things for rational, public-spirited billionaires to support.
Why leave the field to those pursuing the climate fetish
and promoting destructive ideologies and fads?

Dr. Wallace Manheimer is a life fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and is a member of the CO2.Coalition. He is the author of more than 150 refereed papers.

Background:  Manheimer Steamrolls Net Zero Claims

Accomplished and distinguished physicist Wallace Manheimer published a crushing argument against the rationale for Net Zero claims and policies.  His paper is While the Climate Always Has and Always Will Change, There Is no Climate Crisis. published in the Journal of Sustainable Development.  In italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

The emphasis on a false climate crisis is becoming a tragedy for modern civilization, which depends on relible, economic, and environmentally viable energy. The windmills, solar panels and backup batteries have none if these qualities.

This falsehood is pushed by a powerful lobby which Bjorn Lomborg has called a climate industrial complex, comprising some scientists, most media, industrialists, and legislators. It has somehow managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison.

Multiple scientific theories and measurements show that there is no climate crisis. Radiation forcing calculations by both skeptics and believers show that the carbon dioxide radiation forcicng is about 0.3% of the incident radiation, far less than other effects on climate. Over the period of human civilization, the temperature has oscillated between quite a few warm and cold periods, with many of the warm periods being warmer than today. During geological times, it and the carbon dioxide level have been all over the place with no correlation between them.

A useful synopsis is written by Chris Morrison at the Daily Sceptic  Net Zero Will Lead to the End of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A damning indictment of the Net Zero political project has been made by one of the world’s leading nuclear physicists. In a recently published science paper, Dr. Wallace Manheimer said it would be the end of modern civilisation. Writing about wind and solar power he argued it would be especially tragic “when not only will this new infrastructure fail, but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment, and be entirely unnecessary”. The stakes, he added, “are enormous”.

Dr. Manheimer holds a physics PhD from MIT and has had a 50-year career in nuclear research, including work at the Plasma Physics Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He has published over 150 science papers. In his view, there is “certainly no scientific basis” for expecting a climate crisis from too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the next century or so. He argues that there is no reason why civilisation cannot advance using both fossil fuel power and nuclear power, gradually shifting to more nuclear power.

There is of course a growing body of opinion that points out that the Emperor has no clothes when it comes to all the fashionable green technologies. Electric cars, wind and solar power, hydrogen, battery storage, heat pumps – all have massive disadvantages, and are incapable of replacing existing systems without devastating consequences.

Manheimer points out that before fossil fuel became widely used, energy was provided by people and animals. Because so little energy was produced, “civilisation was a thin veneer atop a vast mountain of human squalor and misery, a veneer maintained by such institutions as slavery, colonialism and tyranny”.

This argument hints at why so many rich, virtue-signalling celebrities argue not just for Net Zero but ‘Real’ Zero, with the banning of all fossil fuel use.

King Charles said in 2009 that the age of consumerism and convenience was over, although the multi-mansion owning monarch presumably doesn’t think such desperate restrictions apply to himself. Manheimer notes that fossil fuel has extended the benefits of civilisation to billions, but its job is not yet complete. “To spread the benefits of modern civilisation to the entire human family would require much more energy, as well as newer sources,” he adds.

In Manheimer’s view, the partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners, “truly is an unholy alliance”. The climate industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everyone. “We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act,” he added.

Perhaps one of the best voices to cast doubt on an approaching climate crisis, suggests the author, is Professor Emeritus Richard Lindzen of MIT, one of the world’s leading authorities on geological fluid motions:

“What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.”

Figure 16. The geological history of CO2 level and temperature proxy for the past 400 million years. CO2 levels now are ~ 400ppm

Much of Dr. Manheimer’s interesting paper debunks many of the fashionable nostrums surrounding politicised ‘settled’ climate science. It is an excellent read. Discussing some of the contrary opinions that debunk obviously false claims, he says it is “particularly disheartening” to see learned societies make definitive claims when so much contrary information is readily available. He points out that over the last 10,000 years, the Earth has almost certainly been warmer. There have been warmer and colder periods, just like today.

To find the off-narrative information, even Google can be used, Manheimer says – though he does note that the company warns it will not provide information on “claims denying that long-term trends show that the global climate is warming”.

Figure 18. Per capita food production in kcal/(per-capita per day) from 1961 to 2009. Notice that there is a steadily increasing production, with no sign of any ‘slowly escalating but long-enduring global threat to food supplies.’

Billionaires are paying to pump climate porn through Hollywood

But instead of persuading us, or doing honest adverts to save the world (which they could obviously afford) they prefer the deceptive approach.

By Jo Nova

It’s lucky the world has so many billionaires to save us from Democracy eh?

But instead of persuading us, or doing honest adverts to save the world (which they could obviously afford) they prefer the deceptive approach.

If you think Hollywood is boring these days, there’s a reason

Chris Morrison at the Daily Sceptic found the Go-To Guide for hiding climate propaganda in Hollywood Movies where children won’t even realize they are being spoon-fed political products:

Green Billionaires Press Hollywood to Promote Armageddon Climate Messages in Movies

Good Energy aims to weave climate alarm into all types of film-making, “especially” if it is not about climate. With the support of Bloomberg, it recently published ‘Good Energy – A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change’. It claims the Playbook is “now the industry’s go-to guide to incorporating climate into any storyline or genre”. As with almost all green campaigning groups, Good Energy would not exist without the support of billionaire funding. These operations seek a supra-national collectivist Net Zero solution to a claimed climate emergency. Good Energy acknowledges it would not exist without this funding, adding, “as collaborators and champions, each has provided a unique contribution for which we are endlessly grateful”.

If action against climate change is woven into the cultural wallpaper, children may not even be able to imagine a world without FakeBurgers and windmills. The seas will endlessly rise while somehow staying in the same place, like living in an Escher puzzle. Every storm surge will be fossil fueled and every retreat will be invisible.

Have you run out of plotlines? Good Energy can help…

Rolling Stone puts the details on the climate movie wallpaper being fostered. Instead of boring statistics and depressing details, Hollywood “is playing its part”. It’s creating heroes that, ah, do what the billionaires want:

How Hollywood Is Crafting A New Climate Change Narrative

Take the Netflix show, Unstable, for example. In the new series, Rob Lowe stars as a genius biotech innovator, who’s created a slew of planet-saving solutions. The Hulu mystery, A Murder at the End of World, hones in on a tech billionaire who wants to save the world from climate change. Hulu’s Indigenous American comedy-drama, Reservation Dogs, features Dallas Goldtooth, an advocate for the Land Back Indigenous sovereignty movement. The CBS sitcom, Ghosts, rolled out an episode called “The Tree,” that dives into different ways a few of the central characters relate to nature and climate change.

And if you were a billionaire invested in EVs or batteries, you’d want heroes to help your investments grow too, right? (Especially, now).

Donations to Hollywood Propaganda Inc are a tax deductible advertising expense that’s not called advertising. It’s something you can brag about at Davos!

According to an analysis by the Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project and Good Energy, which supports TV and film creators in telling compelling and accurate climate stories, less than 3 percent of film and TV scripts from 2016 to 2020 mentioned climate-related terms.

For now, the organization is dedicated to ensuring that by 2027, 50 percent of contemporary TV and film acknowledges climate change.

What this also guarantees is that it buys up some writers that might have mocked climate change. De facto it squeezes creativity out. That only works though, if some upstart production unit doesn’t cherry pick off the sacred cows of modern climate-moo, and have a riotously funny time doing it. That probably won’t happen in Hollywood, but it might on Twitter, which is why Elon is such a threat. It only takes one popular rebel to breach the whole cultural fake facade.

This goes deeper than just being a renewables advert

The Playbook notes that “indigenous people are the first climate scientists, and indigenous people are leading us through this climate crisis”.

If raindancing shaman were the original climate scientists, then science itself is just another religion, and it’s nothing special. The whole idea of hypothesis testing, pffft. The modern scientists are just an upgrade on the original voodoo, not a totally novel philosophy that transformed the world.

See what they did there? They’re not just selling windmills, they’re undermining a civilization.

It is a cultural war, whether you want one or not.

The sponsors behind the subliminal advertising program are groups like the Sierra Club, which is then funded by the Tides Foundation, among others, which was in turn funded by the usuals: the Rockefellers, the Soros, the Hewletts, and the Packards, and all the rest. There are a hundred other variations for the money to flow from the Uber Rich to protect their investments and keep the riff raff happy voting for absurd Presidents and Prime Ministers, and content to holiday at home with a heat pump.

The men with the most money in the world will craft our culture if we let them.

Tell the children…

Fantasy female hero image by Stefan Keller