Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The profound disconnect between the attitudes shared by the ‘top’ 1% elites in American society and the rest of the population is laid bare by the results of an illuminating new poll.
The profound disconnect between the attitudes shared by the ‘top’ 1% elites in American society and the rest of the population is laid bare by the results of an illuminating new poll. Nearly six in 10 elite members believe there is too much individual freedom in America, more than two-thirds favour rationing of food and energy to combat climate change, somewhere between a half and two-thirds favour banning things like SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning and non-essential air travel, while two-thirds believe teachers should decide what children are taught. Meanwhile, 70% of those polled trust Government to “do the right thing most of the time”, while among these groups, President Biden enjoys an 84% approval rating.
The poll’s authors note that at a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of members say they are financially better off than in the past. “The people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction. They’ve isolated themselves from everyday America’s realities to such a degree their views about what is and what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average American,” it is observed.
The poll studied American elites but observations suggest these views are widespread within small highly influential groups in many other countries. Populist parties are rising across Europe and elsewhere, in reaction to open borders, the woke attack on traditional values and cohesive societies, and the savage insanity of the collectivist Net Zero project. In Britain, this last lunacy is demonstrated with the recent news that steel making is to stop in Port Talbot with the horrendous loss of around 3,000 local jobs. Wherever you look, none of this concerns the new elite aristocracy, insulated and isolated by high state salaries and subsidies, or large, outsized remunerations from corporations and financial institutions with an almost monopolistic lock on commerce and ‘virtue’.
Two polls were conducted last September among 1,000 U.S. elite members, defined as having a postgraduate degree, a household annual income of more than $150,000 and living in an area with more than 10,000 people per square mile. About 1% of the U.S. population are said to meet these criteria. The results were titled ‘Them v U.S’ and published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CUP), a Maryland-based non-profit advocacy group founded by the distinguished economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore. The methodology was determined after observing numerous surveys indicating that these elite segments of the population consistently exhibited views that were distinct from the general population.
Many of the views expressed are frankly very scary, but they chime with the agenda promoted by similar elites across the world. Climate change is clearly an obsession of the very rich and highly educated, note the authors, adding: “An astonishing 77% of the elites – including nearly 90% of the elites who graduate from the top universities – favour rationing of energy, gas and meat to combat climate change.” More than two-thirds of graduates from elite colleges would ban SUVs, gas stoves, air-conditioning and most air travel. The cynical will note of course that current elite lifestyles suggest that the favoured few have little expectation that such restrictions will apply to themselves – rather it is a new way of living for the sheeple, the fly-overs, the deplorables or the gammon, or whatever insult is in vogue at any one time.
Attempting to remove a steak dinner from many Americans and substituting it with a bean salad might be considered an unwise course of action, but elites are three times more likely to say there is too much individual freedom than all Americans. Almost six out of 10 graduates from elite colleges think there is too much freedom in a country that has always considered itself the ‘land of the free’.
The authors note that these elites have extraordinary political and societal powers. They determine what the conversation will be about on campus, in the legacy media and corporate boardrooms. They put their trust in big government/media/business/academia because they run all these institutions. As we have seen in the Daily Sceptic, large amounts of green billionaire money is available to promote their destructive agendas, and in the process censor any views not fully backing the pre-ordained narrative. Only in mainstream media and over-funded academia can the scientific process of climate science be deemed ‘settled’, only a Harvard professor can think there is ‘context’ in calling for the genocide of Jews, and only the very flexible of mind can believe that a woman has a penis. Only a very odd group can give the barely sentient President Biden an 84% approval rating.
The CUP points to widely differing views of individual freedom. Most Americans think there is not enough freedom, a view shared by only 21% of elites. Being this down on freedom is not surprising within decadent groups seeking to reshape human and economic society using all the levers of power available in supra-national organisations. Look at the example of Port Talbot. Steptoe and Son horse-drawn carts suitable for 20mph roads taking scrap steel to a promised electric arc furnace that will probably never be built. The main road connecting England and de-industralising South Wales reduced to a local rat-run around the M4 Newport tunnel because local ‘labour’ politicians have banned further construction. Farming restrictions likely in the rural areas. You can lie and propagandise all you like, but in the end you don’t get away with this unless you restrict common and popular lifestyle choices by overwhelming state control.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
Stop Press:Watch the President of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, articulate similar themes at Davos.
The global elite plan to introduce a near-permanent “global state of emergency” by re-branding climate change as a “public health crisis” that is “worse than covid”.
The comingling of climate and covid fears and policies is currently ramping up to warp speed across all propaganda platforms. Kit Knightly explains the shock and awe agenda by media and governments to corral the public into submission. His Off-Guardian article is Why are the globalists calling “Climate Change” a “Public Health Crisis”? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T Tyler Durden
The answer is all to do with the pandemic treaty and climate lockdowns.
The global elite plan to introduce a near-permanent “global state of emergency” by re-branding climate change as a “public health crisis” that is “worse than covid”. This is not news. But the ongoing campaign has been accelerating in recent weeks.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
I have written about this a lot over the last few years – see here and here and here. It started almost as soon as Covid started, and has been steadily progressing ever since, with some reports calling climate change “worse than covid”.
But if they keep talking about it, I’ll keep writing. And hopefully the awareness will spread.
Anyway, there’s a renewed push on the “climate = public health crisis” front. It started, as so many things do, with Bill Gates, stating in an interview with MSNBC in late September:
We have to put it all together; it’s not just climate’s over here and health is over here, the two are interacting
Since then there’s been a LOT of “climate change is a public health crisis” in the papers, likely part of the build-up to the UN’s COP28 summit later this year.
Following Gate’s lead, what was once a slow-burn propaganda drive has become a dash for the finish line, with that phrase repeated in articles all over the world as a feverish catechism.
It was an editorial in the October edition of the British Medical Journalthat got the ball rolling, claiming to speak for over 200 medical journals, it declares it’s…
Time to treat the climate and nature crisis as one indivisible global health emergency”
Everyone from the Guardian to the CBC to the Weather Channelpicked up this ball and ran with it. Other publications get more specific, but the message is the same. Climate change is bad for the health of women, and children, and poor people, and Kenyans, and workers and…you get the idea.
And that’s all from just the last few days. It’s not only the press, but governments and NGOs too. The “One Earth” non-profit reported, two days ago:
Both theRed Cross and Doctors Without Borders have published (or updated) articles on their website in the last few days using variations on the phrase “The climate crisis is a health crisis.” Local public health officials from as far apart as Western Australia and Arkansas are busy “discussing the health effects of climate change”
“WHO data indicates 2 billion people lack safe drinking water and 600 million suffer from foodborne illnesses annually, with children under 5 bearing 30% of foodborne fatalities. Climate stressors heighten waterborne and foodborne disease risks. In 2020, 770 million faced hunger, predominantly in Africa and Asia. Climate change affects food availability, quality and diversity, exacerbating food and nutrition crises.
Temperature and precipitation changes enhance the spread of vector-borne diseases. Without preventive actions, deaths from such diseases, currently over 700,000 annually, may rise. Climate change induces both immediate mental health issues, like anxiety and post-traumatic stress, and long-term disorders due to factors like displacement and disrupted social cohesion.”
They are tying “climate change” to anyone who is malnourished, has intestinal parasites or contaminated drinking water. As well as anyone who dies from heat, cold, fire or flood. Even mental health disorders.
We’ve already seen the world’s first “diagnosis of climate change”. With parameters set this wide, we will see more in no time.
Just as a “Covid death” was anybody who died “of any cause after testing positive for Covid”, they are putting language in place that can redefine almost any illness or accident as a “climate change-related health issue”.
Two days ago, the Director General of the World Health Organization, the UN’s Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health and COP28 President co-authored an opinion piece for the Telegraph, headlined:
Climate change is one of our biggest health threats – humanity faces a staggering toll unless we act
The WHO Director went on to repeat the claim almost word for word on Twitter yesterday:
The climate crisis is a health crisis. Air pollution and extreme temperatures are causing an increase in diseases like diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory. People are dying prematurely, and the most vulnerable are being hit the hardest. We must prioritize healing our…
Consider, the WHO is the only body on Earth empowered to declare a “pandemic”.
Consider, the official term is not “pandemic”, but rather “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”.
Consider, a “public health emergency of international concern”, does not necessarily mean a disease.
It could mean, and I’m just spit-balling here, oh, I don’t know – maybe… climate change?
Consider, finally, that one clause in the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” would empower the WHO to declare a PHEIC on “precautionary principle” [my emphasis]:
Future declarations of a PHEIC by the WHO Director-General should be based on the precautionary principle where warranted
Essentially, once the new legislation is in place, the plan writes itself:
Put new laws in place enabling global “emergency measures” in the event of a future “public health emergency”
Declare climate change a public health emergency, or maybe a “potential public health emergency”
Activate emergency measures – like climate lockdowns – until climate change is “fixed”
See the end game here? It’s just that simple.
Oh, and we won’t be able to complain, because “climate denial” is going to be illegal. At least, if prominent climate activists like this one get their way. That’s only a whisper in the background right now, but it will get louder after COP28, just wait.
Until then, like I said, I’m stuck here writing forever.
Background: Nine Elements Shared by Climate and Covid
All true believers of The Science™ of climate change have taken careful note of the lessonsoffered by the coronavirus pandemic during 2020–22 for managing the ‘climate emergency.’ The two agendas share nine items in common that should leave us worried, very worried.
1. Elites’ Hypocrisy
The first is the revolting spectacle of the hypocrisy of the exalted elites who preach to the deplorables the proper etiquette of abstinence to deal with the emergency, and their own insouciant exemption from a restrictive lifestyle. Most recently we witnessed the surreal spectacle of Britain’s Parliament interrogating disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson on allegations that he serially broke the lockdown rules he had imposed on everyone else—but not questioning the anti-scientific stupidity of the rules themselves. Possibly the most notorious American example was California Governor Gavin Newsom and his cronies dining maskless in the appropriately named French Laundry restaurant at a time when this was verboten, being served by fully masked staff.
Similarly, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Al Gore, and John Kerry have all been widely mocked for jetting around the world to warn people about global warming. I wonder if anyone has done a calculation of the total carbon footprint of each annual Davos gathering where CEOs, prime ministers and presidents, and celebrities fly in on private jets, are driven around in gas-guzzling limousines and preach to us on the critical urgency of reducing emissions? I understand the hookers do quite well during that week, so perhaps there is a silver lining.
2. Data Challenged Models
A second common element between Covid and climate change is the mismatch between models that inform policy and data that contradict the models. The long track record of abysmally wrong catastrophist predictions on infectious diseases from the Pied Piper of Pandemic Porn, Professor Neil Ferguson, is if anything exceeded by the failures of climate change alarmist predictions. The most recent example of the drum roll of “The end is nigh and this is absolutely your last chance to avert the end of the world from climate collapse” is yet another Chicken Little Sixth Assessment Report from the indefatigable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At some point the IPCC morphed from a team of scientists into activists.
“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report warns us. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “survival guide for humanity.” But a one-time climate action journalist-turned-sceptic, Michael Shellenberger, described the UN as a “Climate Disinformation Threat Actor.”
Calls for urgent climate action based on the language of “edging towards ‘tipping points” have been made over many years. Atmospheric scientists and former IPCC members Richard McNider and John Christy note that climate modeling forecasts have “always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.” A few examples:
♦ In 1982, UNEP Executive Director Mostafa Tolba warned of an irreversible environmental catastrophe by 2000 without immediate urgent action. ♦ In 2004, a Pentagon report warned that by 2020, major European cities would be submerged by rising seas, Britain would be facing a Siberian climate and the world would be caught up in mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting. ♦ In 2007, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri declared: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.” ♦ Most hilariously, in Montana the Glacier National Park installed “Goodbye to the glaciers” plaques, warning: “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020.” Come 2020, all 29 glaciers were still there but the signs were gone, taken down by embarrassed park authorities.
3. No Dissent Allowed
Third, the rapidly consolidating Censorship Industrial Complex covered both agendas until Elon Musk began releasing the Twitter Files to expose what was happening. This refers to the extraordinary censorship and suppression of dissenting voices, with extensive and possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech—and, in the case of the pandemic, also Big Pharma and academia.
Even truth was no defence, for example with accounts of vaccine injuries, if their effect was to promote narrative scepticism. The social media Big Tech censored, suppressed, shadow banned and slapped labels of “false,” “misleading,” “lacking context” etc. to content at variance with the single source ministries of truth. “Fact-checking” was weaponized using fresh young graduates—with no training, skills or capacity to sift between authentic and junk science—to put such judgmental stamps on pronouncements from world-leading experts in their field.
4. We Want You to Panic
Fourth, an important explanation for the spread of Covid and climate catastrophism is the promotion of fear and panic in the population as a means to spur drastic political action. Both agendas have been astonishingly successful.
Polls have consistently shown the hugely exaggerated beliefs about the scale of the Covid threat. On climate change, the gap between the stringent actions required, the commitments made and the actual record thus far is used to create panic. The notion that we are already doomed promotes a culture of hopelessness and despair best epitomized by Greta Thunberg’s anguished cry: “How dare you” steal my dreams and childhood with empty words.”
5. Only Trust Science Authorities
A fifth common theme is the appeal to scientific authority. For this to work, scientific consensus is crucial. Yet, driven by intellectual curiosity, questioning existing knowledge is the very essence of the scientific enterprise. For the claim to scientific consensus to be broadly accepted, therefore, supporting evidence must be exaggerated, contrary evidence discredited, sceptical voices stilled and dissenters ridiculed and marginalized. This has happened in both agendas: just ask Jay Bhattacharya on one and Bjorn Lomborg on the other.
6. Government Empowers Itself
A sixth shared element is the enormous expansion of powers for the nanny state that bosses citizens and businesses because governments know best and can pick winners and losers. Growing state control over private activities is justified by being framed as minor and temporary inconveniences in the moral crusade to save Granny and the world.
Yet in both agendas, policy interventions have over-promised and under-delivered. The beneficial effects of interventions are exaggerated, optimistic forecasts are made and potential costs and downsides are discounted. Lockdowns were supposedly required for only 2-3 weeks to flatten the curve and vaccines, we were promised, would help us return to pre-Covid normalcy without being mandatory. Similarly, for decades we have been promised that renewables are getting less expensive and energy will get cheaper and more plentiful.
Yet increased subsidies are still needed, energy prices keep rising, and energy supply gets less reliable and more intermittent.
7. Self-Inflicted Damage
Seventh, the moral framing has also been used to discount massive economic self-harm. Alongside the substantial and lasting economic damage caused by savage lockdowns to businesses and the long-term consequences of a massive printing of money, the obstinate persistence of excess deaths is painful proof of collective public health self-harm.
Similarly, the world has never been healthier, wealthier, better educated, and more connected than today. Energy intensity played a critical role in driving agricultural and industrial production that underpin the health infrastructure and comfortable living standards for large numbers of people worldwide. High income countries enjoy incomparably better health standards and outcomes because of their national wealth.
8. Elites Thrive at Others’ Expense
Eighth, government policies in both agendas have served to greatly widen economic inequalities within and among nations with fat profits for Big Pharma and rent-seeking Green Energy. A lot of money was said to be required to keep Mahatma Gandhi in the style of poverty he demanded. Similarly, a lot of money is required to support Covid and climate policy magical thinking where governments can solve all problems by throwing more money that must neither be earned nor repaid.
In the triumph of luxury politics, the costs of the rich suffused in the golden glow of virtue are borne by the poor. Should a billion more Chinese and Indians have stayed poor and destitute over the last four decades, so Westerners could feel virtuous-green? Alternatively, for post-industrial societies, climate action will require cutbacks to living standards as subsidies rise, power prices go up, reliability comes down and jobs are lost.
Attempts to assess the balance of costs and benefits of Covid and climate policies are shouted down as immoral and evil, putting profits before lives. But neither health nor climate policy can dictate economic, development, energy and other policies. All governments work to balance multiple competing policy priorities. What is the sweet spot that ensures reliable, affordable and clean energy security without big job losses? Or the sweet spot of affordable, accessible and efficient public health delivery that does not compromise the nation’s ability to educate its young, look after the elderly and vulnerable and ensure decent jobs and life opportunities for families?
9. Global Bureaucrats Gut National Sovereignty
The final common element is the subordination of state-based decision-making to international technocrats. This is best exemplified in the proliferation of the global climate change bureaucracies and the promise—threat?—of a new global pandemic treaty whose custodian will be a mighty World Health Organisation.
In both cases, the dedicated international bureaucracy will have a powerful vested interest in ongoing climate crises and serially repeating pandemics.
There’s a quite a lot of heat and noise being generated at the moment about London Mayor Khan’s expanded Ulez (Ultra-Low Emission Zone) which is supposed to start at the beginning of this week. But what few seem to have noticed is that Khan’s Ulez is just a very small part of a much larger programme to control how our rulers believe we should live our lives.
There’s a quite a lot of heat and noise being generated at the moment about London Mayor Khan’s expanded Ulez (Ultra-Low Emission Zone) which is supposed to start at the beginning of this week. But what few seem to have noticed is that Khan’s Ulez is just a very small part of a much larger programme to control how our rulers believe we should live our lives.
Khan’s Ulez is part of the C40 programme:
C40 is a global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis. It was founded in 2005 as C20, and has since expanded to its current network of 96 cities, including London.
Here’s an overview of what the mayors of the 96 C40 cities are planning for us:
It’s the usual measures to make our lives poorer, more restricted, more miserable and more controlled by our rulers:
buying fewer clothes each year and making those clothes last longer
eating less meat and fewer dairy products
taking fewer flights
‘enhancing building utilisation’ which could sound a lot like squeezing ever more people into ever smaller homes
reduced car ownership and reduced travel by car
making all our technological devices last longer – does that mean restrictions on how often we can buy new devices as part of our ‘individual carbon budgets’?
Many people have been wondering why Mayor Khan is implementing the Ulez expansion when not only Londoners but also several Labour politicians (including Starmer) seem to be against it, blaming it for Labour’s failure to win the Uxbridge by-election.
Well, hopefully you are now aware that the expanded Ulez is just a tiny part of a much larger globalist agenda which looks suspiciously like a form of climate-catastrophist lockdown for us ‘useless eaters’. So, it should be clear why Mayor Khan is driving this through in spite of the howls of opposition and in spite of the doubts of his own Labour Party.
There’s a lot more I could write about the C40 Cities assault on our lifestyles. But you can go to the C40 website if you’d like more information. However, there’s just one thing I should add – I found it interesting to look at who is actually funding this horror story. Here’s a link to the funders page.
Major funders include eco-organisations such as the Climateworks Foundation, Global Environmental Facility, the Climate Change Collaboration and the European Climate Foundation; Governments such as the U.K. Government, the German Government and the Danish Government and foundations set up by billionaires such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, IKEA, the Hewlett Foundation, Fondation L’Oréal, Google and Novo Nordisk.
Moreover, there is one more major funder which surely deserves a special mention – the Open Society Foundations. The Open Society Foundations website explains “George Soros is the founder of the Open Society Foundations. He has given away more than $32 billion of his personal fortune to fund the Open Society Foundations’ work around the world.”
So who is Mayor Khan really working for when he implements his expanded Ulez as part of his C40 agenda? Londoners? The Labour party? Or the eco-fanatics and the multi-billionaire Davos globalists? I’ll leave you to decide.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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