Late last year, Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary for Global Communications at the United Nations, told a World Economic Forum ‘Disinformation’ seminar that we “own the science” around climate change, and we think the world should know it, so we partnered with Google to ensure only UN results appear. Needless to say, this arrogant claim merely hints at the scale of disinformation practised by global elites in pushing numerous messages designed to spread fearful command-and-control societal propaganda.
PR Flak Fleming also noted that the UN worked with Tik Tok on a project called ‘Team Halo’ to boost Covid messaging. This was said to be another trusted messenger project, “where we trained scientists around the world and some doctors on Tik Tok, and we had TikTok working with us”.
With climate, as with some of the Covid narrative, science has long taken a back seat. Any scientific findings that suggest human-produced carbon dioxide is not the overriding thermostat that determines the Earth’s climate are either insulted or ignored. Only ‘settled’ science messages from presumably ‘trained’ scientists are allowed. It is perhaps no accident that Google’s capture by the UN came at a time when it ‘demonetised’ a blog detailing the global satellite temperature record. This work by two scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, is the most accurate record of global temperature. As we have seen, it shows considerably less warming since 1979 than surface datasets, that have been adjusted upwards on a retrospective basis. Google took its action on the patently false grounds that the page was supplying “harmful claims“.
Of course, much of this narrative is indicative of a desire by elites in an inter-connected world to enforce more controlling collectivism on local and international populations. Green politics mostly arose on the Left, attracting activists who have always sought collectivist approaches to often messy, individualistic human activities.
We must be grateful to the Guardian for providing a ‘long read’ (how your correspondent suffers for his art) detailing the way that political activists infiltrate the climate debate in order to push this long-cherished, capitalism-hating political narrative. “One of the goals of system change is to supersede individual virtue,” writes U.S. correspondent Rebecca Solnit (pictured). By “individual virtue”, of course, she means individual choice. “Electrification will have happened because of the collective action that takes shape as policy and regulation,” she adds.
Solnit quotes the climate writer Mary Heglar, who suggests that for too long the climate fight has been limited to scientists and policy experts. What we “desperately need” are more artists. Solnit suggests “winning” the popular imagination by providing new stories on climate. Already, she says that “climate denial” has been rendered largely obsolete by climate-driven catastrophes promoted by activists and journalists. By this, she refers to the non-stop pseudoscientific attribution of every bad weather event to humans burning fossil fuel. We have to find stories of a liveable future, “stories of popular power that motivate people to do what it takes to make the world we need”, urges Solnit.
Stories, it might be noted, that persuade people to give up products that work like gas boilers and internal combustion engines, in favour of manifestly inferior substitutes. Stories, for instance, as spun by Solnit, that suggest mining for lithium and cobalt will be an “inevitable part of building renewables”. Thus important questions over the finite supplies of both these materials, and the use of children to mine cobalt, are conveniently ignored. It is estimated that 225 tonnes of the Earth’s crust must be disturbed to supply just one 1,000 pound car battery, but Solnit points to the “far vaster scale and impact of fossil fuel mining”. Of course it can be argued that the modern-day extraction of oil and gas is a remarkably clean process, requiring little more than a hole in the ground. No children need die in the process.
Old-school Marxists have always relied on demonising the rich to promise a better future for all. So Solnit runs with the story that we need to punish the rich with their large carbon footprints, and “the global majority don’t need to change much”. This is highly disingenuous. Lifestyle changes proposed by green elites become more extreme by the month – this month, meat off the menu because cows fart, next month, dangerous fertilisers and farms impounded. Billions of people will be affected by diet, travel and energy bans and restrictions, and billions more will be denied the life-enhancing progress enjoyed in the industrialised countries over the last 200 years.
Last year, green elites were shocked by polling evidence that suggested four in ten people across five continents believed climate change was mainly due to natural causes. This despite decades of climate catastrophising to promote Net Zero policies. The 30-country IPSOS survey found that the level of climate scepticism was very similar in all age categories, but there was wide divergence when political leanings were taken into account. Across seven countries surveyed, 28% of supporters of the Left were sceptical of human-caused climate change, a figure that rose to 50% of those on the Right.
The underlying climate message is hard-core Marxist. Recognising the reality of climate breakdown means limiting the freedom of the individual “in the name of the wellbeing of the collective”, Solnit states. There is another way to count wealth and abundance for the many including “meaningful work and purposeful lives”, she suggests.
You will be happy in your work and prosperous, declared the Communist posters of old. “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”, muttered citizens of the old Soviet Union quietly among themselves.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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