The much touted green energy economy and Net Zero goals are built on the dirty little secrets of slavery, child labour and environmental destruction, according to H. Sterling Burnett of the libertarian U.S. think tank the Heartland Institute. Those pushing Net Zero, like the Democrats in the U.S. and green energy elites profiting from mandates and subsidies, know child and slave labour is used to produce the minerals their green technologies demand. “They claim to care about it, but their actions belie their words,” charges Sterling Burnett.
It is time these issues were brought into the forefront of the Net Zero debate. Many societies around the world are hurtling towards the disastrous goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Years of relentless virtue signalling and hysterical climate scare mongering has set the scene for a collectivist re-ordering of society under the ridiculous notion that 80% of our current cheap and efficient energy sources can be replaced in less than 30 years by windmills and solar panels. In his eye-opening essay in Saturday’s Daily Sceptic, Andrew Montford, Deputy Director of Net Zero Watch, noted that it has long been clear that inhabitants of the Westminster Village had been happy to hype up fears of climate purgatory “and to fib about the road to redemption”.
Furthermore, noted Montford, a huge pipeline of wind projects is in place already, each eligible for an astonishing array of hidden subsidies. “Once built, they will suck wealth from our economy and hope from our society,” he observed.
Sterling Burnett writes that – according to the International Energy Agency – offshore wind requires more scarce minerals, rare earth elements and other critical metals per kilowatt hour of energy produced than any other source of electric power generation, renewable and non-renewable alike. Onshore wind and solar are the next that need critical mineral resources. The vast majority of these critical minerals and elements are mined abroad and almost all the refining is done by China alone.
A single onshore wind turbine requires up to three metric tons of copper and magnets, continues Sterling Burnett. Thousands of pounds of ore must be mined to produce a single pound of rare earths, while between 200,000 to 1,500,000 pounds of earth must be moved to produce the lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and other trace elements necessary to produce a battery pack for a single electric car. Billions of tones will have to be mined and refined to produce the large scale battery facilities providing backup power when wind and solar are offline. Sterling Burnett doesn’t mention it in his essay, but all these batteries will need to be replaced within 10 years, despite there not being enough lithium and cobalt to provide for the first round of manufacture.
Montford is in no doubt what the future holds if we continue along this path: “If we do not reverse course soon, our children will never know the wealth we have enjoyed until now, just poverty, rationing and hardship. And all because everyone is too scared to challenge the lies.”
Until that day comes, the relentless growth of the modern windmill business looks set to condemn ever more children to life in the mines. The conditions under which many of these materials are produced from mine to finished products are appalling, notes Sterling Burnett. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a large percentage of the world’s cobalt is mined under appalling conditions at small mines. “Child labour is not the exception, but the norm there,” he writes.
He continues: “Increasing the demand for cobalt will increase pressure on cobalt mines to produce more, meaning either more children will be put to work, or existing child labourers will be forced to work harder under dangerous conditions.” In the U.S., the Biden Administration acknowledged the problem of slave labour in China, having signed the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act in 2021. But the reality of today’s supply chain, combined with insufficient intelligence on the ground, “makes it almost a certainty” that the green energy transition will be built with mineral, rare earth elements and parts using Chinese slave labour.
In addition, writes Sterling Burnett, a prominent form of modern slavery is climate imperialism, or eco-colonialism, with restrictive energy policies conceived and promoted by politicians in western economies being forced on some of the world’s poorest. “Though branded as environmentally friendly, these outlandish policies deny economic growth to those who most need it,” he writes. “In moral terms, the West’s climate obsession is immorally condemning present generations of impoverished peoples and nations to continued penury and early death.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Did the authors declare any links to the Puppet Masters of the Narrative? Is or has been their research work funded by Gates or Wellcome or Pfizer? Are these big funders of the institutions to which they are closely connected?
A very good question. They claim to be funded by the National Institutes of Health, which claims to be government (i.e. taxpayer) funded, but it would interesting to scratch beneath that veneer and find out if the NIH launders private donations as well.
Government funded? Isn’t there a long standing and quite sophisticated campaign by Big Pharma to influence democratic policies? In any case, with such a flagrant distortion of the truth (again), one would be right to be suspicious.
Morning, rational extremists.
But what if hampering learning and social interaction are goals?
Sub-goals, I mean, with the main chance being unquestioning obedience to the State, inculcated by acts of ritual self humiliation.
But what if hampering learning and social interaction are goals?
These might well be the main goals and of course they all all the more reason not to do it.
Sweden.
Basically that one word is already the only response necessary.
No masks, no problem.
Least of all in schools.
The recent CityJournal review of all RCTs shows that masks don’t work.
Logic, maths and physics show that masks cannot work.
Prof. Kappstein’s work and all observations demonstrate that community masks cannot work in practice even if they could work in theory, which, see above, they don’t.
(You need to get fitted, you need to wash your hands 3x per exchange, you need to use sterilized masks only, you need to exchange them after having spoken 3 sentences or touched your face, you must never put on one which hung under your chin, on your rear view mirror or was put loosely in your bag. ETC.)
In practice, masks are medically just a dangerous farce.
Politicially though, they are essential.
They are the modern day Gessler hat and Hitler salute.
That’s their real and sole function and purpose: to demonstrate consent, allegiance and obedience to the cult.
And these authors know that very well.
Add to that the fact that for centuries mankind did not wear masks and the population increased enormously in that time.
Do you suppose this may be about something other than increasing the population?
I cannot believe we are still talking about masks – they don’t work – end of.
Because the majority still seem to think they do.
Because the BBC told them so.
“It doesn’t stack up” Only if you think the NYT is motivated by public health concerns. Why would you assume that? It’s a political entity. Masks in schools stack up if you want to further political goals supported by the NYT. Everything about covid has been political from the start.
Yep. NYT = Dems/Orange Man Bad.
Everything Covid related is solely partisan now in the US.
And Dems = Masks.
It’s partisan in the UK too I think – just that there’s only one side represented. At least they have a mainstream opposition in the US.
It’s endemic. It’s a common cold even in adults. It’s gone.
Nothing medical about this for over a year (if at all).
NYT = evil.
Watch and share while it’s still up!
Dr Tess Lawrie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2EEDJuQNrI
Yes – a very good interview on the key issues.
Not even sure that this non-study was worth giving airtime. It’s pure bollocks – and contrary to a mass of studies. Pure propaganda.
“The authors of the New York Times piece make two claims: universal masking cuts transmission in schools; and therefore we should require it. I’m sceptical of the first claim…”
Only ‘sceptical’, Noah?
Noah raises some good points about the science as presented in the NYT article. But it is not so clear we actually want children to get Covid. Although they are extremely unlikely to get seriously ill, they can pass it on to their families and more significantly their teachers – losing a teacher for two weeks is a lot more disruptive to learning than wearing a mask!
It is not at all certain that they will gain any useful immunity in the future by contracting Covid now. We don’t know how long natural immunity from Covid lasts, but as a virus it seems to be more like flu than say measles or chickenpox, and flu varies so much that getting flu one year is little help in protecting yourself the next year. We would not recommend young children get flu to gain immunity in the future.
“.. losing a teacher for two weeks is a lot more disruptive to learning than wearing a mask! ”
Nonsense – even if the comparison is valid. Destroying key components of communication is not very disruptive? And that apart from the physical effects of hypoxia and hypercapnia. Get back to Planet Zog (where evidently they don’t have faces or lungs).
Your post is a sequence of non-sequiturs – starting from the fact that this is no exceptional crisis requiring damaging interventions – let alone pointless black magic.
The realm that you are in with these sort of interventions treats this very moderate seasonal infection as if it was terminal cancer, where desperate measures are the last hope.
Get a grip.
ROFL. Many years ago I did a PGCE. First few weeks of teaching practice the entire course was full of snot, as the student teachers were re-exposed to all those varieties of bug that go round, across dozens of schools. Brought them into the halls of residence too, so everyone got a boost to their immune system. After that, you don’t seem to catch much. Teachers’ immune systems deal with it all, they are practically bullet proof. There’s a bit of a snuffle at the beginning of the autumn term, then it goes away. The point is, no-one thought anything of it. Hide under a rock if you want, but when you come out you’ll be slain by something the rest of the population shrugs off.
Losing a teacher for two weeks – that’s an economic argument, hence can’t be used to justify abusive practices.
Also the scientific ‘votes’ (the facts) are in. There is, in this case, little evidence that children transmit Covid to adults – which distinguish it from the snot-bugs that neophyte teachers are prone to.
But you aren’t allowed to have an “immune system” anymore…didn’t you see the memo?
My mother, a teacher, said that long ago, and I’ve heard the same from shop workers and other customer-facing people, they initially catch a lot of things and then become immune.
“the science” Lol. None of the covid measures are to do with science, it’s just a cover. It’s political. And my political view is that I am not going to restrict my breathing for someone else’s supposed benefit.
As for kids getting covid, they either will or won’t, depending on mother nature/fate/whatever. There’s nothing much we can do about it, as the last 18 months have shown.
There’s rather a lot of evidence suggesting that the main covid risk for teachers is teacher-to-teacher transmission — the children don’t seem to be involved in this, particularly.
But then who needs evidence when the decision has already been made and where the politicians would lose power if the masses saw that their interventions were only making things worse.
I have an extremely simple solution to solve the problem of teachers who claim to believe that teaching is just too dangerous to them: Find a different job. You wrongly assumed that this was about getting state money for live with nothing in return. According to a Facebook ad I just saw, the NHS is hiring diversity counsellors, ie, people who do nothing in exchange for money. This might be more to your liking.
—-
Regarding the “it’s not at all certain”: This would be more correctly worded as Because we the undersigned refuse to take note of factual information about Sars-CoV2 and COVID-19, we still maintain that it must be fundamentally different from anything else which ever happened on this world so far. And the answer to that is Get a life. Perhaps on the far side of the moon or some remote island in the north Atlantic. That’s perfectly possible. Mankind will probably not notice if you remove yourself from it, minus the sudden drop in levels of white noise.
I absolutely cannot work out what you think I was assuming. I wrote nothing about teachers believing the job was dangerous -nor do I think it is. I was just pointing out that if a teacher gets Covid then the whole class is disrupted.
I said something was not certain and explained why I thought that. Maybe I am wrong. If so, how about explaining why I was wrong rather than this weird tirade about getting a life?
Teachers get ill for all sorts of reasons. That’s life. There are supply teachers. Education has been and continues to be immensely disrupted in the UK, much less in Sweden. Evidence suggests the Swedish approach gives the more satisfactory outcome.
I am not arguing for or against a Swedish approach. All I am saying is that it is not necessarily a good thing if children get Covid. One of the reasons being their teacher may get ill – and Covid can be very nasty. Yes schools can cope to some extent if teachers are ill but there is a limit. It is all a question of how much.
After over a year of this, I’m simply tired of treating obvious pretexts as if they were meant to be serious statements.
At each turn of this sorry spectacle, the teacher’s unions have demanded that schools must be closed for the safety of their members. They were also the ones who demanded that all pupils must be vaccinated until the end of the summer holidays, for the safety of their members, and this article is about forcing pupils to wear masks, again for the safety of teachers/ members of teacher’s unions. The obvious conclusion is that teacher’s unions must have a lot of members who are convinced that their jobs are too dangerous for them. Hence, they should switch jobs. Problem solved.
The second part of your text was another COVID standard, namely, harping on about all kinds of things the person talking claims to be ignorant of. Functionally, this is intended to sow doubts/ fear in the audience, practically, it’s white noise: No useful information can be gained from stating that something is unknown and no course of action can be justified by this. That’s a pretty elementary logic error called appeal to ignorance.
If we don’t yet know something which will be of importance to us, we’ll have to find out. There’s no use speculating about it instead.
The second part of your text was another COVID standard, namely, harping on about all kinds of things the person talking claims to be ignorant of. Functionally, this is intended to sow doubts/ fear in the audience, practically, it’s white noise: No useful information can be gained from stating that something is unknown and no course of action can be justified by this. That’s a pretty elementary logic error called appeal to ignorance.
The appeal to ignorance is to argue that something must be true because there is no evidence against it. I clearly have not done this because I haven’t claimed anything must be true. What I have done is argue something may not be true (that children will gain useful immunity through infection) and given a reason for it (immunity may not last very long). It is a very straightforward, logically sound argument. Is it a fallacy to argue that something is uncertain? What if it is uncertain – are you not allowed to prove it?
You said coronavirus is similar to flu but it is different in that flu strains do ‘shift’ from year to year whereas a coronavirus will just ‘drift” (@0.3%), therefore not requiring booster shots.
You seem to be unaware that people who caught SARS CoV -1 still have immunity 18 years later.
The government has just said through (the mouth of Javid) for people to ” get your jabs as soon as you can so we can continue to safely live with this virus…” If teachers have the ‘vaccine’ are they not “safe” as Javid claims?
Your posts are not well informed nor well argued….by reading ATL and BTL you should become better informed.
RW, you are a well breed person. I’m not. I just wrote what I think of this beast.
And regarding influenza:
There’s substantial evidence showing that children do catch influenza and as a result develop broadly protecting cross-immunity to multiple influenza strains. They also tend to have only mild symptoms.
The relative susceptibility to influenza in older adults is known to be due to the gradual loss of the innate immune system with age (that protects against upper respiratory tract viral infections), but also due to them not being exposed to H3N2 during childhood (as it didn’t circulate prior to the late 1950’s); in older adults H3N2 is much more lethal than H1N1 strains (which they would likely have been exposed to as children).
Vaccination of children against influenza appears to offer a much more selective immune response, which, because of immunogenic imprinting (original antigenic sin) will likely result in increased risks of serious symptomatic disease once the influenza has mutated sufficiently (ie, once they reach adulthood).
So, it would seem at present that children might well be better off by becoming infected with influenza before they reach adulthood.
Oh, and this immunogenic imprinting is why it is very dangerous to vaccinate people using only a highly mutable protein of a given virus — each successive infection with a similar virus will stimulate the production of antibodies biased towards the original proteins ‘learnt’ by the immune system — as the spike protein is mutating rapidly this suggests that the vaccinated will have a poor immune response to future covid infection. OTOH, those with natural infection will have a broad immune response to the entirety of the virus, much of which does not mutate rapidly, and thus even with immunogeneic imprinting their immune response to future infection should be somewhat protective. In this sense the vaccination of children against covid would appear to be rather risky wrt medium- and longer-term risks.
So would you honestly recommend that parents expose their young children to influenza? (the mortality rate for 0-4 year olds is about 1.3 in 100,000 – so chances are it will just be unpleasant).
I would honestly recommend that people who are concerned about the large number of relatively harmless pathogens on this planet find another to live on they’re better adapted to — I already suggested the far side of the moon or remote, otherwise uninhabited islands.
“…losing a teacher for two weeks is a lot more disruptive to learning than wearing a mask!”
Your exclamation suggests how trivial you find masking a person’s face and expression, the muffled voice and other effects.
Disruption is part of life. I well remember teachers’ occasional illnesses. Some carried on regardless, others were replaced by supply teachers who would often present a new dimension to the subject; on one occasion a teacher demonstrated his lost voice. We learnt a bit about (and maybe even how to spell) Laryngitis.
Besides huge stupidity, there is clear evidence of being a beast: not being human,
There is now rather a lot of evidence suggesting that childhood covid cases:
But science be dammed — the authorities have decided that masks are great, vaccines even better and that children are dirty spreaders of covid. There is no arguing with these people, no amount of evidence that will sway them. We’re being held ransom by a pile of covid zealots who want their agenda to be followed no matter the consequences.
Control zealots. Covid is a useful cover.
Another pointless study which was clearly initiated with a predetermined outcome.
The evidence to support the result is based on case numbers which in themselves mean nothing based as they are on PCR testing which is wholly inappropriate.
All in all a complete waste of everyone’s time. Or to sum up:
Complete and utter Bollox.
ps. This Scam has nothing to do with public health, unless we acknowledge the ‘health’ angle is about undermining it.
The f***ing irony of the MSM complaining that the Taliban are demanding women cover their faces in Afghanistan is not lost on me.
Classic
A very nice, plain and intelligent text by Jeffrey H. Anderson.
Any suggestion that kids should wear masks is simply absolute criminal abuse – end of.
Still think the timing of all of this was weird, in between Event 201 and before Agenda 21