Labour Party political elites in the U.K. are flocking to support a new green campaigning group called Labour Climate and Environment Forum (LCEF). At its launch last year, senior Labour politicians present included Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and former leader and Net Zero champion Ed Miliband. LCEF claims its team comes from all parts of the labour movement as it seeks a collectivist Net Zero solution to tackle “climate and ecological breakdown”. As we have seen in numerous articles in the Daily Sceptic, none of these types of elite organisations arise from the grassroots. LCEF is funded by the European Climate Fund (ECF) and Clean Air Fund (CAF), both supported by Extinction Rebellion (XR) paymaster Sir Christopher Hohn. Also in the mix is Gower Street, a fund that is currently helping to pay for the latest offshoot of XR.
LCEF is run by Paul McNamee who has worked for the Green Alliance and recently for London Mayor Sadiq Khan. He is said to have advised on the Ultra-Low Emission Zone, Khan’s controversial poor person’s punch-down, and “the Mayor’s presence at COP27”. Sitting on the Advisory Board is Polly Billington, a former BBC journalist, and a key adviser to Ed Miliband in the previous Labour Government that set the U.K. on the path to its unrealistic Net Zero agenda. She was previously instrumental in establishing the local government network UK100. This network targets local authorities by demanding they accelerate Net Zero with various anti-car activities. Needless to say, public consent to such personal restrictions is not seen as a priority. The investigative journalist Ben Pile notes that UK100 is an opaque organisation, “though it admits to being funded by ECF and CAF, both of which are substantially supported and controlled by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and therefore Hohn”.
Money of course makes no distinction between political tribes when there is public policy to be altered in the interests of the few. Net Zero offers huge opportunities for organisations peddling unfounded climate collapse scares and funded by billionaires to influence lawmakers to collectivise the economy and human society. Since such an ambition requires a complete re-engineering of modern industrial society, by happy chance, vast amounts of diverted money, mostly taxpayers’ hard-earned, are available to fund almost any crackpot green scheme and technology going.
As the Daily Sceptic recently noted, almost half the ruling Conservative Party backbench MPs in the U.K. Parliament belong to a Caucus promoting extreme Net Zero ideas that is funded by a small group of green billionaires led, quelle surprise, by the ECF and CAF, along with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers and Oak Foundation. The Caucus is part of the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) which is run by Ben Goldsmith. For his part, Goldsmith is one of five trustees of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.
The LCEF appears to have a number of links with the Green Alliance, which says it is an “independent think tank and charity focused on ambitious leadership for the environment”. In 2019, it was able to signal its considerable virtue by dropping long-standing funding arrangements with Shell and BP. Happily, and perhaps again to no great surprise, new funders in the form of the ECF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were able to take up the financial slack.
The LCEF funding from Gower Street is also of some interest, since this relatively small operation seems to pick a number of grantees at the more colourful end of the Net Zero spectrum. The funding for a new XR offshoot, run by XR old hands Gail Bradbrook and Stuart Basden, helps “make good on the potential of Extinction Rebellion”. Cash to Stop Ecocide International helps develop green ‘lawfare’, while the World Environmental Crimes Unit builds a database on individuals “holding back action on climate in the U.K.” Peers for the Planet, a group of 150 members of the U.K. House of Lords, is helped in its mission to put climate change at the top of the political agenda. Grants are also made to the Green Alliance and the CEN.
The sheer scale of the money that is available to fund all these groups from a relatively small number of very rich people is beginning to attract wide attention. It dwarfs the individual contributions made to major political parties in the U.K. The Labour and Conservatives make do with income in the recent past between £30-50 million a year each, but Michael Bloomberg and Sir Christopher Hohn have each contributed $45 million to C40 alone This is a green activist group comprising 100 city mayors around the world. and it is currently chaired by Sadiq Khan. Like C100, it aims to push local areas to press ahead with numerous Net Zero measures including personal movement and diet restrictions. But for Bloomberg, even that $45 million to C40 is chickenfeed compared to the $1 billion that he has given to groups seeking to shut down America’s gas and coal power plants. The goal is to “shut down every last U.S. coal plant” and “slash gas plant capacity in half, and block all new gas plants”.
For all its talk of campaigning on behalf of the wider Labour movement, the LCEF, like the CEN, is further proof of the disconnect between the current crop of politicians and the wider voting public. None of these operations arise from the grassroots. They are funded by a few elites and are part of global political campaigns. Ben Pile estimates that both Bloomberg and Hohn are funding green organisations to the tune of $200 million a year each. Money buys influence and vast quantities are pouring in to bypass the wishes of local electorates. The LCEF might wish it had support from the wider labour movement, but the truth is that it does not need it. It operates within the political system trying to exert influence on profoundly undemocratic policies. In the process, of course, it is supporting any number of virtuous, and rather comfortable, ‘Islington’ lifestyles.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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This begs the question ‘what is the billionaire class’s business model?’
What is their motivation to deny the proles free movement and access to abundant energy? Why does farming nutritious food for all appall them?
Why is the economic elevation of those living in the developing world no longer considered a priority?
Consider their bottom line.
They are seeking to run the planet like a business and to reduce costs. Labour is normally the biggest cost in a business.
If they now have AI and robotics to do their donkey work they no longer see a human workforce and therefore human consumers as being necessary for their business model.
Listen to what they say openly:
Humans (created in God’s image) are problematic useless eaters, our exhalation of CO2 is considered bad for the planet, therefore we are the ‘carbon’ they wish to reduce.
what they want is to own the planet, for themselves and their heirs, they want the worlds population reduced so that there is more for them to own, the remaining population of normies will be there slaves, who will live out of site in ghetto towns, and who will be treated as battery farm animals, once useful life is deemed at an end they will be finished off hence the projects in Canada, and the tests on putting old people down during the covid years. Of course what the billionaire idiots don’t realise is, that once they have achieved their ownership of the earth, they will as humans have always done whose main motivation is greed and power, they will start to fight one another, as they demand and desire other territorys. The green zealots at the top of the tree are barbaric, greedy, misanthropes who are using politicians and people to do their bidding, but once done they will be disposed of just like any other no longer useful piece of trash.
Yes they really are seeking to steal the green from the goose. Why would they not do that when elected governments have put all the pieces (Globalisation) into place for them to do this?
Governments accommodate virtually every wish they desire. Establishment politicians careers and parallel earnings are often so interlinked with these people they are mere puppets.
We are in an age of full blown Corporatism, It is evil, it will distinguish our sovereignty our freedoms and our liberties. All establishment parties are fully signed up to the corporate agenda and as long as the majority of people continue to vote for them they will continue to do the bidding of the corporatists.
Excellent research, Mr Morrison. Thank you.
Sadly, it’s just yet more “Daily Sceptic publishing Climate Denial”, as Wikipedia puts it… someone bomb Wikipedia already, please.
‘Climate denier’ is another idiotic term used by half wits. They lose on science so they resort to name calling.
Yes there is a climate.
Yes it does indeed change.
Yes I do believe in the 4 seasons.
Yes I do believe in weather.
No I don’t believe that Co2 controls climate since no scientific proof exists for that assertion.
No I don’t believe that Co2 a trace chemical 400 parts per million which falls out of natural processes and which is mostly recycled, causes weather.
No I don’t believe that mankind’s output of 5% of Co2 has any impact whatsoever on anything.
No I don’t believe that a few temp stations in airports and along highways provides proof of hottest days evah.
Yes I believe in science, namely that natural cycles, solar activity, oceanic convection systems, and other many:many relationships result in local, regional climactic patterns.
Mr Alarmist—“Climate Change is real and happening now”
Mr Denier—–“Oh really so where can I see this climate change”?
Mr Alarmist—-“You can see it everywhere”
Mr Denier——“So can I see it from my bedroom window”?
Mr Alarmist—–“Yes”
Mr Denier——“What does it look like”?
Mr Alarmist—-“Well it doesn’t look like anything as such”
Mr Denier——“But didn’t you say I can see it everywhere”?
Mr Alarmist—-” Yes but I meant you can see it’s effects”
Mr Denier——“And what are those effects”?
Mr Alarmist—-“The effects are changes to the climate”
Mr Denier—– “When did the climate start changing”?
Mr Alarmist—-“Well it has always changed”
Mr Denier——” If it has always changed why not just say climate is real and happening now”? Why bother calling it climate change, when climate would suffice”?
I would love to see a story of the political classes doing something useful. The whole swamp needs draining
Never happen unfortunately.
It is the usual struggle to be the Leader of the World (or Bliar complex). They live to be surrounded by the adoring masses. Then they need to programme these adoring masses to adore, work, reproduce & die.
Only problem with this strategy is their are now so many of these would be ‘Bliars’ all striving for the top spot that they will end up fighting each other.
The proposed mandatory jab in Austria also revealed another ‘weakness’ in their plans, as they found they could not lock the unjabbed in their homes as planned, because they were the same 20% who kept the Country running!
Les rois du monde se battent entre eux
C’est qu’y a de la place, mais pour un pas pour deux
Et nous en bas leur guerre on la fera pas
On sait même pas pourquoi tout ça c’est jeux de rois
Roméo et Juliette, 2000
Davos coming soon, this years theme.”Rebuilding trust”, which is laughable I would no more trust someone who is a member or who attends the WEF, than I would Charles Manson.
Lol.
I used to think the James Bond film baddies were unrealistic and now I can see Ian Fleming was way ahead of the game.
I suppose we could point out that “Rebuilding trust” acknowledges, if nothing else, that trust has gone. Trust once lost is very difficult to regain.
‘Ben Pile estimates that both Bloomberg and Hohn are funding green organisations’
They are not, simply one link in the chain.
It is us, the long suffering taxpayers, who are funding all of this.
‘UK government revenue from energy taxes totalled over £38.1 billion in 2019′
Bloomberg and Hohn are simply leeching off the rest of us, via government ‘green levies’ and subsidies.
On a separate point, the government receives about £1200bn in receipts and spends about £950bn
You know where the rest goes.
Governments, typically, are rubbish at running anything. The government is the problem, not the solution.
There are very few problems in this country that could not be solved by a smaller public sector.
Picky point but the “green” in “green billionaires” should always be written in quotes.
Whenever I read about billionaires I am always reminded of Steve Sailer’s fictitious, ironic “NAABP” – “National Association for the Advancement of Billionaire People”. He is very cynical about their motives especially with regard to mass immigration. It’s a play on the NAACP – National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
NAABP (National Association for Advancement of Billionaire People) buys Gang of Eight, by Steve Sailer – The Unz Review
The man-made climate change hoax and racket is about one thing only:
money and power for a different set of people.
Absolutely nothing else.
0.04%?
C’mon man!
From global warming to climate change to “climate and environment”.
If the policies are wrong because you got it wrong, don’t change policy, blur the lines, confuse the issue, obfuscate.
The dumb public won’t notice.
I quickly scanned the article before reading it, and when I do this I always see certain names and phrases sticking out. As my eyes scroll down up pops things like Ed Miliband, Net Zero, Collectivist, John Kerry , Guterres, “denier”, greenhouse gas, UNFCCC etc. ——-It is almost like my brain has a bit of software in it that identifies all the evil. Then sure enough as I read the article all the evil becomes clear. But then people like me are “the “deplorables”. We don’t accept being easily manipulated. We know that climate models are not science, We know that Polar Bears are not in trouble, We know that the data gets adjusted to fit in with a narrative. —–But ofcourse saying stuff likes that gets you into a spot of bother, or as Mark Twain pointed out, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure just ain’t so”. Many eminent people have lost their careers for “knowing it ain’t so”. ————-Some lost their life ——JFK
Climate change and net Zero only happens in rich Western countries where philanthropy, fake charities and foundations are allowed to abuse the lax and largely unregulated tax deductions that are given by western governments to all spending by these organizations. This can amount to from 20% up to 74%. This means that our taxes are funding most of what these organizations spend. These are oligarchy organizations influencing government policy which is supposed to be illegal. These organizations have set up such an impenetrable web of numbered tax free organizations, it is impossible to audit or regulate. The way to limit the power of these organizations is to remove or severely limit their abuses by altering the tax rules.