The big guns of the mainstream media can be relied on to spread climate Armageddon fear based on the latest ‘scientists say’ modelled fantasies, but elite billionaire funders are taking care to spread the word across all communications in the public square. With steadily falling advertising revenue, the U.K. local press is in the firing line with targeted stories pushing the collectivist green agenda available free of charge. A new start-up called the Local Storytelling Exchange (LSE) aims to use “community engagement” to shape a collective narrative of support for a green transition. Local stories are “amplified” and placed across national, regional and local print, radio, TV and digital media. It will perhaps not be a great surprise to learn that this operation is another string to the bow of Extinction Rebellion paymaster Sir Christopher Hohn, and his funding through the European Climate Foundation.
There is a vast amount of money available from a few billionaires to curate a climate catastrophe agenda and promote global Net Zero. It buys influence and power within large sectors of the media, politics and academia. The Daily Sceptic has investigated numerous bodies receiving large sums of money from a small number of elite billionaires. The LSE promotes itself as a tiny start-up, but it names six team members with considerable past media experience. A recent job advertisement to expand coverage in the South East offered a 12-month contract for a “global witness” of £64,000 per annum, or £38,400 for a three-day week. Needless to say, all of these operations would cease to exist without elite billionaire backing. Sir Christopher Hohn, alone, is estimated to pour £200 million a year into various bodies influencing journalists, politicians and academics.
The LSE has also attracted backing from the Sainsbury Family Trust and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The latter operation attracted some publicity in 2020 when it gave a €1 million “humanity” prize to the Swedish climate hysteric Greta Thunberg.
The LSE money helps pay for “experienced journalists” to “collaborate with local and regional media to tell engaging and inspiring tales of action”. Spoon-feeding this type of copy into local media is obviously intended to build local and national support for Net Zero measures. “By placing the stories and spokespeople from our regions into national news we help to show how the stories of the transition are normal and everyday,” notes the LSE. The stories are said to direct attention towards the benefits of a fairer transition, “whether that is lowering fuel bills thanks to community heat pump initiatives, or building a legacy for the next generation by returning farmland to woodland”. Quite what the benefits of being colder and hungrier are is not immediately apparent from this statement.
From cycling GPs and eco churches to the miner’s son running the world’s largest offshore wind farm, our diverse and powerful stories highlight the people behind the green transition, says LSE. At its website it lists six examples of “our stories” that have appeared in local media. But the true source of these stories does not appear to be shared with the local readers of the publications. All six articles are by-lined with a staff reporter.
Targeting local audiences is an obvious growth area for climate alarmists seeking to promote the collectivist Net Zero economic and societal reset. The Cornish coastal town of Bude has been given £2 million from the National Lottery for a Bude Climate Partnership programme, in addition to £3 million from the U.K. Government to look at how it can “adapt” to a changing climate. That amount of money can obviously buy a lot of fearmongering, and when there is climate alarmism to be spread, the state-dependent BBC is never far from the frontline.
In a recent article, the BBC said Bude faced an “imminent threat” due to rising sea levels. Images produced by the U.K. Environment Agency for Crooklets Beach show cafes and the car park under water in about 30-years’ time. According to investigative journalist Paul Homewood, this silly make believe was ultimately based on computer models fed with an implausible temperature rise up to 4°C within 80 years. The scare-mongering from the BBC was all based on a rise in sea levels between 2020 and 2060 of 9.75 mm a year. Notes Homewood, the actual sea levels have been rising in the area by just 1.94 mm a year, with no acceleration throughout the record. The areas said to be at risk of flooding are observed to be a good metre or so above sea level.
Local flooding is an easy and lazy climate scare to produce. U.S.-based Climate Central is backed by substantial billionaire money and targets local media with ready-to-publish climate change material highlighting local landmarks allegedly due to disappear beneath the waves. In the past, the Wiltshire Times reported that the flood water would lap the steps of Gloucester Cathedral, sited at an elevation of 19 metres. The Dorset Echo, meanwhile, informed its readers that the waters would soon be lapping around the village of Lytchett Minster, a mere 17 metres above sea level.
Climate Central draws support from numerous wealthy funders including Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and the green investor Jeremy Grantham. Through a Climate Matters offshoot it also targets American local weather broadcasters. As a result, there is said to be “a coast-to-coast network of TV weathercasters who believe that educating their audience about global warming is as crucial as telling them when to bring an umbrella”. Kaitlyn McGrath, a meteorologist at WUSA9, notes that to a lot of her viewers, “it’s lost on them how much Climate [Matters] really is doing”.
Around the world, elite money is helping curate journalists to insert climate alarmism copy into their published work. In just a couple of years, the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, drawing past support from the European Climate Foundation, has tried to encourage 400 journalists to raise their alarmist game. To “hit closer to home”, the course directors tell participants to pick a fruit such as a mango and discuss why it wasn’t as tasty as the year before due to the impact of climate change. Past speakers include the geography lecturer Saffron O’Neill, who is on record as speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science.
She made these comments in the activist blog Carbon Brief, an operation that is funded by – well blow me down with a feather – the European Climate Foundation.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Anyone commenting below the line that the earth isn’t boiling will find that they are posting in breach of conditions and they’ll get banned. This has happened to me to such an extent I’d created 6/7 email addresses but kept getting banned. Eventually I gave up as the local goons were hardly going to be persuaded and I had better things to do with my time.
I’ve recently been permanently banned from commenting on the Telegraph. They couldn’t tolerate my questioning of their funding sources and disgraceful coverage of the mRNA vaccine issues. … and probably also my continued use of the phrase “disgraceful reporting”!
I have always been careful throughout to avoid directly criticising anyone on a personal level (though what I have written has often clearly implied criticism of the journalists of the piece I have commented against – so I’m not surprised at the ban. But that implied criticism is unavoidable because the truth is unavoidable).
I’m in the process of submitting a Subject Access Request. I haven’t sent the actual request yet because I am first requesting the name of their Data Protection Officer, as they are obliged by law to have. I believe they are also obliged to publish the the details of their named officer, but they haven’t done that.
I’ve learned from the pandemic and from various YouTube videos regarding FOI and subject access requests, that it is extremely important (and potentially quite a powerful move) to insist on the details of a named individual who is responsible for a given policy or taking action.
I would suggest you also submit a Subject Access Request.
I don’t think the Daily Sceptic will mind me adding their own template they have provided from their recent Premier League article. This one can be adapted to your needs. I have added the line about responding with the name of the appointed Data Protection Officer.
—–
Dear Sir or Madam
Subject access request
Name: {{name}}
Please supply the personal data you hold about me, which I am entitled to receive under data protection law, held in any:
• Correspondence including but not limited to emails and any other form of written messages, whether sent or received internally or externally.
• Documents including but not limited to investigation reports, and any documents produced in relation to your article user comments policies, whether created by you or received by you.
• Complaints you have received about me or anything I have posted on social media.
Please also confirm:
• The purpose of the processing.
• The categories of personal data concerned.
• The recipients or categories of recipient to whom the personal data have been or will be disclosed, in particular recipients in third countries or international organizations.
• Where the personal data was not collected from me, any available information about its source.
• The existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, and meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for me.
If you need any more information, please let me know as soon as possible.
I would prefer to receive the data in pdf or Microsoft Word format, by email to {{email}}.
It may be helpful for you to know that data protection law requires you to respond to a request for personal data within one calendar month.
If you do not normally deal with these requests, please pass this letter to your data protection officer or relevant staff member.
Please also respond with the name of your appointed Data Protection Officer.
If you need advice on dealing with this request, the Information Commissioner’s Office can assist you. Its website is ico.org.uk, or it can be contacted on 0303 123 1113.
Yours faithfully,
{{name}}
Quick update to correct a slight misaprehension on my part – courtesy of ChatGPT:
“Are they obliged to provide the name of the appointed DPO if asked?”
Yes, under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), organizations that are required to have a Data Protection Officer (DPO) are also obliged to publish the contact details of their DPO and communicate these to the supervisory authority, which in the UK is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
This means that if an individual or entity requests the contact details of the DPO from an organization like a newspaper, the organization is generally expected to provide this information. The purpose of this requirement is to ensure transparency and to facilitate communication between data subjects, the DPO, and the supervisory authority, particularly in matters relating to the processing of personal data and the exercise of the rights of data subjects.
However, it’s important to note that while the organization must make the DPO’s contact details accessible, they are not necessarily required to provide the DPO’s name. The key requirement is that the contact details should enable effective communication with the DPO. In practice, many organizations do choose to publicly list their DPO’s name for ease of reference and communication.
The one piece of post that no organisation ever wants to receive is a Subject Access Request (SARs) because they are a nightmare to comply with, primarily in staff time which of course is damned expensive these days.
It bears repeating here that much of present-day Holland and Belgium have always been “below sea level” and were actually originally sea turned into land by building dykes from one dry spot to another and then pumping out the water behind it, a technological feat humans living adjacent to the English Channel or the North Sea have been capable of for centuries. If there’s one thing people living in European coastal areas don’t have to fear, it’s sea levels rising by about 1½” over the course of fourty years.
Isn’t it interesting how all of these “grass roots” activist groups, formed by concerned hippie citizens, with an interest to end human suffering and abolish the rule of large corporations, are all funded by large corporations and billionaires?
Wealthy communists wanting to control ourmlives. There really are evil geniuses out there
My Local Paper as I have mentioned before on DS has morphed into a Party Political Broadcast for the Green Party. It has a weekly full page of GREEN encouragement and assorted articles, like advising people not to buy a lawnmower and simply borrow one from the guy down the street. I am sure he will happily loan out his lawnmower whenever a neighbour calls (nope). They advise walking or getting the bus and leaving your car in the drive, when infact the real goal is no cars at all in any drives. Readers are encouraged to believe that that there is something called “the climate change clock” that is telling us that we have only 7 years before temperature increase become irreversible. This is Not Science. It is Not Fact, but it is very dangerous propaganda. Then they insist that on Valentines day we should not have bought Red Roses. Do these dreamers never think that encouraging the customers of businesses to not buy products is none of their business, and infact is economic destruction? Next they insist heat is being “trapped from the sun”. ——Nope. It is radiation from the surface they really mean. So in other words they have no clue what they are talking about when they lecture people. Then they insist poorer countries suffer the most because of the actions of wealthier countries. ——-Nope—What harms poor countries is the climate policies imposed on them that stops them using fossil fuels to develop and become prosperous like the west. One billion people in poor countries don’t even have electricity.—- Most absurd of all is the claim that deaths from heat occurred more often in 2022 than deaths from cold. —-Remember this is a newspaper reporting from the central belt of Scotland (Fife) where if a temperature ever gets up to 25 C it is a very rare event. This paper is packed full of all of the worst misinformation about energy and climate, and it is no surprise to hear that billionaire funders of the Green Industrial Complex are behind a lot of this blatant propaganda that is encouraging us to destroy our own economies and impoverish ourselves all for reasons that are not backed up by any empirical evidence.
What hope is there of stopping the mass brainwashing of local people via their local newspaper filled with climate change propaganda and green politics, when only 10 people in the whole of the UK have read what I just wrote and saw fit to give it a thumbs up. ——————–I have said it many times, but unless we are able to get anti climate change information that exposes and counters the propaganda with some serious TV News Programs or documentary’s then the Climate Industrial Complex is going to continue to get away with their eradication of the free market capitalism which is the true goal of this “official science”. ——It has very little or nothing to do with the climate.
Billionaire oligarchs, like Hohn and Gates and Soros, wealth increases exponentially simply due to investment income and compound interest. It requires no effort whatsoever. They simply set aside a few billion into a tax protected philanthropy and use growth from that to fund their oligarchy projects. It requires no sacrifice on their parts. All of the money spent is tax deductible and their tax rates vary from 20-70%. So a very high proportion of the money they spend on pet projects is actually being supplied by your tax money. What a scam! The obvious reason they do this is so they can assuage their guilt due to their incredible wealth while millions barely survive and millions in the world are actually starving and sick. The other reason is so they can appear highly virtuous to their family and friends. This is nothing more than virtue signalling.
Storytelling suggest works of fiction, apt!