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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You can’t power an industrial economy on wind, anyone who believes so is either corrupt, mad or stupid.
Didn’t we try that in the past?
Yup. There is a good reason that coal then oil tool off and windmills and sailing boats got relegated.
You cannot run a country on wind and that is why as well as the wind we have the Smart Meter to ration energy use. ——–Energy is the new currency. Carbon taxation is the new wealth redistribution tool.
Clearly the intention is to make sure that we are no longer an industrial economy.
Net Zero Means Powerless Defenceless –
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
12.000 Bird choppers in the UK coving an area almost the size of West Sussex. 500 dead large birds per chopper every single year. Producing at best 15% of our energy needs. They are not Gaia friendly. Capacity is at best 50% given wind intermittency and the poor quality of battery storage. Per Chopper:
There are not enough rare earth elements to power a wind grid to sustain our economy. Not enough in the entire world and you need to move gigatonnes of tender Gaia’s skin to get at them. All done with hydrocarbon (clean, abiotic) power.
There is not enough land (must be flat, in a wind zone etc). Each MW eats up 50 acres of space (most farms are 3 MW to 5 MW in size). To treble wind production you would have to carpet the equivalent of Kent, Surrey and the Sussexes with the Bird manglers. It is insanity, not ‘green’. The Choppers are placed on farmland or once wild areas. This is not eco-friendly.
Follow the money. Lots of millionaires in the supply chain of the Bird Eaters.
I hear in Germany the Red Kite is virtually wiped out. —Birds of prey are always looking down. They don’t see the blades coming.
Used to see lots of birds of prey in the hover in Caithness when driving down the A9. Haven’t spotted one in ages now, but the area has been industrialised with turbines.
In many areas in Scotland the formerly beautiful landscape has been ruined by bird choppers. Who would want to go hill walking in apparently remote areas if these areas have disfiguring structures, concrete and roads all over them, and you have to listen to woop woop turbine noise instead of wildlife and the breeze?
When you return from holiday and are emitting all the “dreadful CO2” you look down at Scotland and it is starting to look like a giant pin cushion.
I didn’t think the models were GIGO, I thought they were just GO
All these scams such as ‘green energy’, electric vehicles, HS2, Cv-19 ‘vaccine’ etc should be filtered out by honest and wise politicians to whom we cede responsibility to make decisions on our behalf. They in turn are answerable to the PM who we trust will be a wise and pragmatic leader. Where are they? They’re certainly not to be found in Westminster.
Without the above, any pseudo-expert, fake, charlatan, flanneler, cheat or phony (yes, Ferguson, I’m looking at you) can hold sway and stuff us all.
The Simpsons monorail episode comes to mind. Sinking our money into inadequate solutions to a made-up problem.
Those who claim to ‘follow the science’ clearly don’t understand the scientific method.
I keep wondering where all the British green jobs are. Minus 3000 in Port talbot is the only relevant statistic I can think of.
It’ll be minus 6000 in Port Talbot by the time the knock-on effects of destroying the steel plant there play out.
Indeed, as I have been pointing out since this criminal and sad announcement.
No need for coal, much of which used to come from a relatively local open cast colliery (Felin Fran, near Merthyr – although I think that is now our of action), nor any iron ore, which arrives by sea via the local docks, or else by train from other ports. Quite a while back, when there was another steel plant at Llanwern, east of Newport, all the iron ore arrived by sea at Margam, which can handle the large ships, and a large chunk of it was hauled by train from there to Llanwern.
Worth observing that the Met Office uses 1991 to 2020 for long term average sums at present. Incidentally, another story that undermines the concept of “Net Zero” is the latest delay to the Hinkley Point C project – now delayed to 2029 at the earliest.
“[Hydrogen] Highly explosive, low kinetic energy compared with hydrocarbons” surely chemical or potential energy, not kinetic?
We know the drill by now and that is to destroy our economy, our society and our way of life. None of this surprises me. What really does surprise me though is the level of abject ignorance demonstrated by MPs. You would have thought that the people actually representing us would have some inherent ability to discern, to weigh information, to be curious, to have some innate intelligence… Apparently not. They, almost as one body, seem to possess no curiosity, no outrage (when the only steel furnace is about to be extinguished), no ability to discern or to look further than the end of their paychecks and expenses and the possibility of jumping on a gravy train here or there, usually funded by some billionaire or other, to endlessly pontificate on matters on which they are not fit or able to speak about. As a whole, bar a very few, they have let us down badly. They give credence to organisations like the CCC because they’re just too lazy to do any digging into the subject themselves or they’re too cowardly to sabotage their careers by speaking out. These are the best in the land?? How the F did they end up where they are? Perhaps it is us who are the lazy ones in not skewering their nominations to be MPs to forensic examination in the first place. One thing I know, from the council politics down here in the shires, is that only those people who know the game and tow the line will be put forward onto the ballot – basically they’ve already been corrupted before they’ve taken one step through the doors of Westminster.
“No outrage”???—-Correct, but plenty of outrage if we want to process illegal aliens in Rwanda who chucked away their documents. Plenty of outrage if someone swears at a Muslim. Plenty of outrage if Braverman uses a perfectly good word that appears in the dictionary—“Invasion”. Plenty of outrage if a father does not want a man that has suddenly decided he is a woman in his daughters toilet. ——Yes outrage is very selective for the parasite class of UN lackeys pandering to pretend to save the planet politics who don’t give a jot whether it impoverishes us all and is actually doing that RIGHT NOW. Just take a look at your energy bills. Just ask people in Port Talbot.
Why would they (establishment, career party politicians) change when the people continue to go out and vote for them time and time again no matter how incompetent, disinterested or morally corrupt they undertake their role.
The most important commodity is ENERGY.———— Price and availability of energy is directly tied to prosperity, good health and life expectancy. The one billion people in the world that don’t even have electricity and the other 2 billion that only have enough to power a fridge will testify to that. So why are our politicians seeking to take away cheap reliable energy and replace it with expensive unreliable energy? ——-Hey Jim Dale answer that question will you? For anyone who does not know who this idiot Dale is, then tune into GB News where he is the resident climate change activist. Well Dale won’t answer that question because he thinks if a Mars Bar goes up 1p it is all because of “Climate Change”. He will claim the cocoa beans got wet or some other squirmers excuse. But enough of silly activist weathermen. ——-Why do government want to remove cheap reliable energy? ——Do they have evidence that the CO2 from the coal and gas is causing or going to cause dangerous changes to the climate? NOPE. The Chinese and Indians who emit 40% of that CO2 don’t think so and continue to use reliable affordable coal. They are using more coal than we did since the beginning of time, so there cannot be a climate apocalypse heading in past Jim Dales house now can there? —So WHY? ———-Because of UN politics. The Politics of Sustainable Development that says the prosperous west has used up more than its fair share of the fossil fuels and we are to leave it in the ground. Eco Socialism with climate as the plausible excuse and we all fall for it. Ask your friends and family. They will almost all think that the climate is changing and it isn’t the same as when they were young. They think they can look out of their bedroom window and see climate change. They see storms on the telly and think “Wow Greta was right”——Wakey wakey people you are being manipulated. —-Look at your electric bill and if you thought that was bad “You ain’t seen nuthin yet”
The good thing about CLS’s Royal Society report was that they looked at 37 years of weather data and considered the impact of variable weather on electricity supply from renewables (see image from their report below). That’s what’s blown the CCC out of the water.
But the RS report had a big weakness in that it didn’t consider the impact of variable weather on energy demand. It turns out that back-to-back low wind years like 2009-11 are also colder than normal so demand for heat is higher. Once we’re all using heat pumps (!), that demand will have to be met with electricity, so we’ll need even more storage than RS calculated. So, the RS has blown themselves out of the water too.
It’s like a green circular firing squad.
The costings in the RS report were a total fantasy too.
Covered in depth here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/royal-society-large-electricity-storage-report.
Perhaps you could use wind power to manufacture gas, oil and coal.
Not really. The first large-scale practical application of a steam engine was using the Newcomen atmospheric engine to pump water out of collieries. This superseeded horse-powered pumps, not wind-powered ones.
Aside: Why haven’t the netzeroes thought about horse-powered dynamos for electricity generation so far? Horses not being sufficiently renewable because they fart?
They never used to give it a name when it was a bit blustery. I agree that the climate in this country has deteriorated very rapidly but I think the reasons are entirely deliberate and man-made and not a by-product. Just look at how many measures have been introduced recently in order to reduce the worldwide harvest and thus reduce worldwide population. They will carry on un until about 7 billion are dead and they are convinced of their righteousness.
I agree that the climate in this country has deteriorated very rapidly but …
How does climate “detetiorate?”
It might help persuade the zealots that they are on shaky ground if they were forced to relinquish all items that they own that are dependent on fossil fuel, in particular oil. All plastics? No more Nespresso? No phones, tablets or desktops? A large proportion of their wardrobes? It would be interesting to determine exactly what they would have to do without…
It’s like being in a recurring nightmare. Doesn’t matter how much the obvious lie is exposed the zombies keep moving in the same direction towards destruction of our country.