Last week, the BBC Verify team’s Marco Silva published a World Service radio documentary, an article and a Twitter/X thread on climate and energy realism’s rising star, Jusper Machogu. Machogu, claims Silva, has become “a champion of climate change denial”. “I have been looking for answers,” he says, promising to explain the young Kenyan farmer’s ascendency. But what followed was a bog-standard smear piece that tells us more about Marco Silva and BBC Verify than it does about Machogu.
Machogu’s core argument is simple. “Do I and a billion and half other Africans deserve a good life? Bet ya!” he says. “But can we do that minus access to life saving Fossil Fuels? A big no!” That simple proposition is not what concerns Silva, whose belief is that “denial” of climate change underpins Machogu’s perspective and his global reach. Consequently, Silva’s hatchet job revolves entirely around just one tweet, in which Machogu wrote that “Climate change is mostly natural” and that “A warmer climate is good for life”. Accordingly, Silva assembles expert opinion from experts to bash this straw man.
Silva turns to Joyce Kimutai, who is billed as “a climate scientist from Kenya” and quoted as saying that Machogu’s views “are definitely coming up from a place of lack of understanding”. Her concern, like Silva’s, is that “misinformation” is threatening to derail the green agenda: “if that conspiracy theory spreads to communities or to people, it could just really undermine climate action.” But while the choice of a Kenyan climate scientist to counter Machogu’s seemingly inexpert claims may seem reasonable, a deeper look at Kimutai’s background reveals her to be a creature of the Western green blob.
Kimutai recently completed her PhD at the African Climate Development Institute (ACDI) at the University of Cape Town. The ACDI is financially supported by and operationally linked to Oxford University, the LSE, UCL, and by government-funded NGOs such as the Climate and Development Knowledge Network and the Carbon Trust, which is a U.K.-based organisation, established by the government as an ‘arms-length’ private company that operates a nexus of NGOs, corporations and academic researchers to promote the green agenda.
So, whereas Kimutai may speak with apparent authority about the supposedly climate-related problems afflicting sub-Saharan Africa, her words have a distinctly Western and blobbish sound. As I have pointed out on the Daily Sceptic this week, and elsewhere previously, BBC Verify journalists looking to conjure up a story just pick up their hotline to media contacts in the blob and obtain an off-the-shelf, pre-determined opinion, as easily as ordering a kebab on Deliveroo.
It is because of this junk-food approach to “reporting” that the BBC’s coverage of environmental issues is so weak. Whereas Verify promises ‘truth’ and to reciprocate the audience’s ‘trust’ in the BBC brand, its inexpert staff are only capable of countering claims made by climate contrarians like Machogu by regurgitating the claims of Establishment-aligned organisations that it already has relationships with. It is, in essence, the opposite of journalism. Whereas proper journalism would require getting to get to the bottom of a debate or controversy by interrogating claims made by protagonists on both sides, BBC Verify just assumed its rolodex of green ‘sources’ are unimpeachable and anyone who challenges the blob’s agenda is either a ‘denier’, a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or in the pay of the ‘fossil fuel industry’.
Perhaps all mainstream journalism has become like that. But it is most stark in outfits that make the loudest claims about representing the truth. ‘Fact checkers’ invariably don’t feel the need to do much more than repackage an appeal to authority. Silva doesn’t even pretend that he has attempted to understand Machogu’s argument. To get his hit piece ducks in a row, he finds a target quote (climate change denial!), suggests a nefarious quid-pro-quo (funded by the fossil fuel industry!) and then decides to be charitable (deluded conspiracy theorist!). Connecting Machogu’s tweet and Kimutai’s rejoinder in this formulaic narrative is Silva’s idea of a devastating exposé. And what evidence does he have that Machogu is a bad faith actor being funded by Big Oil? Silva says he may have earned as much as $9,000 in donations from his followers. “Among his donors were individuals with links to the fossil fuel industry and to groups known for promoting climate change denial,” he says.
$9,000?!? Links to known individuals and groups?!? Call the cops!
Sums such as this demonstrate the extent to which green ‘journalists’ have abandoned any sense of proportion. BBC Verify is by any measure a large news organisation, boasting 60 staff and global reach. Even assuming modest incomes, the staffing costs alone are likely to be in excess of £2.5 million a year – that’s 280 Juspers. Moreover, as explained above, they do very little original work, relying instead on green blob organisations for their junk-food analyses.
One such organisation is the philanthropic grant-maker, the European Climate Foundation (ECF), which is involved in practically every U.K.-based civil society organisation in the climate domain, including the BBC, and which is largely under the control of billionaire hedge fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn. Hohn makes grants to climate organisations through his philanthropic project, The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), exceeding $200 million a year (equivalent to 22,222 Juspers). Hohn’s philanthropy included 34 million Euros to the ECF in 2020, which according to my investigations turned over €125 million in 2020, including €34 million from Hohn via CIFF, and €36 million from two anonymous donors – that’s an additional 10,800 Juspers, bringing the total to 33,022 Juspers. Hohn’s CIFF, working with the U.S.-based ClimateWorks foundation (annual budget $478 million, equivalent to 53,111 Juspers) recently established the African Climate Foundation (ACF) in the same mode as the ECF. The South-African based ACF does not publish its accounts, but it has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation ($1.5 million or 166 Juspers) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($3.5 million, or 388 Juspers).
So, with this back-of-an-envelope calculation, we can begin to assess the extreme lack of proportionality in BBC Verify’s work. The nexus of the blob we have examined has resources equivalent to at least 87,133 Jusper-years. In total, according to ClimateWorks, Climate change mitigation philanthropy is a $12.8 billion per year industry (1.42 million Juspers), of which approximately 9% was directed to projects in Africa – $142 million, or 15,777 Juspers. Whichever way one slices it, two things are clear: first, Jusper is vastly outnumbered; second, if Jusper is in it for the money, he has backed the wrong horse. He could have set himself up as an African sustainable development social influencer and received nothing but worship from the rest of the $12.8 billion year blob – and no doubt a great deal more money than $9,000 and the praise of a few climate sceptics. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.
The philanthropic foundations discussed above are, in my view, extremely political organisations. They are bent on the total reorganisation of society around green ideological precepts. For us here in the West, this has so far been mostly merely irritating, although with its enormous resources, it will eventually become a huge, arguably existential, threat. But for people in developing countries, the reach of green ‘philanthropy’ is far more dangerous. ‘Philanthropic’ foundations make control of grantees’ projects a condition of funding. Consequently, the green blob is a global alignment of ‘civil society’ organisations that, despite the appearance of being locally-based, independent, and even grass-roots, in fact work against the interests of local populations everywhere to serve their grantors. This is the same model of political intervention, from the same interests, that has successfully achieved the abolition of coal, and increasingly the prohibition and restriction of natural gas exploration in Europe and the U.K., and placed Net Zero at the top of the political agenda. The blob’s lobbying has successfully led to financial institutions withdrawing the offer of services such as credit and insurance to hydrocarbon energy projects, and the withdrawal of support from intergovernmental agencies such as the IMF and World Bank for such potentially poverty-busting developments as coal-fired power stations. The social and economic consequences for developing countries are incalculable.
The appeal of Jusper Machogu’s social media feed is easy to explain. He shows, with his characteristic charm and good humour, education and intelligence, that he, and his subsistence farming family and community, are no victims. But he also shows the stark reality of subsistence farming: it is dawn-to-dusk, back-breaking work, with no respite even for elderly women, even in the afternoon heat. “It doesn’t matter if the sun is too hot, they have to do this. This is what Europeans refer to as ‘Sustainable’,” he explains. It is a level of existence that would not be tolerated in Europe, and which has long been abolished by the use of fossil fuels and legislation.
Conventional green wisdom claims that “climate change will be worse for the poor”, and that this necessitates depriving low-income countries of the energy abundance and affordability that we have enjoyed in the West. No industrial revolution for the world’s poorest. But that ecological maxim surely has as much sense when it is inverted: it would be better and easier to alleviate poverty in the developing world than it would be to falsely promise that making vastly more people significantly poorer in high-income countries will yield slightly better weather for those in the poorest. “Being anti Fossil Fuels for Africans is the most racist and Neocolonial thing to do!” says Machogu.
Silva and the armies of green blobbers moving through the world on the eco-billionaires’ endless gravy train simply don’t understand this perspective and have no interest in understanding it. But across the developing world, often referred to as the ‘Global South’, the evidence of a ‘climate crisis’ is rapidly diminishing. Kenyan GDP per capita continues to rise. Consequently, this century: infant mortality has more than halved; communicable diseases (excluding Covid) claim a third fewer lives per year and the burden of disease has halved; cereal production and agricultural output have both nearly doubled. It is not clear, however, that these developments have altered metrics of extreme poverty, which shows little progress since 2005, with a third of the population still falling into this category.
The green rejoinder is of course to mobilise blob-funded expertise to emphasise climate change as responsible for what will soon be worsening poverty in the developing world, using extremely unreliable ‘attribution’ studies. But the idea of a worsening situation is contradicted by the evidence. Greens reply that the weather has got worse, retarding progress, which would be greater, had C02 emissions not ‘destabilised’ the weather. And this is where the debate between the blob and Machogu gets interesting. Would slightly different weather be more or less effective than farm machinery for improving life for countless millions of subsistence farmers? Moreover, are policies that deny abundant and affordable energy to those people more or less harmful than any plausible amount of climate change?
It is a debate that Silva and his colleagues are not merely uninterested in, they are determined not to allow it to happen. To do so would risk not merely ‘climate illiterate’ Africans becoming possessed by a ‘conspiracy theory’, as Kimutai claims; it would undermine the very notion that climate’s sensitivity to C02 is equivalent to society’s sensitivity to climate. And it is that notion that is at the heart of green ideology, despite the evidence. Accordingly, despite the blob having 1.4 million times the resources of Jusper Machogu, it must smear him to protect that notion pour encourager les autres. Were we permitted to take the uppity, recalcitrant subsistence farmer at face value, we might concur that he is entitled to make more for himself, through his own efforts, using the resources that ought to be available to him, than the green blob has decided he is entitled to.
That is why BBC Verify and the blob it serves are absolutely terrified of a subsistence farmer and his mobile telephone. More power to Jusper Machogu’s arms and his digits. BBC Verify is nothing more than a nasty smear machine.
Stop Press: Watch Jusper Machogu being interviewed by Darren Grimes on GB News. Needless to say, his climate contrarianism hasn’t been diminished by the BBC Verify hit job.
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