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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Since I first subscribed to Daily Sceptic about 2 years ago I have regularly pointed to the fact that over one billion people in the world do not have access to electricity. People in the wealthy west really cannot comprehend this and certainly BBC journalists cannot.
Living like this is a diabolical disgrace since these people could easily be using coal to generate electricity and bring themselves out of this stone age existence just as the Chinese and Indians are doing by using fossil fuels. Poor people want to develop their economies, but wealthy environmentalists hate the thought of them using coal to have the same standard of living as us. Western Governments fob these people off with some money for wind turbines and solar panels as if they are doing them some great big favour. We regularly see articles and photo shoots in leftist media of some new wind farm or water facility and some “Happy Africans” smiling for the camera so delighted with this offering.
The Sustainable Development Agenda that is being imposed on us is this Malthusian idea that as the population of the world grows and there is only finite resources in the ground of coal oil and gas, that the use of these fuels should be curtailed. The idea is that here in the wealthy west we have used up more than our fair share of these fuels in getting the standard of living we have, and our own political class have set about implementing policies (NET ZERO) to slow our use of coal oil and gas and use wind and sun instead. This is being done because “The lifestyles of the affluent middle classes is too high”. China and India are not so easily pushed around though and continue to use coal, but poor Africans are the easy target and when we tell them they cannot use coal and gas, what we are really telling them is that they cannot have electricity and develop their economies.
This is a diabolical disgrace, and the likes of BBC should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for pushing this eco socialism down the throats of poor people in support this evidence free climate dogma.
I agree, I have always watched the way billionaires like Gates, Bloomberg etc parade as philanthropists, whilst making substantial coin and publicity from their various “charitable works, injections, fake meat, bugs etc. If they really cared why haven’t they done the simple things that would produce the greatest reduction in poverty and sickness, provide villages and rural areas in Africa and India with access to clean fresh water, and sanitation. But there is no financial return, the results would mean an increase in population not dependent upon the drugs and injections provided by the Philanthropists, and there is no Kudos in doing something so simple.
Hence I look at these billionaire, cos play benevolent men and women and see them for what they are, on the make.
Yes but isn’t for the western world to provide clean water and sanitation to poor countries. It is for them to provide it for themselves. But absurd climate policies which have mostly nothing to do with the climate which coerce poor Africans living on a dollar a day into not using their coal and gas which would enable them to develop and provide for themselves is preventing them doing so.
But they are allowed to dig for rare metals in appalling conditions so we can make our “eco-friendly” lithium batteries. Disgusting hypocrites.
Agree, but the figures for who has access to electricity is bit better than 7 billion with access. To quote unstats.org
“The global electricity access rate increased from 87 per cent in 2015 to 91 per cent in 2021, serving close to an additional 800 million people. However, 675 million people still lacked access to electricity in 2021, mostly located in Low Development Countries”.
Unfortunately, and as one would expect, they are equating access to electricity with renewables. In addition they falsely equate renewables with efficient energy and the least polluting.
https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/Goal-07/#:~:text=The%20global%20electricity%20access%20rate,2021%2C%20mostly%20located%20in%20LDCs.
The data showing least air pollution where there is most fossil fuel usage. Also, where there are the most modern fossil fuel driven power the pollution is the lowest. The right hand graph shows deaths from indoor pollution although it is not much different from general air pollution. Interesting use of blue for deaths from pollution while a red brown for CO2 ‘producers’. In other graphs for OWID they show deaths from fossil fuels in a strong red even though the figures for this can only be contrived statistically.
Yes but the UN IPCC and the WEF and our lackey politicians have decided that CO2 is actually pollution. There is however no evidence that CO2 is causing or will cause dangerous changes to climate and it certainly does not harm human beings in the sense that smoke and other genuine pollutants do.
CO2 in Nuclear Submarines eg can be 5000 ppm compared to 400 ppm in our atmosphere and it causes the sailors no ill effects.
CO2 is therefore, as most sceptical people who do the slightest investigating into this issue have known for a very long time is a means to control people and resources as every human activity involves the release of some CO2. CO2 is the globalist bureaucrats dream gas. It gives them the excuse for policies they have long craved.
“It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’ — and readers’ — attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty”
Monika Kopacz Atmospheric scientist
“Access”.?? ————-Having a few hundred part time wind turbines though is not really the same as having on demand electricity, so the figure is probably closer to the 1 billion I quoted.
The UN would like to think that it is wind and solar that is extending access but it is still predominantly oil, coal and gas. Look at the late developing countries in the table below and their energy mix. India and Bangladesh have extended access to electricity to almost all within the last few decades and I’m sure it wasn’t using wind and solar. India has 180 coal fired power stations with more on the way.
“Despite the push by Western countries at COP 28 to phase out coal, China and India are still building coal-fired plants that will last 40 to 50 years for energy security reasons. Despite adding renewable capacity, they realize that wind and solar cannot operate 24/7 and must have back-up.”
instituteforenergyresearch.org
Bangladesh has 170 power plants and 152 of those are coal, oil and gas
BBC Falsify strikes again with its cutting edge Bullshit
The chattering classes in their nice Grid Fed comfy homes waffling shit to us all ! Fu-k Off ……. !
They can’t argue against his point, obviously, because he’s 100% right.
So they go ad hominem and attack him personally.
If you attack the state religion, the state and all it’s agents like the BBC, attack you back. Nothing new.
Look how they went after Alex Belfield. He was i think the top UK Youtuber to call out the BS in 2020 with facts and logic.
Where did Sir Christopher Hohn get all his money that he is now showering on the climate change net-zero pantomime? He was a Hedge fund manager, he made his money by playing with money. It does strike me that when we have got to a stage in society when you can make far more money by playing with money than you can by actually making and doing the things that money is supposed to facilitate that something is rotten in the state of our world and its finances.
It seems ironic or maybe that should be tragic that the climate change, net-zero business is being funded by people playing money tricks, the whole thing is like an edifice of scams, deceptions and sleights of hand. In the end I guess it will come tumbling down but meanwhile it is doing much damage.
Thank goodness for this Kenyan farmer and all other farmers around the World who seem to be at the front line of people who are becoming aware of the horrors that climate change and net-zero are unnecessarily inflicting on the world.
Here is wattsupwiththat on the same topic with additional graphs.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/06/19/bbc-worried-about-kenyan-farmers-climate-scepticism/
The Blob and, of course, the MSM, are absolutely petrified of people like him, Reform supporters and people like you, me, Toby et al.
It amounts to one thing and one thing only: The Truth Terrifies Them.
You have the ultimate power: you know the Truth. Vote Reform and wield it.
How does Kenya produce the materials to stand on its own and build a “Green” system? Indeed, how does “Net Zero” West maintain, replace, expand a “Net Zero” system once it reaches it?
The answer in both cases is, of course: It is not possible to do so.
The materials which go into the production and siting of every single “Green” item requires fossil fuels. The UK Government is paying British Steel billions to sack tens of thousands of experts from Port Talbot in order to close down all British steel production. In future all that British Steel will be able to do is recycle metal.
How do you build rigs, cargo ships, cargo containers, girders, machinery etc. with Coke cans? Indeed, how do you make the drills that anchor wind farms to the seabed? What do you lubricate wind farms with when they require millions of barrels per year and you stopped producing any?
The Blob talks about how we must level the world and living conditions, we must help Africa. How do you do that when you destroyed the pharmaceutical industry whose factories can no longer be built and whose products can no longer be produced since they contain oil by-products?
This young man in Kenya, one of the most poor places I have ever been, tells it as it is. He has more intelligence than any rich person ever had and infinitely more than any corrupt Scientist or non-Reform politician.
I’ll leave it with one more thought: we cannot recreate stained glass windows; the knowledge was lost. What do we do when we realise we need steel? There will be nobody at Port Talbot to ask, the internet won’t have electricity and the libraries will have long disappeared as will any Heretic books on making oil by-products.
Something I thought of yesterday: the EU has started a trade war over Chinese electric vehicles, a war they cannot win. What happens to Happy Clappy if the Chinese simply say “We aren’t selling you the items your EV industries need”? Energy Security indeed.
Unwanted EVs will destroy an already tottering Chinese economy. Mark my words.
In some ways, I wish they would, nor the items for our wind and solar scamdustries..
I’m going to assume Sir Christopher Hohn is part of the WEF Brigade?
I am sure that must be a given. These people really are Yuva Hari’s “useless eaters.”
Why the fuss?. I like millions of others have dumped my BBC licence. Let them witter on in their own little echo chamber. Nobody cares.
I work in agriculture and a year or two ago I attended a seminar in which a fertiliser expert presented a paper. He could barely disguise his anger at the expectation that farmers worldwide should cut their fertiliser inputs as nothing will bring Africans out of poverty more than being able to increase their yields. While in the West we definitely use too much nitrogen fertiliser, it is the worst type of arrogance to think that others should cut their inputs too. They starve, we sit in smug, ivory towers.
This is a great article.
Thank you for covering the climate issues. Robert Bryce publicized Machogu’s Substack months ago and hopefully he can make a difference. I lived in West Africa in the 60s and not much has changed in the living conditions of ordinary Africans in the intervening years. We now have the new colonialism perpetrated by the West in the form of green new deals and from the Chinese who make loans that can ever be repaid while extracting resources to make products to sell to Western consumers.
Great response by Jusper on GB News and a great expose of the “Big Green” propaganda money trying to impoverish us all.