On Saturday, the Daily Sceptic reported Matt Ridley’s contention that the well-organised campaign against fracking shale gas was part-funded by a Russia concerned about reducing Europe’s dependence on its gas exports. Daniel Hannan wrote in Sunday’s Telegraph that Russia poured £60 million into Western anti-fracking campaigns, “using gullible activists” to spread scare stories about contamination and earthquakes. “Utter tripe,” tweeted the investigative journalist David Rose, stating that there was simply no evidence for the claim, but noting that the activists had all the money they needed from “Sir Christopher Hohm and his buddies”.
Rose is correct in drawing attention to the huge sums of money that pour into the thousands of green activist organisations that have sprung up over the last 20 years. Sir Christopher Hohm is a billionaire hedge fund manager and has given Extinction Rebellion nearly £200,000. But unsurprisingly, none of the gifts, bequests and grants to the countless green operations are labelled, “A present from a grateful Russia.” Of course, any foreign power seeking influence could easily channel money undetected.
Russia’s hand is clearly detectable in the anti-fracking campaigns of the last decade, and by implication in the wider green movement. Unlike most conspiracy theories about Russia meddling in Western politics, Matt Ridley suggests, “this one is out there in plain sight”. He continued in an article written in 2019: “The head of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the Russians, as part of a sophisticated disinformation operation, ‘engaged actively with so-called non-government organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas’.”
Ridley also reported that the Centre for European Studies found that the Russian Government had invested $95 million in NGOs campaigning against shale gas. In addition, the TV station Russia Today (RT) ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”.
In the United States, a House of Representatives 2018 Science Committee investigated Russia’s attempts to influence domestic energy policy by exploiting social media. It reported that both Republicans and Democrats agreed that the Kremlin was “manipulating environmental groups in an attempt to carry out their agenda”. The Kremlin will use “any and all tools” to preserve Russia’s dominant energy status. The committee found that documents supplied by social media groups “confirmed” that Russian agents were exploiting social media platforms in an effort to “disrupt domestic energy markets, suppress research and development of fossil fuels, and stymie efforts to expand the use of natural gas”.
The committee also quoted a private speech made in 2014 by the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, disclosed first in WikiLeaks. She talked about the struggle of dealing with Russian-backed environmental groups, noting:
We [the State Department and the U.S.] were up against Russia pushing oligarchs and others to buy media. We were even up against phoney environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, ‘Oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem, for you’, and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from Russia.
Four recent years of Republican political control put the tin hat on any moves to disrupt fracking in the U.S., with the result that its plentiful natural gas is a quarter of the U.K. price. At the same time, Theresa May pushed the increasingly implausible Net Zero policy into law, while Boris Johnson had a Damascene conversion at the altar of Sir Patrick Vallance and turned into the Government’s Green Activist-in-Chief.
Far from seeking secure and reliable energy security, the U.K. Oil and Gas regulator recently ordered two fracking wells in Lancashire to be sealed with concrete. A two-year moratorium on fracking remains in place in the U.K. The move followed years of campaigning by green activist groups, citing non-existent pollution and earth shakes similar to the effect of someone sitting on a chair. The Government’s own Climate Change Committee says there must be a “presumption against exploration” of oil and gas. Tim Eggar, the Chairman of the Oil and Gas Authority, claims the debate about climate change is over, and warns that the oil and gas industry’s “social licence to operate is under serious threat”.
Few green groups in the last three years have been more extreme and high profile than Extinction Rebellion (XR), an organisation that has collected millions of pounds in donations to fund its disruptive and provocative public protests. As David Rose notes, it has succeeded in raising large sums from wealthy donors. But before its first lengthy blockade of London’s bridges and roads in April 2019, its co-founder Roger Hallam was known mostly to viewers of RT. In a lengthy ‘why-are-you-so-very-wonderful’ interview, Hallam suggested that street blockages were the “pathway to the revolution”. His view was that the optimum point for such protest was two or three steps above “decent civil disobedience”. In his view, disruption and property damage is “good stuff”. Hallam has also said that “sacrifice is losing liberty and ultimately dying for the cause and that brings more people out into the street”.
XR sprang into life in the U.K. in late 2018, but it is interesting to note that similar operations suddenly appeared in many other countries. An early investigative article on the group in the Finnish limastotiede blog casts an interesting light on these early formations. “Similar campaigns seem to have appeared almost simultaneously in other countries too. Is it only imitation, or is there some international coordination in play?” it asked.
It is possible that XR had a part to play in the wave of school strikes that brought Greta Thunberg to international prominence. In an early Facebook post, Thunberg admitted that she had been contacted around the middle of 2018 by Bo Thoren “whose group wanted to do something about the climate crisis”. It was Thoren, later a leading member of XR Sweden, who suggested a school strike to the impressionable Thunberg. When the school strikes briefly hit the U.K., Roger Hallam said they were “cool”, while the Government Energy Secretary at the time, Claire Perry, said that if she was younger she would have joined them herself.
XR is engaged in a constant and ongoing campaign to irritate and inconvenience law-abiding members of the public, but it is usually careful to claim that it is non-violent. Occasionally, the “peace and love” shtick slips a bit. Last November, the Canadian activist David Suzuki, who runs a green foundation that receives millions of dollars a year from wealthy donors, warned about the risk of XR’s activism morphing into eco-terrorism if Western governments didn’t do more to advance the green agenda. In a subsequent media interview, he said: “We are in deep, deep doo-doo. This is what we’re coming to. The next stage after this, there are going to be pipelines blown up if our leaders don’t pay attention to what’s going on.”
Suzuki later explained that his remarks were “spoken out of extreme frustration”, but Zain Haq, XR Canada’s National Action and Strategy Coordinator added: “Not only will pipelines be blown up, but we can be certain that world leaders will be put on trial for treason or worse – be killed.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: In an earlier version of this piece, Sir Christopher Hohm was described as “Sir Christopher Holm”. This has now been corrected. Thanks to Ben Pile for pointing out that mistake. Ben also thinks the evidence that the Russians helped to fund anti-fracking movements and protests is very flimsy. For more on this, see here.
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Watermelons, green on the outside, red in the middle.
And look where it has got us. Christopher Booker was right – The Real Global Warming Disaster.
That insult’s accuracy flounders on the question of whether or not Russia is communist.
Old habits die hard…
Communism/socialism was not a Russian invention, nor was it what the Russian people wanted. It was imposed on them against their will, and now that they are rid of it, they are not going back their willingly.
Why’s that then?
Russia knows the damage that communism does to an economy and a society.
They’re perfectly capable of wielding it as a weapon against their opponents without subscribing to it themselves, much as you keep the pointy end of a sword aimed firmly away from yourself.
Especially when their opponents are behaving like demented cretins!
In fairness, they are green on the outside, red in the middle, regardless of where they get their money from. The more extreme green nonsense is mostly just radical collectivism repackaged.
Russia is of course not communist – but no one in the politically illiterate UK even knows that.
It’s neo-communist. A mix of communism and fascism.
It’s more ‘state capitalism’. What Marxism always turns into
The closest term to “state capitalism” is fascism, which is state controlled capitalism.
Mussolini’s economic policy was identical to the British Labour Party’s theory of guild socialism.
When that couldn’t be implemented, his policy, in practice, was an incomplete version of the theory known as German socialism.
Fascism is not capitalist, it is socialist.
I didn’t say fascism is capitalistic. Since capitalism implies a free market, which implies little to no government, it is obvious that state controlled capitalism is not capitalistic in nature. It is the general term used for an economic system based on currency and amassing wealth where the government dictates the rules and the plan. And considering how easily certain “thinkers” such as Aleksandr Dugin jump from fascism to socialism, the relation there is clear.
In which case, calling it capitalism is a misnomer. You can’t have ‘state controlled capitalism’, by definition. What you describe is a form of socialism: German socialism.
There is no such thing as ‘state capitalism’, the term is moronic, used to pretend the exact opposites of socialism and capitalism are the same thing. It’s a genocidal term.
Environmentalism is green on the outside, red in the middle, while National Socialists are brown on the outside, red in the middle.
If Vladimir Putin were Rastafarian, it would not change the nature of environmentalism.
You overstate the degree of political literacy found here.
Founders
What a totally ridiculous smear headline.
There are two basic reasons for not wanting fracking. One relates to the huge levels of pollution.
The other is even more basic. it relates to something called the Energy Return on Investment (EROI). If a fox expends one unit of energy to get five back from catching and eating a rabbit then it flourishes. If it uses five units of energy to get one back from the catch then it starves.
The estimated EROI of an oil find like Spindle Top in Texas was 100:1. EROIs with conventional oil have in general been declining ever since. There’s a lot of doubt as to whethr there is any positive EROI from fracking since so much energy is expended on transporting all the raw materials, drilling down so far and then going horizontally etc.
And, unlike conventional oilfields, which generally last decades, “tight” oil fields last a few years only.
“EROI of a typical well is likely between 64:1 and 112:1, with a mean of approximately 85:1″
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jiec.12040
I’d be interested in seeing what’s led you to a different conclusion.
That claim makes fracking less energy consumptive than conventional wells. in fact, if there was a fracking well with an EROI of 112:1 it would be a better source of energy than Spindle Top – where the oil shot out and fountained high in the air. It’s like claiming electric cars are carbon neutral without calculating the energy required to dig up and process and fabricate all the stuff required to make them.
Well, Londo, why not let them go bust if they have got it wrong?
It certainly isn’t taxpayers’ money being pumped into fracking.
Very unlike Big Wind.
Exactly. Cost – what you have to pay, the actual baseline cost before markups – is a close proxy for energy requirements.
Not just cost, but energy security and independence.
I agree with you on this, and your post above. For now it’s probably cheaper and more energy efficient / environmentally friendly to repair old fossil-fuel burning cars, that mine all the materials needed for building new electric cars.
Still waiting, chap. And no, it’s not like an apples to electric strawmen bad analogy.
What’s behind your “facts”? I’ve shown you mine. Where’s yours?
Tell us more about the EROEI for renewables, why don’t you?
Here’s an actual petroleum geologist, Art Berman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkzQRiiN1Jw
Yes the petroleum geologist consistent in saying that gas and oil couldn’t be obtained from shale rocks.
Impossible.
As far as I can tell this link takes us to a discussion about the extraction of shale oil. The planned extraction of shale gas appears to be an entirely different calculation. Do you hqve any evidence which is pertinent to the debate here please? If you do I am sure we would all be pleased to see it, ifnot an apology might be in order
I remain unconvinced that it’s above 1, when you consider exploration, mining, refining, manufacture, distribution, installation, maintenance, disposal, and keeping enough wetware alive to do that work.
That last bit is the one that I never see touched on. Unreliables need to generate enough to sustain the entire energy requirements of all the humans required at every step of the process, or else what exactly is their point?
You can’t alter physics with subsidies, but we seem determined to try.
A wind turbine can never produce sufficient electricity in its lifetime to manufacture another wind turbine. That’s perpetual motion.
And the point of wind turbines is to provide electricity to a population so there is little excess to allow for manufacturing more wind turbines.
When the wind fails in a region there is no electricity for either which then demands, for example, a Europe wide, interconnected grid to transfer electricity with functioning wind turbines to the areas where the wind has failed.
That means interconnectors on a massive scale which are all subject to geopolitical events.
It also means substantial over production in every region to allow for failure of another region.
Well done Londo. You have just made the most logical reason why windmills and glass mirrors should NOT be used to generate power.
Thank you.
He’s made an assertion. What’s backing it up? Bear in mind what site we’re on.
[EDIT] Apologies, I fully agree with your point. I’m just miffed that he’s handwaved away fracking without showing his working.
Yes indeed, straight from the BBC handbook!
Huge levels of pollution? Evidence please.
There is none.
“There’s a lot of doubt as to whethr there is any positive EROI from fracking since so much energy is expended on transporting all the raw materials, drilling down so far and then going horizontally etc.”
Utterly ridiculous statement from someone conforming to green blob lies. The materials required for a fracking site fit onto an area about the size of a football field. The principe ‘materials’ are water and sand and horizontal drilling has been done for generations in the North Sea and every other Oil well in the world.
I followed two wind turbine blades and a small part of the tower being transported along the M74 yesterday. Traffic was backed up for miles. Just two of them and the tower were far longer than a football field, and the renewables industry needs hundreds of thousands of these individual blades none of which can be recycled, they are buried in landfill at the end of their lives.
Individual foundations of these monstrosities comprise thousands of tons of concrete and steel which will likely never be removed. They take hundreds, if not thousands of lorry loads of material just for a single foundation. The road network cut into the countryside to facilitate this on a windfarm are extensive and used for nothing thereafter other than maintenance.
Seabed destruction on inshore windfarms is enormous and vastly expensive. For all this the UK is subsidising the wind industry with £10Bn+ a year to provide intermittent electricity that must be backed up with Coal/Gas/Nuclear/Biomass or interconnectors to foreign countries.
Convince me there is sense in here somewhere.
Come on RedHot,
There is an upside.
Her Majesty gets over £200 million for her Crown Estate for “allowing” offshore windmills around our coast. Mind you with the current expenditure by her family in court settlements she needs every penny
Given the energy content of the gas released, I can only conclude that, if fracking is not worthwhile, it must be hugely more energy-dependent than I had imagined. Compared to getting provisions, equipment and personnel onto and off an offshore installation every couple of weeks, I’d have thought that fracking would be relatively cheap.
Environmentalism is opposed to all energy.
I would be extremely careful at this point about falling into the trap of divide and rule that has once again been clearly set for us. Are we really going to do as the US Democrats and conveniently blame Russia for every outcome we are upset about? Who really benefits from this?
The accusation is a joke anyway. Because, assuming it’s true, that’s just the game that everyone everywhere plays. As if western nations have never meddled in the affairs of other countries for commercial gain. Please…
Exactly Stewart. And this is why I am surprised and disappointed to read some of the comments to this article, and the article itself.
I also was taken aback by the use of ‘unhinged psychopath’ in the article here yesterday.
Yes, Putin’s opponents just assassinated themselves.
Western politicians have even interfered in the affairs of their own nation for commercial gain – see Shellenberger on the way US politicians have sabotaged nuclear power both for green profits and, paradoxically, for fossil fuel interests.
You have to be gullible enough to swallow the propaganda for the misinformation to succeed.
Well LovelyGirl,
The Biden/O’ Bama/Clinton Crime syndicates benefit for a start in Ukraine to name just one dysfunctional country.
Hopefully former Coke addict Hunter Biden is up to his neck with Ukrainian dodgy deals.
Going to do? Haven’t we already done? It was the Russians wot done Brexit.
Meanwhile on Planet Earth, Countries/companies bribe people in other Countries to promote/protect their National output.
Russia gains hugely from other countries not having their own energy.
Hang on. While I’m fully open to the possibility – indeed, the likelihood – that Russian money funded the crusties, the only evidence I can see presented here is some clumsy RT propaganda, plus the opinion of career politicians.
And we know how much their word is worth.
On principle, the more that I’m inclined to believe something, the harder I question it. So I’ll need to see the receipts on this one.
Who benefits from the green bs … I think we need to look to a big country to Russia’s east to see who really benefits from all this green non-science, who has been polluting our universities with their money and turning them woke.
I always suspected it was the House of Saud funding them.
Green groups are nothing if not incredibly wealthy and rolling in money. They probably have competitive bidding.
Off topic but the Guardian appears to have stopped publishing the daily covid death figures. Mind you they have the “we’re all going to die in a nuclear attack” headlines.
I’d have thought the Guardian would be all in favour of a nuclear winter ending global warming.
don’t encourage them…
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nuclear-war-global-warming_n_828496
So that’s where our little green wicked witch of the North here in Scotland gets her instructions from.
The GRauiard no less. Well blow me down as she has stopped publishing daily WuFlu figures as well.
So now Russian money fund’s the green totalitarian orthodoxy? Putin really is being painted as the Satan/Hitler isn’t he…
Russian interest tries to hobble shale gas industry? Daniel Hannan writes?? Give me a fekin break… I’d be more interested in why Rockefeller is pulling investment in fossil fuels, I’d be more interested in why the US and it’s allies have turned the middle east into flames for, let’s be honesy, fossil fuels!
Not on this subject, he isn’t. He gains hugely from other countries crippling their own energy and having to buy from him.
Putin is many things but daft isn’t one of them.
Gosh, the Russians have been promoting their main export and trying to beat out their competition by any means. Well, I’m sure that’s never happened before in the history of trade and commerce.
And western governments never ever try to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries for the commercial gain of their companies. Ever. And certainly not in the oil and gas industry. God forbid.
I honestly don’t see how your post could justifiably attract down votes. Weird.
We’ve hit a big deposit of salt on the way down to the shale.
Who says they have to be justifiable? Most hobbies aren’t.
Is it normal to blame others for one’s own deluded decisions?
You mean XR, who pushes the UN sustainability goals? But it’s nothing to do with the UN, or the globalist central banking cartel? It’s all those naughty Russians now? LOL
https://nowhere.news/index.php/2019/04/01/astroturfing-the-way-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/
https://nowhere.news/index.php/2019/04/01/dr-gail-marie-bradbrook-compassionate-revolutionary-for-hire/
two under researched downvoters who must be…
“the type of person who conveniently forgets how to read when Xi and Putin release documents extolling the creation of the New World Order
that call on all states “to protect the United Nations-driven
international architecture” and declare that “In order to to accelerate
the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,”
states will have to “take practical steps in key areas of cooperation”
like “vaccines and epidemics control, financing for development, climate
change, sustainable development, including green development,
industrialization, digital economy, and infrastructure connectivity”
h/t James Corbett
Excellent post by Chris Morrison.
Followed by comments by the gormless people who have sucked up the GangGreen agit prop without even thinking about it for two minutes.
Of course, as a Chartered Engineer (retired) who spent his working life supporting efforts to produce reliable and affordable energy, I have a particular perspective.
But there is ample evidence that Russian money has supported the anti fracking anti pipeline campaign. There is even detail about Gazprom and Roznef funds being channelled via a laundering organisation in Bermuda. And of course the Billions from American “Charitable” foundations.
But for those who tell you about fracking causing pollution or earthquakes or flames coming out of the tap, note that they are the very people who will tell you that Covid originated in food imported by China and nothing to do with Wuhan Instatute of Virology at all.
You don’t need to be an expert in Geology or Virology to spot a liar.
And the millions of successful shale fracking wells in America with very few problems all resolved to the EPA’s satisfaction is evidence that fracking does work and does produce cheap and reliable energy. And that those with the expertise make big profits and pay enormous amounts of tax to the government without subsidies.
Compare and Contrast with Solar and Big Wind.
Relying on us regulators isn’t really a mark of quality, the faa is a recent example of US regulators who turn a blind eye to quality at the expense of consumers, we have our own uk regulators that do much the same.
I don’t disagree that fracking could be ok but there will obviously be issues and concerns that need to be adequately addressed by a competent and trustworthy regulator.
let me know when such a regulator exists.
If you want a zero carbon future you have to put in place the alternatives. No point closing down our carbon based system without something to replace it.
I’d prefer anti-frackers to be campaigning FOR wind turbines, nukes etc. Such that fracked gas isn’t needed.
I think they don’t really want a replacement though. Just campaigning for the sake of it.
The carbon they want to get rid of is you.
Agent Smith: I’d like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
That’s the green “thinking”.
But Greens always make great baddies for films as they are evil and trying to hide it with green virtue signalling.
Interesting Emerald that the late (lamented??) consort of Queen Elizbeth 2 – the guy us old sailors called Phil the Greek – is credited as saying just that.
He said in order to “solve the population crisis” he wished to return as an maligned virus.
He should have been a weather forecaster
Maybe Phil the Greek ran in the same circles as Jacques Attali, Attali was a counselor to the French President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991 and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991-1993
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/tyranny/the-stupid-will-believe-it-and-ask-to-be-treated-pandemic-to-depopulate-1981/
Point succinctly made, MH.
Correct.
It’s very easy to do a deal with a guy like Soros and make it look like a business transaction which has nothing at all to do with the massive funding he then puts into green and woke causes destroying our civilisation.
And, it is not Russia, but China who has benefited massively from the Green “movement” (con).
I’d say they both have. Russia is minting it from selling us the gas, oil and coal that we’re pretending that we don’t need, while China flogs us useless unreliable PV and wind boondoggles built with cheap coal energy.
Yes Mike,
Sorearse, Jeffery Grantham, Tom Steyn(?), Hewlett Packard, Gates, ‘Rocketfellers’ etc etc etc The World Banksters (think Carney) I have run out of time to itemise them all.
Putin is just a bit player.
A few “tree huggers” campaigning against fracking pales into insignificance against the US fomenting wars around the world to wean other countries off of Russian gas and back into the arms of US liquified gas shipments.
Wow, £60m into the pockets of green activists.
£32 billion to get track and trace Big Brother QR ID Green pass dystopia pump primed.
Compare and contrast.
I wonder which one Matt Ridley thinks is the greater danger to the ‘free and democratic peoples of the West’.
Sadly Ridley stopped thinking several years ago.
Lockdown is green ideology put into practice.
Did anyone notice the difference between the war in Ukraine and the one in Syria?
In the Ukraine it is the women and children who flee and the young able-bodied men that stay to protect the towns and cities.
Is Syria it is the able-bodied men that flee and the women and children that stay in the towns and cities.
It’s always and ever boat loads of fit young men that the UK’s border patrol ferry into southern ports.
It’s a strange racial phenomenon, isn’t it?
“UK’s border patrol ferry”
Patel’s Taxi Service.
I just hope the Ukrainians aren’t under any illusion that their women and children will be safe in the UK if they’re housed anywhere near our millions of other “refugees”.
Perhaps they are already drooling from their mouths at the prospect of a fresh group of young White girls to groom and rape.
The Ukrainian menfolk, though, might not be as acceptable of it as White British men have proved to be over the last few decades.
Not so much racial as religious, Islam being what it is.
Yes, but it doesn’t explain Millipede and the rest of the dumb MPs nodding through the most destructive piece of legislation, the Climate Change Act. Home grown nutters have got us here, they didn’t need help. But what they did have was loads of financial support from the people behind Carney and the BIS.
I am sure Russia saw an opportunity to stoke the flames, but the fire was already well and truely alight.
Low density energy (wind & solar) is merely a way of boosting rents from land by coercing taxpayers into rewarding people for owning windy/sunny land.
No prizes for guessing which group this tends to reward most.
All of this is nothing compared to the massive campaign funded by a couple of Latin American countries to stop the UK growing its own bananas.
So, what if the Ruskies did put money in.
People don’t want fracking. simple as that. The Russians might have partially funded that sentiment, but they didn’t create it.
And, of course, a few more years of ‘Global Warming’, Latin America will be ‘seen’ to have failed comprehensively! I’m already planning a cactus garden of course.
People who don’t want Fracking also don’t want the lights to go off. Our dependency on gas will last for another 20 years at least, even if we implement insane net-zero in full. Home-produced gas, imported gas – the emissions are the same. We cannot be dependent on imports when we have our own.
It doesn’t matter, BoJo just announced to the world in Poland that it will hurt regular British people. That now is the time to double down on the mad ‘net-zero’ goal. I live 3 miles from the site just past Blackpool, there were practically zero local protesters. We are going to have to continue to ship questionable habitat destructive ‘biomass’ across the Atlantic in heavy oil fueled ships. It’s all an accounting trick.
I’d have thought that the emissions associated with importing gas might just be fractionally worse than making it at home.
People don’t want fracking but then that opposition came from somewhere, the rejection of fracking is ideological.
As I recall, there were the usual MSM scare stories (never authenticated) about tremors that threatened buildings – and of course the stuff from the US about gas coming out of the water supply to domestic houses.
I’m sure it must all be true, since I read it in the Graun (or was it the Mail?).
There may be truckloads of Russian gold going to the enviromentals, but they’d get along fine without it.
Social justice warriors existed long before the term was invented. Tom Wolfe’s story about Leonard Bernstein and his fundraiser for the Black Panthers comes to mind.
At a time when we should be demanding China and the US start compensating the rest of the world for their part creating covid … suddenly Russian has been stirred up to invade UKraine.
Let’s not forget we are owed a lot of compensation from China and the US.
Zalenksy the cabal puppet.
Includes the censored music video they don’t want you to see, showing what a filthy degenerate Zalensky really is.
I’m new to the concept of establishing someone’s degeneracy via music videos. Is this an offshoot of Phrenology that I’ve missed so far?
The very least of our worries.
This has been the case for ages. Greenpeace was founded to spread communist propaganda. They were the originators of the “nuclear winter” hoax. And even to this day they still fight hard to deny Europe’s energy independence. From things like comparing Romania’s nuclear power plant (one if not the safest designs of power plant in use) with Chernobyl and Fukushima (completely different operating principles), all the way to lobbying for renewables.
The article above refers to a Twitter discussion on the high-pitched claim that our energy problems are the fault of Russia. But it does not link to any of them. Perhaps it should. There, sceptics wishing to acquaint themselves with the facts will find out what Chris Morrison has missed in his cribbing a story from Twitter from exactly these links.
https://twitter.com/DavidRoseUK/status/1497874738630336512
https://twitter.com/DavidRoseUK/status/1498255529830981632
At the very least, readers may discover that the correct spelling of the UK billionaire hedge fund manager’s name is H.O.H.N., not Holm. Chris Morrison could have done no original research by investigating Christopher Holm, whoever that poor accused man is.
I have done that research. I have been doing it for well over a decade — since the one before last. And have worked with David Rose on a number of occasions on this issue — who and what is the green movement. And that is why David and I have been challenging this story, even though it comes from people we might count as friends and allies — certainly in the case of Matt Ridley, though perhaps not Daniel Hannan — who, unfortunately, have not done their research, either.
Chris Morrison echoes those claims
That claim is simply false. No such influence has been detected at all. The only sources for such claims are without evidence. They are
I’ll state it again: none of them provide a single shred of evidence. It is entirely hearsay, from people who we might want to note are not known for their commitments to truth.
Sceptics should be committed to truth, since sceptics demand a higher level of evidence and argument than typically is passed off as such in The Guardian, and public debates and policymaking. Not so here, it seems. Says Morrison, ‘none of the gifts, bequests and grants to the countless green operations are labelled, “A present from a grateful Russia”‘. But that is the journalist’s burden: to find out, all the same, where they did come from. And if not, what the mechanisms by which such transfers were obscured should be lifted. Hearsay, innuendo and speculation are not fact and evidence and careful argument.
It is not enough to say “Of course, any foreign power seeking influence could easily channel money undetected”. The argument that any money from Moscow would be of no consequence — no influence — when seen in the context of vastly greater volumes of money from western governments, western billionaires, and western corporations and financial institutions was right under Morrison’s nose. He ignored it. That’s not scepticism. And it’s not investigation.
The inconvenient and uncomfortable fact is that using Russia as a whipping-boy for the UK political establishment misleads us from the facts and lets UK politicians off the hook. It is very western, and British corruption that led to our banning fracking here.
Good “Fact Check” Ben. Rather embarrassing for DS, maybe we’ll see a retraction?
Such things become accepted in the mainstream because they all cross-report each other and nobody does any authentication. Quite what use the modern Press is to the public is increasingly a mystery.
The concept of due diligence is obviously considered incredibly passé by those who pretend to be journalists these days.
You suggest I “cribbed” my story from a twitter discussion and should have provided a link. Indeed I would have, if I knew what you are talking about. I’m obliged for you pointing out my spelling mistake, a practice,I have to admit I gave up long ago – there but for the grace of God and all that. I take it there were no more, your keen eye would have leapt to any, no doubt. And I note you go out of your way to alert us to your decades of experience – again, for myself ,I desist from such promotion – as they say in the marketing business – nobody gives a flying flamingo what you think about yourself.
I think you miss the point of the article. It is mostly a work of reportage. The heading itself ends with a question mark. I report on what has been said in the first paragraph and find space for David Rose’s “utter tripe” remark. You can dismiss a former head of NATOs remarks and both Democrats and Republicans in America, but in reporting what they say I am not just picking A N Other off the street. Agreed, Mrs Clinton got a bit of a Russian fixation in her bonnet when she lost to Trump, but her remarks came two years before that, and she had just concluded a long stint at the heart of the US government.
The whole tone of your impertinent reply seems to be that unless you have the receipts, you should shut up. The idea that we should not report what people say is an astonishing one. Of course much of the evidence is incomplete – it’s why I didn’t write an article stating that Russia had funded an anti-fracking campaign. But it is perfectly legitimate to lay out what we know and speculate about the motives of a country that stood to gain massively by cutting out foreign gas supplies. Or should we not do that – how on earth did so many Cold War reporters find gainful employment covering the old KGB?
Anyway, thank you Ben for your lecture in investigation. Along with your keen nose for a speling mistake – as I say, I’m obliged.
Chris. You have amended the story, seemingly taking care to adjust the spelling of the billionaire in question, but you have still not got the spelling right. It is HOHN. H O H N… HOTEL, OSCAR, HOTEL, NOVEMBER.
You make out that it’s trivial. But how can you even report, let alone investigate, if you cannot correctly identify individuals’ names? At the very least it is embarrassing to the website and the cause of scepticism of policy.
You say that you are merely reporting. But you are reporting only partially. You should have followed up on David Rose’s comments rather than reproduce — “report”, as you put it — the extant claim. You claim that “Russia’s hand is clearly detectable in the anti-fracking campaigns of the last decade”, but that is an analysis, not ‘reporting’, after having signalled that there is a dispute about the facts.
I have no idea what the word “receipts” is standing for in your reply. You can write whatever you want. But if you write something that falls short of doing justice to the matter, then you should expect criticism. I have criticised Ridley and Hannan for their low standards. And I criticised Rasmussen at the time — 2014 – https://www.spiked-online.com/2014/06/23/dont-blame-russia-for-the-anti-fracking-panic/ — and the campaign to explain the West’s problems in the terms of its whipping-boy’s interventions, which had its own momentum even then, hence the events in Eastern Europe that year.
“The Foreign Secretary said the war could last “months and years” as she prepared the British public for “some economic hardship” as a result of the [Russian] sanctions, but vowed to Ukraine that the UK would “suffer economic sacrifices to support you, however long it takes”.”
Excuse me wench, I didn’t vote for that.
Fuel has gone up another 5p/L over the past 3 weeks.
My food budget is getting stretched thinner by the month.
Yet my taxes are being used to pay her salary, so she can fulfil the cult agenda, virtue signal support for neo-nazis and make the economy even worse.
But the weather seems to be turning at least.
“the UK would “suffer economic sacrifices to support you, however long it takes”.”
Put that to a referendum and see what the response is!
Who made the West the policeman of the world? The arrogance (not to mention the hypocrisy!).
‘“Utter tripe,” tweeted the investigative journalist David Rose,’
One of the advantages of being born in the early 50s is having more experience of the World. I remember claims that the KGB was funding Trades Union leaders, academics and politicians like Michael Foot were ‘utter tripe’ until the USSR collapsed, Kremlin records became available and then guess what?
No5 forgetting that SARS CoV 2 being genetically engineered in a Wuhan lab and somehow escaping was ‘utter tripe’ right up until it wasn’t.
The difference is that David Rose has done the investigations, and I with him.
I have spent thousands of hours on this issue.
We have identified the origins of the anti-fracking funding and ideology, its movements and organisations, and its associations.
https://unherd.com/2021/12/does-the-ccp-control-extinction-rebellion/
If the CCP does control XR, it puts a new slant on asking the government to fund your hobby or pastime, given that it’s a foreign government.
The west, and particularly Europe, liberal (socialist) policies opened the door for foreign influence, and I mean all foreign influence, not just Russian.
An acquaintance and her family is being thrown out her rented London home without notice because it’s owned by ‘a’ Ukrainian who now needs it for Ukrainian refugees.
I’m not suggesting that’s wrong, other then for the lady and her family. Refugees deserve compassion and support however, I find it strange they can now afford to fly to freedom wherever they choose in the world and take up residence in a London family home worth, probably, the best part of £1M.
Fortunately our government banned the Chinese electronics giant Huwawi from our public communications infrastructure, but didn’t think to replace it with British designed and manufactured hardware and software, because there are none.
Where does the money come from for the MSM giants, of which there are six I believe, across the western world?
The UK is one of the most influential and powerful countries in the world. It’s natural we would be under attack from global competitors. The problem is we have been so hampered by EU membership what government we had couldn’t make decisions without having it authorised by Brussels. Now we are left with an inexperienced government that’s floundering to learn how to govern the country.
International interference in domestic issues didn’t happen because the Russians or Chinese got clever, it’s because our government and the civil service has got more stupid over the last 40 years and let it happen.
We did it for hundreds of years to other countries, now it’s being done to us and our government is turning to more ‘liberal’ policies for solutions, when that’s been the problem all along.
Whether Russia did/did not fund the Green loonies to protest against fracking, it would have been of no matter if we had pragmatic, political leadership capable of cogent, rational thought with an understanding of economics and scientific process.
The USSR was very good at identifying and exploiting useful idiots. I am sure that Russia retains that legacy expertise.
There wasn’t any denying it even in the beginning. They admitted on record that the climate malarkey was the nonsense that might lead to wealth redistribution. If you are an intelligent person can you really cast your eye over the last forty years and claim that anything that is happening now is unexpected. Forget political posturing this situation was entirely predictable. Either you care where we go from here or you don’t.
The EFN have been promoting nuclear power for decades.
One shocking revelation we found was that the nuclear industry itself was undermining next gen reactors (safe, cheap, non proliferation).
There was so much profit in fabrication the enormous number of 60 year lifetime fuel assemblies, Westinghouse etc would build the expensive reactors at cost.
The new SMRs, especially LFTRs, have a closed fuel cycle. So there’s little incremental revenue in them. Despite being a huge energy innovation.
Sure, in the end, government of all party’s has watched over it all.
So there’s no need to look to big carbon for a perpetrator. Or fake greenery. The industry and it’s woeful regulators are quite sufficient to destroy a future.
If things get really hard then we won’t need a stimulus to dig up our own energy. But it does make you ask, what kind of an insane mindset would make it a virtue for a country to sabotage its own reserves of energy. One of the reasons that this country is on a CIA hotlist is the amount of fossil fuel that we sit on. We have to start thinkng in survival mode.
I know we like being sardonic and taking the piss but sometimes even us fuckwits need to be serious.
Look on the bright side. We are moving into serious waters. There will be no room for sellouts. We are at this point now I wish more intelligent people would acknowledge it.
The headline asks, “How much Russian gold has stuffed the pockets of green activists?”
The answer is none. Nobody in the fiat club uses gold as payment any more. The greatest (true, I believe) “conspiracy” of them all is the one to get people to trust fiat “Monopoly money” that governments can print as needed. A big part of this objective is the effort to vilify so called “gold bugs” or people who still believe that gold or silver are “real money.”
Everyone knows that with any investigation into any scandal one should “follow the money.” Well where does this “money” actually come from? It now, largely and ever-increasingly, comes from a magic (fiat) printing press. I think everything that is happening in the world can trace its roots to the effort to PROTECT this vital printing press. Gold and silver are kryptonite to this movement.
A bit more scepticism about fracking is in order. Currently here it’s gullibility that is the order of the day.
More ridiculousness from ClownNews, falling for the same trick they play every time – associate Russia with anything they dont like. Kissinger and Co and the WEF and The Cabal who have their claws deep in GOVUK also handle Russia, so why dont you put your sceptical head on and investigate that, rather than just sticking to the script they feed you. Stanley Johnson has been running the climate change agenda in the UK for decades, working as a rep for all the usual suspects. He is heavily associated with Extinction Rebellion, and Insulate Britain and all the rest of the green new deal propaganda controlled opposition networks.The people running the show sponsor and run all sides of the narratives. All the worlds a stage.
Because Stanleys equivalents all over the world are getting their script from the same place – much like the covid narrative was fed out and became policy everywhere all at once, so too are the green initiatives. Its the same system of control, just a different department. They have their stooges in every government, committing treason and rolling out antihuman policies on demand no questions asked.
There are serious issues and risks with fracking and to say there arent is to be dishonest.
More info about Stanley in this clip:
The Oxford Global Depopulation Agenda 2025
https://www.bitchute.com/video/LyLretdObH0d/