Elite green billionaire funders are mobilising their forces to promote the idea that climate ‘reparations’ must be paid by the countries that were first to industrialise. Ahead of today’s opening of the latest COP in the United Arab Emirates, the Guardian claimed new analysis had revealed that the U.K. was responsible for almost twice as much “global heating” as previously thought when its colonial history was taken into account. This “first of its kind” analysis by Carbon Brief claims to offer “thought-provoking fresh perspectives on climate justice”.
The reparations shake-down is a collectivist invention that flies in the face of the astonishing benefits that continue to flow to humanity from industrialisation. Harnessing fuel from natural hydrocarbons has gradually released millions, and then billions, of people from a lifetime of back-breaking manual labour. The improvements in the standards of living and overall quality of life would have been unimaginable to previous generations. On an unprecedented scale, humans freed from a life of toil have widened scientific and intellectual life leading to major advances in medicine, clean water, human comfort and longer life spans. As humans conditions started to ease, it often led to a dramatic flowering of intellectual enlightenment and wider democratic freedoms.
Many would argue that, far from coughing up reparations, the countries that led the way in this leap of human progress should be thanked for their pioneering work in improving the human lot on Earth. Seen in this light, the extremist Net Zero and ‘Just Stop Oil’ movements are a decadent return to primitivism, and little more than uneducated fantasies about nature and the human condition.
The science backing the idea of climate reparations is the usual modelled nonsense-on-stilts. As with most green and collectivist Net Zero projects, there is no widespread democratic support behind the idea of giving away billions of pounds for ‘climate justice’, even if such a concept could be defined. As always, in seeking to understand such campaigns, we first look at the money backing the unworkable idea. The Guardian is supported by billionaire cash, most notably $20 million provided by the Gates Foundation. Carbon Brief exists mainly due to the funding it receives from the European Climate Foundation, an umbrella green activist group that is backed by wealthy ‘philanthropists’ such as Bloomberg, Hewlett and Extinction Rebellion-funder Sir Christopher Hohn.
In the cosy cabal of climate catastrophism, the same names and links occur with circular regularity. Covering Climate Now (CC Now) is backed by the Guardian, funded by green foundation money and feeds ready-to-publish climate disaster material to over 500 media outlets. This year, Damian Carrington was awarded a CC Now ‘Journalist of the Year’ award for an “extraordinary” body of work. The “planet is on fire” said Kyle Pope, chair of the CC Now judging panel, and this year’s winners exemplified the best in public-spirited journalism. Quelle surprise, Damian Carrington is also the Environment Editor of the Guardian and wrote the latest climate reparations story.
The Guardian and Carbon Brief story relies heavily on a recent paper written by a number of academics working out of known green activist units in the University of East Anglia and the Potsdam Institute. It attempts to measure the impossible, namely the global ‘heating’ caused by past colonial activities from countries such as Britain, France and the Netherlands. It is riddled with ‘estimates’, then computations based on estimates, all run up on the ubiquitous climate models. It assumes that human-caused carbon dioxide drives the climate thermostat, causing 1.1°C of warming since the Little Ice Age eased a couple of hundred years ago. It attributes ‘heating’ to any industrialisation that occurred in colonial times, even if, as in the case of the nationwide railway system built in India, the benefit has long accrued to the former colony.
Writing in the Guardian, Dr. Simon Evans of Carbon Brief notes that former colonial countries are tied to a responsibility to “support the climate response in less developed countries”. This argument might have wider appeal if it could be shown that a changing climate had led to more extreme weather events. In fact there is no evidence of this, with little change reported in the incidence and severity of many natural disasters. In fact during the last 100 years, humans have used the wealth created by exploiting hydrocarbons to protect themselves against natural disasters and death rates have plunged by over 90%. Western advocates for reparations often cite the example of Tuvalu, a group of Pacific island said to be about to disappear beneath rising sea levels – a story somewhat spoilt by research that revealed recent land growth in these particular locations.
At the heart of the climate reparations grift is the “loss and damage” fund agreed at last year’s COP meeting. Why was this agreed? Science writer Roger Pielke Jnr. notes that one reason rich countries were happy to sign the framework is because “arguments over loss and damage can go on for years, for decades, before any money changes hands”. He notes the role played by “contested science”, a matter not helped by the different interpretations of climate change held within different bodies of the United Nations. “So, the narrow definition of climate change, which has bureaucratic and political reasons, makes loss and damage compensation subject to contested science, and in the real world it places it out of reach”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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I remember seeing this Romanian MEP with a handful of others denouncing the covid lunacy when it was in full swing and drawing hope from their actions.
And then I saw the zero impact it had and my eyes opened even wider to the total farce that is our system, the EU and the joke we call democracy in the west.
It works if rulers act with restraint, but when they don’t and they bulldoze over everything and everyone to impose their own policies you realise our freedom and democracy is in the gift of our rulers.
It’d nice that this MEP denounces what many of us see, but in terms of effect, it could be him, me or Bugs Bumny saying it. It will move the dial exactly zero degrees.
Pessimist!
Realist
I’m still glad he is saying it – someone has to, and he has the guts to do it. I believe it is having an effect because it can’t only be here that Terhes and his group are re tweeted and cited.
Thank God for his like.
Let them. All good people with rational things to say and who have a desire for freedom speak face-to-face anyway. The control freaks are unwittingly forcing the creation of the alternative world they so fear.
Optimist!
Being optimistic is exactly what they don’t want us to be. Love always wins. Value and encourage individual interactions. It’s the only way to beat the Borg.
That’s why they closed the pubs down during the Covid lunacy. They couldn’t possibly have people discussing the lunacy and concluding that it was unjustified and completely moronic.
Yes..it’s truly Orwellian, Well I’m not joining in, neither should you, and if enough of us don’t it won’t work……how are they going to ban, or correct, or stop millions of us?
They can say anything they fricken want..it doesn’t make it true or feasible…just like I’m never having the jag, and I’m never eating ze bugs!!!?
I’m aware that in my lifetime that real fascism and communism has been overturned..and I suspect it’s just the little things..the people who just don’t go along..
the little acts of rebellion…and at least now we also have more ways to communicate than ever before no matter how hard they try to stop it….…some other ‘platform’ will pop-up….
…it really bothers them, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop it if it didn’t…
David and Goliath
David won that battle I recall.
Controlling information through intimidation and explicit controls saps government credibility and makes rumors spread more readily, thus creating ever more work for busy censors. Media Control in China, He Qinglian.
He Qinglian’s censorial officedates back to Tang times.
The Chief Censor is responsible for making Chinese media a consistently reliable source of information so, in case of an epidemic or a war, everyone can trust what they’re being told.
Chinese media provided consistently reliable Covid information so everyone followed it and only 80,000 of them died – even though only 7% of them were ever locked down. They also kept the economy turning over nicely during the drama: GDP grew 14% in those three years.
With no trustworthy information sources, we Wessies split up, got lost in thickets of misinformation, and 1.2 million didn’t make it.
Friends fall down laughing when I tell them that the current dynasty has never lied nor failed to keep a promise (though so far none has claimed the prize of $100/occurrence).
Here’s a funny thing: when I tell Chinese friends that I’ve never found the government lying or welching on a promise they look at me oddly.
Eventually they say something like, “But, um, why would the government lie to us? What do they have to gain? What’s the point?”.
It’s a different world. We must destroy it without delay.
“In 2023, Canadians reported an all-time low trust level of 40%.
Additionally, trust in English speaking Canada was much lower (37%) than in French Canada (49%).
Additionally, the report found that attitudes towards publicly-funded outlets like the CBC “are more negative.” ”
True North report
The don’t care about disinformation. They want to stop unapproved information.
You cannot take the Fascist and Communist tendencies out of the EU “Elite.” They know nothing else. It’s what and who they are.
Yes spawned from Nazi Germany
“Cristian Terhes, a Romanian MP and Member of the European Parliament,” At least one member has a modicum of common sense. That’s one more than I thought possible!
Unless people on mass say this. ——“I have an education and I own a dictionary and I will choose my own words and thoughts”, then freedom is gone, if it isn’t already. ———–I want a million people to stand with that placard in their hands outside every government building in Europe. We need to STOP this tyranny now or it is the Fourth Reich.
If there is some infallible person or people making the decisions about what is the ‘truth’, please refer me to them.
I would like to meet them.