In a previous article, Global Climate Confusion, I covered some of the reasons why the official narrative on our climate does not ring true. However, many people still find it hard to believe that they have not been told the truth, wondering, ‘why would they lie to us?’
So, why would they?
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore was asked who is responsible for promoting unwarranted climate fear and what their motives are. His reply is deeply revealing: “A powerful convergence of interests. Scientists seeking grant money, media seeking headlines, universities seeking huge grants from major institutions, foundations, environmental groups, politicians wanting to make it look like they are saving future generations. And all of these people have converged on this issue.”
We can add to that list the UN with its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, along with political & social ideologies and foreign rivals.
A number of these elements overlap and with the momentum of emotnal, business and political commitments already made, the whole scenario takes on a life of its own.
United Nations / IPCC
The United Nations has a key role. The body was conceived during World War II with a charter to do what the League of Nations had not been able to in preserving peace and security, but with an expanded role, adding human-rights elements, international justice, and general well-being. The UN was given a shiny reputation and a grand headquarters, maybe more in hope than expectation, with ‘saint’-like General Secretaries such as U Thant, Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan, with large secretariats and proliferating agencies. It is all paid for with taxes.
There has not been a world war since 1945, but this is more down to the military and economic strength of the United States than anything the UN has achieved. Indeed, in the many regional, civil and proxy wars, the UN seems to have been remarkably ineffective, not least in its peace-keeping duties – such as during the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Even when supposedly promoting peace in Gaza in recent times, some sections within UNRWA have been contributing to the conflict.
The UN is not value-free. Current Secretary General António Guterres says; “No one wants a world government. But we must work together to improve world governance”(!). Guterres’ background is as Socialist Prime Minister in Portugal, President of Socialist International, then head of the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees. As an ideology, socialism favours state over individual, central planning over market-choice, atheism over respect for God.
The UN and climate change
It’s said that the UN needed to find other ways to justify its position and foster its world governance aims. It found an opportunity in the environmental movement – something to unite the world, and something which needed global oversight. Enter multi-millionaire Maurice Strong, regarded as “the man who, more than any other, redefined a trace gas as the meal ticket for tens of thousands of climate functionaries – the same people whose light-fingered heirs are today gathered in Paris’”(COP21).
Strong was “a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology”. He organised the early meetings for the UN: The Earth Summit, The Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and the UN Environment Program (UNEP). The 'woke capitalist' was, however, caught in a huge bribery scandal, fled to China and was stripped of his many eco awards.
A Fox News 2007 report said it shows, “the tangled nest of personal relationships, public-private partnerships, murky trust funds, unaudited funding conduits, and inter-woven enterprises that the modern U.N. has come to embody—and which Maurice Strong has done so much to create”. Embarrassing as this was, the eco-cause continued with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCCs founding charter is based on the pre-determined assertion of a link between human activity and climate change. If this link was proven not to be there, the Panel would have to close down (and so, indeed it should!). This informs its quasi-scientific, partisan approach.
Political & social ideologies
1. Power & control
What do the member states think of the climate narrative and its authoritarian effect? The vast majority of countries making up the UN have low scores for democratic freedom (see democracy index and 'human freedom index'). Only 8% of the world’s population (14 countries) have ‘Full Democracies’. Therefore, overall, UN members are inclined to authoritarian policies and are opposed to anything that would threaten their domestic power. Their countries are also less well off than the more liberal-democratic nations, but they don't want to apply the liberal-democratic approaches that would help prosperity. Instead, they are going to be happy with anything that will move wealth from the West without the related wealth-creating and human-rights reforms.
For other countries, anything that reduces the agency of the electorate is going to be attractive to the bureaucrats, as the long-standing ideals of democratic choice have been widely substituted for elite control (viz Brexit obstructionism). The EU has been seen as a model for world governance with its oligarchic executive and show parliament. Only in the face of dire electoral peril does the UK government start to roll back the more damaging consequences of CO2-phobia.
2. Money
The UN has a formal partnership agreement with the World Economic Forum. One wonders what is in it for the hundreds of billionaires and government representatives at Davos?
'Green deals' consume a lot of tax-payer money.
'Green deals' consume a lot of tax-payer money. According to the UK government, '£16.4 billion of expenditures which received financing (were) raised in (the) financial year 2021 to 2022' (£8.6 billion in 2022/23). This includes funding for over 200,000 electric vehicles (EVs) and charging points (while EV market demand has been decreasing due to insurance, fire-risk and other disincentives). The US, disturbingly, is spending massively more than this. And the World Economic Forum in 2022 gleefully announced that net zero by 2050 will cost us 'an extra $3.5 trillion a year ...equivalent to half of global corporate profits, a quarter of world tax revenue and 7% of household spending.'
The public might believe that these huge sums of their money just virtuously convert themselves into helping the planet, without worrying too much about how. In truth, the money obviously gets spent in the form of grants and subsidies to organisations for various projects, probably without too much scrutiny as to their eco-effectiveness. No doubt, there’s a hard-nosed scramble to get this windfall cash. Often, it’s quite brazen; for example, energy suppliers like Octopus moan about the delay in a tax-funded grid connection for a projected solar site - in not-so-sunny Northern Ireland of all places.
And just to give one subsidy example: wind farms are paid even if their power is not needed! This was highlighted recently when generating companies were censured for charging 10% more than they should for ‘curtailments’. When the wind is blowing and there is more generation than needed, we pay them for the energy the grid can’t use, adding £40 to the average bill! Presumably this is because their cost-effectiveness is so low they would go out of business without this extra money. The rising overall subsidy is over £110/MWh (megawatt hours).
These anti-CO2 command-economy edicts and subsidies ... benefit entities other than consumers and shift massive amounts of money, resources & political agency out of our hands.
These anti-CO2 command-economy edicts and subsidies distort the market and thus make things more expensive; they also work less well and stop better solutions being developed. This comes as a huge ‘Opportunity cost’. As we saw with ESGs (another UN/WEF sponsored authoritarian scheme), they benefit entities other than consumers and shift massive amounts of money, resources & political agency out of our hands. Undue collusion between government and business at the expense of the population is an important aspect of fascism.
Related issues
There are a number of other significant related matters that also need to be factored in to the discussion on climate change. These include:
1. Energy shortages
We’re already highly indebted by Covid borrowing. A recent report by the UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation points out that the required energy infrastructure cannot be afforded in time, so we can expect shortages in electricity (and all other services that depend on it). Professor Gordon Hughes states: “Realistically the reduction in private consumption would have to be 8% to 10% for 20 years. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war periods and even then, never for more than a decade.” This alone should make us wake up (and it seems it has with recent UK announcements on gas generation plants). However, the WEF promotes 'degrowth' for us - a consequence of its disturbing slogan: “You will have nothing and you will be happy.”
2. Food shortages
The protests of the farmers in Europe and the UK have reached the public's notice despite media muting. Farming practices release 'greenhouse gases' not only for beef but also for fertilisers made using natural gas. So there is a programme to shut them down - all geared towards 'global warming'.
3. Environment
As with all mass-influencing campaigns, it helps if there is a grain of truth. Climate is changing – but it appears to be doing so naturally - and it has the benefits of extending growing seasons and product diversity. Where it provides greater challenges, adaptation strategies can be devised, but they need to be geared to those nations' priorities and not to UN/WEF dogma.
Some of the minor activities wrapped up in Net Zero spending are genuinely helpful: reducing plastic, pollution, energy and other waste, promoting bio-balance, better pesticides, greener cities, quieter electric transportation.
But these must all be done transparently and with all the negative costs identified. There is little doubt that they could all have been done at a tiny fraction of the Net Zero cost. As the Duke of Norfolk says about changes in ecology on his Sussex farm, while keeping it profitably growing food: “Let's listen to all the science, not just that bit that suits our entrenched positions”.
4. Censorship
This coercive impoverishment of the West, based on an evident falsehood or part-truth, needs a massive propaganda scheme to survive. We saw this in Covid, and the same techniques are still being used. The BBC created the Trusted News Network (Newspeak!) to coordinate what was acceptable across the English-speaking world. Google suppresses search results and attaches warnings to videos. The UK Army has its hybrid warfare division, 77 Brigade, that was turned against its own population during Covid.
As almost all sectors of funded society have something to gain out of the climate narrative, it's surprising how many there are who dissent; of course, these individuals and bodies are notably less well-funded, often receiving next to nothing at all – but they tend to be robust, persistent, and continue to speak out, no matter to what extent they are ‘cancelled’.
It's easy to paint individual dissenters as rebels (and some ‘victims’ maybe relish this too much!) but beware 'false flag' operations (e.g. social media accounts) where fake actors speak nonsense, justifying 'misinformation' reprisals. Many who support man-made (anthropogenic) global warming struggle to refute the genuine arguments made against it. Instead, they just assert that it’s 'settled science'. But science is an enquiry process and so is never settled, least of all with a highly complex multi-disciplinary system like climate, whose mechanisms are still only partly understood.
5. Foreign powers
China, radical Islamic countries, and other rivals, while vying for top-dog status, are obviously happy for the West to follow a debilitating course, and their many agents (academia, media, politicians & aides) promote it. China has corraled most of the rare-earth metals needed for batteries and other electronics so they can control this market, at the same time supplying the world while using coal-fired power. CO2 does not seem high-risk to them.
Let's listen to all the science, not just that bit that suits our entrenched positions.
Honouring His ways
Patrick Moore’s above-noted 2011 comment about motives (scientists & universities hankering after grants, newspapers after headlines, eco-dogma and political virtue-signalling) are only too well-known. But they are relatively benign compared to the overarching move towards world-wide authoritarianism. This erodes the power of democracy, with its implicit valuing of individuals and their God-given dignity. This in turn leads to a breakdown of the Christian-inspired work practices that lead to prosperity.
Along with this is the seeming hatred of mankind with an overall policy of 'degrowth', diminishing the flourishing of humankind, with reduced freedoms, food, heat and space. Also, there’s the drive towards a reduction in population, with social policies favouring abortion and opposing marriage and families.
At the end of the day, national leaders will ignore the UN/WEF if it doesn't suit them and if they can get away with it (as with recent UK decisions around Net Zero). We need to pray that our societal leaders fulfil their God-given mandates to honour His ways.
The crazy thing is that we really do need a world-wide movement – but one of grace, not of coercion. There is only one who is Sovereign and He brooks no other (the first law of life). So this feels a lot like a Tower of Babel moment!
A work of God
It seems God is in favour of nations (note, plural), and opposes too much power concentration. It’s interesting that one of the world’s most powerful nations, the United States, has a constitution that recognises man's evil potential and has many checks and balances to try to mitigate that. When these break down (as is currently being attempted) that union of states will no doubt also break down, as other great centres of power have done throughout history.
It seems God is in favour of nations (note, plural), and opposes too much power concentration.
The biggest previous empire, that of the British, was dissolved – but peacefully, and possibly prematurely for some of its constituents. The beneficial influence of this tiny island nation was surely the result of a work of God over the course of several centuries, and often in the teeth of its organised religion and politics.
It was a work in a ‘remnant’ of people who were motivated by His Spirit, inspired with His love and guided by His Word.
For those who continue to love and serve Christ in the world in the present day, we’re biblically instructed to “take up the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand (Eph 6:13)."
Jon Sharp has worked as a software dev and latterly as a cultural apologist. He is founder of the website Knowing the Times
