(Conclusion of Part I)
The slogan for the burgeoning green campaign was ‘think globally, act locally’. This noble principle has been inverted by the powers-that-be, such as those attending World Economic Forum conferences at Davos.. They are acting globally, imposing draconian restrictions on ordinary lives, while putting themselves first. Genuine ecological concerns have been hijacked.
At the turn of the millennium, two decades after the first electoral successes of the Greens, much had changed for the better. Leaded petrol and a plethora of harmful chemicals were banned across the European Union. Factories were cleaner than ever, as were the Volkswagens and Opels that they produced. Population was stable, while deindustrialisation was continuing apace. A greener world was being created with renewable energy and an ecologically-conscious society. So how did the extremism of ‘zero carbon’ take hold of polity?
The answer is not found in the aims and activities of the original green movement. Impetus for the tightening ratchet came from earlier in the twentieth century, when it became apparent that technology could be used to control every aspect of human behaviour, banishing economic unpredictability and social chaos. A future technocracy run by the elite, aided by experts and engineers, was dramatised in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man (1942) warned of the dire implications for humanity.
Over many decades a globalist cabal worked behind the scenes, forming secretive societies such as the Bilderberg Group. Perhaps most significant was a think-tank founded in 1968. The Club of Rome claimed that the challenges of building the necessary post-industrial world were too complex for conventional institutions and political process. Its report The Limits to Growth (1972) followed in the Malthusian footsteps of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), castigated human beings as a cancerous tumour on the planet. The Club of Rome may be likened to a secular Vatican, its apocalyptic scripture guiding the development of a new world order.
Maurice Strong was a major player in creating the structures and funding streams that established climate change as an existential crisis that would justify radical action. Strong enabled dogma to override rational enquiry and atmospheric physics. A successful oil man, Strong was appointed as head of the Canadian overseas development agency, where he commissioned the report Only One Earth: the Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (1971). In 1972 he chaired the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, and he directed the UN Environment Programme.
As the UN lacked teeth, climate concerns needed direct involvement of governments. The administration of Jimmy Carter commissioned The Global 2000 Report, which warned of dwindling natural assets and population growth, calling for a global biosecurity regime. Previously an unremarkable senator, Carter was groomed for the presidency by the Trilateral Commission, a powerful globalist organisation. If Washington wants it, the UN gets it. In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the UN to instil climate policies.
The idea of rising temperatures caused by industrialisation came after the birth of green parties and prioritising of climate action by the UN. In 1976 Stephen Schneider, an academic colleague of Ehrlich, was sounding the siren for a coming ice age, asserting ‘a cold fact the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years’. Thirteen years later Schneider had changed his tune, writing Global Warming: Are we Entering the Greenhouse Century? (1989). A pivotal moment for the new warming scare was in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where developed nations agreed to relinquish sovereignty to Agenda 21.
Brazen lies were accepted practice for lavishly-funded scaremongers. Manipulated statistical models substituted for evidence. In the prestigious Nature journal in 1998 Michael Mann presented his ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing dramatically increasing temperature (using trickery such as removing the medieval warm period). Failed US presidential candidate Al Gore’s book An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and subsequent film were sent to every school. But Gore’s catastrophic predictions proved false. The Himalayan mountain snow has not melted into a devastating Ganges flood. Nowhere has been submerged by rising sea levels, not even the low-lying Maldives.
In Climate: Ecosocialism (2023), the last of his trilogy on the climate change scam, Jeremy Nieboer describes the misanthropic tactics of the climate alarmists: ‘from the outset intimidation was the IPCC’s principal weapon’. Pseudoscientific propaganda is pushed hard through compliant mainstream media. ‘With each decade the IPCC apocalyptic predictions of extinction of the human race due to the CO2 content of the atmosphere become ever more extreme such as to evaporate into fantasy.’ The minds of schoolchildren are filled with unnecessary anxiety.
Yet few scientists or politicians dare to speak out. Popular BBC nature presenter David Bellamy quietly disappeared from television screens after expressing doubts on climate change. In An Appeal to Reason: a Cool Look at Global Warming (2008), former British chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson did not deny climate change, but denounced exaggerated projections and the harm of drastic carbon reduction. He was lambasted, later saying in a speech at University of Bath (25th April 2014) that ‘I have never in my life experienced such extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification’. Lawson’s book appeared in the same year that the Climate Change Act breezed through parliament, 463 MPs voting in favour with only five opposing. This statute decreed that carbon dioxide emissions must reduce by 80%.
The four pillars of the German Green Party (see Part One) are a useful contrast of how the movement started, and how it’s going.
Ecology
The green agenda, originally concerned with emissions from carbon fuel, now casts all carbon dioxide as pollution. This is despite the indispensability of the gas to plant and animal life Interventions on climate change are often nonsensical, as in paper straws wrapped in a plastic sheath. The Covid-19 pseudopandemic caused more plastic pollution than ever, littering the oceans with billions of masks and testing kits.
As Nieboer writes, ‘Silent Spring claims of pesticide carcinogens inflicting mass deaths were false. Forests were not destroyed by acid rain. There could not be any nuclear winter. There was no hole in the atmosphere. There was no ice age’. Runaway global warming is no more real than the previous hyperbole. But positive facts cannot get in the way of a pessimistic narrative.
The report Absolute Zero (2019) by Oxford University and Imperial College London scholars, commissioned by the UK government, projected closure of all airports by 2030, with the exception of Heathrow, Glasgow and Belfast (although the elite will continue to fly private jets). Roads are being blocked by local authorities, and punitive ‘pay-per-mile’ schemes are proposed. It does not need much critical thinking to realise that electric vehicles are neither practical nor environmentally protective – unless they are to con people out of car ownership. The only thing that is green here is our envy, as the rich pass by in their Range Rovers.
Social responsibility
Progressive green virtues are distorted into a confabulation of lie upon lie, using climate change to destroy traditional society. According to former Canadian minister of the environment Christine Stewart, ‘no matter if the science of global warming is all phoney…climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world’. A prominent theme is white guilt, and demand for reparations to Africa and Asia for imperialism and ecological degradation. Citizens of Western countries are being weakened democratically and economically, with vast funds appropriated for developing poorer regions but really enriching the leaders of nongovernmental globalist organisations. While the West tightens its belt, the East engorges on unchecked development and a corrupt carbon exchange scheme enabling global corporations to carry on polluting.
Grassroots democracy
Marxist emphasis on command-and-control collectivism prevailed over the naïve notions of liberty and localism of the spiritual Greens. The focus shifted from decentralisation and people power to tightly ordered colonies of the technocratic super-state. Yet there are similarities between Bahro’s idealistic village units and the present concept of 15-minute cities. Perhaps we will return to feudal times when a stranger risks being attacked for being ‘not from these parts’. Authoritarians always benefit from people policing themselves.
Ironically, the biggest cause of increasing consumption (and consequent unsustainability) is mass immigration – a policy promoted by current green parties. Why are governments so keen to import people from other continents and cultures? Arguably, this is a globalist strategy to weaken nations by overwhelming the host society. The incomers are more easily controlled and less attached to freedom of expression and movement. Dependent on state support, they will readily accept the mooted universal basic income. Of course, there is nothing green about this demographic transformation.
Nonviolence
Ecological activists are supported by the political establishment. Stunts that would get protestors for other causes a hefty fine or jail sentence, such as blocking arterial roads and throwing paint over treasured paintings, are treated with kid gloves by the police and judiciary. James Delingpole’s polemic Watermelons (2012) was written before the highly-publicised antics of Extinction Rebellion and the popularised alarmism of Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, but it set the scene for shrill, moralising zealots. Government climate policy is now seriously impeding ordinary people’s lives through fear and extortion: a form of state violence that the original Greens opposed.
Ecofascism; a Fourth Reich?
Action against alleged anthropic global warming is misanthropic totalitarianism. Rupert Darwall, in Green Tyranny: Exposing the Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (2019), described how ‘mankind’s subservience to the commands of nature provides the connecting thread between Nazism and modern day environmentalism and represents a radical rejection of the Enlightenment’s belief in progress’. Intriguingly, the National Socialists had a major programme for wind power, and they were against eating meat. Klaus Schwab, leader of the World Economic Forum, has a Nazi background (his father was an acquaintance of Hitler).
Meanwhile, many critics of the contrived climate crisis perceive a global onset of communism. Janet Daley (Sunday Telegraph, 2 April 2023) opined that ‘never since the advent of modern socialism has the Left advocated making ordinary people poorer’ (until now). Useful idiots thinking that they are fighting capitalist oppression are unwittingly facilitating mass enslavement.
The struggle, therefore, is not Left versus Right but freedom versus control. Technocracy has risen by exploiting invisible threats of climate change and contagious disease, with a thinly-veiled motive of depopulation. We are the carbon that they want to reduce.
Niall McCrae RMN, PhD is a social commentator with regular appearances on Unity News Network, Hearts of Oak, the David Vance Show and George Galloway’s Kalima Horra debates. His books include The Moon and Madness (2012), Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016) and Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (with Robert Oulds, 2020). He is an officer of the Workers of England trade union.
