The Climate Imperialism of the Climate Crisis, By James Reed

A very good article appeared at Infowars.com, a bit longish for them, but it covers the bases on the climate change imperialism that now dominates Western culture. The material below will be of interest to those who want a historical background to the idea of a "climate crisis," which first arose with the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972. In the same year the UN General Assembly (UNGA) passed its Resolution 2997 XXVII to establish the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). And the UN has been on a roll since then, with the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the Agenda 2030 sustainable development objectives, and "One Health." All for one world government.

Throughout this history, the main weapon has been alarmist arguments, that if nations do not follow the UN, they will be destroyed by the dark gods of the climate, say from extreme weather events. That is why it is important to continuously discredit all aspects of their narrative to delegitimise the UN. Then, when there is the political will, the UN must go!

https://www.infowars.com/posts/climate-crisis-or-climate-imperialism/

"For decades now, the United Nations (UN) and its collaborators have been saying that humanity faces an existential threat due to "global warming" caused by human activities ("anthropogenic factors"). Then, in July 2023, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, declared, "The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived." CNBC reported that Guterres relied on data released by the European Union and the World Meteorological Organization indicating that July 2023 was set to be the hottest month on record.

The UN has so intensely popularised the "climate crisis" narrative over the past five decades or so that anyone who questions it is now routinely dismissed as a "climate sceptic," "climate denier," "conspiracy theorist," or "anti-science." Nevertheless, just as Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living, so John Stuart Mill correctly observed that an unexamined belief is not worth holding because it is a mere dogma rather than a living truth.

The "Climate Crisis" Narrative: A Historical Outline

The "climate crisis" narrative made its debut with the First UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972. Subsequently, in the same year, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) passed its Resolution 2997 XXVII to establish the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to monitor the state of the environment and coordinate responses to the world's greatest environmental challenges.

Environmental ethics also emerged as a distinct area of philosophical inquiry during the 1970s. In 1983, the UNGA appointed the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). The report of the Commission, popularly known as the Brundtland Report and published in 1987, called for sustainable development to deal with the twin challenges of environmental conservation and human development. In 1988, UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on the current state of knowledge about "climate change."

Then came the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the "Earth Summit," in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 3 to 14 June 1992, on the 20^th anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm environment conference. According to the UN, "One of the major results of the UNCED Conference was Agenda 21, a daring programme of action calling for new strategies to invest in the future to achieve overall sustainable development in the 21^st century. Its recommendations ranged from new methods of education to new ways of preserving natural resources and new ways of participating in a sustainable economy."

The 'Earth Summit' had many great achievements: the Rio Declaration and its 27 universal principles, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity; and the Declaration on the principles of forest management. The 'Earth Summit' also led to the creation of the Commission on Sustainable Development, the holding of the first world conference on the sustainable development of small island developing States in 1994, and negotiations for the establishment of the agreement on straddling stocks and highly migratory fish stocks.

As the UN explains, "Every year, countries who have joined the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meet to measure progress and negotiate multilateral responses to climate change." These conferences are now popularly referred to as "COP," which is an acronym for "Conference of the Parties."

The UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, commonly referred to as "the Rio+20 conference," galvanised a process to develop a new set of goals that would carry on the purported momentum generated by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) beyond 2015, and that was adopted by the UNGA as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on 25 September 2015 to be achieved by the year 2030. The SDGs are part of Resolution 70/1 of the United Nations General Assembly, commonly referred to as "The 2030 Agenda," whose full title is "Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development."

Besides, the contemporary Western conservationist movement is now advocating for a "One Health Approach." As I recently observed, the notion of "One Health" goes back at least to a symposium titled "One World, One Health: Building Interdisciplinary Bridges to Health in a Globalised World" organised by the Wildlife Conservation Society and hosted by The Rockefeller University on 29 September 2004. The symposium adopted "The Manhattan Principles on 'One World, One Health,'" and declared: "Only by breaking down the barriers among agencies, individuals, specialties, and sectors can we unleash the innovation and expertise needed to meet the many serious challenges to the health of people, domestic animals, and wildlife and to the integrity of ecosystems."

It also emphasised the alleged positive role of private sector players in this endeavour. In 2016, the One Health Commission, the One Health Initiative, and the One Health Platform Foundation declared 3November One Health Day to be observed annually. The proposed WHO Pandemic Agreement, which failed to make it for a vote at the 77^th World Health Assembly but which is scheduled for further negotiation, is committed to the One Health Approach.

Furthermore, as Phidel Kizito explains, governments are now introducing "Eco levies" or "environment levies" "to reduce environmental pollution, encourage sustainable practices, and promote the use of environmentally friendly alternatives." Taxes on cows and other ruminants such as goats and sheep, even if not designated as "eco levies," still fall under this category of taxes because such animals are said to produce inordinate amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, thereby raising the concentration of "greenhouse gases" to dangerous levels.

Similarly, levies on motor vehicles are now being introduced on the pretext that they discourage the use of "fossil fuels" that allegedly cause major environmental pollution. The revenue generated through eco levies is allegedly used to finance conservation projects such as the disposal of waste and the planting of trees. However, governments often impose them simply to increase the volume of the taxes they collect for use at their discretion.

Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Environmental Conservation

Among the central tenets of the "climate crisis" narrative are that the planet earth is on the brink of ecological disaster largely due to the actions of human beings ("anthropogenic factors") that cause "climate change" in the form of "global warming;" that global warming is resulting in the disruption of ecosystems, increased adverse weather events, and an unprecedented high rate of pathogens transmitted from animals to humans ("Zoonotic diseases"); that the only way to reverse the imminent collapse of the earth's ecosystems is to treat the well-being of humans, animals, plants, and even non-living things as deserving of equal attention ("One Health approach"); that it is therefore necessary to drastically reduce the human population, to deploy "sustainable" methods of agriculture, and to use environmentally friendly sources of energy commonly referred to as "green energy."

However, the "climate crisis" narrative being promoted by Western billionaire self-proclaimed philanthropists and Western multinational corporations seldom addresses the fact that environmental degradation is in large part due to poverty. When a handful of people own large tracts of land and consign the abject poor to tiny spaces in slums in cities and towns and in rural villages, the environment is bound to be degraded through poor sanitation that pollutes waterways, results in inadequate disposal of household waste, and gives rise to the over-exploitation of land for agricultural purposes, among others.

Yet it is these same "philanthropists" and corporations, the beneficiaries of the gross economic inequalities, who mainly fund research on conservation, and are therefore able to ensure that this vital issue remains largely unaddressed.

Furthermore, through the so-called One Health Approach, the discourse on conservation now threatens to overshadow and distort most, if not all, other discourses. It is noteworthy that the twelve Manhattan Principles on "One World, One Health'" that I earlier referred to say nothing explicitly about the need to protect and promote human rights. Instead, the One Health Initiative is unequivocal in its declaration that it will "unite human and veterinary medicine." Clearly, this is an attempt to devalue human dignity which is the bedrock of human rights, considering human life to be of equal value with the life of domestic animals, wild animals, and ecosystems.

A short while before the 77^th World Health Assembly, there were reports that the European Union (EU) was bullying low and middle-income countries (LMICs) into adopting an auxiliary instrument on One Health under the Pandemic Agreement. Health freedom activists objected to the draft One Health Instrument on the grounds that it would cut across many different sectors falling within the jurisdictions of many different government ministries, thus creating tensions among the various ministries at country level, as well as discord among various international organisations with mandates on the said sectors.

For example, it would erode the rights of governments recognised under other international instruments such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing. The activists also pointed out that the One Health Instrument would further limit the ability of low and middle-income countries to sell their products on the global market.

One of the forerunners of the One Health approach is Garrett Hardin's infamous "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor." In it Hardin discounted the analogy of the earth as a space ship, and suggested that it is more like a number of lifeboats, a few very wealthy, and many very poor. He contended that the world is overpopulated with poor people who destroy the environment and aggravate the situation through their high birthrate. According to him, wealthy countries do not have enough resources to help the poor ones, so that their attempts at helping them would jeopardise the welfare of the wealthy ones and plunge the globe into an ultimate climate disaster.

Hardin's solution was to let natural causes such as disease and famine regulate the population of the poor and thus save the earth without the intervention of the wealthy Western countries through food aid ("taking food to the poor") or immigration ("taking the poor to the food").

In his Practical Philosophy: In Search of an Ethical Minimum, the late Kenyan philosophy professor H. Odera Oruka vigorously objected to Hardin's Lifeboat Ethics, pointing out that the few wealthy boats acquired, and still acquire their wealth by exploiting the poor ones. He therefore proposed that Hardin's lifeboat ethics be replaced by "Parental Earth Ethics," in which all the countries on earth jointly constitute a family, and as such, all of them are ultimately disadvantaged if the materially better endowed among them neglect to assist those less endowed. For him, Parental Earth Ethics "is a basic ethics for both a global environmental concern and for global redistribution – i.e., aid."

However, I think Oruka's understanding of redistribution as "aid" is very narrow and therefore misleading, because "aid" connotes charity and presumes assistance at the discretion of the one providing it. A reconfiguration of the economy to ensure that all human beings have the opportunity to get just returns for their labour and thus not need aid would, in my view, be a more adequate prescription.

After all, according to Oxfam International, between 2021 and 2023, the richest 1 percent had accumulated nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together. With that kind of wealth, the wealthy 1 percent own the means of production and maintain their privileged position in a variety of ways. They keep the levels of wages and salaries down through cartels, and by using their influence over electoral processes and thus government policies, thereby eroding the meaningful exercise of agency by the vast majority of citizens. They also own both traditional and social media, and thus disproportionately influence public discourses to maintain the status quo.

The Single Narrative on Environmental Conservation: Science or Ideology?

In "Question One Narrative, Question Them All," Dr Thi Thuy Van Dinh draws attention to DeSmog, reportedly founded in January 2006 by Jim Hoggan of James Hoggan & Associates – one of Canada's leading public relations firms – "to clear the PR pollution that is clouding the science and solutions to climate change." Note the phrase "the science," which gained unprecedented prominence in the advent of Covid-19, and which suggests that all credible scientists hold only one incontrovertible position on a subject, contrary to the facts.

This is the basis on which numerous scholars are now routinely silenced for questioning dominant narratives on a range of subjects in which they are qualified to comment, making it even more difficult for non-experts in the said fields to articulate their views on the issues. This is a strategy to stifle genuine science which, by definition, is characterised by open debate.

That the initiatives of the United Nations and its partners to popularise the "climate crisis" narrative over the past fifty years or so have borne abundant fruit is evident in the casual way in which almost every weather-related disaster is now attributed to "climate change." For example, several Western countries have had to deal with wildfires for generations, so some of them had official "fire seasons" long before the ascendancy of the "climate crisis" narrative. Yet such fires are now routinely attributed to "climate change," only for it to turn out that in several instances the fires were deliberately caused by negligence or arson.

This was the case with several such wildfires in the summer of 2023 such as Louisiana's Tiger Island fire, and many of the fires in Southern Europe including the majority of the 667 blazes in Greece. Vassilis Kikilias, the Greek minister of climate crisis and civil protection, said that in certain places, blazes had broken out at numerous points in close proximity at the same time, suggesting the involvement of arsonists intent on spreading fires further.

Similarly, the devastating impact of the floods in Nairobi in the second quarter of 2024 was blamed on "climate change." Yet it is a well-known fact of history that the city was accidentally built on an inappropriate marshy land, so that early in its existence the British colonisers actually thought of relocating the country's nascent capital for this very reason. In fact, Nairobi experienced such floods in 1961 and 1997, and now again in 2024; but the lazy explanation for this latest deluge is "climate change."

Besides, meteorologists analyse historical data on "return periods," a term that describes the likelihood of extreme rainfall events that cause floods to recur in 5, 10, 25, 30, or 100 years. Hydrologists then use the data to calculate likely water levels during such events and advise engineers on how to factor these into their designs of physical infrastructure such as roads and buildings.

Most regrettably, although several climate experts question "global warming," their views are hardly ever covered in mainstream media. For example, in January 2022, more than one thousand professionals, including highly qualified ecologists, signed the World Climate Declaration, which asserted that "there is no climate emergency." It stated:

Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.

The signatories to the World Climate Declaration went on to highlight the following points: Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming; warming is far slower than predicted; climate policy relies on inadequate models; CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth; global warming has not increased natural disasters; climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities.

One of the ecologists who disagrees with the "climate crisis" narrative is Dr Patrick Moore, a holder of a Ph.D. degree in Ecology from the University of British Columbia, and a leader in the international environmental field for more than 40 years. In the early 1970s to mid-1980s, he worked with Greenpeace, which was devoted to preserving endangered animal species, preventing abuses of the environment, and creating awareness of the need to protect the environment by engaging in non-violent confrontations with corporations and governments perpetrating pollution.

Moore served for nine years as President of Greenpeace Canada and seven years as Director of Greenpeace International. However, he resigned from the organisation in 1986 and later explained his decision in his Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist. Additionally, according to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy,

Dr Moore, in an email obtained by the Epoch Times, said, "Greenpeace was 'hijacked' by the political left when they realized there was money and power in the environmental movement. [Left-leaning] political activists in North America and Europe changed Greenpeace from a science-based organization to a political fundraising organization." He further stated, "They are primarily focused on creating narratives, stories, that are designed to instill fear and guilt into the public so the public will send them money."

Frontier further reports that according to Moore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not a science organization, but rather a political organization composed of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, and that it hires scientists to provide them with "information" that supports the "climate emergency" narrative. Says Moore:

Their campaigns against fossil fuels, nuclear energy, CO2, plastic, etc., are misguided and designed to make people think the world will come to an end unless we cripple our civilization and destroy our economy. They are now a negative influence on the future of both the environment and human civilization.

Besides, Frontier informs us that Moore takes issue with the now popular view that human beings are a danger to ecosystems, and notes that those who hold that the world would be a better place if there were fewer people in it are not willing to be the first to be eliminated. For him, the young generation today is taught that humans are not worthy and are destroying the earth, and this indoctrination has made them feel guilty and ashamed of themselves, which is the wrong way to go about life.

Regarding the alleged deleterious effects of carbon dioxide, Moore points out that farmers around the world inject their greenhouses with CO2 to boost their yields, which indicates that plants in the natural environment are actually starved of it. According to him, "carbon neutrality" is a political term, not a scientific one.

"It is simply wrong to call CO2 'carbon.' Carbon is an element that is what diamonds, graphite, and carbon black (soot) are composed of. [And] CO2 is a molecule that contains carbon and oxygen and is an invisible gas that is the primary food for all life…'Net Zero' is also a political term made up by activists who are not scientists. For example, the top leaders of this crusade are people like Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Greta Thunberg, none of whom are scientists."

However, in a 2010 response updated in 2019, Greenpeace claims that "Patrick Moore has been a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years, including the timber, mining, chemical and the aquaculture industries. Most of these industries hired Mr. Moore only after becoming the focus of a Greenpeace campaign to improve their environmental performance. Mr. Moore has now worked for polluters for far longer than he ever worked for Greenpeace."

While I cannot vouch for Moore's integrity or lack of it, the issues he raises have also been raised by many other scholars who have signed the World Climate Declaration to which I earlier referred. What is certain is that in its response to Dr Moore, Greenpeace claims: "Patrick Moore often misrepresents himself in the media as an environmental 'expert' or even an 'environmentalist,' while offering anti-environmental opinions on a wide range of issues and taking a distinctly anti-environmental stance." To claim, as Greenpeace does, that a holder of a Ph.D. in ecology is not an environmental expert is clearly and deliberately misleading.

Critics of the "climate crisis" narrative also point out that several innovations touted as "environment-friendly" are actually harmful to the environment. For example, @PeterSweden7 on X states: "Scotland has chopped down 17 million trees to build new 'environmentally friendly' wind turbines. Oh, and they had to use diesel generators to keep them warm in the winter…" @JamesMelville writes: "Wind turbine blades last for around 20–30 years. And this is what often happens at the end of their lifespan. Wind turbine blades are set to account for more than 40 million tonnes of waste by 2050. Not exactly environmentally sustainable."

In another post he writes: "Huge demand for balsa wood (used to make wind turbine blades) is causing enormous deforestation in the Amazon and causing environmental destruction in Ecuador, with a disastrous impact on indigenous communities and ecosystems." Similarly, Atalay Atasu, Serasu Duran, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove observe that the disposal of solar panels has an adverse impact on the environment. Lloyd Rowland points out that electric vehicles "are proving to have at least as much environmental impact as conventional vehicles due to the demands of power supply, manufacturing processes, materials extraction, and waste disposal."

For example, they note that "Entire regions of the nation [DRC], including forests and water resources, have been ravaged and polluted to provide much of the world's supply of cobalt. Without this metal, the vast majority of battery production for electric vehicles would falter."

Besides, the current WHO-led initiatives to prepare for pandemics proceed from the assumption that climate change is resulting in an exponential increase in transmission of infections from animals to humans ("zoonotic diseases"). However, in February 2024, a report by a research group at the University of Leeds questioned the purported link between global warming and the alleged unprecedented accelerated transmission of zoonotic diseases on which the One Health approach rests:

"[T]he data suggests that an increase in recorded natural outbreaks could be largely explained by technological advancements in diagnostic testing over the past 60 years, while current surveillance, response mechanisms and other public health interventions have successfully reduced burden in the past 10 to 20 years."

In sum, contrary to the One Health approach, it is self-defeating for us, the most intelligent form of life on the globe, to think, even remotely, that sacrificing our well-being for the benefit of other forms of life and even non-life is virtuous. Instinct moves every living thing to preserve itself. Consequently, it is ideology rather than biology and science at large that has convinced so many among us to think otherwise."