ANNE MARIE WATERS’ SUNDAY COLUMN 

What’s behind the climate change movement?

Sunday April 19th 2020

 

Alarmism

Under the heading “The Truth” the campaign group Extinction Rebellion (XR) tells us this:

We are facing an unprecedented global emergency. Life on Earth is in crisis: scientists agree we have entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown, and we are in the midst of a mass extinction of our own making.

The language is pure alarmism and the message so vague that it veers in to outright dishonesty.  Scientists do not all agree, as was evidenced when 500 wrote to the UN saying that there is no climate emergency.  They wrote the letter on the same day that Swedish left-wing activist Greta Thunberg made her famous “how dare you?” speech at the United Nations HQ in New York.  While the world’s media focussed on Thunberg, 500 scientists were ignored.  Given what their letter said, it’s no wonder the left-wing mainstream media didn’t give it much attention.

It stated:

1. Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause [global] warming.
2. Warming is far slower than predicted.
3. Climate policy relies on inadequate models.
4. CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a plant food that is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
5. Global warming has not increased natural disasters.
6. Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities.
7. There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic.

The last one is particularly note-worthy, because the left much relies upon panic, particularly in children, to bring about the radical economic transformation it is seeking.

 

Greta Thunberg and the role of children

Children play a core role in the climate change movement, as can be seen in the promotion of Thunberg (who looks younger than her age) and the propagation of climate change alarmism at school.

In late 2019, millions of children took part in “global climate strikes” around the world, led by Greta Thunberg.  These would be followed up in the UK when 1000s of pupils walked out of schools to protest the “climate emergency”.  The same “emergency” 500 scientists insist isn’t an emergency at all.

UK protests included speeches from the uber-left Jeremy Corbyn and were supported (with gusto) by Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan, another notorious leftist.

Thunberg herself is an example of the fear tactic used to bring children to the cause, and resulting in great optics.  She said she learned about the “climate crisis” at school, and has suffered severe depression at a very young age as a result.

This alarmism continues in schools and Newsweek reported in 2019 that a University of Bath study found “children are commonly being subjected to a barrage of concerns about the future of the planet and “environmental doom.””  

The study also found that “a rising number of kids and young adults are being treated with psychiatric drugs in order to reduce the emotional stress and exhaustion caused by “eco-anxiety,” or, a fervent fear that humans will go extinct as a result of their own pollution and damage to the environment”.

 

Environmentalism vs Climate Change

So what is behind all of this?  Is this really a campaign for environmental protection or yet another hard-left hijacking of a legitimate cause?  Let’s have a look at the evidence.

Gabriele Niehaus-Uebel is chair of a local campaign group in Essen, Germany.  She is fighting proposals to build wind farms – an array of solar powered wind turbines – because “a previously intact ecosystem would be destroyed.”  This case reveals something very interesting: the climate movement and environmentalists are on opposite sides, and wind farm advocates are arguing for a reduction in bird protection laws.  The clash is caused by the fact that the blades on wind turbines are responsible for the deaths of 100,000s of birds and bats every year.

When the climate change movement is arguing against environmental protections, it’s clearly not a movement based in environmental protectionism at all.

It’s not, it’s an economic movement.

The Greta fan club don’t speak about pollution or real environmental protection solutions, but they do allow these legitimate issues to be confused with their own alarmist cause.

Pollution is a true environmental emergency, but as so much pollution is the fault of non-Western, non-capitalist countries, the left-wing climate change movement isn’t overly interested.  Its wrath is aimed at capitalist countries only, and that is not a coincidence.

The Greta-ites target US and European leaders for criticism, but little is said about who the world’s greatest polluter is.  It isn’t the US, and it isn’t Europe.  In fact, it emits more carbon dioxide (the exact thing the Greta protests are complaining about) than the US and the EU combined.  That country is of course China, the same country that brought us COVID-19 via its appallingly unhygienic food preparation practices and its totalitarian and sinister government.

We can look forward to absolute condemnation of communist China by the left-wing climate change movement, but we shouldn’t hold our breath.  Nor should we hold our breath waiting for acknowledgement of the species threatened by Chinese buying habits.  Tigers and rhinos are being driven to the verge of wipe-out because China refuses to ban the trade of their body parts.

Greta and her followers don’t often mention these looming disasters, nor campaign for real environmental or ecological protections.

As if we need further evidence of the left-wing nature of the climate change movement, Barack Obama made it the centre of his “commitment to protect the environment”.

 

Green Tyranny

In his book Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex, Rupert Darwell describes a conference held in Essen, Germany in June 2009.  The 450 conference delegates included powerful groups like the government-funded Advisory Council on Global Change.  Also in attendance was the Essen Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, a group Darwell claims includes “long-standing members of the German Communist Party”.  John Podesta, a Washington heavy-weight on the Democrats’ side, was also there, as was Angela Merkel’s top climate advisor.

Speeches made at the conference made the situation clear – what was needed was economic transformation.  Darwell writes: “democracy came in for a lot of criticism”.

(Democracy also came in for criticism when anti-globalism Trump was elected and when Britain voted to leave the EU).

One particular speaker has spelled it all out.  Ottmar Edenhofer told the Swiss Neue Zurcher Zeitung in 2010 that we must free ourselves from the illusion that international climate policy is environment policy.  Admitting the economic aim at its core, he said “one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy”.

Herman Ott, former Greenpeace activist and now Member of the German Bundestag, briefly explained some of the ways in which climate change activism can bring about economic transformation when he spoke of the need to “break down the last resistance of the big oil and chemical companies”.

 

Conclusion

There are environmental emergencies facing our planet, but climate change is not one of them.  The climate change movement has hijacked legitimate concerns about our planet in order to push through radical economic policies, including widespread taxation much greater government control.  It targets capitalist countries while the communist state responsible for most of the world’s pollution largely escapes criticism.  It is, in other words, a fraud.

It is a fraud that exploits our fears and deliberately places children at its front line.  As has happened across the board, the extreme left has taken control of a legitimate movement and turned it in to an attack on capitalism and defence of communism.  As so often, the left-wing media is happy to help push the narrative.

We do need to protect our environment, but in order to do so, we must expose the fraudulent nature of “climate change”.  This won’t be easy, but the natural world (as well as our economy) is at stake.  Once again, we have no choice but to stand up and tell the truth.

 

Anne Marie Waters 

Leader

For Britain 

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