Climate Change: When the Solutions are Part of the Problem

By Karen Harradine –

1. Prosperity vs Hyperbole

When I first moved to the UK I saw a photo in one of the mainstream newspapers showing beautiful lavender fields. The caption claimed that within a few years, if global warming continued, Britain would transform into southern France, complete with droughts and heat waves. Twenty years later I have yet to see the entire country covered in swathes of lavender as was predicted. Yet the hysteria and fear surrounding global warming and the new lingo for it – climate change – has continued.

Doomsday scenarios, painted by an assortment of global organisations, governments and climate change activists have shifted what should be a nuanced and balanced debate into a religious cult. In 2005 The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned that all Artic ice could melt by 2010.¹ It hasn’t. And the same year the United Nations Environmental Programme said that climate change would make huge swathes of the world uninhabitable by 2010 and create 50 million ‘climate refugees’. This has not come true either. Compliant Western taxpayers are being fleeced by governments who mistakenly raid the public purse in their eagerness to appease the alarmist tantrums of climate change ideologues.²

Climate change is happening. That much we know to be true and we cannot, and should not, deny this. Global reports of the impact of climate change are now part of our daily reading.

For example, much has been written about the disastrous impact that an increase of one degree is having on the Australian environment.³Forests are being decimated as trees struggle to adapt to the extreme temperatures. Whole species of trees are being wiped out from bushfires caused by an escalation in heat wave and droughts.

The questions we should ask are what causes climate change and what can be done to solve it without destroying the West’s prosperity and stability. So far solutions have focused on man-made climate change, with very little attention paid to the natural causes of this phenomena. Scientists are divided as to how much of climate change can be attributed to natural causes, with some claiming only 5%.⁴ But some say that the CO2 model of global warming, which informs our understanding of climate change and pins the blame squarely on humans, is outdated and needs further research. Natural causes of climate change must be acknowledged and researched, as part of the method of solving climate change. They are the obvious missing piece of this puzzle. The science centred around climate change keeps changing, each new theory promoted as a solution requiring immense amounts of money to implement.⁵

Despite the divisions among scientists about the causes and extent of climate change, there seems to be consensus that it is indeed happening. Such a pity then that the Left distorts any valuable progress made by climate change scientists by trying to discredit any theories which don’t fit in with their de-industrialisation strategies. This hinders the implementation of potentially effective solutions. The Left blindly postulate that humans are solely to blame for climate change. To parrot their narrative of climate change is now the ultimate signifier of virtue and self-immolation.

2. Hysterical Inefficiency

At the start of the 21^st century we were encouraged to purchase diesel cars in a bid to ‘save the planet’ yet they turn out to have a harmful effect on the environment. Diesel air pollution is known to inhibit lung development in foetuses, as well as increasing the risk of heart attacks, strokes and lung diseases in adults.⁶To combat this Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, increased a diesel tax. Many French citizens, outraged at yet another punitive green tax, took to the streets to protest this and gave birth to the Gilets Jaunes movement.⁷ In a perfect example of the greed and corruption endemic in the climate change industry, the French government is allocating only 7.2 billion euros – out the 34 billion euros raised in these green taxes – to combat climate change. Why is only less than a quarter of this revenue to be used for environmental issues? What is the rest being spent on? This is cynical in the extreme, not to mention a slap in the face to the struggling French.

The diesel car scandal also raises the question of why governments commit billions to one climate change scheme only to nix it when scientists change their minds? Governments should exercise caution when it comes to spending on climate change solutions. Far better to wait until scientists successfully prove their theories than through money at the problem in a frenzied response.

As with all contentious issues in our society, narcissistic emotions overtake rationality and science. If only those who have exaggerated the impact of climate change were screaming into the wind. But worryingly, the assault on climate change is being spearheaded by the corrupt and Islamist dominated UN – a dangerous endeavour which is guaranteed to be self-defeating. Countries belonging to the Islamist Organisation of Islamic Cooperation make up a quarter of the 195 member countries and non-member observer states within the UN.⁸ Their dominance is also felt in the UNHRC – historically consisting of member states like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and China. Between 2006-2016, the UNHRC passed 68 resolutions against Israel and only 20 against Syria and nine against North Korea, despite the killing and suffering that these two regimes inflict on their own citizens.⁹We should remember that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Equal rights are enshrined there for all Israeli citizens, regardless of religion or race. This begs the questions as to why the UNHRC sees fit to pass such a high number of resolutions against the Jewish state. And the West meekly capitulates to UN despots at the expense of hard-pressed taxpayers.

For every decision there is a consequence. In 2015, the UN set up their 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – embellished words for a scheme designed to siphon off more money from the West.¹⁰Part of this Agenda is the Green Climate Fund.¹¹ So far, UN members (including the UK) have pledged £7.5 billion to the Green Climate Fund and G7 countries, and they also have committed themselves to providing an extra £314 million just for climate risk insurance and warning systems. The UK already contributes £83 million to the UN annually and also finances the Kyoto Protocol. Under the Paris Agreement, the West will pay an extra £75 billion a year to developing nations.¹²

The Green Climate Fund is inefficient – projects are cancelled after long delays, its board lacks consensus on how to spend money, and 30 per cent of the funds allocated to it by the Paris Agreement have been withdrawn. Quarrels between developed and developing nations over who controls the review process has also hampered progress.¹³Renewable energies, so favoured by the Paris Agreement, are proving uneconomical and useless in combatting CO2 emissions.¹⁴ These global measures to solve climate change are costing billions yet are inept and prohibitively expensive. No wonder President Donald Trump withdrew the US from this sanitised form of monetary theft.

The Green Climate Fund was given a remit in the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep the rise of climate change below 2 degrees Celsius in developing nations – classified as least developing countries, (LDCs), small island developing states (SIDS) and African states. These countries can access millions of pounds annually in the name of combatting climate change.

Strangely, these tyrants in charge of developing nations always seem to have enough money to finance their own private jets, palaces, fleets of Mercedes and armaments. No wonder they don’t have any left over to combat climate change.

And these countries make up a large section of the UN voting bloc. It doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to see that this is another form of conspicuous consumption, aided by climate change NGOs and compliant Western governments. Why should these tyrants pay for their own designer clothes when the hard-pressed Western taxpayer can do this for them? They have enough money hoarded away to pay for their own climate change solutions without siphoning off more from the West.

In yet another UN green scheme, developed nations (the West) can purchase certified emission reduction (CER) credits from developing countries as a way to reduce their own carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions targets set by the Kyoto Protocol.¹⁵

This money will be used to finance climate change projects in developing countries. In other words, the West’s money will be funnelled either to UN inspectors having a jolly in the Maldives, or given to terror groups. As epitomised by the squabbles over delegating the Green Climate Fund, UN inspectors are notorious for mismanaging projects while staying in fancy hotels. And those that do attempt to get some work done find they have to offer food or money as bribes to terror groups so that they can work unhindered. In 2014 UN staff driving food convoys into Somalia had to surrender 80 per cent of their food to Al Shabaab.¹⁶Corruption is endemic within the UN.

And so far these UN projects are having a minuscule impact on climate change. The little bit of money which is actually spent on climate change solutions finances mainly renewable energies – solar and wind power. But expensive and inefficient renewables are not the answer and neither is channelling billions from the West to corrupt regimes.

The West’s collective GDP has fallen while SE Asia’s has risen. Why are we still financing developing countries when our own economies are slowing down? It’s grossly unfair to expect the poorest among us to subsidise the rich. Why should a shop assistant in Tesco be forced to fund the fancy lifestyle of a climate change NGO executive? This is a global Robin Hood scheme, taking from the West’s poor to give to the rich, both in the West and in developing nations. If the despots who ran most developing nations didn’t indulge in conspicuous consumption as much as they do, then they would have more than enough money to pay for their own climate change solutions. Not only are the UN driven solutions inefficient and expensive, the Western poor are still expected to pay the bill via their taxes. Gullible Westerners are now indoctrinating their own children into the climate change narrative led by the UN.

3. Paranoia and Corruption

Climate change rhetoric centres on the anthropomorphising of the earth and animals. This childish emoting, so typical of our infantilised society, obscures any common sense when it comes to tackling this issue. Al Gore’s 2006 propaganda film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ made good use of anthropomorphising to push his agenda. Who can forget that mournful image of a singular polar bear stuck on a melting ice sheet, a symbol of our dystopian future in which we all drown? Gore cynically lied about polar bear numbers to incite us – their population has been increasing since 2005.¹⁷He also warned that sea levels would increase by 20 feet in ‘the near future’ – it is yet to happen.¹⁸Gore claimed that the Ocean Conveyer, which carries the Gulf Stream that keeps climate temperate in countries like the UK, would stop circulating – a claim contested by climate change scientists and another prediction which has failed to materialise.

Thanks to climate change ideologues like Gore, traditional ways of life are being threatened and decimated. The lives of the Inuit in northern Canada are threatened daily by a growing polar bear population, yet the Canadian government won’t allow them to increase their hunting quota.¹⁹Climate change activists have insisted that the polar bear is a dying species, despite all the evidence to the contrary. So the traditional Inuit hunting ways, which harmonised with the environment, are banned on the basis of false science and so an imbalance has set in. That a government cares more for their green policies than it does for the lives of its citizens is deeply sinister.

Gore’s assertions have been widely debunked. Yet his propaganda film is worshipped like a religious text and, since its inception, has been shown in schools in the UK and US. No wonder teenagers are so terrified of climate change – they have been indoctrinated into this ideology from a very young age.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s lunatic Green New Deal is the product of years of this fear mongering. Like most of her generation, she really believes that we will all soon be killed by climate change unless trains can made to go to Hawaii. The Green New Deal is not only unhelpful in preventing climate change as it champions now ineffective solutions like energy renewables, but it is also another alarmist document which favours dogma over rationality and science.

Gore’s film is a perfect example of the cynical hyperbole surrounding climate change. Emotions are hyped up and disparate positions on climate change are polarised even further. Like a dog chasing its own tale, we seem to endlessly circle around the same solutions without ever finding a sufficient endpoint to cure the devastation wreaked by climate change. Billions are wasted on disproven solutions and scientists who have the answers but don’t fit in with the Left’s climate change ideologues, are needlessly rebuffed. Doomsday predictions that the world will end tomorrow are best ignored, while scientists grapple with remedies to solve climate change. That way we can avoid hysterically throwing money at the problem as this doesn’t benefit anyone.

Last month, a rat stuck in a German manhole needed a team of firefighters to be rescued.²⁰ Rats are not cuddly creatures – they are dirty and vicious animals which need to be culled to prevent disease. That this rat was anthropomorphised to the point that valuable rescuers were diverted to save it shows just how deluded this marriage between anthropomorphising and climate change is. Anthropomorphising is the practice of attributing human characteristics to animals and objects, like the earth. This hypes up emotions around climate change debate and those who question the extent of the problem are accused of harming the earth, an act seen as evil as harming an innocent child.

It might also explain why corruption is so rife in the climate change industry.

After all, who wants to be the one who challenges the climate change narrative and is consequently accused of being a lunatic who hates the earth? One glaringly obvious fact, which so far remains unchallenged, is that punitive climate change policies and green taxes are creating a new feudal system in the West. Taking its cue from the UN, the UK government is tripling the amount of subsidies to fund renewable energy, rising the amount to £13.5 billion in 2021-22, in a futile attempt to reduce the UK’s greenhouse gases by 80% in 2050.²¹ And it is the British taxpayer who will pick up the bill. Surely it is better to be circumspect in the allocation of money to climate change solutions so that the taxpayer doesn’t miss out on vital revue when it comes to schools, pensions and other public services which could benefit from more investment rather than the UK government wasting more money on unproven climate change solutions.

Since the Climate Change Act was created in 2008 by the Labour government, it has little impact on the environment but a major one on British wallets.²²To meet the demands of the Act, British households each paid, via green taxes, £327 in 2014. This will rise to £875 in 2030, a huge sum of money and especially so for the poorest who are not on welfare. Only a very elite bunch benefit from this legal theft – renewable energy corporations, investors eager to put their snouts in the troughs of government guaranteed profits, and landowners who are growing very wealthy from allowing those landscape scarring, bird killing wind turbines to be built on their land. Energy poverty will increase to satisfy the virtue signalling demands of the climate change ideologues and those looking to make a quick buck.

Combatting climate change is now an elitist pursuit.

The debacle surrounding the seemingly corrupt practices of Lord Deben, chair of the British government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), is the epitome of this. Deben has failed to declare £600,000 in payments to his company, Sancroft International, from green corporations.²³

In 2017, Biomass generator Drax Group was awarded £729 million in government subsidies, financed through electrical bills charged to the taxpayer.²⁴On the same day that Deben was promoting expensive renewable subsidies in parliament, his company Sancroft International received £15,500 from Drax.

Under Deben’s guidance, the CCC suggests that the government invests in expensive renewables from companies including those, like Drax, that are on his client base list. So far this costs the public purse an annual £8.6 billion. In a grubby feat which signals that feudalism has indeed been resurrected and is alive and well, the very wealthy landowner Deben is channeling taxpayers’ money to his own pocket via his company’s clients.²⁵And the government is complicit in covering this up. Deben is also advocating to have gas banned by 2050 and that from 2025 onwards, new homes will not be connected to the gas grid. This will guarantee work for green corporations, including Drax.

4. Green Poverty

Without gas and electric bills, those nefarious green taxes will rise exponentially. And it will be the poorest among us who will have to choose between eating or heating to pay a fealty to wealthy landowners like Deben and his ilk.

The CCC’s plan to outlaw gas and make us dependent on renewable energy is absurd. The impact of gas on C02 emissions is negligible in comparison to that of coal.²⁶ The UK contributes only 1.3% of global CO2 emissions. It is lunacy to ban gas while the developing word burns coal and produces most of the CO2 emissions. It solves nothing other than plunging more British citizens into energy poverty.

Transport emissions make up the largest contribution to C02 emissions. Perhaps the CCC would like transport companies to use a horse and carriage instead of trucks so that they offset their carbon footprints – this is seemingly of far more importance to them than ensuring the country has a workable transport system. A repeat of the pre-industrial age will see a universal fall in prosperity and lives. Thanks to capitalism, living standards are on the increase in countries like India. This positive achievement will be reversed if climate change ideologues get their way. And capitalism is the ideal system within which to raise money to fund workable climate change solutions without putting human lives in peril.

Solar and wind energy are unreliable and expensive, as both require huge swathes of land and are dangerous to wildlife.²⁷ Their impact on climate change is negligible, yet in some sort of collective madness we are encouraged to invest in these, at the expense of the taxpayer, but we ignore the one source of energy that is cheap and clean; nuclear power. Far fewer will die from the radiation fall out from nuclear power plant accidents than from pollution related disease.

A solar farm in California takes up 450 times more land than a nuclear plant does, yet it will produce the same amount of energy. But the popular and false narrative (fed by anti-nuclear weapon campaigners, fossil fuel inventors and renewable energy companies) that nuclear is bad and will destroy the planet, is not scientifically backed up. Despite this, our government is being held hostage by the green lobby to invest in renewables. Not only are the cheap and clean benefits of nuclear energy ignored, but in thrall to the CCC, the government is hampering the development of fracking, despite the proven economic benefits it will bring.²⁸

Fracking has lowered the cost of gas in the US and secured both the US and Canada’s energy needs for the next 100 years. So why is the UK so reluctant to frack? Not only will this type of energy resource benefit the environment as it cuts down the reliance on fossil fuel, but it will also create jobs and increase prosperity by lowering energy costs as it has done in the US.²⁹ It does have a downside though – the amount of water used to frack and the potential this process has to cause earthquakes is worrying. But it is a clean energy alternative and has half of the CO2 emissions that coal has. Fracking is far cheaper and more effective than renewables. The British government has strict rules on fracking, deeming it safe and has regulated the industry to minimise any risks.³⁰Fracking firms are mandated to stop drilling if an earthquake measuring more than 0.5% in magnitude is detected. But this hasn’t stopped the pressure group, Talk Fracking, from taking the government to court over their fracking policy. That they won their case is another example of alarmist ideologues hampering the progress on climate change.³¹

Fracking leads to the decrease of greenhouse gases, a contributor to climate change.³² It also has the added benefit of decreasing the UK’s reliance on oil and gas from regimes like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Russia has a vested interest in the push to ban fracking in the UK. We are increasingly reliant on importing gas from Russia, a risky business given Vladimir Putin’s threat to cut off gas supplies in the Ukraine in 2014.³³ Russia won’t hesitate to use this leverage against any country that it wants to assert its power over.

Yet Deben and the CCC want to ban gas and increase our use of renewable energies. This makes no sense unless corruption is taken into account. Why would Deben push to ban gas and invest further in renewables if not to create more business for his company and clients? If the government succeeds in banning gas, the economy will be severely affected and we may have to burn money to keep us warm.

But the UK’s government’s inept handling of climate change pales into insignificance in comparison to that of the European Union (EU). On the say so of a hormonal sixteen-year-old Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, the EU has committed one fourth of its budget to combatting climate change.³⁴

If the EU has billions to fritter away on this vanity project, then it surely has enough money to help EU member states that have never recovered from the 2008 economic crash, rather than keeping them suspended in severe austerity measures.³⁵ Especially since youth unemployment is at almost 40% in Greece, 33% in Italy and 32.6% in Spain.³⁶ But for the EU, like most Western governments, virtue signalling and vanity projects are far more important than the livelihood of human beings.

Despite climate change activists repeating claims that they care for humanity, they don’t seem to be bothered about the nasty habit that the West has of shipping off its waste to countries like China.³⁷Any improvement in combatting C02 emissions needs to take into account the outsourcing of heavy industry and manufacturing to countries like China. This is often forgotten in the furore to exercise punitive green taxes. So is the calamitous effect on the environment from the burning of wood and coal in India and China. The annual burning of palm oil plantations in Indonesia also increases CO2 emissions that choke the atmosphere.³⁸ No wonder climate change initiatives are failing if these aberrations are not taken into account.

But debate is denied. The post-liberal Puritans forbid it, just like they forbid questions arising from their claims that women have penises, veganism will save the planet, global warming will cook us all to death, and climate change will destroy the planet, even though the projected end date for our demise keeps changing. Scientific advances, even those which can solve climate change, are ignored if they go against the prevailing ‘wisdom’. Emotions should not dictate policy, but sadly they do.

5. Leaving the Green Cult

The hyperbolic response to those who question accepted approaches to climate change is to label them ‘deniers’, a word which resonates with Holocaust denial. So the corrupt get away with their thefts while at the same time complicit governments and mainstream media attempt to make us feel guilty for living. And while all this sound and fury is happening, climate change is still occurring and none of the solutions are actually working.

That no dissent is allowed from the narrative leads me to conclude that the climate change industry has morphed into a cult. At beginning of this month an activist group called Birthstrike appeared on the BBC to say that they were far too scared to have children.³⁹A world made unliveable and terrifying by climate change was the reason they cited for their decision not to procreate. Advocating that human life should not even be allowed to begin because of climate change is akin to a death cult. If adherence to an ideology is so extreme that it affects life decisions like this, it cannot be described any other way. It is such a pity that a worthwhile and essential pursuit – solving climate change – has turned into a squalid, money-making cult.

Post-liberal Puritans and their progressive allies are doing a disservice to the project of combatting climate change. This is because the global response to climate change is itself regressive. Gullible western governments, suffering from a hangover of misplaced guilt, will bankrupt themselves in the name of solving climate change.

The West risks hurtling backwards into a post-Industrial age, complete with a brand new feudal system, while the developing nations grow fat on our taxes.

The West cannot solve climate change by imposing punitive green taxes on its citizens. Financial contributions to the UN’s green scams must stop. Some of the world’s biggest culprits in causing climate change, like India, China and India, must curb and reduce their CO2 emissions and finance their own solutions. For climate change is not just the fault of the West, which should not be blamed for creating a prosperous and aspiring society, something that the climate change harridans will destroy if we let them.

Climate change is real. If we are to fix its destructive impact, we need to make use of cheap and clean energy resources and ignore the bleatings of the climate change cultists and stop those who enrich themselves at our expense.

So to save the planet, let’s build those nuclear power stations and frack, baby, frack!

THE END

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Notes

1. See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6263143/STEPHEN-GLOVER-False-warnings-climate-change-make-sceptical.html

2. See https://www.thegwpf.com/left-wing-think-tank-withdraws-fake-extreme-weather-claims/

3. See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/07/whole-thing-is-unraveling-climate-change-reshaping-australias-forests

4. See https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/845901/climate-change-natural-global-warming-evidence-jennifer-marohasy

5. See https://www.thegwpf.com/carbon-dioxide-the-newest-form-of-renewable-energy/

6. https://doctorsagainstdiesel.uk/#WhyDiesel and also see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/27/health-effects-of-diesel-cost-european-taxpayers-billions

7. See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-france-protests/frances-macron-learns-the-hard-way-green-taxes-carry-political-risks-idUSKBN1O10AQ

8. See https://www.oic-oci.org/home/?lan=en and https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-un-a-club-run-by-tyrants-for-tyrants/

9. See https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/is-it-any-wonder-americas-had-enough-of-the-showboating-anti-semitic-unhrc/

10. See https://www.greenclimate.fund/who-we-are/about-the-fund

11. See https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300

12. See https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/what-is-the-paris-agreement

13. See https://www.devex.com/news/q-a-behind-the-breakdown-at-un-s-green-climate-fund-93250 and also see https://www.devex.com/news/at-the-un-s-green-climate-fund-the-honeymoon-is-over-93093 and also see https://www.thegwpf.com/behind-the-breakdown-at-uns-green-climate-fund/

14. See https://www.thegwpf.com/renewables-and-climate-policy-are-on-a-collision-course/

15. See http://cdm.unfccc.int/about/index.html

16. See https://nationalpost.com/opinion/geoffrey-clarfield-the-united-nations-is-losing-staggering-sums-to-corruption-mismanagement-and-bad-decision-making

17. See https://order-order.com/2019/02/27/polar-bear-numbers-reach-new-highs/ and also see https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2019/02/State-of-the-polar-bear2018.pdf

18. See https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jasmin-guenette/al-gores-inconvenient-sequel_b_16669842.html