How The War on Climate Change Destroyed the Environmental Movement
The many overlaps between the military-industrial, medical-industrial, and climate-industrial complex.
In the
first part of this series (which must be read to understand many of the concepts here), I reviewed how many different industries are dominated by individuals who will put profits before human lives—and that this happens to a degree that is often difficult to even imagine. The military industrial complex, and the recent war in Ukraine best embody this grotesque facet of the human condition, but the same patterns are seen in many other fields as well.
As a longtime environmentalist, one of the most depressing things I have watched in my lifetime has been major polluters hijacking the environmental movement and transforming it from something that fought to against the destruction of our air and water to a fanatical crusade against (harmless) carbon dioxide. Sadder still, this crusade has gradually become a war and has adopted the same playbook used by the parties which lust for complete power over the citizenry.
(Disclaimer: some of what I will write here will likely raise strong disagreements with some of you. I am completely fine if you disagree with this piece, particularly since it is not my field of expertise, and I likely made some unintentional errors in writing this.)
The War on Climate Change
Before COVID-19 vaccines, the drugs best known for having a terrible risk-to-benefit ratio but nonetheless being pushed on entire populations were statins.
Note: I would argue the antidepressants were worse in this regard, but the issues with statins were better recognized.
When you dive into statins, you find a very familiar pattern—the evidence shows there is no benefit from them, the public is not even allowed to view most of the evidence, and all the bodies which mandated statins on the population (e.g., government health panels) were being bribed by statin manufacturers. Beyond the COVID-19 vaccines, this is precisely what happened (and can be clearly proven) with Remdesivir, which for a long time was the only approved treatment for COVID-19 despite it being deadly and ineffective.
One of the leading advocates against statins, Malcolm Kendrick MD, has advanced a compelling argument for why the drug industry will never let statins go. It took so much money (and time) to create the cholesterol market built upon the dogma that cholesterol is the primary cause of heart disease and that we must do everything possible to lower it, that the industry will never let that investment go.
Similarly, with global warming, because so much was invested into having it be the entire face of environmentalism, once its predictions failed to materialize, something else had to be done to preserve the investment. This was, of course, “climate change,” an even more vague and undefinable target that anything and everything could fit into, including every destructive effect of pollution that had nothing to do with carbon dioxide being emitted.
Throughout my lifetime, I have repeatedly read numerous documents either authored by or allegedly authored by government think tanks which have essentially said that to effectively control the population and exploit them (e.g., have a national unity behind a terrible policy), wars and crises are necessary. In each case, that emergency can be used to justify rapid changes in society, no one would otherwise accept, and the minority who go against them can be labeled as traitors and, in one way or another, neutralized.
In the old days, this was done with physical wars (best encapsulated by 1984’s reference to the totalitarian state the main character lived in, always being at war with one of the other two empires). However, when World War 2 happened, a significant issue with that approach emerged—war technology had advanced to the point that physical wars between major powers were immensely devastating and resulted in destroyed infrastructures no one could make money off of once the war ended.
This, along with the threat of mutually assured destruction, led to various alternative warfare methods being developed, such as economic conflicts between major powers, limited proxy wars in smaller nations (e.g., Vietnam), and pseudo-wars being created domestically.
In the case of pseudo-wars, the goal was to create a war against an “idea” so the war could never end, and it could be continually used to justify all the policies that normally required a war. In most of the documents I read, the typical targets for a pseudo-war were:
•An infectious disease.
•Terrorism.
•A widespread environmental threat.
Since we all lived through Bush’s War on Terror, it should be clear how that played out, and that it accomplished nothing besides making a lot of money for those invested in it and it diverted a lot of America’s attention toward non-existent terror threats (e.g., does anyone remember how long we had a color code of terror alert days?).
Early in COVID, a wise friend called me up and stated the following:
I just realized something. COVID-19 is the Democrat’s War on Iraq. It’s going to be built on a bunch of blatant lies the media will viciously uphold as truth, and everyone behind this is going to do as much profiteering off of it as they can for as long as possible, which is probably going to be a long, long time.
I guess I can’t complain though; at least we aren’t killing tons of Iraqis overseas to fund this.
In the book The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK Jr. provided the best case I have seen for just how much many members of government (e.g., the intelligence services) and the oligarchs have pushed for a “war” against a disease. To share two of its many quotes:
[Bill] Gates reiterated: “The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war.”
“Governments do like epidemics, just the same way as they like war, really. It’s a chance to impose their will on us and get us all scared so that we huddle together and do what we’re told.” —Dr. Damien Downing, President, British Society of Ecological Medicine (Al Jazeera, 2009)
In a recent interview, RFK Jr. also discussed how the War on Climate Change had been coopted by those same war profiteers. I believe his position on this specific issue, in time, will show itself to be one of the most important reasons for his presidential campaign:
The climate issues and pollution issues are being exploited by the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates and all of these big Mega billionaires the same way that COVID was exploited. To use it as an excuse to clamp down — top down totalitarian controls on society and to then to give us engineering solutions. And if you look closely as it turns out, the guys who are promoting those engineering solutions are the people who own the IPs, the patents for those solutions. It’s being used…
…They’ve given climate chaos a bad name because people now see that it’s just another crisis that’s being used to strip mine the wealth of the poor and to enrich billionaires.
Note: many of the same individuals who were responsible for the disastrous wars on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan during Bush’s presidency, continued business as usual within the Obama administration (e.g., in Libya and Ukraine), and then after a brief hiatus returned to power with Biden. Victoria Neuland is an excellent example of this issue (e.g., see Ron Paul’s article here).
One of the more disturbing things these individuals have been pushing for in the Biden administration is to restart the War on Terror, but instead have it be directed towards American citizens who question the narrative. For example, consider this Homeland Security Bulletin of Terrorist Threats to The US Homeland:
•Law enforcement have expressed concerns that the broader sharing of false narratives and conspiracy theories will gain traction in mainstream environments, resulting in individuals or small groups embracing violent tactics to achieve their desired objectives. With a diverse array of threats, DHS is concerned that increased outbreaks of violence in some locations, as well as targeted attacks against law enforcement, may strain local resources.
•Nation-state adversaries have increased efforts to sow discord. For example, Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked media outlets have repeatedly amplified conspiracy theories concerning the origins of COVID-19* and effectiveness of vaccines*; in some cases, amplifying calls for violence targeting persons of Asian descent.
*all of these have since been proven true.
Questioning Climate Change
One of the things I always marvel about with life is how often a sincere commitment to the truth ends up putting you at odds with a peer group you join because you share many of their values. I care about the environment but am stuck in a position where the environmentalists hate me because I do not support the Climate Change narrative. In contrast, those who do not support the Climate Change narrative hate me because I care about the environment and do not believe polluters should be given a free pass to support economic growth.
Because of how much has been invested into the climate change narrative and the vital social functions it serves (protecting industrial polluters from scrutiny and being a war that can be drawn out when needed), the need to hold onto the investment is even stronger than that seen with statins. So, as you might expect, when evidence emerges that challenges the climate change narrative, whatever is necessary to dismiss it occurs, while when evidence appears to support it, regardless of how flimsy it is, everyone parades it as irrefutable proof of the narrative. In other words, it is a situation not too different from what we have seen with COVID-19 vaccines.
From a philosophical standpoint, the root problem with the climate change narrative is that nothing can disprove it (thereby making it fulfill the classic criteria of pseudoscience). Climate change is an intentionally vague term, and fluctuations in weather always occur, so any unwanted fluctuation can be attributed to human-caused climate change (especially given how flexible our “models” are), and there is no way to prove or disprove any argument asserting climate change.
Consider natural disasters, which always occur. Many of them ultimately result from the fact that settlements were built where they should not have been (New Orleans being the classic example, since it is in a hurricane zone and below sea level, flooding is almost inevitable there). However, each time a disaster occurs, rather than acknowledging what really caused it, something else is blamed (e.g., bad luck or climate change) so disaster money can be gotten to patch the issue. Then, years later, the disaster repeats.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, whenever evidence emerges that suggests the climate change hypothesis is wrong, that data is attacked, censored, hidden, or altered. In the same way, those questioning vaccines are never given a platform to present their argument (as doing so asserted as equivalent to enabling murder), those questioning climate change are treated the same.
Many noteworthy examples of data have been presented that challenged the global warming hypothesis (either that warming was happening or that carbon dioxide, which only composes 0.04% of our atmosphere, correlates to temperature changes). Almost all of these have been censored.
The best example I ever came across happened during what was known as “Climategate,” where hackers got access to many documents and private emails from leading climate researchers worldwide in 2009. Although the press buried this story, the leaked files showed the following:
•A lot of data manipulation occurred to support the climate narrative; especially once raw data showed a downward trend in global temperatures after 2001. For example, a decision was made to primarily use temperature monitoring stations in hotter areas (while throwing out many more stations in colder areas) and then using the remaining (hotter) stations to extrapolate (hotter) temperatures for every single station (e.g., those in the colder areas). Similarly, numerous “adjustments” were made to the raw data, which increased the final temperatures.
•Most of the raw temperature data (which the theory of global warming was founded upon) was thrown out, thereby making it impossible for anyone to question or verify the scientist’s work. In emails, the scientists also discussed working to illegally circumvent Freedom of Information Act laws so their misconduct could not be uncovered.
•Leading climate scientists actively conspired to subvert the scientific peer review process to ensure that papers skeptical of their climate change narrative had no access to publication.
•This scientific malfeasance occurred globally (e.g., in England and in the USA at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Their erroneous results provided the involved scientists with continued funding and were repeatedly cited by officials (e.g., the Obama administration) worldwide to justify public climate policy.
much, much more at OP ...
