Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Over the years, I’ve noticed pretty much every establishment attempt to push a climate agenda is accompanied by a call for people to unite. What if fear of change, of loss of control, and a desire for social unity and predictability are the real driving force behind the climate push?
Does the UK need a referendum on climate change pledges?
Critics say net-zero target has been imposed by ‘elites’ without electoral mandate
27 OCT 2021
A large proportion of the British public are in favour of a referendum on the government’s net-zero proposals, according to a new poll by YouGov.
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The Tony Blair Institute’s Tim Lord rejected the idea that “elites” are behind the drive for climate action. He said “there is irony in this – as it is the poorest who will be most severely affected by unconstrained climate change”.
Lord agreed that the net-zero target was introduced in the summer of 2019 with minimal debate in the Commons and no mention of the plan in the 2017 election – but it was included in the Conservative manifesto ahead of the December 2019 election.
While delivering net zero is a “complex task” that “cannot be achieved without public support for both the overall goal, and the policies required to get there”, this “cannot mean everyone supports every measure”, he said. Consent must be drawn from a broad base and “net zero has to be based around a politics of unity, not division”.
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Read more: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/954591/does-the-uk-need-a-referendum-on-net-zero-pledges
Here’s another call for unity;
Pope Francis praises youth activists in fight to tackle climate change
“It is said that you are the future, but in these matters, you are the present. You are those who are making the future today, in the present,” the pontiff said.
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The pope said solutions to climate change, including sustainable development and production, must be built on unity and a shared sense of responsibility.
“There must be harmony between people, men and women, and the environment,” he said. “We are not enemies. We are not indifferent. We are part of this cosmic harmony.”
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Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/pope-francis-praises-youth-activists-fight-tackle-climate-change-rcna2401
China wants unity too;
China releases white paper on climate change response
Updated 18:47, 27-Oct-2021
China on Wednesday released a white paper on the country’s policies and measures for responding to climate change. China has set a goal of peaking carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.
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The white paper states that climate change is a cause shared by all of humanity. Faced with unprecedented challenges in global climate governance, the international community needs to respond with unprecedented ambition and action. We need to act with a sense of responsibility and unity, take proactive measures, and work together to pursue harmony between humanity and nature.
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Read more: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-10-27/China-releases-white-paper-on-climate-change-response-14Hs1nziBe8/index.html
Unity, unity, UNITY. Plenty more examples where they came from.
When you think about it, a child could see through the nonsensical claims of climate alarmists. If slightly warmer temperatures are so terrible, why aren’t slightly warmer places already suffering all the problems alarmists say will happen? But climate alarmism, as a potential source of social unity, is far too valuable allow it to be defeated by mere logic.
What has caused this sudden upsurge in fear amongst global elites, that they are losing control?
I believe the trigger for this panic amongst the global elites was the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet State, right up until the very end, seemed all powerful, enormous, an unstoppable juggernaut with its terrifying state security apparatus and apparently complete control of communication.
But the Soviets failed to adapt to the information revolution.
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“Truth is good,” goes an old Russian proverb that Shane quotes, “but happiness is better.”
The earliest stirrings of free thought were nurtured on the radio broadcasts of Voice of America and the crude, self-published books and tape recordings of the Samizdatand Magnitizdat movements. By the end, of course, it was CNN and cellular phones that finally defeated the Soviet Union.
“The exploding arsenal of electronics–cellular telephones, fax machines, VCRs, satellite dishes, computers with modems–demonstrated a trend for technology to become more compact, portable, versatile and inexpensive,” Shane explains. “As such, the new machines seemed to be weapons the citizen could wield against the state as readily as the state could use them on the citizen.”
As Shane points out, the phrase “information revolution” takes on an entirely new meaning in this context. And he helps us understand how stirring but also how bizarre it must have been for a Soviet citizen to turn on his television set and see the top brass of the KGB on a call-in show: “Tonight they will be answering the questions,” the host announced.
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Read more: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-05-11-ls-56160-story.html
China has survived more successfully than the Soviets, because they had more money. Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist economic reforms in the 1980s gave the CCP the financial resources they needed to buy monitoring equipment and expertise, which made them more able to keep up with the information revolution. But even the Chinese are struggling to contain the free flow of information which is undermining state control of public narratives. Global freedom initiatives have provided systems like the TOR Project, which are used by Chinese citizens who want to sneak past the Great Chinese Firewall, so they can keep track of what is really going on in the world.
If global elites cannot control communication technology, the next best thing is to try to dominate the conversation, through a fear campaign and a call for global unity. The focus point for that push for global unity didn’t have to be climate change, but I believe they chose climate alarmism because it was convenient and available, and already had a significant following at the time the elites took an interest. Mikhail Gorbachev, after he lost his old job as the last dictator of the Soviet Union, spent a lot of time in the early 90s supporting United Nations climate initiatives.
The desire by elites to cling on to control, in my opinion, is why climate alarmism has survived repeated embarrassing predictive failures.
Normally when a scientific theory produces a disastrous series of wrong predictions, the theory withers and dies. But in my opinion global elites are keeping climate alarmism on life support, with vast infusions of taxpayer’s cash for compliant researchers, and en entire renewable energy industry which only exists because the governments of the world keep diverting taxpayer’s cash to pay the bills.
So long as a significant portion of the population believes in the climate crisis, this powerful source of social unity is too useful for spooked global elites to surrender.
The elite desire to hold back the information revolution at any price does nothing good for ordinary people.
Frightening kids with false climate doomsday narratives might buy the elites a little time, by helping the elites to retain their grip on power in the face of the technology driven growth of free speech and open communication, but the kids who accept the climate lies endure tremendous personal suffering.
The weather scammers in our garbage elite have predicted disaster from global cooling to global warming to climate change—trying to hide their lies behind name changes. But the “solution” is always consistent: more control and more looting by the central tyranny in DC.
A UN guy confirmed this over 10 yrs ago.
No. The University Presidents and Media Moguls who permit this cabal to thrive are haters of mining in general. These Lib-Tards FEEL that they are defending the Earth. They don’t think much if ever.
That explains the endless coverage of any oil spill no matter how small, Mann himself, and the IPCC. Prosperity, particularly for the less fortunate, means nothing to them.
Yuck.
It’s a classic tactic of the left.
Hi Eric,
This was a really insightful essay and this comment really caught my eye:
You might want to continue to explore that through the lens developed in Marshall Mcluhan’s famous essay:
The Medium is the Message
https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf
After you absorb that essay, you will notice that the “elites” as you refer to them, didn’t study Mcluhan when they pushed the notion that the internet and social media would unite and “bring the world together”. In fact, the response has been the opposite… and the reaction of the elites has been to double down on the “content” (dominate the conversation), which, as Mcluhan points out, is a futile.
A few years ago, I was reading an academic paper about the birth and introduction of the Gutenberg printing press which posited that within about ~70 years of its introduction, to any place in the world, there has been a revolution. Two of the examples I remember were the Reformation & American Revolution. In the American Revolution the regions with the most printing presses were the most rebellious. Canada had practically none and there were very few in the Southern States. Conventional, linear thinkers, would posit that the plethora of printing presses allowed the dissenters to “get the message out” but Mcluhan asserts this is incorrect.
I think you are really on to something with the “kernel of thought” you presented above, so it would be interesting to see what you come up with when you integrate Mcluhan’s thesis with your own observations.
Thanks for posting this!
Very intersting essay, and anecdote, thanks.
I see social media as an outlet for outrage, the lack of outrage outlets pre internet made revolution more likely IMO. That doesn’t negate revolution post-internet, if people are pushed too far they’re going to revolt. e.g. yellow vests
I wonder what Marshall Mcluhan would make of the internet, the push for biometric digital IDs as a requirement for access, the push to cancel people, and/or label anyone with a counter gov/narrative position as a ‘domestic terrorist’ with ‘hate speech’ and other laws so nebulous anyone could fall foul one day.
I see this trend leading to a social credit system in the not so distant future…
Lin Jinyue, lead designer of China’s social credit system, extolls its value and his hope for worldwide adoption: “If you had the social credit system, there would never have been the
Yellow Vests, we would have detected that before they acted.”
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/take-away-their-freedoms-take-away-their-homes_MvS2rHPhYGrLSDj.html
I think, not having studied Mcluhan in a while, is that all of the corrective measures (really content regulation) you mention, is an effort to put the internet genie back in the bottle. While that may work for a while, he would posit that ultimately the medium will prevail. Ultimately, all of the content regulation is a tacit admission of the content’s veracity.
What is interesting about Mcluhan’s lens is that he makes the assumption that people have not changed in thousands of years. There have always been liberals and conservatives living together and the complaints people were making back in 1776 are the same as people are making now. So, if people are the same, then the only variable left is how they communicate (the medium).
Before the internet, you may have had no idea that your neighbors believed in some ideology that you disagreed with. But now that everyone can tweet and blog, you know who believes in what. The internet is like providing everyone with their own personal printing press. The ironic thing is is that your community has not changed at all, but what has changed is that you now know how your neighbors think. So, with this discovery, your community or nation, goes from harmonious to acrimonious.
And this outcome was so obvious that there even as a Gilligan’s Island episode about “mind reading seeds” that seemed like a gift at first but ended up exploding the harmony of the castaways that they burned the bush that produced the seeds.
I don’t know where this going or how it will end, but I think Mcluhan’s lens may be of use in deciphering the outcome. IMHO
Astute observations, thanks.
Addendum: I also remember from that period of reading… about why Christianity swept through the Roman Empire. The authors suggested that it was not the content of the religion, but the Sabbath day weekly mass (Mcluhan’s medium) that gave it the competitive advantage over the pagan sects, which only met sporadically.
What came first, promotion of climate alarmism, or the decrease in oil exploration spending?
Is climate alarmism a cover for peak oil?
or is it just a coincidence all the AGW policy nonsense is (almost) exactly the same response one would expect from a peak oil policy response?
Would the response be any better if the parasite class were honest about it?
Climate alarmism started at least 50 years ago.
Peak Oil has been 10 years off for almost twice as long.
Hubbert presented his theory in 1956, his preliminary paper (Energy from Fossil Fuels) came out in 1949 laying the ground work…
But that doesn’t answer the question regarding exploration investment, I recall financial headlines ~17yrs ago Shell was buying back shares rather than investing it on exploration, which makes me wonder if the parasite class decided to leave it in the ground, or they really hit an exploration limit.
Peak oil started much earlier, probably before 1900 but certainly not long after that date.
You just noticed this? I thought it was pretty obvious in 1988.
The satisfaction of knowing that the house of cards will inevitably fall does little to improve the lives of those it will fall upon. Which, unfortunately, is pretty much everyone currently living today.
History won’t look kindly upon charlatans like John Kerry, Joe Biden, Angela Merkel and Boris Symonds, but, since I believe in reincarnation about as much as I believe in algoremageddon, all this just makes me feel worse.
They won. They have our children dancing in lockstep (makes me yearn for the days when the biggest worry about high schoolers was that they’d have too much sex – these days, they have less sex than octogenarians). Our economies will be destroyed and we will become dependent on the same governments that destroyed them.
Unity -> conformity. -> obedience -> subservience -> subjugation -> slavery -> death.
This is not the formula that led to innovation and human flourishing.
The bigger picture doesn’t matter when one believes he is losing his grip on his little part.
Dictators are always concerned about public opinion and is why they brow beat the hell out of their citizens.
A friend who grew up in East Germany said in school they told us everyday the Americans are coming, and you never came. She went on class trips to Russia to learn what the USSR wanted. Her aunt was in an engineering program when she demonstrated against the government, was promptly thrown in jail for five days while being threatened and upon release was expelled from any further education. The procedure of elites has changed but the results have not. Or maybe it has not changes so much after all.
Obliquely admitting we may have already lost.
The truth will prevail in the end. Hopefully the end will be before the collapse of western civilisation.
“Is Climate Alarmism an Establishment Attempt to Restore Social Control?”
I would say more to SEIZE social and political control.
UNITY! BETTER TOGETHER! Remember that “fascism” comes from the Roman “fasces” — bundles of sticks tied together for strength. Unity = “shut up and do as we say”.
Great observation – fascism is literally a large group of people acting as one without dissent or individual thought. Antifa are the ultimate fascists and too stupid to see it. Same for most progressives who adopt their beliefs from the herd.
OT note about upcoming :Green Summit”
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Featured speakers include Hap Klopp, the founder of North Face, Prince Gharios, the sovereign Prince of Ghassan, Karl W. Feilder, the founder and CEO of North Face, and Sylvia Earle, National Geographic Explorer. More speakers will continue to be added as we grow the event.
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Prince Gharios of Ghassan — the exiled Sovereign Prince and heir to the Ghassanid Kingdom … which no longer exists… overthrown in the 7th century, following the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 AD.
Prince Gahrios of Ghassan Al-Nu’mani is an actor, known for Ode to My Mother (2014).
Two guys from the same outdoor gear company & an oceanographer.
Sounds a bundle of fun !!!
It might be interesting to attend just to see how far off these “future leaders” are.
“The Tony Blair Institute’s Tim Lord rejected the idea that “elites” are behind the drive for climate action. He said “there is irony in this – as it is the poorest who will be most severely affected by unconstrained climate change”.”
It’s not “unconstrained climate change” that’s going to severely affect the poorest, it’s unconstrained government action to solve a fake crisis that has been created to rid the world of eviiiiiil capitalism.
“Is Climate Alarmism an Establishment Attempt to Restore Social Control?”
No, I don’t think so. Its an episode of mass hysteria and irrationality. There have been many of these in human history and in the 20th century, where they are well documented. Leave aside wars and genocides and financial bubbles and lets confine ourselves to the West, and to manias surrounding social issues. They usually contain a strong element of irrational fears. Here are some striking examples:
Early 20c masturbation mania
Eugenics movement
McCarthyism in the US, fifties
Satanic abuse mania in the eighties and nineties
Recovered memory movement late 20c
The current trans movement
Climate alarmism
People are just very irrational and prone to these sudden waves of hysteria. Take for instance shrinking penis mania, quite common in Africa but not only found there. Or the episodes of hysterical fainting that have been reported in a few girl’s schools from time to time. Extend it to the plainly irrational persistence in mutual slaughter of WWI, but then consider Pol Pot, Sendero Luminosa, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s purges and famines. Not to mention the insanity and wickedness and purposelessness of the Holocaust. The tribe in Africa, who on instructions from crazed children slaughtered all their cattle and died of hunger. The great bull market of 1920s, which has its analogues today in the crazed idea that unlimited printing of money will lead to perpetual prosperity.
It happens on a large scale in nations, but it also happens on a small scale in groups and cults – a well known case is documented in ‘When Prophecy Fails’, when people became convinced of the imminent second coming, and persisted in that belief when the prophecies had failed.
The current widespread acceptance of the crazed idea that one can change a man to a woman by surgery and hormones, or vice versa, is an example.
We have to accept that we are a species in which irrational waves of feeling and action and policy based on them will sweep across the communities in which we live. Bertrand Russell expressed a rather disturbing but basically rational point of view on this. He was reproached for having moved to America during WWII.
He replied that when a group of madmen are fighting each other with knives in a pitch black room, the intelligent thing to do is get out.
So its dangerous, dangerous to communities and countries in the effects of the policies, and dangerous to anyone who is seen to be dissenting from the mania and can be turned into an object of attack. but its not an Establishment anything, its just another episode of mass hysteria.
Jacques Ellul, French Philosopher died in 1994 but his quotes are so relevant to this current discussion.
The allure of controlling the masses using smart phones, big data, industrial and Operant psychology is what has brought on the massive investment in what I call comprehensive propaganda. Then add false campaigns of fear, ( climate, weather, health, over population etc) and a entirely new set of tools is now available to the highest bidder. The establishment has bought into the power of the new technique. The outcome will be global smartphone serfdom. The allure of the power of the technique is what has caused the onset of the campaign to unify the world with fear. This is as much about megalomania as any ideology. Yet in our covert era of false flag and smoke and mirror, it is difficult to pinpoint the megalomaniacs. Whoever they are, they are bolstered by their own massive success.
Ellul Quotes.
It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. (think smartphone in 2021) (Quote from 1968)
Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. (think smartphone for controlling people) (1960’s qoute)
The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief (1960’s ) (the end of science and intellectual pursuit of truth)
No technique is possible when men are free…. Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being.
The question for me is how free do we have to be to prevent a massive technique from completely over taking our freedom? How free are well really? Personally, I have no clue but I fear the technique is built to ensure that we won’t realize it’s gone until it’s long gone.
Isn’t that the goal of propaganda?
These are my ideas about the roots of climate activism:
http://www.davdata.nl/math/piedpiper.html
The elites are promoting climate change as a driver of unity. As the only real driver our civilzation It is a strange choice. The human race has existed as species for many millions of years. Despite many cataclysms worse than anything except a cold period reducing CO2 to less than 50 ppm or so it has survived. Fossils and relics show virtually discoveries of might be human remains often includes items that must have been traded.
My future prediction is that the primary hazard is not just wars and another cycle of mad leaders. It is a very real risk that all this commotion, if carried to the bitter end will result in a few thousands of tribes scattered over the globe in pockets of relative livability. They will keep outsiders away by reflex and have very little communication or trade.
The main reason would be vague legends of the destruction of the tribes ancestors by such things as petrifying storms, plagues, the seas drying up, mountains falling, and huge tidal waves, almost ad infinitum.
Sound familiar. It’s all in the western bible and in other legends across the world. It can happen again.
The current climate/virus/trade could very well nearly destroy civilization. It woud leave the current intelligent people aghast. The power-hungry elites will start armies. The timid will either die are team up with somebody supposedly stronger. Loss of trade will turn many societies in ghosts of themselves.
Fortunately or not, no one living today will experience it,
The founders of the Club of Rome ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome ) have had to to dance around a lot as they saw that increasing CO2 greatly aids the production of crops to feed the world’s billions, but they maintain their focus that the way to control society is to scare it, and try to convince you that only more government can save you.
Baloney.
What do you think “unity” means? Here, it means that any dissent from the globalist party needs should be squashed. Anyone that agrees with The Party should attack any dissent until the dissenters become silent. Unity = one group of people imposing their will onto others by force. We are seeing a worldwide push towards vaccine unity right now, aren’t we? See what that looks like as a reference.
The global push towards vaccine unity looks like the previous global push to eliminate smallpox and the vaccine push to eliminate polo. Or are you opposed to those as well?
Ridiculous, it looks nothing like that, not from an immuno-biology POV at least (unless you get your immuno-biology from skilled TV watching). Have a read of this review paper, and think of unintended consiquences…
https://gigaohmbiological.com/review
They mean Uniformity
Yet another conspiracy theory about the global elite trying to control everything. And still no mention of who exactly this shadowy group are. Do they include for example all the billionaires who have gotten rich from fossil fuels? Is Donald Trump part of this “global elite”? Or George Bush? Surely being president of the US should be enough to put amount the global elite? What about Putin? Or Mohammed bin Salman?
Communists/Socialists/Liberals believe they acting to ‘saving the planet’ and advocating wonderful things. They all display the worst aspects of a ‘Savior Complex’. Psychologists say ‘Savior Complex’ tendencies can involve fantasies of omnipotence*.
Communists/Socialists/Liberals are defined by their awful pompous pseudo-moral superiority, and their continual egotistical desire to virtue signal. They’re duplicitous in furthering their dangerous ‘the means justifies the ends’ suicidal advocacy. They are actually wreaking chaos on this planet. They are catastrophic for humanity’s development and evolution, being as they are, the greatest threat that humanity has ever confronted.
There will be only one outcome for this; human life being reduced to a consensus of drudgery, mediocrity, and immortality, godless empty lives with only vaporous celebrity pettiness and trivia as relief, before finally succumbing to absolute nihilism and slavery.
*See https://www.healthline.com/health/savior-complex