"This anti-sustainability backlash, this anti-woke backlash, is incredibly dangerous for the world."
— Alan Jope, CEO, Unilever, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative
It would not be an exaggeration to say this is probably one of the most inverted takes on what is “dangerous” in the history of civilization. Not because anyone is against the concept of sustainability, but because sustainability as defined by Alan Jope is incredibly unsustainable. If he gets his way, he will destroy the world.
Jope, Clinton, the infamous Karl Schwab who heads the World Economic Forum, the ESG movement informally headed by Larry Fink of BlackRock (with over $10 trillion in investments), and all the rest who champion today’s prevailing globalist climate agenda are coercing nearly 8 billion people into an era of poverty and servitude.
The primary target of the “sustainability” movement is fossil fuel, the burning of which allegedly is causing catastrophic climate change. Heedless of the fact that fossil fuel provides more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide, banks, hedge funds and institutional investors throughout the Western world are using ESG criteria (environment, social, governance), to deny the financing necessary to maintain or build new fossil fuel infrastructure.
It’s working. Pressure from governments, international NGOs, and global finance is now delivering unprecedented shifts in policies around the world, creating needless scarcity and turmoil. In just the last month, new emissions rules have triggered protests by farmers in the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Sri Lanka, in the process of earning a near perfect ESG score, lost its ability to feed its people. In the ensuing fury, the president was forced to flee the country. Undaunted, globalist climate activists are discouraging African nations from developing natural gas.
It should be easy to see the hidden agenda behind this repression. If you control energy and food, you control the world. The biggest multinational corporations on Earth are empowered by ESG mandates, because marginal or emerging competitors lack the financial resiliency to comply. From small independent private farmers and ranchers to small independent nations, once their ability to produce is broken, the big players pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. But that’s not what you read in the Washington Post.
In a blistering editorial published on September 18, under “The Post’s View,” the editors wrote “The World’s Ice is Melting: Humanity Must Prepare for the Consequences.” For at least 30 years, and with increasing frequency and intensity, it is not the weather that has become extreme, but rather these proclamations. We have now reached the point where every major institution in the Western world is bent on spreading this panic. Yet very little of it is justified by the facts.
To verify the credibility of the globalist climate agenda, should it have any, several hurdles have to be overcome. If global warming and extreme weather is definitely happening, then how serious is the problem, what is the cause of the problem, and what are rational solutions to the problem? To all four of these questions, serious debate is mostly absent from mainstream discourse. Skeptics are pariahs.
But if a skeptical response to any one of these four questions is accepted, the entire edifice of climate alarm collapses. Consider each of them:
Melting ice is sort of a trump card in the hands of the climate alarm community. If every molecule of ice on top of Greenland were to melt into the ocean, sea level would rise by over 20 feet. If the entire 5 million square mile Antarctic continent were to lose its ice, sea level would rise by 200 feet. That much is indisputable. But is ice in retreat?
The Wall Street Journal recently published an analysis by theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, where he noted that Antarctica has been ice-covered for over 30 million years, and is covered with over 26 million gigatons (a gigaton is a cubic kilometer) of ice. He points out that even at the current estimated rate of net loss, 250 gigatons per year, it would take a century for sea level to rise 3 inches. What Koonin ought also to point out is that 250/26,000,000 is a fraction so small, it is unlikely to exceed the margin for error using existing measurement technology.
In Greenland, as in Antarctica, summer ice melt is offset by snow that causes accumulation of ice in the interior. A recent paper authored by NOAA’s Michael Gallagher evaluates how snowfall affects ice mass in Greenland. Throughout the document, the author acknowledges large uncertainties that make it difficult to predict that climate change automatically signifies net losses in ice mass. It may be that a warmer climate would cause increased snowfall to more than offset increased melting in Greenland.
As for floating ice in the Arctic, which does not raise sea level when it melts, but does offer a cooling, reflective surface at the top of the world, inexplicably it is at a decade high. Vijay Jayaraj, writing for Principia Scientific, citing findings from both the Japanese Institute of Polar Research and the Danish Meteorological Institute, reported that “the extent of ice in the summer of 2022 has been greater than the 10-year average. On most days in July and August, sea-ice levels were above the 10-year average and significantly more than the previous few years.”
Digging further into arctic ice loss, over the past 40 years, the summertime retreat of ice has become more significant, while the wintertime maximum has dropped slightly. So let’s assume the planet is warming. How serious is the problem?
To answer this, you can go to the IPCC’s own reports, which are routinely misread by governments and media to hype the worst case scenarios. Michael Shellenberger, an environmental writer and activist, and author of the book Apocalypse Never, in a recent essay he published on Substack, referenced IPCC reports among others to refute the idea of a climate crisis. Here are excerpts:
Since the end of the Cold War, policymakers, journalists, and activists have pointed to melting glaciers, dying coral, and deadly floods as signs of the apocalypse. But people misread the signs. Scientists in 2022 measured more coral on the Great Barrier Reef than at any point since they began monitoring them in 1986. And, not only have deaths and damages from flooding declined significantly worldwide, for the first time in 25 years, there were no Atlantic hurricanes in August.
Climate change is real and having real world impacts, to be sure. But none of those environmental changes are the end of the world. While warmer temperatures increase bleaching, corals can survive bleaching; scientists find that corals are adapting and evolving to warmer water; and people are breeding coral that can survive hotter temperatures. And the main factor preventing flood damage and death remains water management to channel stormwater through upgraded drain systems, not modestly higher rainfall. As for hurricanes, NOAA estimates that they will become 25% less frequent.
In truth, there is no scientific basis for any claim of climate apocalypse. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and others forecast that farmers in the world’s poorest regions, like sub-Saharan Africa, could see a 40% increase in crop yields if they gain access to fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization, even at high levels of warming. There is no science supporting the alarmist claims of an imminent collapse of the North Atlantic Ocean currents, which bring warm water north, and cool water south, an oft-repeated ‘tipping points’ scenario. Indeed, it is hard to come up with any scenario where temperature changes of 4°C could be world-ending.
So whether it’s mild or severe, what is causing climate change?
First, as climate skeptics are fond of pointing out, the earth’s climate has always been changing. Many of the variables at work today are identified as causing major climate shifts in previous epochs. For much of the last 2.5 million years, the earth has been a snowball. What we are living in today is known as the Holocene interglacial, a warm period that has lasted for 11,000 years. Based on geologic history, another ice age is past due.
Clearly it wasn’t anthropogenic CO2 that drove these profound episodes of climate change in Earth’s past. Other causes include how the shape of Earth’s orbit fluctuates on a 96,000 year cycle, how the tilt of the Earth’s axis fluctuates on a 41,000 year cycle, and how that axis wobbles on a 26,000 year cycle. The combinations in which these cycles converge impact how much sun hits the polar latitudes, possibly triggering warming or cooling.
These orbital phenomena are not believed to be enough to trigger the beginning or the end of an ice age on their own, but instead start a feedback loop in the Earth’s climate system. In that regard, anthropogenic CO2 may actually be postponing the next ice age. From LiveScience.com, “Scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany have shown that the onsets of past ice ages were triggered mainly by decreases in carbon dioxide and that the dramatic increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because of human-caused emissions, has likely suppressed the onset of the next ice age for up to 100,000 years.”
More immediate variables affecting climate include solar cycles, as well as major fluctuations in ocean currents such as the 20 to 30 year Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Climate is also affected by volcanic activity which releases CO2 and aerosols into the atmosphere. The climate may be affected by deforestation or desertification, urban heat islands, and other changes in land use. The climate is greatly affected by water vapor in ways that are still poorly understood.
The multidisciplinary nature of climate science, the infinitely complex assortment of variables impacting climate, the uncertain and often conflicting measurements, the dichotomy between predictive modeling and actual events, combined with relentless pressure on scientists to always reinforce the “consensus,” ought to call into question all alarmist proclamations. But weather has always been capable of wreaking havoc on civilization. What should be done to mitigate its extremes?
This is where the doomsday coalition, with the globalist ESG lobby in the vanguard, are themselves the most dangerous people on Earth. Their solution, preposterous on its face, is to halt further development of fossil fuel resources and, within 30 years, eliminate use of fossil fuel entirely.
This is nihilistic, tyrannical oppression. It is horrendously unsustainable. It is an impossible goal to achieve. To even approach accomplishing this objective in a matter of a few decades would cause famine, depression, and war—impoverishing if not killing billions of people.
In his remarks at the Clinton Foundation, Unilever CEO Alan Jope also said this, “In 1939, George Orwell wrote that we have sunk to such depths that stating the obvious is the first responsibility of every person.” He went on to say “stating the obvious, that we are having a climate emergency, is becoming an unpopular thing to do.”
To state the obvious, however, is to state that we are not having a climate “emergency.” And while we have reason to hope that a tipping point is near,that remains the unpopular sentiment. Equally obvious is that the globalist climate agenda, among other things, aims to control and ration all energy in the world.
Alan Jope, and others like him pushing this death wish, are themselves the most dangerous people in the world. They may claim to be high-minded altruists, but if they get their way, the destruction they unleash will make the last century’s tyrants seem amateur by comparison.
One must wonder how anyone can be so delusional in the face of overwhelming evidence. Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and an energy expert who is becoming a powerful voice for sanity on this topic, recently produced the following chart showing the resources required to produce renewable power:
