Climate Confusion, Astroturfing, Pseudo-Science, Population Movement and Radical Right Libertarians

With COP26, the environment and net zero being in the news, the following Guardian article ‘Meet the ‘inactivists’, tangling up the climate crisis in culture wars‘ is relevant overview on those confusing the science round climate and measures to ameliorate e.g. Net Zero Watch formerly GWPG the Global Warming Policy Foundation linked to Lord Lawson (situated at 55 Tufton Street, London).

However, this modus operandi or strategy including misinformation, astroturfing, lobbying, accessing media, deflecting from fossil fuels and/or carbon mitigation measures also fits with the old ideology of the many corporate leaders, oligarchs and conservative politicians; radical right libertarian socio economic ideology and eugenics but, both are unpalatable to most voters.

Population Movement, Eugenics, Fossil Fuels & the Environment

The ‘science of eugenics’ went quiet after WWII for obvious reasons but reemerged in the US under the guise of ‘population control’, Population Council (Rockefeller) and the UN Population Division (UNPD).  Meanwhile ZPG Zero Population Growth was founded in the ‘70s with support of Rockefeller Bros. (Standard Oil/Exxon), Ford and Carnegie Foundations with directors being Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich and deceased white nationalist and anti-semite John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton.

This was later replicated in the UK with now Population Matters (Ehrlich is a patron) and in Australia, SPA Sustainable Population Australia, in liaison with both Ehrlich and Tanton.  In Australia their role is transparent, i.e. producing ‘demographic research’ that is used for dog whistling post white Australia immigration through the supposed environmental prism of ‘population growth’ portraying immigrants as an environmental ‘hygiene issue’; ‘greenwashing’ racism.

Further, Tanton can also be linked to UK’s Migration Watch, an anti-immigrant lobby group claiming e.g. there is demographic and/or immigration crisis, for media consumption, then negative headlines for tabloids.

It’s the ‘libertarain trap’ as focus upon immigrants and/or population growth then allows both dog whistling and deflecting from fossil fuels etc. and stymying any attempt at robust regulation of carbon and the environment.

Radical Right Libertarian Socio Economic Ideology

There is a network of Koch linked think tanks across the globe in the Atlas Network promoting low taxes, small government, reduced regulation, fewer public services and nobbling education.  In the USA this includes Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Heartland and American Enterprise Institute, the UK it’s Taxpayers’ Alliance, IEA Institute of Economic Affairs etc. and in Australia it’s the IPA Institute of Public Affairs, CIS Centre for Independent Studies and Taxpayers’ Alliance.

They also can be linked back to the white nationalists etc. round the population movement, including the ‘great replacement’ as Tanton had been active in having IRLI involved with the Koch linked and corporate donor supported Congressional lobbying ‘bill mill’ ALEC.  IRLI is part of another Tanton offshoot, FAIR Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform, like CIS Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA which informed the Trump White House, Miller, Sessions and Bannon; while nowadays still being deferred to by US media for expert commentary on immigration.

Common interest in antipathy towards empowered immigrants and citizens, discouraging science or ‘experts, versus more gut instinct and religious belief, underpinned by eugenics?

These seemingly disparate elements in different nations seem to orbit in the same system, though publicly dissociated from each other; global warming, climate, environmental regulation and eugenics is the common strand or theme that is shared.

A stark example exists in London, i.e. 55 Tufton Street, coincidentally houses the following groups within the Koch orbit i.e. IEA, Taxpayers’ Alliance and Lord Lawson’s Net Zero Watch, but the surprise is having the Tanton linked Migration Watch sharing the same building; libertarians, climate and/or science denial, immigration restrictions or eugenics aka 18th or 19th century?

The following Guardian article of Jack Shenker unwittingly stumbles across some of these links which are taken at face value but represent a ‘long game’ (identified by Nancy Maclean regarding radical right libertarians) of anti climate science and pro big business or ‘Big Oil’ to influence policy, regulation, MPs and voters, but it’s neither democratic nor transparent.

Also according to DeSmog, there are also links across to Covid science denial, ‘freedom & liberty’ from sensible constraints and with support from Koch linked networks.  Again, similar has been witnessed round the world but especially US, UK and Australia where nativist and/or conservative libertarians appear compelled to reinforce and maintain concepts of freedom & liberty, scepticism of science, avoidance of regulation and strangling government through ever lower taxes, with assistance of the radical right aka Capitol Hill and street demonstrations against Covid restrictions.

Meet the ‘inactivists’, tangling up the climate crisis in culture wars

As climate science has gone mainstream, outright denialism has been pushed to the fringes. Now a new tactic of dismissing green policies as elitist is on the rise, and has zoned in on a bitter row over a disused airport in Kent.

by Jack Shenker

In May 2020, as the world was convulsed by the coronavirus pandemic and global infections topped 4 million, a strange video began appearing in the feeds of some Facebook users. “Climate alarm is reaching untold levels of exaggeration and hysteria,” said an unseen narrator, over a montage of environmental protests and clips of a tearful Greta Thunberg. “There is no doubt about it, climate change has become a cult,” it continued, to the kind of pounding beat you might hear on the soundtrack of a Hollywood blockbuster. “Carbon dioxide emissions have become the wages of sin.”

The video’s reach was relatively small: according to Facebook data, it was viewed somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 times. But over the following weeks more videos came, each one experimenting with slightly different scripts and visuals. All focused on the supposed irrationality and hypocrisy of climate campaigners, and the hardship they wanted to inflict upon society’s most impoverished communities…..

At one stage, users hovering over the logo of that advertiser – a UK organisation called The Global Warming Policy Forum, or GWPF – were informed by Facebook that it was a “Science Site”. The GWPF is not a science website: it is the campaigning arm of a well-funded foundation accused by opponents of being one of Britain’s biggest sources of climate science denial.

The videos being tested by the GWPF in the spring and summer of 2020 were part of a strategic pivot away from explicit climate crisis denialism, and towards something subtler – a move being pursued by similar campaigners across the world. Welcome to a new age of what the atmospheric scientist and environmental author Michael E Mann has labelled climate “inactivism”: an epic struggle to convince you not so much to doubt the reality of climate crisis, but rather to dampen your enthusiasm for any attempts at dealing with it…..

Mackinlay, who has described Britain’s net-zero aspirations as a “social calamity” and insisted that “sooner or later, the public will rebel against this madness”, was not alone in framing decarbonisation through the lens of cultural division and class privilege…. 

Steve Baker, another Conservative parliamentarian and a close ally of Mackinlay, has dismissed the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the government, as “unelected and unaccountable”. Earlier this year, Baker declared that “In net zero, as with Brexit, the political class has in a very, almost smug and self-satisfied way, built a consensus which is not going to survive contact with the public.” Instead, he predicted, “there’s going to be an enormous political explosion.”….

Popular anger at the economic insecurities that are synonymous with 21st-century capitalism – which in the UK have included soaring housing costs, the casualisation of employment and sustained falls in wages – has provided an opening for any political forces presenting themselves as radical outsiders, fighting on behalf of the voiceless masses (Ed. they promote the former to justify the latter). On the right, these grievances have been fused with a cultural resentment towards highfalutin virtue-signalling and liberal elites…

In the run-up to Cop26, more than 30 leading organisations came together to develop a new set of tools capable both of monitoring the online spread of inactivist messaging, and anticipating the next Texas blackout campaign before it takes off. The ongoing project is being led by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, or ISD, a thinktank better known for its work tackling hate and extremism. So far it has yielded valuable insights into the shape of climate debates across Europe, such as the “national sovereignty” arguments being used to defend coal mining in Poland, and the entwining of anti-EU sentiments with inactivist climate messaging in Hungary. It has also led to a major report exploring the global spread of “climate lockdown” alarmism, in which hard-right activists and Covid denialists have found common cause in driving fear of pandemic-type lockdowns that they claim will soon be imposed by tyrannical governments at the behest of environmentalists.

It was back in May this year that DeSmog – a journalism platform that aims to expose and eliminate the “PR pollution” around climate breakdown, and one of the project’s partners – first noticed a newly trending Twitter hashtag: #CostOfNetZero. It was being pushed by Steve Baker, the Tory MP for Wycombe and the former chair of the Brexit-supporting European Research Group, as well as a newly appointed GWPF trustee…..

In the months that followed, however, disquiet over the net zero transition began ramping up in sections of the UK press – initially in outlets such as Spiked Online and GB News, but eventually creeping into the pages of major newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Sun, too. In August, the Spectator magazine printed an image of banknotes tumbling into a void on its cover, with the headline “The cost of net zero”; by September, right-leaning media commentators were homing in on the government’s aim of gradually phasing out gas boilers as part of the decarbonisation plan, and replacing them with air- or ground-source heat pumps instead. The far greater economic costs of inaction on climate crisis were rarely mentioned in these reports, but again and again, efforts to reduce our collective carbon emissions were framed as an elitist power-grab….

By the autumn – as a growing cost-of-living crisis began to dominate the news agenda – the GWPF had rebranded itself as Net Zero Watch, a new parliamentary grouping called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group led by Craig Mackinlay had been formed,….

The idea that decarbonisation is inherently elitist is a myth, peddled largely by political figures who have shown little concern for deprived communities in any other context, and who ignore the fact that without a net zero transition it is the very poorest – globally and domestically – who will suffer most severely. But like all effective myths, it is founded on a kernel of truth: namely that under successive governments, political decision-making has felt remote and unaccountable, the rich have got richer, and life for a great many of the rest of us has grown harder.’

For more blogs and articles click through below:

Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy

Anglosphere Triangle – Immigration – Environment – Population Growth – Radical Right Libertarians 

Koch Industries: How to Influence Politics, Avoid Fossil Fuel Emission Control and Environmental Protections 

Trump’s White House Immigration Policies and White Nationalist John Tanton

White Nationalist Extremism – Mainstreamed by Politicians and Media

Tactics Against Bipartisan Climate Change Policy in Australia – Limits to Growth?

Conspiracy of Denial – COVID-19 and Climate Science