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May 20

2020

0

350.org / 1Sky

Bill McKibben Manufactured "Movements" No Deal For Nature Planet of the Humans

Green Capital and Environmental “Leaders” Won’t Save Us

Undisciplined Environments

May 20, 2020

By Alexander Dunlap

 

Despite its serious flaws, Jeff Gibbs’s documentary Planet of the Humans powerfully exposes how optimism for “renewable energy” transitions is misplaced, and how mainstream environmentalism is becoming a force for green capitalism.
People are outraged! Jeffery Gibbs’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans – co-produced by Michael Moore and Ozzie Zehner – has shocked and awed “progressive” critics, fuelling a steady stream of outcry. “It is truly demoralizing how much damage this film has done at a moment when many are ready for deep change,” exclaims Naomi Klein on Twitter.

Much of the concern voiced is correct, yet it detracts away from two fundamental messages: “renewable energy” is dependent on extreme mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, and mainstream environmentalism has “sold out.” This, in many ways, is old news for political ecologists, especially those involved in environmental conflicts concerning wind power, hydroelectric dams and mineral extraction development, yet the pandemonium generated by this film deserves some clarification.

Important Criticisms: Caveat

The documentary has some foundational flaws. It underestimates the efficiency and capacity of wind and solar technologies. The data is old and the range of people interviewed limited. More damaging, however, is their discussion of population. Yes, population is an issue, and voluntary initiatives to control it are adopted by some environmentalists (for instance, degrowth advocates). Yet, modes of consumption and production will always be the determining factors for how populations will articulate catastrophic ecological and climatic impacts.

The problem with the “overpopulation” narrative is that it condemns all of humanity for the present socio-ecological situation. Even if, later in the documentary, corporations, financial consultants and their “environmental movement” collaborators become the main focus of critique, the directors largely neglect class, race, and gender as issues related to environmental degradation.

At the same time, the film forgets the socio-ecological values of different groups. It overwrites the variegated agency of (a “pluriverse” of) people, positioning Indigenous land defenders at war with extraction in the background, and not acknowledging in any way their different socio-ecological practices and relationships. The lack of clarity surrounding these issues, or the missing explicit support for environmental struggles against green capitalism and extraction is damaging, ultimately taking away from issues that deserve popular acknowledgment in the film.

Film segment title page reviewing the extraction necessary for so-called renewables (Screenshot: 36’55”). Source: youtube.com

 

So-called Renewable Energy

The outraged critics need to realize that the distinction between fossil fuels and so-called renewable energy is exaggerated. Every aspect of so-called renewable energy requires hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon-based facilities for equipment construction and operation; mining; processing, manufacturing, transportation and the security personnel to enforce land control for these projects. Hence, I proposed the term “fossil fuel+” as a replacement for the inaccurate concept of “renewable energy.”

Ethnographic research investigating natural resource extraction for fossil fuel+ systems remain insightful in this regard. Modelling studies, however, have exposed the seriousness of resource extraction and waste for fossil fuel+ systems. Drawing on a World Bank report, Jason Hickel estimates that making 2050 renewable energy targets will require mining “34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminium, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.”

This also includes increases in other minerals essential to solar, wind and battery technologies over the same period:  35-70% neodymium, 38-105% in silver, 920% in indium, 2,700% increases in lithium and is compounded with further increases (70%) with the promotion of electric vehicles.

Moreover, Benjamin Sovacool and colleagues calculate a single 3.1 MW wind turbine creates “772 to 1807 tons of landfill waste, 40 to 85 tons of waste sent for incineration and about 7.3 tons of e-waste per unit.” This does not even account for mineral processing, component manufacturing, transportation or provisions for security personnel to facilitate security operations of “renewable energy” extraction sites or development sites. Remember: “It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium.”

Critics of the film declare to speak in the name of science. Yet this is a question of research design and methodology. Fossil fuel+ projects are frequently justified by carbon accounting and modelling practices imbued with capitalist ideologies and technological utopianism, which – more to the point – are separated from the political contexts, neglect various forms of pollution (e.g., industrial wastes), local struggles and violence emanating from “green” and corresponding mining projects that animate fossil fuel+ development.

Corporate Environmentalism

Land defenders are well aware of corporate co-optation of environmental struggles. Jeff Gibbs and colleagues are correct to highlight these connections as this problem has only intensified. Submedia.tv released a documentary nearly 10 years ago demonstrating at length the problem of environmental NGOs co-opting struggles and marginalizing land defenders. This segment, moreover, documented the connection between large environmental NGOs, such as Greenpeace and Sierra Club, and their staff going to work in mineral extraction and timber industries. Does anyone remember how, in 2014, Greenpeace lost £3 million in currency speculation? The proclaimed mission and actions of environmental NGOs frequently do not add up.

The “NGOization” of struggle has emerged as a body of literature. Meanwhile, Cory Morningstar’s updated the connection of green capitalists, “climate youth leaders” and the new (corporate) environmental movement, charting trends and issues many ignore or fail to understand. Planet of the Humans documents a small piece of this compared to Morningstar’s work, focusing primarily on Al Gore, Bill Mckibben and their financial managers and partners.

While Al Gore is no surprise, some film reviewers suggest Bill McKibben’s exposé was startling, if not personally offensive. “I have never taken a penny from green energy companies or mutual funds or anyone else with a role in these fights, ” explains Mckibben in a Rolling Stone interview, “I’ve never been paid by environmental groups either, not even 350.org, which I founded and which I’ve given all I have to give.”

The film presents some damaging evidence. For instance, it shows McKibben sitting on a panel at the “Investors and Environmentalists Sustainable Proposal,” discussing a “40-50 trillion ‘green energy fund’” with The World Resource Institutes’ David Blood, who “spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs including serving as CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.” Moreover, 350.org’s collaboration with the “Green Century Funds” makes a clear connection to how manufactured or self-styled “environmental leaders” (see 1:15:14) are clearly in bed with green capitalism and efforts to financialize nature.

The No Deal for Nature Campaign is particularly relevant in this regard. The exposé of corporate environmentalism and collaborative efforts to financialize nature holds. The film highlights the timeless issues of “leaders,” but also how single-issue campaigning – built on carbon accounting and narrowing its focus to “fossil fuels” – disables itself from holistic assessments and offers itself to the construction of a “green” or “climate” economy their movement leaders are invested in promoting.

 

David Blood (co-founder of Generation Investment with Al Gore) and 350.org’s Bill McKibben: featured keynotes for divestment partner, Ceres.

 

Conclusion

The film deserves both hostility and love. Hostility for carelessly discussing population issues, homogenizing different people – a socio-ecological-cultural flattening – and lacking, even in passing, respect for those fighting the mines, energy factories and politicians small and large, formal and informal. The film would have benefited from a more refined scope and tighter narrative, with a greater diversity of participants, from Indigenous groups struggling against fossil fuel+ projects, to political ecologists and environmental anthropologists.

Yet the film also deserves love, as it highlights a neglected and sensitive issue for many: how the (mainstream) “environmental movement” has been corporatized, how its actions are not working, and how “renewable energy”/fossil fuel+ systems are not ecologically sustainable. The film is correct to publicize these issues, even if most popular media outlets are having a less than intelligent conversation about the contested issues within the film. Instead of writing the film off as “demoralizing“, it should resituate one’s hopes and realities concerning environmental struggle.

Concern has also been voiced about the film “dividing” the environmental movement. But the movement is already divided, to the extent that environmental “leaders” are divided from their “flock”, and “light” green (capitalist) movements try to extinguish or recuperate “dark” green radical critique and action. Autonomous, horizontal and leaderless resistance akin to the multiplicity of land struggles taking place across the world, should be what climate activists gain inspiration from – not McKibben or Gore. Earth First!, for instance, – not without its critiques – represents an alternative mass-organizational model, discarding leaders and dedicated to organizing discussion space and direct action.

Those shocked by Planet of the Humans’ revelations concerning “renewable energy” and environmental movement “leaders” are either unfamiliar with the boundless treachery of capitalist society or have yet to commit themselves to fighting the capture, domestication and exploitation of human and nonhuman resources near and far.

[Alexander Dunlap holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His PhD thesis examined the socio-ecological impact of wind energy development on Indigenous people in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Alexander’s work has critically examined police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development and extractive projects more generally with coal mining in Germany and copper mining in Peru. Current research investigates the formation of transnational-super grids and the connections between conventional and renewable extraction industries.]

Featured image: Planet of the Humans poster. Source: planetofthehumans.com.

 

Oct 17

2019

0

Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Capitalism Extinction Rebellion Greta Thunberg Imperialism India Militarism

Greta Thunberg, Green Barbarism and #ClimateStrike

Newsclick India

By Azhar Moideen

Greta Thunberg,
Image Courtesy : Twitter/@GretaThunberg

 

Every few years, in a crisis situation, a child captures the attention of the world and plays a huge role in convincing nay-sayers, silencing critics and seemingly ties the hands of the global ruling establishment into taking swift action. It happened in Afghanistan more than once, in Iraq and recently in Syria.

Now it has happened all over the world thanks to the passionate and compelling Greta Thunberg. In a world devoid of real adult heroes, children become unlikely superheroes to look up to. In just about a year after Thunberg began striking school to protest, alone, outside the Swedish Parliament, she has appeared on the cover of Time, featured in a Vice documentary, addressed climate and political conferences including the World Economic Forum and the United Nations (UN) Climate Action Summit, published a collection of her speeches (under the Penguin catalogue), won praise from world leaders, influenced the European Union’s budget and she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. All this, for spearheading a global climate strike, which included protests in India.

‘India’s Greta Thunberg’: Seven-year-old Licypriya Kangujam from Manipur

In most respects, mobilising millions of people the world over, including trade union representatives, for what became the largest climate protest ever, is no mean feat. However, if the past be our guide, the working class should be cautious while extending support. Instead of being carried away by the number of people mobilised and the positive media coverage Thunberg got, the Third World needs to ask whether the movement has their best interest in mind. After all, even Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai was used by Western imperialist interests and discarded when she spoke against them.

Alongside the meteoric rise of Thunberg, last year bears witness to dubious new environmental NGOs such as Extinction Rebellion and We Mean Business. Over the same period, ideas like the Green New Deal also captured new ground. Investigative reportage (such as by Cory Morningstar) exposes the non-profit-industrial complex that boosts and benefits from the popular surge of interest that ‘influencers’ gain.

The coterie managing Thunberg’s media appearances include the world’s biggest philanthropic foundations, whose contributions to the climate debate have essentially weakened plans to mitigate the effects of climate change. Their interests controlled the negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement, which treats worst-case scenarios as an acceptable 50:50 chance. Dire warnings of negotiators from developing countries were conveniently forgotten.

These handful of philanthrocapitalists, despite contributing 0.1% to climate finance, have significantly influenced the climate debate: developing and promoting voluntary, market-based and bottom-up approaches can only be deemed a failure. They have erased the radical nature of grassroots environmental movements and propped up capitalist-friendly solutions such as carbon-trading instead. They call for “net-zero” emissions by pushing technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage, which have delivered poor results so far and only offset fossil fuel emission—or burn even more fossil fuel through Enhanced Oil Recovery.

If this is not enough, they now plan to implement “negative emissions” technologies such as the unproven BECCS, which, apart from uncertain benefits and large known nitrous oxide emissions, also requires vast tracts of land, fertilizer production and freshwater consumption. One scenario, for example, would require land three times the size of India. Such requirements have already led to large-scale land grab. Researchers are already talking of a new type of appropriation of nature called ‘green grabbing’. No wonder, the likes of Extinction Rebellion pit themselves against established climate activist groups.

The Green New Deal is another new buzzword, advertised through glitzy ad campaigns and supermodels. It is well known that funding NGOs such as Extinction Rebellion helps corporates mobilise people into backing a consensus created by them. Political leaders such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States (US), whose plans amount to Climate Imperialism, will end up forcing debt onto poor countries to purchase US-manufactured climate tech.

These “clean” technologies demand large amounts of minerals, which are currently being mined from Third World countries in unsafe environmentally-hazardous conditions. This is social engineering under the guise of action against climate change. And Greta Thunberg is their figurehead.

Thunberg famously was invited to make a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos and what she said was replete with the talking points and keywords these organisations use. She later appeared on a video sponsored by the WEF, along with David Attenborough and Jane Goodall, who frequently espouse neo-Malthusian ideas such as blaming over-population for climate change—a debunked racist myth being revived in climate-mitigating talks. They also raise fears over migrants and climate refugees, which later popped up in banners during the Climate Strike. All this, when the average American’s annual carbon footprint is around 2,000 times that of a Chad resident, and the average Briton’s carbon dioxide footprint in a day matches that of a Kenyan in an year.

The WEF, composed of big capitalist firms from all over the world, recently announced a Strategic Partnership Framework with the UN—a move roundly criticised for weakening of the role of nations in global decision-making. Apart from the Paris Agreement, they have dipped their toes into collaborations with Bill Gates’ Mission Innovation to develop instruments for public-private investment in clean energy.

Their promotion of “nature-based” climate solutions got a big boost when Thunberg and George Monbiot ran a campaign endorsing it. The list of “allies” they mention include the main promoters of the UN’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programme as a carbon-trading mechanism, including The Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, Conservation International, and Nature4Climate.

The businesses which are planning to use these solutions to drive indigenous communities from their sources of livelihood and mint a seven-fold return on an annual investment of US$320 billion include Unilever, whose CEO is on the record that such climate action is the only way to grow the economy. No wonder, Shell has announced $300 million for it while burning fossil fuels. And the UN quietly complies.

Gone are the days when equity and common but differentiated responsibilities were integral to climate negotiations. Thunberg advocates that elected representatives “listen to the scientists”, but the background paper of the UN Climate Action Summit, United in Science, prepared by a “scientific advisory committee” abandoned any references to equity and common but differentiated responsibilities, thus placing the major burden of future mitigation on India and other developing countries.

The Climate Strike that led up to the Summit backed the call to declare a Climate Emergency, a move that could pave the way for governments to dig into public money to support green big business under the pretence of taking urgent action. Urgency has replaced equity as a basic element of climate action, poorer nations be damned.

It should not surprise that in all these plans, there is no talk about anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, the bedrock of the radical environmental movement. No understanding that the exploitation of labour and nature go hand in hand. No mention that the US military is the biggest institutional polluter, producing more greenhouse gas emissions than most countries on the planet. No denunciation of war, an inevitable corollary of Imperialism, as a significant cause of environmental damage. No account for the colonization of the atmospheric space that is needed for the use of fossil fuels for the development of the global South. No acknowledgement that the effects of climate change exacerbates already existing global inequality, and environmentalism itself delivers enhanced revenue streams for corporations under this system. No space for indigenous people who fought for the cause, nor people’s agreements on climate change (which they led) that recognised that what was needed was the end of capitalism.

Capitalism is “in danger of falling apart” and the bourgeoisie are here to save it. This is environmental activism brought to you by the captains of the industry. The ‘NGO-ization of resistance’ ensures that there is a manufactured consent for the ruling class agenda – the ‘unlocking’ of public money to finance huge capital investments. Class consciousness has been erased and the oppressed are made to identify with the oppressor. It is no different in India.

The people organising the protests claim most Indians lack awareness about the issue and that the only ones conscious are the middle and upper class elites. They hide the fact that the poor, organised by progressive and democratic mass movements, are fighting for some measures required for mitigation—provision of public transport, prioritising basic needs over luxuries, and radical redistribution of wealth. They forget that adivasis are at the forefront of the fight against capitalism and its destruction of the environment.

Thunberg was one of the favourites to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year. It did not happen. But there will be more of her and #ClimateStrike in the near future. “We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change,” says she, but what we see is capitalist “solutions” that demand our acquiescence. The rhetoric of the Left, of women’s empowerment, poverty-reduction, fighting inequality, rights of the disabled, and so on will all be used.

The  should not be distracted—it will not be long before imperialist attacks are sold under the name of the environment and, closer to home, authoritarianism is greenwashed. It is either Socialism or Climate Barbarism.

 

[Azhar Moideen is doing his Masters in Humanities at IIT Madras.]

The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline

Oct 06

2019

0

Foundations, Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline

October 6, 2019

By Cory Morningstar

 

 

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

[Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI • Addenda I] [Book form]

[Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [ACTS VIII & IX forthcoming]

• A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story] [Oct 2 2019]

• The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline [Oct 6 2019]

 

 

Financial Times, September 16, 2019

 

No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline:

  • 2009: G20 gathering in London: The world’s major economies come together to stem the global financial panic triggered by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the US (and subsequent unprecedented bailouts for corporations and banks). They assure society that they will establish a more stable growth path going forward.

  • 2009: UN works on the prospect of a Global Green New Deal to reboot the global economic system. It simultaneously works on tools to assign monetary value to all nature, global in scale, with the goal of creating new markets (TEEB – later to be absorbed by the Natural Capital Coalition).

  • 2009-2019: In the years that followed the 2009 assurances to contain panic in markets and salvage a battered financial system, growth – crucial to keeping the capitalist economic system afloat – failed to find a firm footing.

  • 2011: IMF: “We have entered what I have called a dangerous new phase… today, we risk losing the battle for growth. With dark clouds over Europe, and huge uncertainty in the United States, we risk a collapse in global demand. This challenge could not be more urgent. In our interconnected world, we are all on one boat. Any thought of decoupling is a mirage.” — The Path Forward—Act Now and Act Together, opening address to the 2011 Annual Meetings of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, managing director, International Monetary Fund

  • 2014: Global economy continues to spiral downward. “Capitalism is in danger of falling apart”, Al Gore, Generation Investment, The Climate Reality Project

  • 2014: Purpose (PR arm of Avaaz): Language of “green economy” is killed in order to save “green economy”. They will build it, but they won’t say they are building it.

  • 2014: People’s Climate March. The march was organized by GCCA/TckTckTck (co-founded by 20 NGOs including 350.org, Avaaz, Greenpeace), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Climate Nexus (a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), 350.org (incubated by the Rockefeller Foundation), the Rasmussen Foundation and USCAN.

  • 2014: We Mean Business is launched. Created with the assistance of many including then UNFCCC executive secretary Christina Figueres, Purpose (PR arm of Avaaz), and Greenpeace.

  • 2015: Global Youth Summit takes place (Keynotes: UN Figueres, Kumi Naidoo Greenpeace, 350.org McKibben), Climate Strike website is created.

  • 2015: The Paris Agreement largely attributed to Christina Figueres comes into fruition. [Further reading: This Changes Nothing – Clive L. Spash]

  • 2015: Mission Innovation (Breakthrough Energy, Bill Gates, Richard Branson et al.) partners with 23 states and the EU. Similar coalitions and partnerships follow (Under 2C, The Climate Group, etc.).

  • 2017: World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab: “Capitalism is in crisis”

  • 2018: A teleconference led by a 350.org/Fossil Free representative with Climate Reality Project (Al Gore’s NGO) proposes a large climate march. Greta Thunberg partakes in this call as well as others that transpire. The idea of a strike is presented. Thunberg is receptive

  • May 2018: Ingmar Rentzhog, founder and CEO of We Don’t Have Time, is featured at a climate event with Greta’s mother Malena Ernman.

  • June 2018: Greta Thunberg social media accounts are created.

  • Summer/Fall 2018: The Green New Deal (promoted by UN in 2009) is resurrected.

  • July 2018: The Climate Group, co-founder of We Mean Business, promotes This Is Zero Hour climate strikes in the US utilizing the hashtag #WeDontHave Time [“Join the youth revolution!”]

  • August 20 2018: Greta sits on a sidewalk with a sign. Rentzhog discovers “the lonely girl”. We Don’t Have Time, partner of The Climate Reality Project, and Global Utmaning (Global Challenge) are interconnected by board relationships.

  • August 20 2018: On the first day of strike, the third person to respond to the “lonely girl” plight on Twitter is We Mean Business co-founder Callum Grieve. He adds the hashtag #WeDontHaveTime and tags five additional accounts: The Climate Museum, Youth Climate March LA, This is Zero Hour Ft. Lauderdale, Greenpeace International, and the UNFCCC, the “official Twitter account of UN Climate Change”.

    • We Mean Business

    We Mean Business represents 477 investors with 34 trillion USD in assets. [July 4, 2019]

    We Mean Business Founding Partners

    The founding partners of We Mean Business are BSR, CDP, Ceres, The B Team, The Climate Group, The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG), and the WBCSD. Together, these organizations represent the most powerful – and ruthless – corporations on the planet, groups salivating to unleash 100 trillion dollars to fuel the fourth industrial revolution – pushed by the World Economic Forum.

    We Mean Business Co-founder Callum Grieve

    Grieve is the co-founder and director of Counter Culture, a brand development firm specializing in behavioural change campaigns and storytelling. He also created Climate Week NYC for The Climate Group. Grieve has coordinated high-level climate change communications campaigns and interventions for the United Nations, the World Bank Group, and several Fortune 500 companies.

    Behavioural Change Campaigns and Storytelling

    Grieve also manages the Every Breath Matters campaign founded by Christiana Figueres, the former UNFCCC Executive Secretary credited with the Paris Agreement. Every Breath Matters “champions” include Leonardo DiCaprio and Greta Thunberg.

    World Economic Forum UN Partnership Effective June 13, 2019

    The co-founder of Counter Culture is head of climate initiatives at the World Economic Forum, and former campaign director of the We Mean Business RE100 initiative led by The Climate Group in partnership with CDP.

  • August 20 2018: Also on the first day of the strike – the “lonely girl” plight is shared Sasja Beslik, international financial expert (WEF), head of Sustainable Finance, Nordea Bank.

  • Fall 2018: New Deal for Nature and Voice For The Planet campaigns commence. Exploiting an increasingly anxious citizenry, utilizing emotive images and language, these campaigns are in fact, not to “save nature”, rather, they are to monetize nature, global in scale.

  • September 1 2018: Only 12 days after her first day sitting on a sidewalk, Greta is featured in The Guardian.

  • September 2018: The largest-ever philanthropic investment to combat climate change is announced by ClimateWorks, largest recipient of climate philanthropy in the world.

  • September 26 2018: Thunberg appears at a seminar organized by The Climate Reality Project and Global Utmaning (Thunberg’s father denies any relationship or affiliation with Global Unmanning).

  • September 26 2018: The Climate Finance Partnership – a vehicle for blended finance – is unveiled at the One Planet Summit.

  • October 31 2018: Launch of XR global expansion is highlighted by The Guardian and endorsed by an array of liberal celebrity signatories.

  • XR global expansion takes place in partnership with The Climate Mobilization Project.

  • January 3 2019: “Global economic growth ‘now in free fall'”

  • January 2019: Christiana Figueres brings Greta Thunberg to Davos where they share accommodations.

  • January 2019: International media amplifies “The House is on Fire” Thunberg speech delivered at WEF. The message and delivery mirror the stratagem laid out in The Climate Mobilization (XR partner) paper “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement.” (“Imagine there is a fire in your house.”)

  • January 2019: Davos, Switzerland – “Standing outside in the pitch-black cold at the World Economic Forum on January 23, 2019, a panel including Future Earth and partners announced to a live audience their intent to launch an Earth Commission.”

  • February 2019: Joint event with European Commission president and Thunberg where it is announced that 25% of the EU budget will go to climate change initiatives. Unbeknownst to the public, this decision was made in 2018.

  • July 2019: Business For Nature is launched. The coalition founders are We Mean Business, the World Economic Forum, The Nature Conservancy, WWF, the Natural Capital Coalition, the World Resources Institute, the IUCN, The Food and Land Use Coalition, Confederation of Indian Industry, Entreprises pour l’Environnement (EpE), Tropical Forest Alliance, and the International Chamber of Commerce.

  • August 2018 to Summer 2019: An international media assault on the populace featuring Greta Thunberg, adored and promoted by the ruling classes, corporations, institutions, World Bank and finance – this is coupled with apocalyptic media saturation. In effect – the multiple ecological crises which have been increasing over decades, is now being fully exploited as a means to manufacture consent. Corporations and institutions seek 100 trillion dollars for “climate solutions”. The unlocking of pensions is identified as a prime target.

  • August 2018 to Summer 2019: The emergence of a green fascism. Those criticizing the said solutions or “movements” designed by the ruling class for our collective consumption are ridiculed and subjected to hate.

  • August 2018 to Summer 2019: Western “environmentalism” creates demand for the further plundering of the planet in order to “save” the climate – in essence, a globally mobilized de facto green lobby group. The planned “climate” infrastructure eyes the Global South. The scale is massive: equates to the building of a New York City – every single month for the next forty years. Despite the fact that this cannot be squared with protection of biodiversity or the climate, the populace clamours for those in power (who are responsible for the crisis) to “do something” and align with the suicidal Paris Agreement.

  • February 20 2019: We Mean Business and Global Optimist (founded by Christiana Figueres, funded by We Mean Business), highlight the reaction to the climate campaign now well underway: “People are desperate for something to happen”.

  • April 2019: The Rockefeller Foundation closes its 100 Resilient Cities initiative, joins the Atlantic Council to launch a new center. [Explored in Volume II, Act VII]

  • June 13 2019: The World Economic Forum – representing the richest and most powerful people on the planet – forms a partnership with United Nations.

  • July 2019: “US philanthropists vow to raise millions for climate activists” – The Climate Emergency Fund is launched. Serving on the board is 350.org founder Bill McKibben and Margaret Klein Salamon founder and executive director of The Climate Mobilization (partner to Extinction Rebellion) and author of the paper “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement.”

  • September 2019: Greta Thunberg sails across the ocean in a yacht to attend the United Nations Climate Action Summit organized and led by We Mean Business and the World Economic Forum (now partnered with the United Nations).

  • September 16 2019: The Financial Times unveils its largest campaign since 2009: The New Agenda – a re-booting of the capitalist system

  • September 18 2019: Conservation International and the *Food and Land Use Coalition finance the “Natural Climate Solutions” promotional video featuring Guardian’s Monbiot and Greta Thunberg. The video reaches more than 1 billion people in less than 24 hours. [*Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill.]

  • September 19 2019: WEF releases promotional video featuring Greta Thunberg for “Voices For The Planet”. This is the WEF-WWF campaign for the financialization of nature, global in scale (payments for ecosystem services) that accompanies the “New Deal For Nature” promoted by WWF, CI, The Natural Capital Coalition, TNC, etc.. Supported by Greenpeace, 350.org, etc. who are not yet publicly promoting it.

  • September 20 2019: Global Climate Strikes take place.

  • September 2019: Many smaller NGOs, including those from the Global South oppose the WEF-UN Partnership. Avaaz, Greenpeace, 350, etc. are conspicuously absent from the signatories.

  • September 26 2019: The UN calls for a Global Green New Deal (bailout).

  • September to October 2019: Arnold Schwarzenegger arranges a Tesla for Greta to tour Canada and visit Standing Rock reservation.

    •  

    Take Away Points

    We dance to the tune of our oppressors

     

    “The ruling class exists, it’s not a conspiracy theory. They operate as a class, too. They share the same values, the same sensibility and in Europe and North America they are white. They act in accordance with their interests, which are very largely identical. The failure to understand this is the single greatest problem and defect in left discourse today.”

     

    — John Steppling

     

  • Climate change is real – but capitalism is the crisis.

  • The structure of the system is working exactly as it is designed to. The NPIC exists to insulate the current power structures and capital itself.

  • Economic growth is sacrosanct – to those in power, and those it serves. Economic growth trumps all priorities including life itself.

  • The Thunberg campaign belongs to the ruling class, not to the people.

  • A decade of social engineering (“together”) has effectively erased class analysis, which is a massive blow, and even a betrayal, to the working class and peasantry.

  • The West is under the rule of a corporatocracy, therefore voting is a massive distraction and spectacle that will never solve or mitigate our ecological crisis.

  • The same system that created the crisis will not and cannot now rectify the crises. The same people that protected and defended this system will do anything and exploit anyone to keep it intact.

  • The NGOs comprising the NPIC must be isolated, shamed and abandoned. The exact methods they use against radical activists and radical grassroots groups. Without the support of the people, they lose all power and influence (and then funding).

  • A litmus test must be placed on all organizations that claim to fight for ecological and social justice: They must be united in opposition to imperialism/colonialism, militarism, white supremacy and patriarchy – all leading drivers of climate change and ecological devastation.

  • Capitalism will destroy everything in its path. Either we kill capitalism, or capitalism will kill us.

    •  

    [Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.]

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: Natural Climate Manipulations [Volume II, Act VI]

    Sep 26

    2019

    1

    Carbon Markets | REDD, Celebrity [Capitalism | Humanitarianism | Neoliberalism], Conservation International, Foundations, Nature Conservancy, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

    ClimateWorks Connect4Climate (the World Bank) Conservation International Food and Land Use Coalition George Monbiot Good Energies Greta Thunberg Natural Climate Solutions Nature4Climate New Deal for Nature Shell the David & Lucile Packard Foundation the Ford Foundation The Forgotten Solution the Global Landscapes Forum the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation The Guardian The Nature Conservancy UN-REDD UNREDD+ WBCSD We Mean Business WWF

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: Natural Climate Manipulations [Volume II, Act VI]

    September 26, 2019

    By Cory Morningstar

     

     

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

    [Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI • Addenda I] [Book form] [Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [ACTS VII & VIII forthcoming]

    • A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story] [Oct 2 2019]

    • The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline [Oct 6 2019]

     

     

    “I’m convinced of my disagreement with the counterrevolution – imperialism – fascism – religions – stupidity – capitalism – and the whole gamut of bourgeois tricks – I wish to cooperate with the revolution in transforming the world into a classless one so that we can attain a better rhythm for the oppressed classes.”

     

    — Frida Kahlo

     

    “The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”

     

    —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

     

    “Capitalism, a vicious system, does not merely seek to rip off our labor and resources but it seeks to confound our thinking. It seeks to make us think we’re thinking when in fact we’re not thinking but merely reacting to stimuli.”

     

    —Stokely Carmichael

     

    September 20, 2019, Business for Nature, Twitter

    September 20, 2019, Business for Nature, Twitter. Launched on July 2, 2019, the coalition founders are We Mean Business, the World Economic Forum, The Nature Conservancy, WWF, the Natural Capital Coalition, the World Resources Institute, the IUCN, The Food and Land Use Coalition, Confederation of Indian Industry, Entreprises pour l’Environnement (EpE), Tropical Forest Alliance, and the International Chamber of Commerce

     

    “Greta Thunberg’s video on natural climate solutions, done with George Monbiot, has reached more than 1 billion people in less than 24 hours.  More than a third of the events of Climate Week focus on nature-based solutions, demonstrating the huge amount of innovation and progress taking place on the ground.”

     

    — Nature4Climate, September 22, 2019

    On September 19, 2019, a short film featuring Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot was launched in advance of the September 20 global climate strikes organized by GCCA NGOs. The film (trending and recommended on YouTube), emphasizing the urgency of funding “natural solutions”, was paid for by Conservation International and the *Food and Land Use Coalition, with “guidance” provided by Nature4Climate (The Nature Conservancy, We Mean Business, WWF, UN-REDD, et al.) and Natural Climate Solutions. [*Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill.]

     

    YouthWashing

    Here, Greta Thunberg becomes the official face for, and of, corporate capture. The rebranding of REDD (the UN “reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation” market mechanism), and the coming New Deal for Nature – under the auspices and brand of “natural climate solutions”.

    To understand how this transpired, we need to step back in time to April 3, 2019.

     

    Business For Nature co-founders

    Business For Nature co-founders. Further reading: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: They Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV]

    September 19, 2019, Callum Grieve, co-founder, We Mean Business, Twitter

    September 19, 2019, Callum Grieve, co-founder, We Mean Business, Twitter. Further reading: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Behavioural Change Project “To Change Everything” [Volume II, Act V]

    “It all sounds so simple and reassuring. No one needs to change anything. The airline industry can continue to expand. The oil industry can continue drilling. We can stop worrying and leave it to the experts. Just a few techno-fixes, and nature will solve climate change for us. Obviously, this is bullshit. It’s a form of climate denial – pretending that we can address climate breakdown without even talking about keeping fossil fuels in the ground.”

     

    — March 3, 2019, Chris Lang, The REDD Monitor, “Natural Climate Solutions: ‘It really is time that governments stopped trying to find more ways to offset their fossil fuel emissions'”

    April 3, 2019 – The Launch

    Illustration: Al Boardman

    Illustration: Al Boardman

    April 3, 2019. The launch of the Natural Climate Solutions project by George Monbiot and The Guardian

    April 3, 2019. The launch of the Natural Climate Solutions project by George Monbiot and The Guardian

     

    On April 3, 2019, The Guardian published an open letter entitled “A Natural Solution to the Climate Disaster – Climate and ecological crises can be tackled by restoring forests and other valuable ecosystems, say scientists and activists”.

    The letter, written by The Guardian’s George Monbiot, is co-signed by establishment-endorsed eco-celebs Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and other “leaders”/celebrities associated with the liberal climate “movement”. The “movement” that evades all systemic drivers of climate change and ecological devastation (militarism, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, etc.).

    The letter –  addressed to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), governments and NGOs – is republished on the Natural Climate Solutions website.

    Launched on April 3, 2019 (coinciding with The Guardian coverage), the Natural Climate Solutions project was created “for the promotion of an important and exciting environmental initiative, led by journalist and author George Monbiot.” [Source]

    The said mission of Natural Climate Solutions (website created March 15, 2019) is to “catalyse global enthusiasm for drawing down carbon by restoring ecosystems: the single most undervalued and underfunded tool for climate mitigation.”[Emphasis added]

    In real life, this mission to “catalyse global enthusiasm” effectively serves the United Nations carbon market mechanism UN-REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation). In addition, it is a construct being created that will build the acquiescence required for the coming “New Deal For Nature” to be adopted in 2020. That is, the privatization, commodification, and objectification of nature, global in scale. That is, emerging markets and land acquisitions. That is, “payments for ecosystem services”. That is the financialization of nature, the corporate coup d’état of the commons that has finally come to wait on our doorstep.

    Mark R. Tercek is the former president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy stepping down June 7, 2019. [A #MeToo scandal engulfs The Nature Conservancy]. He is co-author of the book Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature

    Mark R. Tercek is the former president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy stepping down June 7, 2019. [A #MeToo scandal engulfs The Nature Conservancy]. He is co-author of the book Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature

    [A #MeToo scandal engulfs The Nature Conservancy].

    To be clear, as this research will demonstrate, the very same NGOs which set the Natural Capital agenda and protocols (via the Natural Capital Coalition, which has absorbed TEEB) – with the Nature Conservancy and We Mean Business at the helm, are also the architects of the term “natural climate solutions”.

    Monbiot has consistently and publicly voiced disapproval for “putting a price on nature”. [One such example: May 15, 2018]. Yet, consider that Monbiot has never utilized his influential platform to oppose the coming “New Deal For Nature”.

    The said purpose of Natural Climate Solutions is to “direct public attention towards this issue and champion the work of others.” [Emphasis added]

    The “work of others” that Natural Climate Solutions seeks to direct the public’s attention to takes one to the “Our Allies” page:

    “There are several wonderful organisations already working hard to highlight and implement Natural Climate Solutions. Please follow these links and support their efforts.” [Emphasis added]

    The allies (“wonderful organizations”) that Natural Climate Solution highlights [1], which it encourages people to follow and support, include many at the helm of the “New Deal For Nature” such as WWF, Conservation International, Avaaz, Greenpeace, Nature Needs Half, etc.

    Photograph by Ron Poling

    Photograph by Ron Poling

     

    “Conservation: The Quiet Spread of Imperialism.”

     

    — Mordecai Ogada

    Here, we find perhaps the most grotesque aspect of the Monbiot/Guardian project of all. The deliberate endeavour to rally support for and redirect citizens to WWF. As both Monbiot and The Guardian are fully aware, WWF bears responsibility for decades of human rights violations including torture, rape and murder, a direct result of “conservation” schemes. In March 2019 in part 1 of an investigative series, BuzzFeed News revealed that WWF, “funds, equips, and works directly with anti-poaching forces that have beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted, and killed people living near wildlife parks across Asia and Africa.” Part 4 of the investigation (published July 11, 2019) reported that “WWF-Backed Guards Raped Pregnant Women And Tortured Villagers At A Wildlife Park Funded By The US Government.”

    Such “conservation projects” have been consistently displacing Indigenous peoples under the guise of conservation while inflicting misery. This has been meticulously documented by Survival International and others. By presenting WWF as an “ally” amongst many “wonderful organizations” Monbiot demonstrates a complete disregard for the decades of work by conservationists such as Mordecai Ogada, Noga Shanee, Reclaim Conservation, and Stephen Corry, executive director of Survival International. By extension, Monbiot turns a willful blind eye to the plight of Indigenous peoples who have been separated from the land they defend. Whose lives and tribal communities have been completely destroyed by these very organizations to which Monbiot directs his followers.

     

     

    [Watch: WWF – Silence of the Pandas, © Wilfried Huismann, Germany 2011] [Further reading: The Big Conservation Lie, The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya, John Mbaria & Mordecai Ogada, 2017]

     

    Natural Climate Solutions allies

    Natural Climate Solutions allies

     

    “Guardian joins growing chorus for natural climate solutions –N4C is delighted that the Guardian and in particular George Monbiot has catalyzed so many diverse voices to champion the cause of natural climate solutions”

     

    – Nature4Climate News, Guardian joins growing chorus for natural climate solutions, April 3, 2019

    Upon its launch on April 3, 2019, the Natural Climate Solutions project had 29 allies (today it lists 48). The most important one to look at, to demonstrate the leveraging of market solutions via the branding and terminology of “natural climate solutions”, is the first ally listed: Nature4Climate, an initiative created by The Nature Conservancy.

    Nature4Climate

    April 3, 2019, "Guardian joins growing chorus for natural climate solutions." Promotion of Monbiot's "Natural Climate Solutions", by Natural Climate Solutions "ally" Nature4Climate. Prior to April 3, 2019, the branding of "natural climate solutions" was already well-established by institutions, corporations and NGOs. Demonstrating solidarity to Nature4Climate, this tweet was "liked" by Monbiot

    April 3, 2019, “Guardian joins growing chorus for natural climate solutions.” Promotion of Monbiot’s “Natural Climate Solutions”, by Natural Climate Solutions “ally” Nature4Climate. Prior to April 3, 2019, the branding of “natural climate solutions” was already well-established by institutions, corporations and NGOs. Demonstrating solidarity to Nature4Climate, this tweet was “liked” by Monbiot

     

    April 4, 2019, Conservation International (CI) expresses its support for "natural climate solutions".  Fast facts: 2018 revenues for CI were in access of 145 million USD (145,013,840.) Wes Bush, CEO of Northrup Grumman, one of the world's largest weapons manufacturers, serves on the board of Conservation International, while Rob Walton, from the Walmart empire, serves as chairman of the executive committee. [2018 Form 990]

    April 4, 2019, Conservation International (CI) expresses its support for “natural climate solutions”.  Fast facts: 2018 revenues for CI were in access of 145 million USD (145,013,840.) Wes Bush, CEO of Northrup Grumman, one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, serves on the board of Conservation International, while Rob Walton, from the Walmart empire, serves as chairman of the executive committee. [2018 Form 990]

     

    Conservation International, A New Deal for Nature: "Countries are in the process of negotiating a new global biodiversity framework through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has been called a “New Deal for Nature.” This pact, expected to be agreed in Beijing in late 2020, will lay out the global strategy for protecting nature through 2030." Identified in the Level 2 Actions for "mainstreaming biodiversity" is "incorporating the value of biodiversity into national accounting processes". [Source]

    Conservation International, A New Deal for Nature: “Countries are in the process of negotiating a new global biodiversity framework through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has been called a “New Deal for Nature.” This pact, expected to be agreed in Beijing in late 2020, will lay out the global strategy for protecting nature through 2030.” Identified in the Level 2 Actions for “mainstreaming biodiversity” is “incorporating the value of biodiversity into national accounting processes”. [Source]

    The Nature Conservancy’s Nature4Climate

    Nature4Climate partners

    Nature4Climate partners

     

    Launched on June 20, 2018, (on the first day of the two-day Ministerial on Climate Action) as a five-year initiative, the Nature4Climate initiative was created as an instrument for strategic communications to escalate the “solutions” (i.e. market solutions) sought by the Nature Conservancy, WWF, We Mean Business et al:

    “Nature4Climate (N4C) is a new campaigning vehicle which is supported by a multi-stakeholder coalition. Its purpose is to use strategic communications to drive action on natural climate solutions.”

    “Nature4Climate (N4C) is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UN-REDD, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Woods Hole Research Center, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), World Resources Institute (WRI), We Mean Business (WMB) and WWF that aims to increase investment and action on natural climate solutions in support of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The N4C partners work together to catalyze partnerships between governments, civil society, business and investors that use nature-based solutions to climate change.” [Source]

    Here, we can add that We Mean Business (co-founder of the Nature4Climate initiative as stated above) was formed with the assistance of both Greenpeace and Purpose, the public relations arm of Avaaz specializing in behavioural change. [Further reading: They Mean Business, Volume II, Act IV].

    “We bring voices from governments, IGOs, NGOs, and business – underpinned by a steering group with communications and advocacy representation currently from CBD, CI, TNC, the UNDP, WHRC, WRI and WWF.”

    The NGOs and institutions represented on the Nature4Climate steering committee include CBD (United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity), CI (Conservation International), TNC (The Nature Conservancy), the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), WHRC (Woods Hole Research Center), WRI (the World Resources Institute) and WWF (World Wildlife Foundation). All of the aforementioned are leading “natural capital” architects and advocates of the “New Deal For Nature” – that is, the financialization of nature, global in scale.

    “Countries are in the process of negotiating a new global biodiversity framework through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has been called a “New Deal for Nature.” This pact, expected to be agreed in Beijing in late 2020, will lay out the global strategy for protecting nature through 2030. Conservation International will contribute our expertise to this process, to ensure the recognition of the value of nature for all aspects of human well-being.”

     

    — DEAL FOR NATURE, Conservation International and the post-2020 global biodiversity framework [Source][Emphasis added]

    Here again, we have the same high-level institutions, NGOs and individuals corralling millions of people toward a fourth industrial revolution sought by the ruling classes. A “New Climate Economy“, largely targeting the Global South. A new era of “green” colonialism, under the guise of saving the planet.

    “It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can’t have capitalism without racism.”

     

    — Malcolm X, 1964, speech at the Militant Labor Forum Hall, New York City, May 29, 1964 [In response to the Harlem “Hate-Gang” scare]

    Nature4Climate Voices, Paul Polman: served in senior leadership roles at both Nestlé and Procter & Gamble prior to becoming CEO of Unilever (2009-2018), B Team chair, chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, appointed to the U.N. Secretary General’s High-level Panel responsible for developing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), founding member of the World Business & Sustainable Development Commission, U.N.-appointed SDG Advocate, leading member of Financing Capitalism for the Long-Term (FCLT), the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and the Food and Land Use Coalition (which he chairs), counsellor and chair of the Global Advisory Board of One Young World (co-founded by “B Team expert” David Jones), named an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to business in 2018, a non-executive director of Dow since 2010. Stern also serves as commissioner to the Energy Transitions Commission and has been selected to serve as a One Planet Lab member, the aforementioned high-level advisory group steered by the French Government. [Further reading: The New Green Deal is the Trojan Horse for the Financialization of Nature, Volume I, Act V and A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment, Volume II, Act I]

    Nature4Climate Voices, Paul Polman: served in senior leadership roles at both Nestlé and Procter & Gamble prior to becoming CEO of Unilever (2009-2018), B Team chair, chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, appointed to the U.N. Secretary General’s High-level Panel responsible for developing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), founding member of the World Business & Sustainable Development Commission, U.N.-appointed SDG Advocate, leading member of Financing Capitalism for the Long-Term (FCLT), the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and the Food and Land Use Coalition (which he chairs), counsellor and chair of the Global Advisory Board of One Young World (co-founded by “B Team expert” David Jones), named an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to business in 2018, a non-executive director of Dow since 2010. Stern also serves as commissioner to the Energy Transitions Commission and has been selected to serve as a One Planet Lab member, the aforementioned high-level advisory group steered by the French Government. [Further reading: The New Green Deal is the Trojan Horse for the Financialization of Nature, Volume I, Act V and A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment, Volume II, Act I]

    Nature4Climate Voices, Christiana Figueres: former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) from 2010 to 2016, vice-chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, ClimateWorks Board Member, World Bank Climate Leader, B Team leader, leader of Mission2020, and board member of both the World Resources Institute and Unilever. Figueres is also identified as a “distinguished member” of Conservation International. [Further reading: To Plunder What Little Remains: It’s Going To Be Tremendous, Volume II, Act III]

    Nature4Climate Voices, Christiana Figueres: former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) from 2010 to 2016, vice-chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, ClimateWorks Board Member, World Bank Climate Leader, B Team leader, leader of Mission2020, and board member of both the World Resources Institute and Unilever. Figueres is also identified as a “distinguished member” of Conservation International. [Further reading: To Plunder What Little Remains: It’s Going To Be Tremendous, Volume II, Act III]

    Nature4Climate Voices, Nicolas Stern: international advisor to the Global CCS Institute, co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate overseeing The New Climate Economy, chair of SYSTEMIQ board of directors, former World Bank chief economist. [Further reading: A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment, Volume II, Act I]

    Nature4Climate Voices, Nicolas Stern: international advisor to the Global CCS Institute, co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate overseeing The New Climate Economy, chair of SYSTEMIQ board of directors, former World Bank chief economist. [Further reading: A Design to Win — A Multi-Billion Dollar Investment, Volume II, Act I]

    Nature4Climate Voices, Achim Steiner: UNDP Administrator, and former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB - now the Natural Climate Coalition, i.e. the financialization of nature), voice for the 2009 Green New Deal [Further reading: They Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV]

    Nature4Climate Voices, Achim Steiner: UNDP Administrator, and former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB – now the Natural Climate Coalition, i.e. the financialization of nature), voice for the 2009 Green New Deal [Further reading: They Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV]

     

    April 3, 2019: Nature4Climate promoting Monbiot's project. Demonstrating solidarity, Monbiot "liked" the tweet

    April 3, 2019: Nature4Climate promoting Monbiot’s project. Demonstrating solidarity, Monbiot “liked” the tweet

     

    August 30, 2019: Delivering on the Paris Agreement. From the paper This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality authored by Clive L. Spash, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria: "Unfortunately, many environmental non-governmental organisations have bought into this illogical reasoning and justify their support as being pragmatic. Neoliberal language is rife across their reports and policy recommendations and their adoption of natural capital, ecosystems services, offsetting and market trading. These new environmental pragmatists believe, without justification, that the financialisation of Nature will help prevent its destruction."

    August 30, 2019: Delivering on the Paris Agreement. From the paper This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality authored by Clive L. Spash, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria: “Unfortunately, many environmental non-governmental organisations have bought into this illogical reasoning and justify their support as being pragmatic. Neoliberal language is rife across their reports and policy recommendations and their adoption of natural capital, ecosystems services, offsetting and market trading. These new environmental pragmatists believe, without justification, that the financialisation of Nature will help prevent its destruction.”

     

    April 3, 2019: Justin Adams promote Monbiot's project on the morning of its launch hashtag: #theforgottensolution

    April 3, 2019: Justin Adams promote Monbiot’s project on the morning of its launch hashtag: #theforgottensolution

     

    One of the first individuals to promote Monbiot’s Natural Climate Solutions on the day of its launch was Justin Adams. Adams joined The World Economic Forum to lead the Tropical Forest Alliance (TFA) [2] in November 2018. [Nature Conservancy, Our People: “Executive Director, Tropical Forest Alliance (Currently seconded to the TFA from The Nature Conservancy)]. Prior to the TFA, Adams spent five years as the Global Managing Director for Lands at the Nature Conservancy where he launched and led all the organisation’s work on Natural Climate Solutions and set up the nature4climate partnership.” Adams served as an advisor to the World Bank from 2012 to 2014 supporting the design and fundraising for the $300M BioCarbon Fund. [Source][Bio] The first initiative launched by TFA 2020 was the Africa Palm Oil initiative, currently ongoing, targeted at the development and implementation of regional principles for “responsible” palm oil development in West and Central Africa. [Source]

    Here we must add that there is no such thing as “responsible palm oil” at industrial scale. Almost 20 years ago (2001), WWF and partners began designing the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). It launched in 2004. Yet, in the past 25 years as much as 76 million acres of forest in Indonesia alone has been cut down for palm oil plantations. In 2013, Mongabay cited the global deforestation accredited to palm oil at 136 million acres. Now it moves to encroach on and decimate Africa. RSPO is just one of many billion dollar certification schemes initiated by WWF. Certification is a means to pay to destroy – under the guise of sustainability. It is a lie. The global palm oil industry (production at scale) is not and can never be sustainable.

    The Nature Conservancy, Nature 4Climate and “The Forgotten Solution”

    February 17, 2016: "The Forgotten Climate Solution", "Natural Climate Solutions", The Nature Conservancy

    February 17, 2016: “The Forgotten Climate Solution”, “Natural Climate Solutions”, The Nature Conservancy

     

    In 2018, Nature4Climate launched the “The Forgotten Solution”(conceptualized in 2016, see image above) – a glossy advertising campaign featuring a Hollywood-esque movie trailer. Featuring its own newsroom, The Forgotten Solutions website utilizes the 350.org font that has proven to resonate with the public.

    “THE FORGOTTEN SOLUTION (2018) – Official Trailer [HD] – Movietrailers” [Running time: 1m:18s]

    Corporations, institutions and NGOs promoting “The Forgotten Solutions” include Connect4Climate (the World Bank), UN-REDD+, WBCSD, We Mean Business, UNREDD+, the Global Landscapes Forum, Shell, the Ford Foundation, and billionaire Richard Branson (The B Team, We Mean Business), to name but a few.

    September 3, 2018, Global Landscapes Forum. During the closing remarks of the Global Landscapes Forum on December 9, 2018, at COP24, Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International stressed that in addition to shifting global focus from the oil and transportation sectors to land and forests, additional co-operation was required to reach consensus on the New Deal for Nature.[Further reading: The House is On Fire! & the 100 Trillion Dollar Rescue, Volume I, ACT VI] The GLF was formed in 2013 by the World Bank, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the United Nations Environment Programme

    September 3, 2018, Global Landscapes Forum. During the closing remarks of the Global Landscapes Forum on December 9, 2018, at COP24, Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International stressed that in addition to shifting global focus from the oil and transportation sectors to land and forests, additional co-operation was required to reach consensus on the New Deal for Nature.[Further reading: The House is On Fire! & the 100 Trillion Dollar Rescue, Volume I, ACT VI] The GLF was formed in 2013 by the World Bank, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the United Nations Environment Programme

     

    September 8, 2018, Connect4Climate (World Bank)

    September 8, 2018, Connect4Climate (World Bank)

     

    September 11, 2018, The Ford Foundation promoting both "natural climate solutions" and "the forgotten solution"

    September 11, 2018, The Ford Foundation promoting both “natural climate solutions” and “the forgotten solution”

     

    December 10, 2018, Achim Steiner promotes the "Forgotten Solutions". Steiner will appear this week at the Social Good Summit (founded and/or financed by the UN, Purpose, Gates Foundation, etc.) with Greta Thunberg and Christiana Figueres. Steiner, UNDP Administrator is a former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). TEEB, initiated in 2008, and officially launched in 2012, hosted by UNEP and backed by the European Commission and countries including Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom, has since been absorbed/rebranded into the Natural Capital Coalition. The Natural Capital Coalition is working with the world’s most powerful corporations and institutions for the implementation of the financialization of nature.]

    December 10, 2018, Achim Steiner promotes the “Forgotten Solutions”. Steiner will appear this week at the Social Good Summit (founded and/or financed by the UN, Purpose, Gates Foundation, etc.) with Greta Thunberg and Christiana Figueres. Steiner, UNDP Administrator is a former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). TEEB, initiated in 2008, and officially launched in 2012, hosted by UNEP and backed by the European Commission and countries including Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom, has since been absorbed/rebranded into the Natural Capital Coalition. The Natural Capital Coalition is working with the world’s most powerful corporations and institutions for the implementation of the financialization of nature.]

     

    December 11, 2018, We Mean Business, promoting We Mean Business co-founder, WBCSD: "Bring natural climate solutions into your business today" #TheForgottenSolution

    December 11, 2018, We Mean Business, promoting We Mean Business co-founder, WBCSD: “Bring natural climate solutions into your business today” #TheForgottenSolution

     

    December 11, 2018, Shell, WBCSD, "the forgotten solution" as promoted by We Mean Business

    December 11, 2018, Shell, WBCSD, “the forgotten solution” as promoted by We Mean Business

     

    December 11, 2018, Justin Adams for The Nature Conservancy, as promoted by We Mean Business

    December 11, 2018, Justin Adams for The Nature Conservancy, as promoted by We Mean Business

     

    December 12, 2018, UN-REDD+

    December 12, 2018, UN-REDD+

     

    June 28, 2019, Richard Branson promoting the celebrity-endorsed "Forgotten Solution". The utilization of celebrity, fetishized in the West, is a much-used tool as a means to expand capital, build brand recognition and break through market resistance

    June 28, 2019, Richard Branson promoting the celebrity-endorsed “Forgotten Solution”. The utilization of celebrity, fetishized in the West, is a much-used tool as a means to expand capital, build brand recognition and break through market resistance

    • Nature4Climate partners

    One of the first institutions to highlight Monbiot’s Natural Climate Solutions launch (April 3, 2019) was the Food and Land Use Coalition. This coalition was initiated under the Business and Sustainable Development Commission leadership led by Paul Polman, former Unilever CEO, and Mark Malloch-Brown, former UN Deputy Secretary-General and Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) who conceptualized the International Crisis Group in 1993 (with Mort Abramowitz), where he serves as chair. Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill. [Source][Board] [Further reading: Controlling the Narrative,Volume II, Act II]

    The Food and Land Use Coalition is supported by partners, including the Business and Sustainable Development Commission (housed at SYSTEMIQ), the EAT Foundation, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and the New Climate Economy (housed at World Resources Institute). [Source] SYSTEMIQ, is advancing the blended finance vehicle (leveraging public funds for private investments into emerging markets) for the Climate Finance Partnership.

    April 3, 2018, Food and Land Use Coalition promoting the freshly launched "Natural Climate Solutions" campaign and website. Tagged users included SYSTEMIQ, EAT, New Climate Economy, SDSN, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) WBCSD, IIASA, World Resources Institute, Unilever, and Yara International

    April 3, 2018, Food and Land Use Coalition promoting the freshly launched “Natural Climate Solutions” campaign and website. Tagged users included SYSTEMIQ, EAT, New Climate Economy, SDSN, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) WBCSD, IIASA, World Resources Institute, Unilever, and Yara International

     

    November 27, 2018, Food and Land Use Coalition congratulating We Mean Business co-founder, WBCSD, on winning an award for its film on "natural climate solutions"

    November 27, 2018, Food and Land Use Coalition congratulating We Mean Business co-founder, WBCSD, on winning an award for its film on “natural climate solutions”

     

    December 3, 2018: Food and Land Use Coalition promoting "natural climate solutions" and "The Forgotten Solution"

    December 3, 2018: Food and Land Use Coalition promoting “natural climate solutions” and “The Forgotten Solution”

     

    January 27, 2019, Food and Land Use Coalition promoting "natural climate solutions"

    January 27, 2019, Food and Land Use Coalition promoting “natural climate solutions”

     

    As the corporate social media accounts demonstrate, the branding of the term “natural climate solutions” was already well established prior to Monbiot’s project launched on April 3, 2019, with a surge in its promotion in December 2018 for COP24 (following the launch of Nature4Climate in June 2018). In fact, the term was being promoted by The Nature Conservancy in 2016 to highlight a parallel revenue stream generated from carbon offset permits.

    In the 2016 video below by The Nature Conservancy, Justin Adams remarks:

    “In many other parts of the world you have forest dependent communities, you have indigenous communities, who know very well how to protect their natural environment. They see the natural world and their own world as much more integrated.”

    The Nature Conservancy, February 8, 2016 [Running time: 4m:5s]:

    The question here is why those in the Global South should be expected to retain their critical roles as protectors of the natural world, simply because the Western societies are too unaware, or too insatiable, to do so. The “other” – are expected to continue protecting their natural environment so the white man in the West can continue to pollute. We can also observe that these communities, in many parts of the world Adams speaks of, do not inflict war, displacement or any misery whatsoever on other communities in the world.

    November 24, 2017, The term "natural climate solutions" in reference to the "Natural Climate Solutions" study, published on October 16, 2017 and introduced by The Nature Conservancy the same day. The study suggests that "nature's mitigation potential is estimated at 11.3 billion tons in 2030—the equivalent of stopping burning oil globally." Here holds the promise for corporate polluters: the continued burning of fossil fuels, coupled with land acquisition (theft) via carbon markets/offsets - all under the guise of stewardship

    November 24, 2017, The term “natural climate solutions” in reference to the “Natural Climate Solutions” study, published on October 16, 2017 and introduced by The Nature Conservancy the same day. The study suggests that “nature’s mitigation potential is estimated at 11.3 billion tons in 2030—the equivalent of stopping burning oil globally.” Here holds the promise for corporate polluters: the continued burning of fossil fuels, coupled with land acquisition (theft) via carbon markets/offsets – all under the guise of stewardship

    The Big Sell

    The Monbiot Natural Climate Solutions “plan” (“by supporting the efforts of others, we want to help bring together two issues that have mostly been considered in isolation: climate breakdown and ecological breakdown”) lends itself as a vehicle for “herding cats”. This is an expression attributed by Forbes, to the efforts of the GCCA alliance in 2014. It was used in reference to the method in which GCCA mobilized the populace for 2014 the People’s Climate March. A march orchestrated to serve the interests of those that financed and organized it (the trial version of what we witnessed on September 20, 2019), with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund at the helm. The herding is essential in order to attain acquiescence and, even demand, for something so ugly it requires the utilization of extraordinarily beautiful imagery, holistic linguistics, coupled with celebrity power, Hollywood trailers, slick marketing and emotive imagery to bring it into policy. Natural Climate Solutions deliberately stays at arm’s length from any direct association with a “New Deal For Nature” (the financialization in nature to be implemented in 2020) and instead sends the new supporters it “herds” into the clutches of the big “conservation” NGOs that are privatizing nature. From the Natural Climate Solutions website:

    “Our plan is to generate the publicity and enthusiasm required to bring this issue to the front of people’s minds. In doing so, we hope to catalyse and accelerate the work of the excellent organisations already operating in this field.”

     

    —Natural Climate Solutions website [Emphasis added]

    Like magic, with the sleight of hand, the very corporate term “natural capital solutions”, is transformed into the benevolent “natural climate solutions”. In the transition from the corporate boardroom, into the public realm, the two terms are thus entwined and at once largely indistinguishable. What we have is a rebranding exercise. Thus we have George Monbiot, The World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the UN REDD Programme, The Nature Conservancy (via Nature4Climate), Conservation International, Natural Capital Partners, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), WWF – all sharing the identical branded term.

    Here it is imperative to highlight the fact that Conservation International, WWF, IUCN, WBCSD, are all founding members of the Natural Capital Coalition. [Natural Capital Coalition founders]

    The architects of the financialization of nature enjoy the penthouse suite of what constitutes a five-star de facto clearing house for institutions, corporations and “conservation” NGOs that serve capital.

     

    July 29, 2019, World Economic Form (now partnered with the United Nations) promoting #NaturalClimateSolutions

    July 29, 2019, World Economic Form (now partnered with the United Nations) promoting #NaturalClimateSolutions

     

    September 18, 2019, World Economic Forum, partner to the United Nations and Voice For The Planet, promoting the #NewDealForNature (created by WEF and WWF)

    September 18, 2019, World Economic Forum, partner to the United Nations and Voice For The Planet, promoting the #NewDealForNature (created by WEF and WWF)

     

    September 8, 2018: James Lloyd promoting the People's Climate March in tandem with "The Forgotten Solution"

    September 8, 2018: James Lloyd promoting the People’s Climate March in tandem with “The Forgotten Solution”

     

    September 8, 2018, GCCA/TckTckTck promoting "The Forgotten Solution"

    September 8, 2018, GCCA/TckTckTck promoting “The Forgotten Solution”

     

    August 24, 2018: James Lloyd: "Scientists call on California governor to OK carbon credits ..."

    August 24, 2018: James Lloyd: “Scientists call on California governor to OK carbon credits …”

     

    James Lloyd , project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy, Twitter, April 3, 2019

    James Lloyd , project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy, Twitter, April 3, 2019

     

    September 19, 2019: James Lloyd , project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy, pinned Tweet

    September 19, 2019: James Lloyd , project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy, pinned Tweet

     

    April 18, 2019, Natural Climate Solutions, The Forgotten Solution

    April 18, 2019, Natural Climate Solutions, The Forgotten Solution

     

    The Art of Playing Obtuse

     

    April 3, 2019, Twitter

    April 3, 2019, Twitter

     

    On the first day of the launch, Monbiot announces: “We’ve launched a website explaining #theforgottensolution and directing people to the wonderful organizations seeking to help nature to help stop #ClimateBreakdown.”

    Yet nature doesn’t need man’s “help” to “help stop climate breakdown”, she simply needs to be left alone. Released from the corporate chokehold killing her. And she certainly does not need help from egregious “conservation” NGOs notorious for land acquisitions (in servitude to corporations and ruling classes), and displacement of Indigenous peoples which has been long documented.

    April 3, 2019, Twitter

    April 3, 2019, Twitter

     

    April 3, 2019, Twitter

    April 3, 2019, Twitter

     

    Natural Climate Solutions google search – which is which?

    Natural Climate Solutions google search – which is which?

     

    Natural Climate Solutions google search – which is which?

    Natural Climate Solutions google search – which is which?

     

    Following the April 3, 2019 launch of “Natural Climate Solutions” Monbiot is challenged by a person who understands the intent behind the branding of “natural climate solutions” by institutions, corporations and “conservation” NGOs that serve capital. Monbiot, a recognized influencer with global reach, responds as follows: “Just because some people hijack this approach for their own ends does not invalidate it. It’s like saying that because David Cameron cynically promoted his Big Society as a substitute for government, all community projects “played into his hands”. Perspective please.”

    The individual who challenged Monbiot responds: “Some people”? You’re evidently unaware that this concept has already been thoroughly co-opted by the WBCSD, Shell, Equinor, the International Emissions Trading Association, International Paper etc.”

    Monbiot’s response? – “All the more reason to reclaim it from them.”

    Monbiot’s weak defense does not hold water.

    This would be akin to anti-imperialists “reclaiming” the term “responsibility to protect” – to protect citizens of targeted states. While at the same time, US-led NATO forces are preparing to annihilate a sovereign state for resources – building consent by using the identical term. If this were to take place, the said “anti-imperialists” repetition of this term would expose them as fraudulent, as individuals deliberately in servitude to empire.

    “As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff points out, when you use the frames and language of your opponents, you don’t persuade them to adopt your point of view. Instead you adopt theirs, while strengthening their resistance to your objectives.”

     

    — George Monbiot, The UK government wants to put a price on nature – but that will destroy it, May 15, 2018

    In the same article cited above, Monbiot writes: “…Tony Juniper – who in other respects is an admirable defender of the living world – says he will use his new post as head of campaigns at WWF to promote the natural capital agenda.”]

    Today, Monbiot is essentially herding the populace to WWF. The most important campaign of both WWF and Conservation International is the “New Deal For Nature” (also marketed as “Voices or the Planet”). Finance, corporations, government, industry, institutions (UN, IPBES, CBD), and those at the helm of the non-profit industrial understands exactly what it is. Everyone that is, except the public.

    Trondheim, Norway, 2 July, 2019– WWF issued a rallying cry for an urgent New Deal for Nature and People for halting biodiversity loss by 2030 at conference for Biodiversity in Trondheim Norway which starts today. [Emphasis added]

    Monbiot informs his audience that “new scientific studies reveal #rewilding has a much greater potential for carbon drawdown than almost anyone imaged” – yet Monbiot did not call his project “Rewilding the Earth” or “Rewilding for Climate” or any other name with the word rewilding.

    “The Panda Bare”, on Twitter, further elucidates: “The vast majority of what is typically described as #NaturalClimateSolutions” has got nothing to do with rewilding – in fact massive areas of new plantation.”

    April 3, 2019, Twitter

    April 3, 2019, Twitter

     

    As the launch day wears on, Monbiot again reiterates his desire for people to follow the groups he lists. He writes: “Usually writing and thinking about #ClimateBreakdown is pretty soul-destroying. But these new discoveries thrill and delight me. Please help us to spread the message, by RTing this thread, directing people to the site and encouraging them to support the group we list.” Tagged users include Greta Thunberg, Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, Michael Mann, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, RSPB, Tim Christopherson, and Nature4Climate.

    September 13, 2019, Twitter: Tim Christophersen coordinates the work on forests and climate change at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), including UNEP’s role within the UN-REDD Programme, a collaborative initiative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UNEP

    September 13, 2019, Twitter: Tim Christophersen coordinates the work on forests and climate change at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), including UNEP’s role within the UN-REDD Programme, a collaborative initiative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UNEP

     

    April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

    April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

     

    April 23, 2019, Natural Capital Solutions promoting "The Forgotten Solution"

    April 23, 2019, Natural Capital Solutions promoting “The Forgotten Solution”

     

    On social media (Twitter) Monbiot feigns aggravation that, despite a concerted effort working with a public relations firm, his campaign is being ignored by broadcast media. This is fairly ironic considering his access to and subsequent exposure from The Guardian alone. It also reveals the privilege and entitlement held by white liberal “activists” who have been deemed safe for public consumption by the establishment. Most legitimate grassroots groups are given zero exposure for new campaigns by mainstream media, let alone colossal exposure by The Guardian.

    April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

    April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

     

    April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

    April 3, 2019, George Monbiot, Twitter

     

    Other tweets accompanying the launch included one in which Monbiot tagged “some wonderful people whom I think will love this approach:” who could help spread the word. The tagged individuals (influencers) included Caroline Lucas, Chris Packham, Avaaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Mark Lynas, Russell Brand, and Ai Weiwei. If only we could all be as environmentally conscious as Leonardo DiCaprio, especially those in the Global South, perhaps then we could save the planet. [Further reading: The Age of Storytelling, Volume II, ACT II]

    April 3, 2019: The tagged individuals (influencers) included Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, and Avaaz. Avaaz/ Purpose: utilizing the behavioural economics of hatred to wage wars on sovereign states in servitude to empire, while deploying emotive campaigns to "save the planet". The fact that war is a key driver of both ecological destruction and climate change appears to be lost on it's followers

    April 3, 2019: The tagged individuals (influencers) included Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, and Avaaz. Avaaz/ Purpose: utilizing the behavioural economics of hatred to wage wars on sovereign states in servitude to empire, while deploying emotive campaigns to “save the planet”. The fact that war is a key driver of both ecological destruction and climate change appears to be lost on it’s followers

    • March 20, 2018: The Nature Conservancy "working hard on 'natural climate solutions'" with the McDonald's corporation

    The Natural Climate Solutions Project

    The first "follows" chosen by for the Natural Climate Solutions Twitter account

    The first “follows” chosen by for the Natural Climate Solutions Twitter account

     

    The first “follows” chosen by for the Natural Climate Solutions Twitter account are its three founders (inclusive of Monbiot who is #1). The next accounts chosen to follow are Wetlands International (#4), followed by Nature4Climate (#5) and the aforementioned James Lloyd (#6), the project lead at Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy. [“Working at the interface of strategic communications and external affairs for nature and climate change. [Nature4Climate Steering Committee] The fifth is Youth4Nature, which is partnered with Nature Conservancy.

    May 3, 2019: Recruiting the youth. Partners: The Nature Conservancy & Nature4Climate

    May 3, 2019: Recruiting the youth. Partners: The Nature Conservancy & Nature4Climate

     

    Following the April 3, 2019 launch of Natural Climate Solutions, we see Extinction Rebellion, YouthStrike4Climate, and those flying under the “grassroots activism” banner, in unison with the most egregious corporations and “conservation” NGOs on the planet (which work in servitude to these very corporations) all sharing the same branding meme #naturalclimatesolutions.

    This is yet another step forward in the engineered evolution of “together” – an orchestrated effort to bring corporations and civil society together as one. The employment of soft-power to give the illusion that class divisions no longer exist.

    “It’s odd, to say the least, to hear a spokesperson for Shell promoting natural climate solutions, and to hear George Monbiot apparently promoting the same thing.”

     

    — Chris Lang, The REDD Monitor, April 5, 2019

    In the same way that global “green new deals” are setting the stage for the “new deal for nature” which is slowly and cautiously being introduced to the public, “natural climate solutions” can help achieve public acceptance for the “new deal for nature”. These are the applications of behavioural change strategies as outlined by Avaaz/Purpose founder Jeremy Heimans. Akin to “killing green” to build the “green economy”, [“we’ll build the green economy, we just won’t talk about it and we won’t say that we’re doing it.”] today corporations, states and financial institutions intend to fully privatize and monetize every aspect of nature – to build the “new” capitalist economy. They just won’t talk about it and they won’t say that they’re doing it.

    This is the new agenda.

    September 16, 2019, The Financial Times, "Protect the future of free enterprise and wealth creation by pursuing profit with purpose. This is the new agenda."

    September 16, 2019, The Financial Times, “Protect the future of free enterprise and wealth creation by pursuing profit with purpose. This is the new agenda.”

    “However, while the critique of capitalism is the starting point, the analysis cannot simply stop there; it must confront the reality of generalized monopoly-finance capital now operating on a world scale and the deep, systematic division of the world into center and periphery, global North and global South—a division only worsened by climate change. It is in this larger imperialist context that capitalism exists as an actual historical system in the twenty-first century, and it is this that must be opposed.”

     

    — Imperialism in the Anthropocene, May 21, 2019

    The methodology of marketing “natural climate solutions” is this: We will “kill market solutions – to save market solutions”. Here, it can be added that Purpose and Greenpeace assisted in the creation of Nature4Climate co-founder, We Mean Business.

    The ruling classes have devised a marketing strategy to sell us the unthinkable (the monetizing of nature, global in scale) by not divulging what lies beneath the surface.

    Patterns appear as branding to target youth broadens its scope. [Nature4Climate, YouthStrike4Climate, Fridays4future, Youth4Nature.]

    Branding that appeals to corporations

    Branding that appeals to corporations

     

    Branding that appeals to corporations and governments

    Branding that appeals to corporations and governments

     

    Branding for an already established conservative audience

    Branding for an already established conservative audience

     

    Branding to reach a liberal and youth demographic

    Branding to reach a liberal and youth demographic

     

    Leads on the Natural Climate Solution project led by Monbiot include Charlie Latimer (Charotte Lattimer, Charlotte Martineau), consultant (clients include UNDP, UNICEF, UN OCHA and UNRWA), Patrick Sterling, former director of product for The Guardian, and Al Boardman, a graphics designer whose clients include “some of the most respected international brands, organisations and agencies in the world; the likes of Apple, Google, Twitter, IBM and BBC amongst them.”

    Further, we have Sandrine Dixson-Declève, John Elkington, Paul Simpson, all identified as members of the advisory panel of Guardian Sustainable Business. Dixson-Declève served as the chief partnership officer for UN Agency Sustainable Energy for All. Prior to this position, she served as the director of the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (also referred to as EU Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, a corporate partner of GCCA/TckTckTck in 2009); vice chair, European Biofuels Technology Platform; board member, We Mean Business; and the advisory board of the oil and gas major Sasol. [Bio] Today Dixson-Declève serves as co-president of the Club of Rome. [Further reading: “Emerging From the emergency: Harnessing the momentum”]. Elkington is the founder of Volans, a B Team expert and Extinction Rebellion Business Signatory. Paul Simpson is the CEO of CDP, a co-founder of We Mean Business.

    Here we can add that The Guardian’s Sustainable Business Leadership section is sponsored by Xynteo, a group that includes Shell, Woodside, and Statoil. Xynteo: “We are reinventing growth”. [Source]Dixson-Declève serves as special advisor to the Xynteo & Energy Transition Commission (ETC). [Source]

    The Guardian Sustainable Business (GSB) Australia advisory council membership has included representatives of WWF, ClimateWorks, 350.org, and Greenpeace (2015) [Source] [An inquiry submitted on September 1, 2019, to The Guardian on members and status of Guardian Sustainable Business advisory panel/panels was unanswered.] Greenpeace International director Jennifer Morgan clearly supports the “new deal for nature” as demonstrated in ACT VI, Volume I of The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg for Consent series, while Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard has co-founded Earth Economics which aims at “identifying, monetizing, and valuing natural capital and ecosystem services”. All hands are on deck.

    Earth Economics branding : "We Take Nature Into Account" - "What Is Your Planet Worth?"

    Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard has co-founded Earth Economics which aims at “identifying, monetizing, and valuing natural capital and ecosystem services”. Earth Economics branding : “We Take Nature Into Account” – “What Is Your Planet Worth?”

     

    The Natural Climate Solutions “call to action” page offers holistic proposals and states that it is opposed to offsets. Yet on April 8, 2019, the carbon certification corporation Verra (formerly the Verified Carbon Standard) was added to the list of allies on the Natural Climate Solutions website. Further, the REDD projects that Shell purchases carbon credits from are certified by Verra. [Source] The Natural Climate Solutions-Verra alliance was disclosed by the REDD Monitor on April 9, 2019. On May 21, 2019, Verra disappeared from the list of allies.

    REDD+ (the UN’s program to “Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation”) was devised as a strategy to enable business as usual to continue in the face of irrefutable evidence of the role of fossil fuel emissions in driving climate change.

    Rather than cut emissions at the source, forests and their ability to store carbon became the sole focus of the UN and the World Bank.  The REDD+ scheme allows corporations and states to buy the carbon stored in forests elsewhere to supposedly “offset” the fossil fuel emissions they are producing.  However, because the carbon stored in the forest has to be verifiably protected, anyone living in the forest – including those who historically protected it in the first place – have to be removed to ensure they do not use any of that carbon.  On the other end of the equation, people living around the polluting industry’s that have “offset” their emissions continue to suffer the health impacts of living in a toxic environment.  Finally, there is no legitimate scientific evidence that temporarily stored biological carbon, in the form of forests, can “offset” fossil carbon, which is a highly condensed permanent form of carbon that was previously locked underground for millions of years. [Learn more at the Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP). GJEP explores and exposes the intertwined root causes of social injustice, ecological destruction, and economic domination.]

    What Natural Climate Solutions does not reference, or oppose, is the “new deal for nature”. In fact, this “new deal”, which is advancing quickly, is not opposed by any environmental “leaders” that have been placed at the vanguard of the spectacle by the ruling classes. This is the foundational structure of the system, functioning exactly as intended.

    Consider that while earlier this year, over 100 NGOs publicly condemned Shell’s launch of a 300 million USD “natural climate solutions” carbon offsetting scheme, there is no dissent whatsoever over Shell’s major partnership in the Natural Capital Coalition. There is practically little to no dissent to the Natural Capital Coalition, its “conservation” partners, nor its plans to commodify the global commons. For the past decade; The Natural Capital Coalition (which absorbed TEEB, initiated in 2008) has been developing the tools and protocols for a new global system of finance where all nature will be assigned a monetary value. It is now time to present the unthinkable to the public in a manner in which it will not only be accepted, but demanded. This requires building global acceptance which will only be possible utilizing unprecedented global behavioural change strategies, methods and manipulations.

    [Natural Capital Coalition advisory council][Natural Capital Coalition partners]
    October 29, 2015: Dow Chemical, The Nature Conservancy, "Nature's Fortune"

    October 29, 2015: Dow Chemical, The Nature Conservancy, “Nature’s Fortune”

     

    The NGOs & institutions that developed the Natural Capital Protocol

    The NGOs & institutions that developed the Natural Capital Protocol

    Natural Capital Coalition organizations

    Natural Capital Coalition organizations

    Natural Capital Coalition promoting IPBES, 2019

    Natural Capital Coalition promoting IPBES, 2019

     

    Chris Lang of the REDD Monitor asks the question: “Natural Climate Solutions – in whose interest?” This is the fundamental question given that the massive advertising campaign behind this effort – and foundations (with investment portfolios in the billions) do not invest in any solutions other than market solutions, or solutions that serve to expand their influence and power (such as societal behaviour modification). “Natural climate solutions” must not be perceived as altruistic or holistic – it is a branding term to increase profits and land acquisitions for corporations.

    Monbiot cites “three crucial opportunities over the next two years for ensuring that Natural Climate Solutions receive the global attention they deserve”. [1) The UN Climate Summit this month, 2) COP 15 of the Convention on Biodiversity in 2020, and 3) the UN COP 26 in 2020, at which countries are supposed to put forward their new Nationally Determined Contributions.] [Source]

    Yet, as pointed out by the Redd Monitor, “Two-thirds of the countries who signed on to the Paris Agreement have already included Natural Climate Solutions in their Nationally Determined Contributions. More than 100 countries include natural solutions in their adaptation plans, and 27 countries include them in their mitigation plans. They are doing so in order to allow continued pollution from fossil fuels – either in their own country or elsewhere.” [Source]

    This clearly demonstrates that the intent of the campaign is hardly to influence states, rather the purpose is to influence and shape public perception.

    Monbiot, June 26, 2019, “Shell is not a green saviour. It’s a planetary death machine”:

    “But the company’s strategy is working. A remarkable number of people who should be fighting Shell instead see it as a green alternative to Exxon, persuaded by what is, in comparison with the company’s filthy investments, a tiny sop. Shell has longstanding relationships with four “environmental partners”: the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, and Earthwatch. I believe it is just as wrong for these groups to take its money as it is for the RSC to take money from BP. It surprises me that there is not as much pressure on them to break their links as there has been, for example, on the British Museum, whose relationship with BP is becoming a national embarrassment.

    Monbiot places quotation around “environmental partners” in reference to the NGOs – two of which are “allies” of his own project, and one, that being Nature Conservancy, which created Nature4Climate, led by The  Natural Climate Solutions stakeholder manager at The Nature Conservancy. The British Museum should be embarrassed, but Monbiot should be embarrassed even more.

    The final paragraph:

    “But naivety about Shell is not confined to its partners. Plenty of well-intentioned organisations and people, who share my enthusiasm for natural climate solutions, appear so desperate to clutch at any straws of hope that they are prepared to see this company as part of the solution. Shell is not our friend. It is an engine of planetary destruction.”

    And here we can paint Monbiot’s “allies” with the identical brush. And so desperate are the citizenry, that they will clutch the “natural climate solutions” straw that has been produced for mass consumption.

    • In 2018, Nature4Climate launched the “The Forgotten Solution”(conceptualized in 2016) – a glossy advertising campaign featuring a Hollywood-esque movie trailer. Featuring its own newsroom, The Forgotten Solutions website utilizes the 350.org font that has proven to resonate with the public.

    From Strategy to Implementation

    The WWF-WEF campaign for the New Deal For Nature (Voice for the Planet) is supported by Nature4Climate.

    The Voice For The Planet campaign is a vehicle to build public support for the "New Deal For Nature" in 2020. Created by WEF "Global Shapers" and WWF

    The Voice For The Planet campaign is a vehicle to build public support for the “New Deal For Nature” in 2020. Created by WEF “Global Shapers” and WWF

     

    The overlap between the New Deal For Nature public partners (Voice For the Planet) and the Natural Climate Solutions partners is as follows: WWF, Conservation International, International Union For The Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the United Nations Environment Programme, Nature4Climate, Royal Society For The Protection of Birds and Birdlife International.

    And while The Nature Conservancy (Voice for the Planet partner) is not listed as an “ally” of Natural Climate Solutions, as demonstrated, it remains at arm’s length. A single degree of separation made possible by the creation of Nature4Climate, the primary ally of Natural Climate Solutions.

    The research for this article was compiled on September 1, 2019. Since this time, we can observe how this branding strategy has been implemented, in real time.

    Corporate Knights – The Voice for Clean Capitalism, April 20, 2015

    September, 19, 2019, Climate Change and Nature-based Solutions: Top 30 Influencers and Brands:

    “Onalytica have analysed an audience of 3.5k sustainability influencers to understand current perception and awareness of Nature-based solutions within the Climate Change debate and how organisations can leverage those influencers to drive policy change.”

    Onalytica’s report opens with an introduction from Lloyd [“This conversation needs to be reflected in the real economy.”]It then identifies the top 100 influencers on the Twitter for “nature-based solutions”. The number one influencer identified is George Monbiot with an influencer score of 100%. Second to Monbiot is Greta Thunberg with an influencer score of 67.56%. Onalytica directs its readers to the nature4climate website for more information.

    Chart: "This data was collected from our Influencer Relationship Management software (IRM). If you are interested in learning more about identifying, managing and engaging with influencers click below to request a demo!"

    Chart: “This data was collected from our Influencer Relationship Management software (IRM). If you are interested in learning more about identifying, managing and engaging with influencers click below to request a demo!”

     

    The top 30 “brands” identified by Onalytica in driving the most engagement on the “nature-based solutions conversation” include the World Resources Institute [Volume I, Act IV], The World Bank, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, WWF, C40 Cities and Extinction Rebellion. [Full list]

    At this juncture we can recall the question imperative put forward by John Elkington, founder of Volans and initial signatory to Extinction Rebellion Business (which quickly disappeared after its public launch).

    John Elkington, founder of Volans, B Team expert and Extinction Rebellion Business Signatory

    John Elkington, founder of Volans, B Team expert and Extinction Rebellion Business Signatory

     

    Global Strike

     

    September 19, 2019: Conservation International Website

    September 19, 2019: Conservation International Website

     

    On September 19, 2019, the United Nations, the Government of Norway, Conservation International, Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy celebrated that the California Air Resources Board adopted the Tropical Forest Standard, a new vehicle for the expansion of carbon offsets into tropical forest regions. Prior to approval by California Air Resources Board (CARB) the standard was narrowly reviewed by a self selected group state legislators through an exclusive stakeholder process dominated by Conservation International, TNC and EDF. [“The purpose of the California Tropical Forest Standard is to establish robust criteria against which to assess jurisdictions seeking to link their sector-based crediting programs that reduce emissions from tropical deforestation with an emissions trading system (ETS), such as California’s Cap-and-Trade Program.”]

    “Forest carbon offsets neither protect forests nor reduce emissions. Forest carbon offsets are an unjust false solution to climate change that enables business and pollution as usual, condemning forests and communities globally to its devastating impacts. If what is proposed as a solution to catastrophic climate change jeopardizes other people or ecosystems it cannot claim to be just or sustainable.” [Source]

     

    The Thunberg-Monbiot film, emphasizing the urgency of funding “natural solutions”, was paid for by Conservation International and the aforementioned *Food and Land Use Coalition, with “guidance” provided by Nature4Climate (The Nature Conservancy, We Mean Business, WWF, UN-REDD, et al.) and Natural Climate Solutions. [*Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill.]

    The Thunberg-Monbiot film, emphasizing the urgency of funding “natural solutions”, was paid for by Conservation International and the aforementioned *Food and Land Use Coalition, with “guidance” provided by Nature4Climate (The Nature Conservancy, We Mean Business, WWF, UN-REDD, et al.) and Natural Climate Solutions. [*Member foundations include ClimateWorks, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Good Energies, and Margaret Cargill.]

     

    September 20, 2019: The Nature Conservancy promoting the film with term "natural climate solutions". Tagged are Thunberg and Mobiot. Note the utilization of the "Spredfast" software

    September 20, 2019: The Nature Conservancy promoting the film with term “natural climate solutions”. Tagged are Thunberg and Mobiot. Note the utilization of the “Spredfast” software

     

    Spredfast: "Seamless interactions and a 360-customer view, now possible with our @salesforce Social Care integration."

    Spredfast: “Seamless interactions and a 360-customer view, now possible with our @salesforce Social Care integration.”

     

    Marc Benioff: Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, one of the fastest-growing cloud-based software corporation in the world. He is a member of the board of trustees, World Economic Forum and inaugural Chair, World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

    Marc Benioff: Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, one of the fastest-growing cloud-based software corporation in the world. He is a member of the board of trustees, World Economic Forum and inaugural Chair, World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

     

    January 24, 2019: Marc Benioff: Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, WEF

    January 24, 2019: Marc Benioff: Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Salesforce, WEF

     

    September 19, 2019: Conservation International promoting Thunberg-Monbiot film with #NaturalClimateSolutions hashtag

    September 19, 2019: Conservation International promoting Thunberg-Monbiot film with #NaturalClimateSolutions hashtag

     

    September 20, 2019: Billionaire Richard Branson, founder of The B Team, promoting Thunberg-Monbiot film. The B Team is a co-founder of We Mean Business - overseeing the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit with WEF

    September 20, 2019: Billionaire Richard Branson, founder of The B Team, promoting Thunberg-Monbiot film. The B Team is a co-founder of We Mean Business – overseeing the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit with WEF

     

    March 20, 2018: McDonald's corporation "working hard on #naturalclimatesolutions"

    March 20, 2018: McDonald’s corporation “working hard on #naturalclimatesolutions”

     

    September 18, 2019

    On cue, We Mean Business co-founders – united with NGOs, global institutions, and media – coordinate their efforts in promoting the video, ensuring it will go viral. At once, We Mean Business co-founders – united with NGOs, global institutions – and the hundreds of corporations they represent, are now affiliated with Thunberg. The citizenry is encouraged to “love thy enemy”, “changing together” in order to save the power elite. [The Behavioural Change Project “To Change Everything”, Volume II, Act V]

    At once, a united front is projected. Corporate power and society are united as one. Effectively erased is the dividing line between corporate “conservation” NGOs and the citizenry. The enemy is at once made friendly and wholesome by aligning itself with Thunberg and Monbiot, presented as icons for the environment by the establishment they serve. If Greta Thunberg trusts Conservation International, then you can too. This is no different from Thunberg doing an ad for a vegan menu at McDonalds – while it continues to participate in the cruel and grotesque livestock production industry that pollutes and destroys land, forests, and ecosystems.

    September 19, 2019: Amazon announces partnership with The Nature Conservancy for the implementation of "natural climate solutions" initiatives

    September 19, 2019: Amazon announces partnership with The Nature Conservancy for the implementation of “natural climate solutions” initiatives

     

    September 20, 2019: The Nature Conservancy

    September 20, 2019: The Nature Conservancy

     

    Financial Times, September 16, 2019 launch: "CAPITALISM. TIME FOR A RESET. THIS IS THE NEW AGENDA. This is "the Financial Times' biggest campaign since the 2008 global recession."

    Financial Times, September 16, 2019 launch: “CAPITALISM. TIME FOR A RESET. THIS IS THE NEW AGENDA. This is “the Financial Times’ biggest campaign since the 2008 global recession.”

     

    In the same way that Hitler and Goebbels, in the 20th  century, utilized youthwashing as a means of psychological warfare in order to  carry out a genocide on a population they believed as inferior, today the ruling class, in conjunction with corporate power, have restored youthwashing for the 21st century as an effective means to continue an ongoing genocide of the natural world, and all life which she graciously sustains. Life, believed to be inferior, by those committing the atrocities. By those seeking societal consent to continue.

    September 18, 2019: The Nature Conservancy promoting #GlobalClimateStrike in conjunction with the "New Deal For Nature and People"

    September 18, 2019: The Nature Conservancy promoting #GlobalClimateStrike in conjunction with the “New Deal For Nature and People”

     

    The “New Deal For Nature” is a scheme so grotesque that it can only be sold to the public by utilizing the most effective tools for cutting through market resistance – that being celebrity. The NGOs comprising the non-profit industrial complex, coupled with the deployment of celebrity, are literally banking on the successful manipulation of the citizenry.

    A natural climate solution would be the end of the military industrial complex. The end of the relentless assault on our Earth, our brothers and sisters, and all life, waged by the US Pentagon. A natural climate solution would be discontinuing the production of all superfluous “goods“. A natural climate solution would be returning stolen lands to those from whom they were stolen.

    Stokely Carmichael asked the pivotal question in 1966:

    “And that’s the real question facing the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we’ve been into for the last hundreds of years?”

    On September 20, 2019, millions of people went to the streets. Those walls could have been torn down. Instead they were propped up.

    I quote Carmichael, as what constitutes mainstream activism in the West, has become nothing more than a parody. We must stop identifying with the ruling class. We are not part of it. And all the luxury consumer brands that one can buy on credit, will not make it any less so. Emulating the rich is a devised marketing stratagem that creates a false sense of belonging in a system designed and protected to serve the rich.

    The question is, will we break away from the clutches of manufactured false demigods and align ourselves with revolutionary grassroots groups, or will we continue to uphold those that protect the very system destroying our natural world? Although the outlook looks bleak, the future is not yet written.

    Clive Spash

    Clive Spash

     

     

     

     

    Further Reading:

    [REDD Monitor: Offsetting fossil fuel emissions with tree planting and ‘natural climate solutions’: science, magical thinking, or pure PR?, July 4, 2019] [REDD Monitor: Shell and Natural Climate Solutions: US$300 million for carbon offsets, April 4, 2019] [REDD Monitor: Is the new Natural Climate Solutions campaign a distraction from the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground?, April 5, 2019]

    End Notes:

    [1]
    • NATURE4CLIMATE
    • ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF BIRDS
    • UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENT PROGRAMME*
    • REWILDING BRITAIN
    • FRIENDS OF THE EARTH
    • AVAAZ
    • GREENPEACE
    • LEONARDO DI CAPRIO FOUNDATION
    • NATURE NEEDS HALF
    • DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION
    • WILDERNESS SOCIETY
    • REWILDING EUROPE
    • WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY
    • EQUATOR INITIATIVE
    • FOUNDATION EARTH
    • CONSERVATION INTERNATIONAL
    • TREESISTERS
    • CLIMATE LAND AMBITION AND RIGHTS ALLIANCE
    • THE GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP ON FOREST AND LANDSCAPE RESTORATION
    • GLOBAL LANDSCAPES FORUM
    • WILD FOR LIFE
    • WWF | WORLD WIDE FUND FOR NATURE
    • GLOBAL PEATLANDS INITIATIVE
    • SIERRA CLUB
    • NATURE BASED SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE
    • FERN
    • EU BIOMASS LEGAL CASE
    • HEALTH IN HARMONY
    • EUROPEAN OUTDOOR CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION
    • SANCTUARY ASIA
    • SCOTLAND: THE BIG PICTURE
    • PLAN VIVO
    • NORTHEAST WILDERNESS TRUST
    • WILD FOUNDATION
    • BIRDLIFE INTERNATIONAL
    • JOHN MUIR TRUST
    • IUCN | INTERNATIONAL UNION FOR THE CONSERVATIONS OF NATURE
    • WETLANDS INTERNATIONAL
    • URBAN BIODIVERSITY HUB
    • PUBLIC PASTURES – PUBLIC INTEREST
    • GO CONSCIOUS EARTH
    • OCEANSWELL
    • PLANT-FOR-THE-PLANET
    • ALLIANCE FOR FOOD SOVEREIGNTY IN AFRICA
    • AFRICAN CONSERVATION FOUNDATION
    • TRUE NATURE FOUNDATION
    • A ROCHA
    • THE EUROPEAN NATURE TRUST
    [April 4, 2019][April 6, 2019][June 13, 2019]
    [2] “The Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 was founded in 2012 at Rio+20 after the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) committed to zero net deforestation by 2020 for palm oil, soy, beef, and  paper and pulp supply chains in 2010. The CGF partnered with the US government to create the public-private alliance with the mission of mobilizing all actors to collaborate in reducing commodity-driven tropical deforestation.

    In support of the commitments of TFA 2020 partners to reduce deforestation in tropical forest countries, TFA 2020 has throughout the years grown its partner members and continues to bring on board those key actors committed to tackling deforestation. Since June 2015, the Tropical Forest Alliance Secretariat is hosted at the World Economic Forum offices in Geneva, with financial support of the governments of the Norway and United Kingdom.” [Source]

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Behavioural Change Project “To Change Everything” [Volume II, Act V]

    Sep 18

    2019

    4

    350.org / 1Sky, Amnesty International, Avaaz, B Team [Managed by Purpose - the PR Arm of Avaaz], Carbon Markets | REDD, Foundations, Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Social Engineering, TckTckTck, United Nations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

    Behavioural Change Climate Optimist Fourth Industrial Revolution Framing Greta Thunberg Language Storytelling The Climate Group UN We Mean Business World Economic Forum (WEF)

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Behavioural Change Project “To Change Everything” [Volume II, Act V]

    September 18, 2019

    By Cory Morningstar

     

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

    [Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI • Addenda I] [Book form] [Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [ACTS VII & VIII forthcoming]

    • A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story] [Oct 2 2019]

    • The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline [Oct 6 2019]

     

     

    “All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization.”

     

    — Guy Debord, Paris, February-April 1988, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

     

    The Climate Group Launches We Mean Business & Climate Optimist 

    “With respect to environmental governance, the effect of this is to sustain ‘the paradoxical idea that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions’. In service to this fantasy, celebrity promotion helps to mobilize affect and desire in support of environmental causes, focusing attention on splashy, sensation-filled spectacle supporting the win-win narrative and thereby conjuring an aura of environmentalism ‘as exciting, exotic, erotic, and glamorous—as ‘sexy'”.

     

    — Blinded by the Stars? Celebrity, Fantasy, and Desire in Neoliberal Environmental Governance, Robert Fletcher

    On September 5, 2014, The Climate Group announced that the launch of We Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV] would take place later that month on September 22, the eve of the UN Climate Summit, in order to “catalyze action around climate change and bring it back to the top of the global agenda”. The founding partners of We Mean Business are Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), the B Team, Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Ceres, The Climate Group, the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Together, these entities represent the world’s most powerful corporations and investors.

    Ahead of the launch (on September 9, 2014) a press conference was held by Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres; and Nigel Topping, executive director of CDP. The conference focused on the role of corporations and investors at the UN Climate Summit and during climate negotiations, as well as the UN climate chief expectations from CEOs leading up to Paris 2015.

    The media contact provided for both the press conference led by Figueres and the We Mean Business launch was that of Callum Grieve of We Mean Business. Grieve, who created and led the first Climate Week NYC in 2009 is identified by WWF as co-founder of We Mean Business. As disclosed in Volume II, Act IV Grieve shared the tweet of the *”lonely” girl on a sidewalk, Greta Thunberg, on the very first day of her strike, August 20, 2018. As the third person to reply to the initial tweet, Grieve would include the following people and institutions: We Don’t have Time, The Climate Museum, Greta Thunberg, Jamie Margolin (youth founder of This Is Zero Hour), Zero Hour, Youth Climate March LA, This is Zero Hour Ft. Lauderdale, Greenpeace International, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, and the UNFCCC, the “official Twitter account of UN Climate Change”. [*Ingmar Rentzhog, founder and CEO of We Don’t Have Time, Volume I, Act I]

    As touched upon in Volume II, Act II, Grieve is the communications specialist for Christiana Figueres “Every Breath Matters” campaign. He is the former communications director for We Mean Business, The Climate Group (co-founder of We Mean Business), and Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL). Grieve has coordinated high-level climate change communications campaigns and interventions for the United Nations, the World Bank Group, and several Fortune 500 companies.

    Callum is the co-founder and director of Counter Culture, a brand development firm specializing in behavioural change campaigns and storytelling, focused on climate change and energy. The co-founder of Counter Culture is Emily Farnworth, head of climate initiatives at the World Economic Forum, former director of Counter Culture and former campaign director of the We Mean Business RE100 initiative led by The Climate Group in partnership with CDP. [Incorporated April 26, 2011, dissolved December 19, 2017, the Twitter account for Counter Culture has been inactive since May 11, 2018.]

    WWF website, May 11, 2015: "We Mean Business – changing the climate challenge narrative... One area We Mean Business is focusing on is carbon pricing. “It seemed that businesses were becoming confused with all the things that they were being asked to sign on to. So we helped create something called the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, which the World Bank is now driving with the UN Global Compact and many of our partners.”

    WWF website, May 11, 2015: “We Mean Business – changing the climate challenge narrative… One area We Mean Business is focusing on is carbon pricing. “It seemed that businesses were becoming confused with all the things that they were being asked to sign on to. So we helped create something called the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, which the World Bank is now driving with the UN Global Compact and many of our partners.”

     

    August 20, 2018: Callum Grieve Twitter post on the first day of Thunberg's climate strike. Hashtag: #WeDontHaveTime

    August 20, 2018: Callum Grieve Twitter post on the first day of Thunberg’s climate strike. Hashtag: #WeDontHaveTime

     

    The Climate Group’s initiatives are brought forward as part of the We Mean Business Coalition. Such initiatives include RE100 (renewable power), EP100 (energy productivity), and EV100 (electric vehicles). [Source] [Further reading on The Climate Group: ACT IV]

    By far the most popular initiative of The Climate Group is the annual event created by Grieve: Climate Week NYC.

    On September 19, 2017, The Climate Group launched Climate Week NYC 2017 with a high-profile opening ceremony attended by B Team leader billionaire Richard Branson, UN representatives, governors, NGOs and corporate entities such as PepsiCo, Bank of America, and Walmart. Showcasing “the unstoppable force for action on climate change”, the ceremony highlighted the launch of the Climate Optimist campaign created “to change the dominant narrative on climate change.”

    “We also launched the Climate Optimist campaign, in partnership with Futerra, which aims to spread the word about climate action and focus on what is happening, rather than the doom and gloom.”

     

    — Helen Clarkson, CEO, The Climate Group, former head of Forum for the Future and Médecins Sans Frontières

     

    “In the last eight weeks Mars and VF Corporation and Interface and Ashden and DivestInvest and EcoMedia came on board to help us launch this campaign.”

     

    — Solitaire Townsend, Co-Founder, Futerra, [Source]

    The Climate Optimist campaign created by The Climate Group

    The Climate Optimist campaign created by The Climate Group

     

    The Climate Optimist Twitter account (created July 2017) would post its first “tweet” on September 25, 2017. The Climate Optimist concept, largely consisting of celebrity endorsement, appears to be more or less sitting in the wings at this time, having been effectively replaced by Christiana Figueres “Global Optimism” project.

    The Medium is the Message

    September 20, 2010: Kelly Rigg (centre), director of GCCA/TckTckTck (Climate Week NYC partner) speaks during the Opening Ceremony for Climate Week NYC Monday in New York. Christiana Figueres is seated on the right. Rigg: "And Christiana I just want to say, civil society has your back."

    September 20, 2010: Kelly Rigg (centre), director of GCCA/TckTckTck (Climate Week NYC partner) speaks during the Opening Ceremony for Climate Week NYC Monday in New York. Christiana Figueres is seated on the right. Rigg: “And Christiana I just want to say, civil society has your back.”

     

    During the years 2003-2009, new joint collaborations were forged to create a global platform where three entities – corporations, state and civil society – would all fuse together as one. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the non-profit industrial complex and the foundation funding made possible via oligarchs, corporations and capitalism itself, would facilitate the transition. [1] Pivotal to this evolution would be the corporate and foundation funded “progressive media”. The social engineering project to “change everything” is today perhaps the most successful behavioural sciences experiment in modern history.

    The creation of ClimateWorks, GCCA (both officially launched in 2008), The Climate Group (2003), Climate Week NYC (2009), and other heavily financed projects would essentially culminate as an overlapping force of key players that would saturate and dominate the discussions surrounding climate. NGOs, such as those that formed the GCCA, would soft peddle feel-good messages to the public, while the critical discussions led by (and serving) corporate power took place behind closed doors unabated, with little to no dissent. Climate Week NYC (“shaping markets and setting policy“) was formed as a partnership between The Climate Group, the United Nations, the UN Foundation, the City of New York, the Government of Denmark, the GCCA TckTckTck campaign, and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). Climate Week NYC, takes place every September in New York City and features the campaigns of We Mean Business.

    “Today more than 3,000 events in more than 120 countries around the world the TckTckTck campaign has organized what we call global wake up events to our leaders. We feel that now is the time for all of us – government, business and civil society – to stand shoulder to shoulder to work together…”

     

    — Kumi Naidoo, Chair TckTckTck Campaign, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, 6th segment of the Opening Ceremony of Climate Week NYC, September 2009

    Behavioural Change: “Together” and “Equality”

    Today, the project for corporations, Annex 1 states and citizenry “to come together as one”, has been largely realized. The distinct boundaries between working class, ruling class, and the corporation rebranded with a caring human face, continue to be strategically and deliberately blurred. Orchestrated movements, comprising the Euro-Anglo (shrinking) middle class are embraced, regardless of vaguely understood elite/corporate origins. Manufactured demigods and deities (framed as “leaders” and “activists”) are predominantly white from elite backgrounds and/or privilege. As this relationship becomes more and more normalized, via a decade of societal conditioning, those tasked with implementing the “together” (i.e. we are all equal) ideology become more excelled in their ability to create discourse. That is, to shift all discussion away from class analysis – and even eliminate the issue of class altogether. The grotesque irony of corporate behemoths that purposely impoverish the world’s most vulnerable while plundering the planet for profits, feigning concern over inequality, goes largely undetected.

    “What they do manage to do is deliver an added punishment on the poor and working class, people who are struggling to make ends meet. It places an unfair level of guilt on ordinary people whose impact on the environment is relatively negligible compared to the enormous destruction caused by the fossil fuel industry, mining companies, plastic and packaging production, shipping and the military industrial complex. Seldom (if ever) questioned are the basic foundations of the current economic order which is driving the decimation of the biosphere for the benefit of the wealthy Davos jet set.”

     

    — Kenn Orphan, March 2019

    “The U.S. military hides statistics on its petroleum usage and its disposal of chemical waste, and of course the severe consequences of all the current ongoing U.S. wars (see Cholera in Yemen just for starters). The socio-political landscape is seeing the rise of global fascism as well as a continuing migration of wealth to the very top tier of the class hierarchy. Homes are being built with servants quarters for the first time in over a hundred years. It is a return to both Victorian values and social structure and in a wider sense a return to feudalism. The homeless camps that circle every American city speak to the extreme fragility of the social fabric in the West today. A fragility that both planned and exploited by the ruling classes.”

     

    — John Steppling, June 2019

    +++

    The Framing and Language Utilized to Create the Required Momentum

    “To Change Everything We Need Everyone”

     

    “Not only is tackling climate change compatible with economic growth… it is the only way that we are getting economic growth from the 21st century onwards.”

     

    — Paul Polman, Chair of the B Team, Chair of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), Vice Chair of the UN Global Compact Board and member of the International Business Council of World Economic Forum (WEF), August, 4, 2014 [Emphasis added]

    “Oh, I say you been misled. You been had. You been took.”

     

    — Malcolm X, 1964

    Above: Susan Rockefeller, Co-executive producer of the “This Changes Everything” documentary film and founding partner of Louverture Films, LLC. Louverture is the production company for the documentary film “This Changes Everything” (with The Message Productions, LLC / Klein Lewis Productions). Photo: Rockefeller at her home on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York, on September 8, 2015. Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)

     

    “We cannot change everything – without everyone.”

     

    — Solitaire Townsend, co-founder, Futerra, at the “Climate Optimism” global launch, Climate Week, September, 2017 (with Helen Clarkson, CEO, The Climate Group)

     

    “To change everything, we need everyone. It is time for all of us to unleash mass resistance – we urge the adults to join us. On September 20th we call for a global general strike.”

     

    — Greta Thunberg, May 23, 2019, Twitter

    Helen Clarkson, CEO, The Climate Group, June 18, 2019

    Helen Clarkson, CEO, The Climate Group, June 18, 2019

     

    "Change Everything" - Illustration from the US Green New Deal promotional video directed by Naomi Klein: "A Message from the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez"

    “Change Everything” – Illustration from the US Green New Deal promotional video directed by Naomi Klein: “A Message from the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”

     

    2014 People's Climate March: "To Change Everything We Need Everyone"

    2014 People’s Climate March: “To Change Everything We Need Everyone”

     

    This Changes Everything started with “The Message” project financed in its infancy by Rockefeller and several foundations in 2011. In 2014 the first stage of “The Message” project launched with the book published by Naomi Klein (350.org director and Leap founder) “This Changes Everything”. [Further reading: “Financing ‘The Message‘ Behind Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ Project”] The book was launched in advance of the first People’s Climate March which took place on September 21, 2014. The march was organized by GCCA/TckTckTck, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Climate Nexus (a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), 350.org (incubated by the Rockefeller Foundation), the Rasmussen Foundation and USCAN. The People’s March was mobilized as a means to build momentum for the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City.

    From this juncture forward, “This Changes Everything”, in its many variations, has indeed served as the central “message” for desired behaviours sought by the ruling classes.

    “Emphasis by repetition gains acceptance for an idea, particularly if the repetition comes from different sources.”

     

    — Edward L. Bernays, Biography of an Idea: The Founding Principles of Public Relations, 1965

    Within the repetitive language and framing that inundates our collective psyche – ever so subtly coaxing our subconscious to acquiesce to the “new climate economy” – we find the words: change, everything, everyone and together. “To Change Everything, We Need Everyone.” “This Changes Everything.” “Changing Together.”

    From Naomi Klein, to 350.org, to WWF, to We Mean Business, to the World Bank, to The Climate Group, to the Green New Deal, to Greta Thunberg – the remixed slogans with identical language are reverberated from the corridors of the non-profit industrial complex and hallways of the power elite. The shared marketing slogans coalesce with the shared neoliberal ideologies. Ideologies undergoing a restructuring in a desperate attempt to maintain an economic system in decline.

    The language continues right up to the present year with Naomi Klein presenting the video production “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” to the call for the September Global Strike by Greta Thunberg via Twitter: “To change everything, we need everyone.”[Shared at 2:22 PM – 23 May 2019, the tweet had 2.9k “retweets” and 6.8K “likes” on 23 May 2019 at 9:54PM EST].

    The B Team, Toward A Plan B For Business, Fostering Collaboration

    The B Team, Toward A Plan B For Business, Fostering Collaboration

     

    2014, Purpose, People's Climate March: "To Change Everything We Need Everyone"

    2014, Purpose, People’s Climate March: “To Change Everything We Need Everyone”

     

    2015, WWF, Paris: "To Change Everything We Need Everyone"

    2015, WWF, Paris: “To Change Everything We Need Everyone”

     

    2019, 350.org: "We Need Everyone"

    2019, 350.org: “We Need Everyone”

     

    2019, 350.org: "School Strikers: 'We Need Everyone'"

    2019, 350.org: “School Strikers: ‘We Need Everyone'”

     

    The purpose of “the message” is paramount. This is the subtle, yet effective, erasure of class divisions. The peasants can sleep soundly knowing they and the corporation (or NGO) that has seized their land share the same values. The interests of those at the helm of Goldman Sachs are no different from those espoused by the plumbers, factory workers, and working class. There is no common enemy, as we are united as one. Inequality will be corrected under a new reformed capitalism sometime in the near future.

    This can be illustrated in the article written by Greenpeace International Executive Director Jennifer Morgan, in collaboration with The B Team’s Sharon Burrows (January 21, 2019, Davos). The following is an excerpt from their article Tackling the Twin Challenges of Climate Change and Inequality:

    “Meanwhile, the world’s richest one percent took home 82 percent of all new wealth last year and, according to the World Bank, almost half of all people worldwide are one medical bill or crop failure away from destitution. Inequality continues to rise as the world warms.”

    The said solution provided by Morgan and Burrows is tragic to say the least: “We need the Davos elite to change the rules of the global economy to benefit people and the planet alike.” The citizenry must “demand the fundamental and urgent change we need” – from those that enslave us and destroy our natural world.

    And here the word “together” presents itself once again. Morgan and Burrows surmise their argument with:

    “We are determined and excited that together, as environmentalists and trade unionists, we can face up to the twin challenges of inequality and climate change. Will the ‘Davos Man’ join us?” [Emphasis added]

    The idea that “the Davos Man” (the billionaire oppressor) would consider joining the oppressed, impoverished and exploited, or that such a union would be a beneficial one, is an insult to both the world’s most vulnerable citizens and to the workers of the world. Black Panther Assata Shakur, now living in exile in Cuba, dispelled this myth and dangerous discourse in a single sentence: “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” Yet this is exactly what those in servitude to the ruling class would like you to believe can happen. At one time, fairytales were written for children. Today, they are written for adults.

    The United Nations goes further than Morgan and Burrows in framing the gross inequality with the following statistic provided by Oxfam:

    “26 people own the same wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.” [Emphasis in original.]

    And indeed this is shocking as it is grotesque. But to comprehend the real new-found concern and focus on inequality between the world’s billionaires and those monetarily impoverished [“The New Focus: Inequality“], one must keep reading.

    At the heart of “the new focus, “inequality” represents something far more important than eradicating poverty and distributing wealth equally amongst the world’s citizens; rather, the real crisis is the growing fear of billionaires – that capitalism could collapse – due to a citizenry no longer willing to be compliant.

    The UN divulges that in 2018 “79% of Latin Americans said their countries were governed in the interest of the powerful — the highest number since 2004.” This statistic is derived from the April 5, 2019 report “Ruling for the few? How Weak Legitimacy Can Hinder Compliance and Cooperation in LAC countries” written by Luis Felipe López-Calva, UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean.

    From the report:

    “The increasingly widespread belief that countries are governed to benefit “the few” rather than “the many” suggests that the legitimacy of institutions may be declining in the region…. Voluntary compliance is a key enabler of cooperation and coordination, and thus ultimately an important foundation of positive governance-development dynamics.

     

    As explained by Margaret Levi, “…citizens are willing to go along with a policy they do not prefer as long as it is made according to a process they deem legitimate, and they are less willing to comply with a policy they like if the process was problematic. One widely used measure of willingness of citizens to cooperate is tax morale…. In the graph, the share of people responding greater than 5 is shown as those that think it is “justifiable” to evade taxes. What we see is that while a majority of citizens in all countries manifest disagreement with the idea of evading taxes, there is a clear and positive relationship between the share of people who think their country is governed in the interest of a few powerful groups and the share who think it is justifiable to evade taxes…. If citizens do not believe that institutions are responsive to the needs of all, they may choose not to cooperate. We can think of this as “opting out” of the social contract.” [Emphasis in original]

    Chapter 4 of the same UN report features a quote by Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator, and former advisory board member of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (*TEEB):

    “Inequality is causing all of us a great deal of unease. In many of our societies, it is triggering a great deal of polarization, a questioning of fundamentals – whether it is the social compact, whether it is the role of government, whether it is the role of capital…” [Source] [Emphasis added]

    [*TEEB, launched in 2012, hosted by UNEP and backed by the European Commission and countries including Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom, has since been absorbed/rebranded into the Natural Capital Coalition. The Natural Capital Coalition is working with the world’s most powerful corporations and institutions for the implementation of the financialization of nature.]

    The UN report continues: “Inequality has jeopardized economic growth and created a serious barrier to eradicating poverty, the bedrock of the 2030 Agenda. But inequality is not natural or inevitable. It stems from policies, laws, cultural norms, corruption, and other issues that can be addressed.”

    While it is true that “inequality is not natural or inevitable”, the statement that it “stems from policies, laws, cultural norms, corruption, and other issues that can be addressed” is a convenient alibi. Inequality is a by-product of the capitalist economic system. It can be “addressed” by the UN for infinity, that is true. It cannot and will not, however, be solved inside of the capitalist system, as the system is built upon and dependent upon exploitation.

    “In 2017, an estimated 82% of the wealth created globally went to the top 1% of the world’s population. Wages in many parts of the world remain flat. Despite important recent progress in tackling poverty, just under half of Africa’s population still lacks access to electricity today.” [New Climate Economy]

    Following the rollout of the global “green new deals” masking the 100 trillion dollar bailout, we can expect the 82% of the wealth created globally that went to the top 1% – to rise. We can expect wages in many parts of the world to remain flat, and despite the promise of job creation (a key selling feature for the GND), the exact opposite is more likely to be true. The fourth industrial revolution is “characterised by increasing globalisation and the rise of automation. Indeed, the growth of new technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) is having a profound effect on labour markets, with some economists suggesting that automation could potentially replace over half of all jobs by 2055.” [New Climate Economy]

    Ironically, the featured image on the cover of this same Sustainable Development Goals report is a young girl in Afghanistan standing at a chalkboard. While feigning concern for the Earth, her inhabitants, and inequality, the US and NATO states have spent trillions of dollars financing their deadly resource wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Death, devastation, and environmental degradation, are exempted from discussions with the modern environmental “movement” – as is organized resistance to the US Pentagon – a leading contributor to climate change. Consider the June 27, 2019 article “The Pentagon’s Outsized Part in the Climate Fight” authored by 350.org founder Bill McKibben, minimizing militarism’s horrific impact. One can only wonder how a victim of US warfare would feel reading McKibben’s optimistic opinion on the world’s most destructive war machine.

    November 24, 2015: "Coffees of the Secretary-General" series, Author Naomi Klein (left) with Angel Gurría OECD Secretary-General, member of the Board of Trustees, World Economic Forum, advisory board member for the Global Green Growth Forum (3GF)

    November 24, 2015: “Coffees of the Secretary-General” series, Author Naomi Klein (left) with Angel Gurría OECD Secretary-General, member of the Board of Trustees, World Economic Forum, advisory board member for the Global Green Growth Forum (3GF)

     

    The Framing and Language Utilized to Create the Required Momentum

    Together

    to·geth·er Dictionary result for together: 1. with or in proximity to another person or people. “together they climbed the dark stairs. synonyms: with each other, in conjunction, jointly, conjointly, in cooperation, cooperatively, in collaboration, in partnership, in combination, as one, in unison, in concert, concertedly, with one accord, in league, in alliance, in collusion, side by side, hand in hand, hand in glove, shoulder to shoulder, cheek by jowl; informal in cahoots “friends who work together”

    Connect4Climate (World Bank): Changing Together

    Connect4Climate (World Bank): Changing Together

     

    December 4, 2018, WWF: "Stronger Together For Climate Action", COP24 climate change summit, Katowice, Poland, photo by Omar Marques

    December 4, 2018, WWF: “Stronger Together For Climate Action”, COP24 climate change summit, Katowice, Poland, photo by Omar Marques

     

    2018, COP24, United Nations: "Changing Together"

    2018, COP24, United Nations: “Changing Together”

     

    The European Bank: "Changing Together"

    The European Bank: “Changing Together”

     

    September 20, 2019: The “Global General Strike”

    “And in 1964 this seems to be the year, because what can the white man use now to fool us after he put down that march on Washington? And you see all through that now. He tricked you, had you marching down to Washington. Yes, had you marching back and forth between the feet of a dead man named Lincoln and another dead man named George Washington singing “We Shall Overcome.” He made a chump out of you. He made a fool out of you. He made you think you were going somewhere and you end up going nowhere but between Lincoln and Washington.”

     

    — Malcolm X, 1964

    On May 23, 2019, the Greta Thunberg Twitter account announced “To change everything, we need everyone. It is time for all of us to unleash mass resistance – we urge the adults to join us. On September 20th we call for a global general strike.

    Also on May 23, 2018, The Guardian published a letter credited to “Greta Thunberg and 46 youth activists”: Young People Have Led the Climate Strikes. Now We Need Adults to Join Us Too – “But to change everything, we need everyone. It is time for all of us to unleash mass resistance – we have shown that collective action does work. We need to escalate the pressure to make sure that change happens, and we must escalate together.”

    May 23, 2019: Author and 350.org board member Naomi Klein shares a social media post by 350’s Strategy and Communications Director, Jamie Henn. Henn is recognized by Future Stewards (Leaders Quest, Mission 2020, The B Team) as a “deep practitioner”: “Committed leaders will increase pressure on their peers to engage – establishing a new norm.” [Source]

    The following day (May 24, 2019), The Guardian published a letter of support and endorsement of the global strike credited to “Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and others”: “It’s a one-day climate strike, if you will – and it will not be the last. This is going to be the beginning of a week of action all over the world. And we hope to make it a turning point in history. “Others” included the following signatories: Christiana Figueres (B Team leader, Global Optimist, etc.), KC Golden (350.org), Annie Leonard (executive director of Greenpeace USA and co-founder of Earth Economics), Michael Mann (The Climate Mobilization board), Jennifer Morgan (executive director of Greenpeace International), Kumi Naidoo (executive director of Amnesty International), Gus Speth (The Climate Mobilization board, World Resources Institute founder), billionaire Tom Steyer (founder of Next Gen NGO), and Farhana Yamin (Track Zero and Extinction Rebellion leader). [2] Here we have Christiana Figueres slowly being brought into the public foray of elite “activism” by The Guardian with those such as 350’s McKibben and Klein.

    Above: Global Climate Strike website [This Global Climate Strike event registration is hosted by 350.org.”] International partners include 350.org, Avaaz, Greenpeace, WWF, Oxfam, Amnesty International, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, Friends of the Earth International, Global Greengrants Fund, and Patagonia [3]

    MoveOn is a co-founder of Avaaz: “US Youth Climate Strike is working with MoveOn”

    The “global strike”, coinciding with the Climate Week NYC event is, in reality, the opening act for the UN Climate Action Summit.

    “Recent climate strikes have shown that young people and civil society are demanding action on climate and want to be engaged in the decision making process. The time to respond with action is now.”

     

    — Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit, Track #3: Youth Engagement & Public Mobilization, V.3 – 31 May 2019

    The UN Climate Action Summit commences on September 23, 2019: “There is still time to tackle climate change, but it will require an unprecedented effort from all sectors of society. The Summit will showcase a leap in collective national political ambition and it will demonstrate massive movements in the real economy in support of the agenda. Together, these developments will send strong market and political signals and inject momentum in the ‘race to the top’ among countries, companies, cities and civil society that is needed to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.” [Source][Emphasis added]

    “Internally, the necessary acquiescence to established powers and institutions is garnered by public relations counsels through the selective presentation of information, repetition, emotional manipulation, and appeals to popularity and authority. Interestingly, contemporary writer and notable propagandist Walter Lippmann referred to this process as the ‘manufacture of consent.'” [See Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann][Source]

    In order to achieve a much sought “Paris-like moment”, the UN has set up a steering committee of 25 “distinguished individuals” and “key advisory committees”. “The overarching purpose of the Key Advisory Committees is to ensure that the Secretary-General’s 2019 Climate Action Summit delivers major outcomes on enhanced climate ambition.” [Source]

    Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation (ClimateWorks) serves as co-chair of the Ambition Advisory Group. Christiana Figueres serves the Youth & Mobilization “action stream”. Other steering committee members include Nicolas Stern (The Global CCS Institute – carbon capture and storage), Paul Polman (New Climate Economy, B Team chair, International Chamber of Commerce chair, UN Global Compact Board vice-chair, member of the International Business Council of World Economic Forum), and Achim Steiner (TEEB, the financialization of nature, Green New Deal 2009). [Full list]

    Christiana Figueres heads the UN taskforce for the Youth & Mobilization committee. Source: United Nations website

    Christiana Figueres heads the UN taskforce for the Youth & Mobilization committee. Source: United Nations website

     

    The UN Secretary-General has prioritized six action portfolios and three additional key areas. The second key area identified is “Youth Engagement and Public Mobilization: To mobilize people worldwide to take action on climate change and ensure that young people are integrated and represented across all aspects of the Summit.” [Source] [Track #3 work plan]

    Leading the youth engagement and public mobilization for September 21, 2019 are GCCA co-founding NGOs Greenpeace International, 350.org, Avaaz and CAN International. Here, we can add that the money being funnelled into these NGOs is phenomenal. Consider 350.org (with assets of $11,249,637.00 in 2017) received funding from 197 foundations in 2017. These included US ClimateWorks, the European Climate Foundation (arm of ClimateWorks), and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

    Others at the helm of youth engagement include WEF Global Shapers (World Economic Forum), The B Team (We Mean Business), World Resources Institute, and YouTube. [88] (Here it can be noted that Voice For the Planet is an WEF Global Shapers initiative managed by WWF. It is more than likely that very few, if any, youth that comprise the WEF Global Shapers actually comprehend that the Voice For The Planet campaign is in fact a campaign to advance the financialization of nature.)

    Youth Engagement and public mobilization partners in the lead up to September 21, 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit

    Youth Engagement and public mobilization partners in the lead up to September 21, 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit

     

    Highlighted under “The Road to the Youth Climate Summit” section on the UN website is the May 29, 2019 meeting between UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Greta Thunberg at the R20 Austrian World Summit, which links to a photo of Guterres and Thunberg on the UN Instagram account. The message to the millennials following Thunberg is that Guterres is an ally, as is the UN. The behaviour change insights offices working with governments across the globe would refer to this media event as “nudging”.

    Behavioural Insights World Map 2018 - Who has institutionalised behavioural insights in public policy (verified by the @OECD) Behavioral Economics #Nudge

    Behavioural Insights World Map 2018 – Who has institutionalised behavioural insights in public policy (verified by the @OECD) Behavioral Economics #Nudge

     

    The “Expected Outcomes Objective” of the working plan is to “respond to the unprecedented mobilization of young people worldwide who are demanding ambitious climate action in the lead-up to the Secretary General’s Climate Action Summit.” In other words, give the appearance of concessions and victories to the organized and orchestrated mobilizations, financed and organized by the very same powers who will thus respond with the so-desired market solutions that will further destroy the biosphere.

    Highlights from the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit outcomes convey what “success” looks like in the face of a global relentless assault on our planet that sustains all life:

    “Starbucks’ CEO Kevin Johnson announce that Starbucks commits to design, build and renovate — and, importantly, operate— 10,000 greener stores globally by 2025.”

     

    [Source: 2018 Global Climate Action Summit Outcomes]

     

    At the Global Climate Action Summit, more than 100 jurisdictions — including California, the world’s fifth largest economy — and over 70 big cities that are home to more than 425 million people, as well as a significant number of companies — including heavy industrial emitters and financial institutions — joined those who have explicitly pledged to reach carbon neutrality by mid-century.

     

    [Source: 2018 Global Climate Action Summit Outcomes] [Here, it must again be stated that “carbon neutrality” has nothing to do with stopping emissions. Rather, the term allows for continued business as usual while simultaneously accelerating carbon markets/offsets.]

    Under the “youth engagement and public mobilization” section titled “intergenerational dialogue”, it is odd to find the “youth leaders of climate action” defined as “now talismanic”. Definitions of talismanic. 1. adj possessing or believed to possess magic power especially protective power. Perhaps written in reference to Thunberg’s mother’s metaphor in her recently published book, that Greta can see CO2 with her naked eye. [Source]

    The intergenerational dialogue continues to the strategy of providing youth leaders “a chance to ask bold and provocative questions of political leaders as well as propose concrete solutions in a UN setting will be an important statement that the voices of youth are being listened to, and more importantly are being responded to” with the expected outcome as follows: “Through partnerships with the private sector, philanthropic foundations, and/or celebrity influencers, XX people reached worldwide as a result of innovative public engagement campaigns.”

    Other expected outcomes are the complete omission of militarism, restrictions on aviation, the elimination of industrial livestock production, and any policy whatsoever that could hinder economic growth of the industrial machine destroying the planet.

    It is incredible, yet completely predictable, that to date, the Twitter account belonging to Miss Thunberg, with 5,102  “tweets” for action on climate (accessed September 7, 2019), has yet to create a single post highlighting the primary drivers of climate change: militarism, imperialism, colonialism and capitalism. It’s not as though Miss Thunberg does not understand what war is, as she has mentioned the word “war” at least twice in reference to solving climate change:

    “How do you solve landing on the moon for the first time? How do you solve a war? I’m sure as soon as we recognise that we are in a climate emergency, we’ll find solutions.”— Greta Thunberg in UK Parliament

     

    “We need to change the system, as if we were in crisis, as if there were a war going on.” [Source]

    The omission of war is quite an interesting oversight considering Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. A Norwegian lawmaker who nominated Thunberg for the prize states that “climate threats are perhaps one of the most important contributions to war and conflict.” – yet no one in a position of power and influence states the opposite reality: war and conflict are one of the most important contributions to the climate threat.

    Recently, there was one small exception. On June 26, 2019, Thunberg retweeted a post on militarism’s contribution to climate change. The following morning on June 27, 2019, at 7am, an article authored by Bill McKibben (referenced earlier in this act) on minimizing militarism’s impact, was published by The New York Review of Books.

    Rather than a call for a global general strike that could “make the economy scream” in defiance of US militarism – the largest polluter in the world, a call for a global strike has been issued by Thunberg et al. for Friday, September 20, 2019 – which will launch the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, 2019. An institution and summit that bows down to corporate power and Annex 1 NATO states. An institution that has been successfully captured by the WEF – the architects of the fourth industrial revolution.

    “The UN Climate Action Summit team invites input and leadership from businesses in the planning of the event throughout the year, and is working with the UN Global Compact, the We Mean Business coalition, the International Chamber of Commerce and the World Economic Forum to coordinate these efforts.”

     

    — Briefing on Private Sector Engagement in the UN Climate Action Summit, 2019 [Emphasis added]

     

    “To strengthen and preserve this [Liberal World] order, however, will require a renewal of American leadership in the international system. The present world order has been forged by many hands and peoples, but the role of the United States in both shaping and defending it has been critical. American military power, the dynamism of the U.S. economy, and the great number of close alliances and friendships that the United States enjoys with other powers and peoples have provided the critical architecture in which this liberal world order has flourished. A weakening of America’s commitment or its capabilities, or both, would invariably lead to its collapse.”

     

    — Strengthening the Liberal World Order, A World Economic Forum White Paper, April 25, 2016 [Emphasis added]

    Emerging from Emergency – Harnessing the Momentum

    “Citizen protests and legal actions against companies, governments and individuals will undoubtedly become an increasing leverage opportunity in support of this emergency approach and have already begun.”

     

    — Club Of Rome “The Climate Emergency Plan”, launched with We Don’t Have Time and Global Utmaning, December, 2018

    The July 4, 2019 high-level Roundtable “Emerging from Emergency – Urgency as a Catalyst for Action and Regeneration” again introduces as the original cast of the Manufacturing for Consent series:

    “The Club of Rome will take part in the inaugural London Climate Action Week, which runs from 1st – 8th July. Co-President, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, will speak at a GLOBE international event (1st July) at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, on the role of parliament in responding to the Climate Emergency. On Thursday 4th July, the Club of Rome will host a high-level Roundtable at Chatham House (“Emerging from Emergency“) on harnessing the momentum generated by the growing climate emergency narrative, to shift from mere declarations to action. The meeting will convene the various strands of the climate emergency and sustainability space – activists, problem-holders and solution providers – in order to co-design concrete solutions for genuine impact.  – invite only.” [Source]

    February 10, 2019: Sandrine Dixson, #voicefortheplanet, #newdealfornature

    February 10, 2019: Sandrine Dixson, #voicefortheplanet, #newdealfornature

     

    Until recently, Sandrine Dixson was Chief Partnership Officer for UN Agency Sustainable Energy for All. Prior to this position, Dixson served as the Director of the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG) (also referred to as EU Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change). CLG, a co-founder of We Mean Business, is the same group of corporations that the climate umbrella group TckTckTck (now simply known as GCCA) had partnered with in its formation prior to COP15 – that threw the G77 states under the bus in Copenhagen, in servitude to their funders. Dixson’s bio is extensive as are her past and current advisory positions inclusive of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). She is a member of The Guardian’s Sustainable Business Advisory Board; former vice chair of the European Biofuels Technology Platform, a former board member of We Mean Business and served on the Advisory Board of the Oil and Gas major African oil corporation Sasol. Dixson worked with Al Gore in 1992. In 2017 she served as moderator for Norwegian CCS policy at a seminar in the European Parliament. [Full bio]

    July 10, 2019: The Under2 Coalition (The Climate Group): “Global ‘Climate Emergency’ declarations are soaring as governments work towards long-term carbon neutrality.” The Climate Group business campaigns “are brought to you as part of the We Mean Business coalition.”

    “The challenge now is to shift from merely sounding the alarm to giving policy-makers and the business community the policy tools and levers of change which genuinely respond to the emergency.”

     

    — City of London website

    The “Emerging from Emergency” roundtable event was organized by The Club of Rome in partnership with EIT Climate-KIC, ETC/SystemIQ, We Mean Business and E3G.

    “The challenge now is to shift from merely sounding the alarm to giving policy-makers and the business community the policy tools and levers of change which genuinely respond to the emergency. The other key intervenors for this session are: Nigel Topping (We Mean Business), Chad Frischman (Project Drawdown) and Cynthia Scharf (Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative).” [Source]

    If only to demonstrate the degree of overlap, here it is of interest that the president and executive director of the Sunrise Movement is Michael Dorsey a full member of the Club of Rome. [ACT V]

    +++

    “And that’s the real question faction the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we’ve been into for the last hundreds of years?”

     

    — Black Power by Stokely Carmichael, 1966

    As media hypes the global climate mobilizations in perfect synchronicity with a tsunami of “12 years until climate apocalypse” news articles saturating our collective psyches, global climate emergency declarations announced by states, and all levels of government, are indeed soaring. As this series has demonstrated, and as confirmed by the July 4, 2019, high-level roundtable (“Emerging from Emergency – Urgency as a Catalyst for Action and Regeneration”) this feat has been a high-level orchestrated endeavour. Indeed, the stakes could not be higher. Late-stage capitalism is faltering with economic growth in freefall. The climate mobilizations beget the declarations, beget the policy, beget the budgets, beget the finance.

    The policy and legislation are instrumental to unlocking the public funds for so-called “climate infrastructure” projects (predominantly in the Global South). Infrastructure and technologies that will be paid by the citizenry, to be owned by the billionaires. We must never lose sight that the terrifying news regarding our rapidly deteriorating natural world is real, but the reason for the media saturation (spectacle) has nothing to do with protecting the natural world nor the climate – and everything to do with rebooting global economic growth and saving the capitalist system itself. Consider the Global Optimist meme shared by We Mean Business: “People are desperate for something to happen.” The message is this: No one can save you but us. Accept our solutions, or die. Another world is possible, but only if that world is designed by the ruling classes that maintain and expand current power structure. One could call this psychological manipulation, or hegemonic coercion.

    This is the gentle transition into the new age of neo-feudalism. Social engineering and behavioural change campaigns have been employed to make hierarchical class invisible, in real time.

    The environmental NGOs comprising the non-profit industrial complex exist as corporate front groups. They insulate, protect, and assist in the expansion of existing power structures that facilitate capitalism. NGOs cannot and will not stop climate change because this would be counterintuitive to why they were created. They are funded to the tune of trillions by foundations which, in many cases, assisted in their development and incubation, because they function precisely as they were designed to function.

    The answers to the multiple ecological crises upon us, will not be found within the capitalist system that created them. Continuing down this path of denial is time wasted while the world burns.

    “Capitalism is borne on manic wings. The economic elite move from corporate skyscrapers and high rise rooftops in order to travel by helicopter, where upon landing, they board private, luxury jets, then, whereupon landing again, they are transported by helicopter to corporate skyscrapers and high rise rooftops. Touching the earth is a fleeting experience. The ruling class have lost touch with ground level verities. In a classical sense, such displays of hubris were understood as the progenitor of madness. The gods first elevate those they drive mad.”

     

    — Phil Rockstroh, Bodies on the Ground and the Rise and Rise of the Economic Elite, August 12, 2019

     

     

    End Notes

    [1] On May 30, 2007 it was announced that “HSBC has created a five-year, US$100 million partnership to respond to the urgent threat of climate change world-wide with the support of The Climate Group, Earthwatch Institute, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and WWF… HSBC’s US$100 million partnership – including the largest donations to each of these charities and the largest donation ever made by a British company.” [Source] [2] “Christiana Figueres, Prof Tim Flannery, Nancy Fraser, KC Golden, Tom BK Goldtooth, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dr John Hewson, John Holloway, Prof Lesley Hughes, Tomás Insua, Satvir Kaur, Barbara Kingsolver, Winona LaDuke, Jenni Laiti, Bruno Latour, Annie Leonard, Michael Mann, Gina McCarthy, Heather McGhee, Luca Mercalli, Moema Miranda, Jennifer Morgan, Tadzio Müller, Kumi Naidoo, Mohamed Nasheed, Carlo Petrini, Dr Anne Poelina, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Sarsgaard, Dr Vandana Shiva, Rebecca Solnit, Gus Speth, Prof Will Steffen, Tom Steyer, Chris Taylor, Terry Tempest-Williams, Aurélie Trouvé, Farhana Yamin, Lennox Yearwood are signatories to this article.” [Source] [3] INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS

    • Accountable Now
    • Action for Sustainable Development (A4SD)
    • ActionAid International
    • Amnesty International
    • Avaaz (GCCA co-founder)
    • CAN International
    • CARE International
    • CIVICUS
    • Christian Aid
    • Demand Climate Justice
    • Earth Day Network
    • Earth Strike
    • Extinction Rebellion
    • Fridays for Future
    • Friends of the Earth International
    • Fund our Future
    • Global Catholic Climate Movement
    • Global Forest Coalition
    • Global Greengrants Fund
    • Global Justice Now
    • Global Policy Forum
    • GreenFaith
    • Greenpeace International
    • Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF)
    • Indigenous Environment Network (IEN)
    • International Student Environmental Coalition
    • International Tibet Network
    • International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)
    • Oil Change International
    • Our Kids’ Climate
    • Oxfam
    • Pan African Climate Justice Alliance
    • Parents for Future Global
    • Patagonia
    • Polar Bears International
    • Slow Food
    • War on Want
    • Women’s March Global
    • World Wide Fund for Nature International (WWF)
    • Yes! 4 Humanity

     

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: They Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV]

    Sep 17

    2019

    2

    B Team [Managed by Purpose - the PR Arm of Avaaz], Ceres, Conservation International, Greenpeace, Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Purpose [Public Relations Arm of Avaaz], Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

    Business for Nature Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) Ceres Climate Week NYC ClimateWorks Global Citizen Greenpeace Natural Capital Coalition New Plastics Economy New Power Purpose Social Good The B Team The Climate Group The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG) We Mean Business World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) WWF

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: They Mean Business [Volume II, Act IV]

    September 17, 2019

    By Cory Morningstar

     

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

    [Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI • Addenda I] [Book form] [Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [ACTS VII & VIII forthcoming]

    • A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story] [Oct 2 2019]

    • The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline [Oct 6 2019]

     

     

    We Mean Business

    Above: On February 20, 2019, We Mean Business promoted the “It’s Going to Be Tremendous” podcast series via its Twitter account. The podcast series co-hosted by Christiana Figueres features interviews with We Mean Business CEO Nigel Topping, Greta Thunberg and Jane Goodall. Funding for Global Optimism is provided by We Mean Business.

    The founding partners of We Mean Business are Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) (full membership and associate members list), CDP, Ceres, The B Team, The Climate Group, The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG) [1], and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Together, these organizations represent the most powerful – and ruthless – corporations on the planet, groups salivating to unleash 100 trillion dollars to fuel the fourth industrial revolution.

    We Mean Business represents 477 investors with 34 trillion USD in assets. [July 4, 2019]

    Above: The We Mean Business co-founders

    Nigel Topping is the CEO of the We Mean Business Coalition, a founding member of the We Mean Business board, as well as the former executive director of CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project). CDP is “a global NGO which has brought together 655 of the world’s investors, representing assets under management of over $78 trillion, to engage with over 6000 of the largest public corporations on the business implications of climate change.” [Source] ClimateWorks [Act I] shares the physical address, inclusive of suite, of both the CDP (West, Americas) and the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI). [235 Montgomery Street, Suite 1300, San Francisco, CA 94104][CPI Website][CDP website]

    Topping also serves on the boards of several institutions, including the Science-Based Targets Initiative, the Energy Transitions Commission, the Grantham Institute, the London Pension Funds Authority, and Daimler. [LinkedIn]

    In order to support the implementation of its work, We Mean Business collaborates with a number of other organizations. The implementation partners of We Mean Business include the World Resources Institute, WWF, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the United Nations Global Compact, and C40 Cities [2] while network partners include the New Climate Economy, Mission 2020, E3G, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the World Bank. [Full list]

    Sitting on the We Mean Business Board are Peter Bakker, WBCSD president; Helen Clarkson, CEO of The Climate Group; Aron Cramer, CEO of BSR; Steve Howard (co-chair), former chief sustainability officer for IKEA; Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres; Paul Simpson, CEO of CDP; Halla Tómasdóttir, CEO of The B Team; Nigel Topping, CEO of We Mean Business; Eliot Whittington, director of The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group; and Celine Herweijer (co-chair), partner and global innovation and sustainability leader of PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers).

    The We Mean Business Compliance Committee consists of the aforementioned Steve Howard; Bruce Boyd, principal and senior managing director at Arabella Advisors; Elizabeth McKeon, head of strategy at IKEA Foundation; and Michael Northrop, sustainable development program director at Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

    The We Mean Business Corporate Advisory Group includes representatives from UltraTech Cement, Mahindra, BT (British Telecom), Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Community Energy England, Unilever, Interface, CLP Group (China Light and Power Co), Iberdrola, IKEA, and Yes Bank. [Source]

    The We Mean Business Coalition was launched in 2014 by Steve Howard who had previously set up The Climate Group in 2003.

    Howard served as chief sustainability officer (CSO) at IKEA Group having served on IKEA’s Executive Group Management from 2011-2017. In addition to co-chairing We Mean Business, Howard sits on the board of SE4ALL (Sustainable Energy For All) and serves as co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Environmental and Natural Resource Security. [Further reading: Fit for whose purpose? Private funding and corporate influence in the United Nations, Sustainable Energy For All, pp. 86-96]

    Above: Image from We Mean Business April 2019 edition newsletter

    We Mean Business & Purpose Create the Climate Campaign Lab

     

     

     

    New Power: “The ability to harness the connected crowd to get what you want”

     

    — Jeremy Heimans, co-founder Purpose/Avaaz, B Team expert [Source]

    The June 12, 2018 We Mean Business article “Profiles of Paris: Steve Howard on helping business be a force for good” shares the history of those who assisted in the formation of the We Mean Business coalition:

    “Hannah and I reached out to others, to leaders at the Climate Group, Ceres, WBCSD, BSR, and CDP, CLG and the B Team. Some of us met at the fringes of Climate Week NYC and then in October 2013, this group of busy people travelled to a small hotel in Wassenaar in the Netherlands to spend a weekend planning something different…”

    Howard outlines the assistance in forming We Mean Business provided by three main NGOs: World Resources Institute, Greenpeace, and WWF, as well as two pivotal institutions that assisted, ITUC and the UNFCCC.

    “Dominic Waughray [bio] and the WEF team supported us (a lot) at Davos where we met again. (The WEF team through initiatives such as the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders have been hugely effective in promoting business action on climate). We reached out to other business leaders, friends in Unilever, Marks and Spencer, DSM, Swiss Re and others. We talked through our plans with, Andrew Steer at WRI, Kumi Nadoo in Greenpeace, Sam Smith in WWF and Sharan Burrow from ITUC and Christiana Figueres in the UNFCCC. Sam had worked with the Climate seven group of NGOs and was generous with her advice on coalition building. We met as a group with the climate seven. We needed to make sure that if we had a super business coalition on climate change that it was genuinely credible with civil society leaders…”

    Howard further discloses that the initial funding for We Mean Business came from IKEA, a founding partner in Macron’s Climate Finance Partnership:

    “I spoke at length with Per Heggenes at IKEA Foundation and he could see we had a powerful idea. Per gave me a slot of the limited time at his next board meeting…A few minutes later the board agreed to 20 million Euros…When you have to move fast there is little or no time for mistakes. I asked people I really trusted if they would step up and amongst others Jim Walker bravely agreed to be seconded from the Climate Group as secretariat CEO, and Callum Grieve, who I had worked with on the launch of Climate Week NYC a few years before, stepped in on communications.”

    Howard confirms the corporate uptake, not only for Climate Week NYC 2014, but for the People’s Climate March:

    “We Mean Business launched at Climate Week NYC 2014. Together with the new IKEA Group CEO Peter Agnefjäll, we joined the Climate March, with other business leaders from Virgin, Unilever, NRG, Patagonia and many others. IKEA colleagues promoted the People’s Climate March on the IKEA home page in twenty countries. We had reached out to business contacts everywhere. Tim Cook from Apple joined us on the Climate Week stage to be interviewed by Christiana Figueres…”

    Climate Week NYC 2019 sponsors and partners include, but are not limited to: Salesforce, McKinsey, Bank of America, Unilever, IKEA, ClimateWorks, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Global Citizen (youth and climate activism partner), We Mean Business, and the UN Climate Action Summit. [3] [Source]

    Here, Howard’s full disclosure on the relationship with Purpose – the for-profit public relations arm of Avaaz, specializing in behavioural change, “new power” and “ownerless movements” – is striking. Again, we see the theme of corporations and civil society uniting as one under the banner of climate:

    “Alongside We Mean Business, Hannah and I had been working with the communications and campaign organisation Purpose to set up a climate campaign lab. We wanted bold breakthrough messages that people would mobilize behind. Purpose were looking at the creation or amplification of ownerless memes and 100% renewable really caught their attention. It got wider traction. And on the final run up to Paris “100% Renewable” got lifted even further and became the call to action for Greenpeace, Avaaz and others. Hundreds of businesses and civil society organisations with the same message so loud and clear you could not miss it.

    Howard cites the corporations and monies involved at an early stage, as well as the assistance from Jim Walker, director of partnerships at Sustainable Energy for All. Walker is a co-founder of The Climate Group as well as the founding CEO of We Mean Business. He sits on the advisory board of Energy Unlocked (“Our 2016 EPIC project and platform was supported by ClimateWorks Foundation”), IronOak Energy and Green Collar Foods, and is the executive director of Thirst. In 2014, he established the Climate Mobilization Fund “to assist the IKEA Foundation and others in mobilizing business and civil society action on climate change”:

    “At the beginning of 2015, Jim Walker moved to manage the coalition’s funding and Nigel Topping jumped from CDP into the CEO role for the secretariat… As I write this in March 2018, more than 700 companies, with a market capitalisation of over US$15.7 trillion have made more than 1,170 commitments…”

    In addition, Walker serves as an advisor to the Purpose Climate Lab. [Source] [Source]

    Prior to Paris, the IKEA Foundation doubled its annual funding for the We Mean Business initiative. A press release announcing IKEA’s additional gift of 1 billion EUR “to finance climate action” by 2020 was understood as a means to place “positive pressure” on governments:

    “The June before Paris [2015] there was a climate finance meeting of negotiators in Bonn: negotiations were slow. After the decision on We Mean Business, the IKEA Foundation board had just decided to double its annual funding, with an extra 100 million Euros per year going to climate change by 2020. Alongside an IKEA group commitment to a further 600 million Euros into wind and solar energy we had a commitment of 1 billion Euros to finance climate action by 2020. Real, additional money. We announced the 1 billion Euros in Bonn. Yes, the press coverage was good, but we did it for the moment, to put positive pressure on governments.”

    In the same way, Greta Thunberg and the climate strikes amplify the “positive pressure” strategy. That is the rationale behind the generous media exposure afforded to the strikes. Rather than the “solutions” appearing top down, they are perceived as being driven by society. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Encouraging the citizenry to bask under the illusion that the ruling elite must answer to the populace, this quickly transforms into a heightened and euphoric feeling of new-found “people power” amongst the populace. It is in this defining moment that the “solutions” waiting in the wings, can finally emerge.

    In the following paragraph, Howard is clear that the role of government to accommodate the “new climate economy” is to develop long-term, well-designed policy frameworks which corporations “can plan on and invest in”:

    “We went to the Abu Dhabi Ascent: the pre-COP summit in January 2015. The dialogue between ministers and the private sector was a little limited. From memory, I think it was only Paul Polman (who was absolutely relentless on the run up to Paris) from Unilever and myself that spoke in plenary from the business community… For a business leader I made the rare interjection of saying, “you can regulate us, you can price carbon, you can tax us, but make it long, loud and legal.” We needed policy makers to understand, businesses do not like bureaucracy and red tape but they do like long-term well-designed policy frameworks that you can plan on and invest in…

     

    By the time of Paris the coalition partners were in lock-step. Ed Cameron from BSR (with great support from the policy folk in CLG, CERES and other partners) was working as policy director for the coalition and had worked across the teams to craft a business brief with 8 common policy asks. Business leaders were supported and the forward-thinking business community had a common message for negotiators… Many, many, business leaders worked either on the stage or behind the scenes… “

    Acknowledging that “clear solid funding is a massive enabler” of the We Mean Business coalition, Howard recognizes those most involved. In the second paragraph, Howard expresses his gratitude to those belonging to NGOs and institutions:

    “My greatest thanks go to the leaders of the partners, to Mindy Lubber [Ceres], Peter Bakker [President and CEO of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)], Aron Cramer [President and CEO of BSR], Paul Simpson [CEO, CDP], Raj Joshi [The B Team], Keith Tuffley [Managing Partner & CEO The B Team], Sandrine Dixson-Declève [former Director of the EU Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change], Mark Kenber [CEO of The Climate Group] and Helen Clarkson [CEO of The Climate Group]. They took a risk. They took a more challenging path than going alone. Many others across the partners have played key roles, Leah Seligmann [The B Team] and Jean Oelwang [President and Trustee for Virgin Unite and Senior Partner at the B Team], Anne Kelly, Jill Duggan [Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group], Eliot Whittington [Prince of Wales’s UK Corporate Leaders Group], Damian Ryan, Lance Pierce [President of CDP North America] and Maria Mendiluce [WBCSD].

     

    Others deserve our thanks for their partnership and encouragement, Andrew Steer at WRI, Kumi Naidoo, then at Greenpeace, Achim Steiner, Dominic Waughray and the WEF team, Sam Smith and colleagues in WWF, the wider climate seven, Sharan Burrow from ITUC for always building bridges and community and Christiana Figueres and the team at the UNFCCC for creating space.”

    Inclusive of Dominic Waughray, who leads Global Public Goods (which “seeks to help shape the existing global governance architecture by adapting to today’s multipolar reality and working to encourage more private-sector capital, entrepreneurship and Fourth Industrial Revolution innovation into public-private cooperation”) all of the institutions recognized by Howard, have been disclosed in the Manufacturing for Consent series as the leading institutions behind the elite-sought fourth industrial revolution as a means to reboot the global economic system, coupled with the coming financialization of nature.

    Above: We Mean Business, October 5, 2015, Twitter

     

    We Mean Business Co-founder – The B Team

     

    The B Team, co-founded by Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz (former CEO of Puma SE), was formed and incubated by Branson’s Virgin Unite and partner organizations in 2013.

    Major funders of The B Team include the Ford Foundation, Kering Group, Guilherme Leal, Strive Masiyiwa, Joann McPike, The Tiffany and Co. Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Unilever and Virgin Unite.

    Other major financial supporters at inception included billionaire Derek Handley (CEO of B Team upon launch) and One Young World co-founded by David Jones. Jones is the former CEO of Havas Media and co-creator of the 2009 TckTckTck campaign. Jones, “B Team expert”, is also the founder of You & Mr Jones, a holding company that is one-part venture capitalist, one-part consultancy and one-part agency. The consultancy arm is Blood “the world’s first brandtech™ group”. Jones is the author of Who Cares Wins and served on the Facebook Client Council. In 2019, You & Mr Jones purchased a majority stake in Oliver owner Inside Ideas Group for an estimated $200m. Oliver’s biggest client is Unilever. [Source]

    Above: TckTckTck Flickr: “The Press Conference of the ‘Beds are Burning’ Launch in Paris was well attended as Kofi Annan, David Jones, Mélanie Laurent, Manu Katché and many other supporters of the campaign made their appearance.”

    The B Team Leaders are as follows:

  • Arianna Huffington: founder of The Huffington Post, founder and CEO of Thrive Global
  • Christiana Figueres: Convener of Mission 2020, vice chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors, Climate Leader for the World Bank, Distinguished Fellow of Conservation International, board member of Climate Works and the World Resources Institute, member of the Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health
  • David Crane: investor and strategic advisor
  • Emmanuel Faber: chairman and chief executive officer of Danone
  • François-Henri Pinault: CEO and chairman of luxury brand Kering
  • Guilherme Leal: co-founder of Natura, serves on the boards of WWF Brazil and the United Nations Global Compact
  • Hamdi Ulukaya: founder, chairman and CEO of Chobani
  • Isabelle Kocher: CEO of ENGIE, the world’s largest independent power producer
  • Jochen Zeitz: co-founder and co-chair of The B Team, founder of the Zeitz Foundation, served 18 years as chairman and CEO of PUMA SE
  • Kathy Calvin: president and CEO of the United Nations Foundation, former president of the AOL Time Warner Foundation, previously served in senior positions at AOL, Hill and Knowlton, and U.S. News & World Report
  • Marc Benioff: chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce
  • Mary Robinson: president of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, former President of Ireland from 1990-1997, member of Richard Branson’s The Elders
  • Mats Granryd: director general of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA), commissioner on the World Business & Sustainable Development Commission
  • Mo Ibrahim: founder and chair of the MoIbrahim Foundation, founder of Mobile Systems International (MSI) and Celtel International, founding chairman of Satya Capital, (a private equity fund focused on Africa), chairman of TPG-Satya
  • Muhammad Yunus: chairman of Grameen Bank
  • Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: chair of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, former Finance Minister of Nigeria and former managing director of the World Bank
  • Oliver Bäte: CEO of Allianz SE
  • Paul Polman: served in senior leadership roles at both Nestlé and Procter & Gamble prior to becoming CEO of Unilever (2009-2018), appointed to the U.N. Secretary General’s High-level Panel responsible for developing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), founding member of the World Business & Sustainable Development Commission, U.N.-appointed SDG Advocate, leading member of Financing Capitalism for the Long-Term (FCLT), the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and the Food and Land Use Coalition (which he chairs), counsellor and chair of the Global Advisory Board of One Young World (co-founded by the aforementioned “B Team expert” David Jones), named an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to business in 2018, a non-executive director of Dow since 2010.
  • Ratan Tata: former chairman of Tata Sons, Tata has been conferred the honorary title of Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, Tata Industries, Tata Motors, Tata Steel and Tata Chemicals. During his tenure, the group’s revenues grew manifold, totalling over 100 billion USD in 2011-12. He serves on the board of directors at Alcoa as well as on the international advisory boards of Mitsubishi Corporation, JP Morgan Chase, Rolls-Royce, Temasek Holdings, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
  • Sharan Burrow: general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), commissioner on the World Business & Sustainable Development Commission, Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy observer and advisor
  • Yolanda Kakabadse: president of WWF International from January 2010-December 2017
  • Zhang Yue: chairman and founder of Broad Air Conditioning
    • [B Team Leaders] [B Team Experts] [B Team Founder Circle and Programmatic Donors]

    Above: On February 23, 2017, The B Team and Safaricom announced plans to create The B Team – Eastern Africa

    The B Team experts roster is also extensive. It includes:

  • Alexander Grashow: a senior advisor and lead moderator for the Clinton Global Initiative

  • Heather Grady: senior fellow, Global Philanthropy for Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors

  • Mindy S. Lubber: president and a founding board member of Ceres, coordinator of Ceres’ Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP), founder of Green Century Capital Management

  • Jeremy Heimans: co-founder of Avaaz, co-founder and CEO of Purpose, “a home for building 21st century movements and ventures that use the power of participation to change the world”, advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the ACLU and Google, recipient of the Ford Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Visionary Award, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader

  • Hunter Lovins: president of Natural Capitalism Solutions, author of The Way Out: Kickstarting Capitalism to Save Our Economic Ass – a sequel to the international best-seller Natural Capitalism

  • John Fullerton: founder and president of Capital Institute, active impact investor through his Level 3 Capital Advisors, former managing director of JPMorgan, a director of the New Economy Coalition, full member of the Club of Rome, creator of the “Future of Finance” blog at CapitalInstitute.org, which is syndicated with The Guardian, Huffington Post, CSRWire, and other media outlets

  • John Elkington: founding partner and executive chairman of Volans, a consultancy and think-tank driving market-based solutions to the future’s greatest challenges, signatory to the XR Business initiative, member of the WWF Council of Ambassadors, member of the Advisory Board of The Climate Group‘s Clean Revolution Campaign, serves on Newsweek’s Green Rankings Advisory Board, Kering’s Technical Advisory Board, and the advisory board of The Social Stock Exchange just launched by the UK Prime Minister. He is also identified as a member of the Guardian Sustainable Business advisory panel.

    Above: The B Team website, July 17, 2017: “Earlier this year Virgin Unite shared the news that Christiana Figueres – former UN climate chief and convener of Mission 2020 – had joined Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz (B Team co-founders) as one of the B Team’s newest global leaders.” [Source]

    Above: The B Team website, January 30, 2019: Greta Thunberg, Climate Activist, Kringlaskolan Södertälje, Sweden, speaking at the Session “Preparing for Climate Disruption” at the Annual Meeting 2019 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 25, 2019. Congress Centre – Jakobshorn, Copyright by World Economic Forum / Mattias Nutt [The B Team: To B or Not To B in Davos]

    Above: The B Team, March 27, 2019 newsletter: “On March 15, an estimated 1.6 million students in 120 countries participated in the Global Student Climate Strike, calling on leaders to act with the urgency the climate crisis needs. Inspired and humbled by their courage, our Leaders shared their support and thanked these students for reminding the world what its leaders are accountable for—their future.”

    Above: The B Team Twitter account, March 15, 2019

    Above: The “New Power” advocates: January 22, 2014, Kumi Naidoo, Twitter | From left: Richard Branson, Kumi Naidoo, Jeremy Heimans (Avaaz/Purpose)

    Working as part of the Natural Capital Coalition, The B Team supported the development of “the first global, standard Natural Capital Protocol” in 2016. The protocol creates “a set of tools for corporations to “measure their impacts and dependencies on nature”. These tools will be used to support the global plan to monetise nature (a “new deal for nature”). Because “what you can’t value what you can’t measure”. The protocol was launched in 2016, following pilots by more than 40 corporations including luxury brand Kering (B Team major funder, Kering CEO a B Team expert) and Dow Chemical (Dow CEO a B Team “leader”).

    Above: Natural Capital Protocol partners

    Above: The Natural Capital Coalition

    Above: Finance For One Planet, CoP Financial Institutions and Natural Capital, 2016 [Source]

    The B Team continues to grow and expand its coalition of corporate executives. In 2018, Indra Nooyi, chairman and former CEO of PepsiCo, joined the coalition. More recently, The B Team welcomed Ajay Banga, president and CEO of MasterCard. Another B Team leader is Andrew Liveris, chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical Company. Liveris also serves as a member of The Nature Conservancy’s Latin America Conservation Council, and the Concordia Leadership Council. [Full bio].

     

    Purpose

    Purpose, which worked with We Mean Business to set up its climate campaign lab, creates cause-related campaigns for non-profits, foundations, and corporations. Purpose clients and partners include IKEA, Unilever, and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, to name a few (see image below).

    One may need reminding that Purpose “movements” are not decrying the more than 300 assassinations of Colombian leaders over the last two years [August 9, 2018, Source], a tragic number which is no doubt higher today. Rather, they are organizing Concordia Summits to facilitate an advancing privatization in Columbia (and the world at large) as they court right-wing politicians and oligarchs. This can best be described as “power in white face”.

    If power dominated through hierarchy and coercion – the emergent “new power” model dominates with influence and persuasion. And while this has been achieved for some decades now by the NGOs comprising the non-profit industrial complex, a growing number of corporations, institutions and states, are now applying it to their business models. The main differences are that first, the organizers remain invisible, and second, the populace is manipulated into believing that they control said movements.

    At the helm of this new model is Avaaz/Purpose co-founder Jeremy Heimans. Purpose, the PR firm (with many arms) specializes in movement building and behavioural change.

    Heiman’s vision is to organize “people not as citizens but as consumers” so as to further empower corporations and brands that he refers to as “the angels”. Among the firm’s partners are some of the world’s most powerful corporations, foundations and institutions, including The Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Unilever,  IKEA, General Electric, Starbucks, TED, Oxfam, SEIU, WHO, UNICEF, ACLU, British Telecom, the Concordia Summit and Nike. Collaborators include We Mean Business and The B Team which is registered to the address of Purpose New York.

    Video. Jeremy Heimans & Timms: Kaepernick is New Power’s 6 Billion Dollar Man [Running time: 0:45s]:

    With strong ties and loyalties to many elite institutions and oligarchs, such as Purpose partner the United Nations (where Heimans cut his teeth as in intern in 1999), the Omidyar Network, and Virgin’s Richard Branson (founder of The B Team, The Elders, Carbon War Room, etc.), Purpose now has a global presence with seven international offices operating in New York, San Francisco, London, New Delhi, Nairobi, Sao Paulo, and Sydney. This expansion is in line with new behavioural insight teams, which are steadily proliferating in government buildings across the globe.

    [Further reading: Purpose Goes to Latin America, Part I, August 8, 2018]

    +++

    New Power

    “Whoever mobilizes is going to win. And if you are understanding new power you can end up on top. Welcome to the new power world.”

    The above quote is taken from the marketing video for the book titled New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World–and How to Make It Work for You (released April 3, 2018). The book authored by Jeremy Heimans (Avaaz/Purpose) and Henry Timms (until recently, the CEO of 92nd Street Y, a 143-year-old institution located in New York City) follows their prior publications: New Power: How It’s Changing The 21st Century (2018) and Why You Need To Know and Understanding ‘New Power’ (Harvard Business Review, 2014).

    Timms is the creator and co-founder of Giving Tuesday, “a classic new power movement”. [Source] Giving Tuesday is funded by such giants as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook. In February 2019, it was announced that Timms would leave 92Y for the Lincoln Centre for Performing Arts where he now serves as president and CEO. Timms continues as co-chair of 92Y’s Belfer Center for Innovation and Social Impact and in guiding Giving Tuesday.

    Former U.S. President Barack Obama accompanied by Melinda and Bill Gates speaks at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Goalkeepers event in New York, U.S., September 20, 2017. REUTERS/Elizabeth Shafiroff

     

    At the 2015 Concordia summit, Heimans and Timms co-moderated a panel. Their session, “Introducing: New Power in a Multi-stakeholder World,” featured an exciting line-up of speakers, each pioneering change in their respective industries in innovative ways.”

    This year, on September 22-24, 2019, the Concordia Annual Summit is set to be “the largest and most inclusive nonpartisan forum” held alongside the United Nations General Assembly. [Source]

    New Power has been named best book of 2018 by the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Fortune, Inc. and CNBC, and Heimans has advised institutions such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and Unilever. A Harvard University grad and McKinsey & Co. alum, Heimans has addressed the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, TED, and the Aspen Institute. [Source]

    On September 30, 2019, at this year’s World Leadership Forum dinner, the Foreign Policy Association will honor Heimans. Hosted by the Foreign Policy Association and coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly, the World Leadership Forum is one of the foremost public forums on global affairs. Individual admissions can be purchased for 1,000.00 USD. [Source] [Further reading: Purpose Goes to Latin America, Part I]

    “The future will be a battle over mobilization.”

     

    — Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, New Power

    Social Good

    The creation of the Social Good Summit (launched in 2012) is attributed to Timms, in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ericsson, the United Nations Development Programme, and Mashable.

    Following the Social Good Summit came the launch of the SocialGood “community”. The founding partners of the SocialGood community include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Case Foundation, Caterpillar, Cisco, Enactus, Mashable, the Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Foundation, and 92Y. [Source]

    This year’s speakers at the Social Good summit include Greta Thunberg, Christiana Figueres, founding partner of Global Optimism and former executive secretary of the UN Climate Convention, [ACT II], and Kumi Naidoo, secretary general of Amnesty International, former president/CEO of both Greenpeace and TckTckTck. Also featured is Achim Steiner, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. Steiner is a former advisory board member of TEEB – now the Natural Capital Coalition (the financialization of nature under the guise/branding of a “New Deal for Nature”).

    Video: Towards a Global Green New Deal, UN Environment, December 28, 2009 [Running time: 6:20]:

    The video above features Achim Steiner promoting the Green New Deal in 2009. Back then, it was promoted as a solution to save the economy; now, it is promoted as a solution to save the climate. In both instances, its sole purpose has been to inject growth into a global economic system on the verge of collapse. The main difference today is that the Green New Deal encompasses the assigning of monetary value to nature. This will transform the global financial system itself, bringing into existence a new financial accounting system which has taken well over a decade to refine. The Green New Deal is essentially a Trojan horse for the ultimate corporate coup of the commons.

    “Can investment in green industry technologies and nature-based assets help lift the world out of recession? UNEP and its UN partners are confident it can. According to Achim Steiner, the Executive Director of UNEP its already happening. He says getting out of the recession will be a boost to building a new green economy. Environmentally-focused investment represents an historic opportunity for 21st century prosperity and job generation.”

     

    — Towards a Global Green New Deal, UN Environment, December 28, 2009

     

    “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.”

     

    — Christiana Figueres, UNFCC Executive Secretary, February 3, 2015 Press Conference, Brussels [Source]

    The strategy to exploit the ecological crisis, in order to save economic growth, is not new. After an initial and fairly short-lived backlash against the “green economy” (growth under the guise of green, UN Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio, 2012), the power elite regrouped. By 2014, Avaaz/Purpose founder Jeremy Heimans would disclose the strategy to “kill green” in order to save it. The green economy was repackaged as the “new economy”.

    “Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an attentive poker face. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

     

    — AOC’s Chief of Change -Saikat Chakrabarti isn’t just running her office. He’s guiding a movement, Washington Post, July 10, 2019

    The Climate Group

    Leading up to the September 2019 media sensation in conjunction with the United Nations Climate Action Summit, the Concordia Summit, and the global climate strikes is Climate Week NYC. This annual event is a project of The Climate Group, co-founder of We Mean Business.

    The Rockefeller Brothers Fund also acts as an incubator for in-house projects which later evolve into free-standing institutions – a case in point being ‘The Climate Group’, launched in London in 2004. The Climate Group coalition includes more than 50 of the world’s largest corporations and sub-national governments, from financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, to media institutions such as Bloomberg to IT conglomerates such as Hewlett Packard. [4]

    The Climate Group functions as the secretariat for the Under2 Coalition, an alliance of state and regional governments. As of 2017, the Under2 Coalition brings together over 220 governments from 43 countries, representing 1.3 billion people and 43% of the global economy. The Climate Group’s initiatives “RE100“, “EP100” and “EV100” are run as part of the We Mean Business coalition.

    Climate Week NYC was founded in 2009 as a partnership between The Climate Group, the United Nations, TckTckTck, the UN Foundation, the City of New York, the Government of Denmark, and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

    Climate Week NYC 2019, taking place September 23-29, is the biggest Climate Week event in the world. This year, there is a predominant focus on youth with Global Citizen as a key partner. Partners of Global Citizen include Citi, P&G, Coca-Cola Africa, Microsoft, Forbes, Havas, and Johnson & Johnson. [Global Citizen Partners]

    Above: July 18, 2019: “Climate Week NYC 2019 is partnering with international advocacy organization Global Citizen for its Youth and Climate Activism Program. The program will reflect the global leadership of young people and its influence on climate action and align with the Youth and Public Mobilization theme of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit.” [Source] Global Citizen partners include P&G, National Geographic and Radical Media.

    “Today’s youth are leading the charge on protecting both people and planet from catastrophic climate change, and through our partnership with Climate Week NYC, we are excited to equip them with the tools and resources to effect more change through the Youth and Climate Activism Program. 2020 will be a pivotal year to catalyze efforts…”

     

    — Michael Sheldrick, Vice President of Global Policy and Government Affairs at Global Citizen

     

    “The Youth and Climate Activism Program will bring together a number of events specifically focused on engaging and working with young people seeking to engage in climate action and will be the lead focus for Climate Week NYC 2019.”

     

    — Helen Clarkson, CEO of The Climate Group

     

    “Young leaders are stepping up across the world, calling on everyone to join them on their mission to create a cleaner and healthier planet for future generations. As business leaders, NGOs, and government officials, we must work together and use our influence to step up and help catalyze impactful change.”

     

    — Suzanne DiBianca, Chief Impact Officer and EVP of Corporate Relations at Salesforce

    Video. Global Citizen Festival 2019, NYC’s Central Park, September 28, 2019 [Running time: 0:30s]:

    “Join Queen + Adam Lambert, Pharrell Williams, Alicia Keys, OneRepublic, H.E.R., and Carole King in NYC’s Central Park … Download the Global Citizen app today to start taking action and earn your free tickets.”

    Above: The Climate Group welcomes Greta Thunberg – its most successful social experiment to date, Twitter

    Above: Teen Vogue climate strike special issue, September 16, 2019

    The sober images of Thunberg, as depicted and shared by the Climate Group, and the media at large, are very much intentional as outlined in the orginal document “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement” published by The Climate Mobilization:

    “The way we respond to threats — by entering emergency mode or by remaining in normal mode — is highly contagious. Imagine the fire alarm goes off in an office building. How seriously should you take it? How do you know if it is a drill or a real fire? Those questions will be predominantly answered by the actions and communications of the people around you, particularly people designated as leaders. If they are chatting and taking their time exiting the building, you will assume that this is a drill. If people are moving with haste, faces stern and focused, communicating with urgency and gravity, you will assume there is real danger and exit as quickly as possible.” [Section: Both Emergency Mode and Normal Mode Are Contagious] [Emphasis in original]

    The American exceptionalism ideology espoused by the Climate Mobilization is shared by many inclusive of the World Business Academy:

    “And if you really want to know how much money a green environment is going to create, I would urge you to look at the economy the United States of America in 1939 in compared to the economy of the United States of America in 1947… it turns out we got really rich by doing the right thing. We mobilized. We saved democracy for the free world and in the process we built the Western democracy that’s been running the world for them ever since. The same or better awaits us if Margaret Klein Solomon is successful and I believe she will be with her efforts at Climate mobilization.”

     

    — Rinaldo Brutoco, World Business Academy, introduction for The Climate Mobilization founder, Margaret Klein Salamon, Event: “2019: The Year of Climate Mobilization”, February 2019, [Source]

     

    Climate Week 2017 Sponsors

    Business For Nature

    “…our natural world provides environmental services to our economy worth over $125 trillion annually.”

     

    — Business For Nature website

     

    “Business for Nature calls on governments to adopt a new deal for nature and people in 2020.”

     

    “How can business deliver for Nature?… promoting policy changes to governments to establish the policy frameworks needed to drive economic changes at scale.”

     

    “THE OCEAN ECONOMY ESTIMATED TO BE WORTH $2.5 TRILLION PER ANNUM”

    New coalitions are forming to assist in the implementation of the financialization of nature. That is, the privatization of nature, global in scale, ushered in under the guise of protecting biodiversity. WWF leads the public charge with the “New Deal For Nature” and “Voice for the Planet” campaigns, while the Natural Capital Coalition, with institutions and NGOs such as the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES – a Natural Capital Coalition partner), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International work in united servitude to corporate power to advance the total capture of nature’s “services”.

    One recently formed coalition is Business For Nature. Launched on July 2, 2019, the coalition founders are We Mean Business, the World Economic Forum, The Nature Conservancy, WWF, the Natural Capital Coalition, the World Resources Institute, the IUCN, The Food and Land Use Coalition, Confederation of Indian Industry, Entreprises pour l’Environnement (EpE), Tropical Forest Alliance, and the International Chamber of Commerce.

    “2020 is a unique opportunity for businesses to call on governments to adopt policies to level the playing field to incentivise the wider business community to act and enable a global transformation.”

     

    — Business For Nature website

    The financialization of nature is coming. And while the media and NGOs work overtime to ensure that the citizenry remains focused on Extinction Rebellion antics, the global climate strikes, and the spectacle at large, the “New Deal for Nature” continues to accelerate forward with zero dissent. There is not a single word of opposition, or even reference to its existence from climate “movements” such as Extinction Rebellion or 350.org. Nor is there a single word of dissent from young Thunberg, who is enclosed by those working toward the “New Deal For Nature” campaign that holistically masks the full commodification of the planet’s “ecosystem services” at scale (i.e. new markets).

    Above: John Elkington, founder of Volans, B Team “expert”, and Extinction Rebellion Business signatory

    Momentum is needed. Get your marching boots on. Demand your politicians and governments align with the Paris Agreement – a politically correct suicide pact.

    “Business for Nature calls on governments to adopt a new deal for nature and people in 2020 and to adopt policies to change the rules of the economic game to ensure a future in which people and nature thrive together.”

     

    “2020 is a unique opportunity for businesses to call on governments to adopt policies to level the playing field to incentivise the wider business community to act and enable a global transformation.”

     

    “The risks create ‘significant opportunities’ … $22.6 trillion opportunity for water infrastructure by 2050″

    The Business for Nature website features the WWF video presentation “Sustainability: The Only Business Plan For Our Planet” (published on May 16, 2019). This video is the condensed version for the longer WWF video presentation “Our Planet: Our Business” (published on June 27, 2019).

    WWF – “Our Planet: Our Business”

    “The global business community can be a powerful force to drive action for nature – find out why we are confident that change is possible. Our Planet: Our Business, a new film for business inspired by the Netflix series Our Planet, is available to watch now.” [Source]

    The Our Planet series launched on Netflix in April 2019. The series – a collaboration between WWF, Netflix and Silverback Films – it  showcases the world’s “rich natural wonders, iconic species and wildlife spectacles that still remain”. Within the first month of its release, the film was watched in over 25 million homes around the world, making it the most successful documentary series ever produced by Netflix. “It was the first series of its kind to carry an important conservation message at its heart.” [Source: WWF].

    But this is not the whole truth.

    A partial truth is disclosed in the April 5, 2019 article “Landmark documentary series Our Planet highlights need for global action to protect nature, says WWF”:

    “WWF is calling on the public to stand up for the planet and is asking global leaders to address our nature emergency by working together to develop a global plan of action, a New Deal for Nature and People… In 2020 we have the chance to put the world on the path to a better future, due to a historic coming together of key international decisions on environment, climate and sustainable development that have the potential to put our planet at the heart of our economic, political and financial systems.”

    The purpose of the series was to carry an important conservation message – with behavioural economics at its heart. That is, to slowly build acquiescence for, and acceptance of, the coming financialization of nature. That is, the grotesque commodification of nature, shrouded behind stunningly beautiful and heart-wrenching emotive images which provoke angst, empathy and urgency while the new financial instruments which will assign monetary value to nature are never spoken of. Senior influencer “Sir” David Attenborough plays a pivotal role for the coming “New Deal For Nature” in servitude to the ruling classes.

    Above: David Phillips, We Don’t Have Time Board of Advisors

    Featured in the WWF promotional video, “Our Planet: Our Business” include Christiana Figueres, Attenborough (face for the New Deal For Nature) and “crude capitalist” Anand Mahindra:

    “My main task as a crude capitalist is to dismiss two myths. The first myth is that there is a trade-off between choosing to do something to improve the climate.”

     

    — Anand Mahindra, Chairman, Mahindra Group speaking to Al Gore & company, We Mean Business, January 25, 2018

    In the WWF “new film for business”, we have the long-awaited for introduction of monetizing the natural world, cautiously being introduced to the public:

    “It’s only as we have started to lose things that we have begun to realise the true value of nature. As Earth’s biodiversity drops, things we have taken for granted start to disappear. Clean air and water, the food we eat, the soil it grows in. A benign climate, productive seas. A healthy world provides us and our businesses with all of these for free. But if we were to place a value on them? The services that biodiversity provides for us are estimated to be worth twice as much as the entire globe’s GDP.”

     

    This is not about saving our planet, this is about saving ourselves. We are the chief beneficiaries of our biodiverse, stable home. Our civilisation won’t work without it. To change this situation will require action on an industrial scale, and at an unparalleled speed. We have just ten years to drastically alter our path.”

    To sell the 21st century fairytale that capitalism will be magically reinvented, transformed to be both ethical and sustainable, the hegemonic forces at the helm of the current global economy will require two things: first, segments of the population that have been thoroughly conditioned to swallow assurances defying all logic and physical realities, and second, “narrative[s] around how your products are sustainable and healthy”, with impact stories as well:

    “If you ask any other generation, “What is the purpose of business?” they will say, “What colour is the sky? The purpose of business is to make money.” If you ask millennials that question, forty-seven percent said some version of the purpose of business is to improve society and protect the environment. This is a fundamental sea-change in the way an entire generation thinks about business. It’s going to mean that if you want to attract the top talent and retain them, if you want to win over millennial customers and attract the thirty trillion dollars of capital that’s currently being given to millennials by the baby boomer generation, you’re going to have to have a narrative around how your products are sustainable and healthy. You’re going to have to have an impact story as well.”

     

    — Seth Bannon, founding partner of the venture capital firm Fifty Years

    Bannon (quoted above), the WWF chosen conduit to the millennial demographic so desired by the corporate ruling class, explains how capitalism and greed can co-exist to create a better world. There is no need for sacrifice:

    “We’re actually trying to prove that you don’t have to concede on anything. We want to convince the purely greedy capitalists that if all they want to do is make more money, they should still invest in these companies that are solving these big problems.”

     

    — Seth Bannon, founding partner of the venture capital firm Fifty Years

    And what is this concession-free solution that will alter the global capitalist economic system – in which violence and exploitation prove necessary in order for the system to maintain and extend its hegemony– to a magically transformed ethical, gentler capitalism? Bannon describes the transformation as a “new conception”:

    “We believe that business as usual, this business that’s meant about purely chasing profits, is on the way out. And there’s a new conception of business that’s going to take its place. That’s about not only generating profit, but actually solving social or environmental issues.”

     

    — Seth Bannon, founding partner of the venture capital firm Fifty Years

    In this “new conception of business”, there are no limitations placed upon the industrial economic system:

    “The broad strategy for this new business as usual is clear. We just have to make sure that everything we do, we can do forever.”

    Here, WWF acknowledged the growth imperative within the capitalist economic system – without mentioning the actual capitalist economic system itself. How will the growth issue be resolved while maintaining the very economic system that is absolutely dependent upon it? The answer is revealed in WWF’s point 5 – “reimagine success”:

    “The most damaging element of today’s society is its quest for perpetual growth. ‘We’ve got an economic system that depends upon growing forever. How does that reconcile itself with a thriving planet?’ Growth for growth’s sake will have to lose its attraction. ‘We cannot think of economic success if we’re deteriorating the environment, and I think that has to be in the essence of each person that wants to lead a country, to lead a company.’ The new sustainable economy will readdress this. ‘We need to create economies that allow us to thrive, whether or not they grow. But something can thrive without getting bigger. It’s just thrumming, alive, creating, regenerating, doing well, and it looks great to us and we feel the energy in that.’ Our reinvented model for Business As Usual will ultimately begin to mimic nature. Adapting to thrive within the finite world about it. Indeed, there is no alternative.”

    This poor explanation resembling a new age mantra, is worse than wrong – it is nonsense. Reimagining success will not stop the growth imperative inherently built into the capitalist economic system. There will be no “reinvented model for business as usual” within the capitalist economic system that does not collapse without growth. “The new sustainable economy will readdress this” means, in real terms, “we really have no fucking clue”.

    The last sentence “[i]ndeed, there is no alternative”, as highlighted above, is the lie they want you to believe. Consider that collectively, the populace appears to believe that not only is it possible to colonize another planet, but that we will do so in the not-so-distant future. This is incredible considering the massive odds of and colossal barriers to such an endeavour succeeding. Thus, it is alarming, that this same populace appears not to believe it is not possible to create new societies where necessity is detached from want (superfluous consumer goods). This begs the question – have we been fully conditioned to believe only those that represent hegemonic interests? It is a sound question considering the billionaires of the world are currently petrified of the capitalist system collapsing – while those oppressed by the capitalist system believe it cannot be dismantled. Yet we can dismantle institutions. We can dismantle the capitalist economic system devouring what remains of the natural world – but not if we identify with our oppressors and the very system that enslaves us. It is our natural world and her living natural communities that sustain us. Not industrial civilization – not technology.

    The following film segment leads to an introduction to Greta Thunberg:

    “We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not.”

    Thunberg’s pivotal role in the global campaign to save global growth is found within this dialogue: “So the vital thing the business community needs to do is come together to encourage politicians to set the global frameworks that will accelerate progress to a sustainable world.”

    Featured in the film is Ellen MacArthur. MacArthur is assisting in the building of momentum toward a said “circular economy” having founded the New Plastics Economy initiative unveiled in January 2019 at Davos. The Coca-Cola Company, Danone, MARS, Novamont, L’Oréal, PepsiCo, Unilever, Amcor, and Veolia are the initiative’s Core Partners. Other partners include Evian, Google, H&M, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Nike. New Plastics Economy “Knowledge Partners” include Arup, IDEO, McKinsey, and SYSTEMIQ.

    Above: Sarkozy awards Ellen MacArthur the Légion d’Honneur, 2008 [Yachting World]

    Above: Sarkozy awards Ellen MacArthur the Légion d’Honneur, 2008 [Yachting World]

    Above from left: Ellen MacArthur, Evian’s global brand director, Patricia Oliva, Christiana Figueres, and Stella McCartney, WEF Arctic Basecamp, Davos, 2019 – Stella McCartney is a luxury lifestyle brand that was launched under the designer’s name in a partnership with Kering. A 2017 report found that “the equivalent of one dustbin truck-worth of textiles is landfilled every second.”

    In the WWF feature, MacArthur assures the viewer there is no such thing as waste: “Waste is just a resource in the wrong place.” Consider this phrase the new mantra for the world’s most powerful yet reformed capitalists intent on business-as-usual rebranded under the guise of sustainability saviours. Here’s hoping we can store all the world’s nuclear waste (i.e. resource in the wrong place) in the front yard of one of MacArthur’s residences.

    While Mahindra of the Mahindra Group highlights his commitment (on behalf of his two hundred and twenty-five thousand colleagues) that “by the year 2040, the entire Mahindra Group of companies would be carbon neutral” (think offsets), Dave Lewis, CEO of Tesco explains the corporation’s commitment to recyclable plastics:

    “WWF narrator: “Even the most complex, global business communities will work to eliminate waste.”

     

    Lewis: “We asked all of our suppliers to tell us exactly which material was in their packaging. And we said, By the end of 2019, we want to take no material into our business that’s not recyclable. Can you manage that? If we do set a standard, most of our suppliers will want to come with us. We can do that. As a responsible business, why wouldn’t we?” (dramatic theme music plays in background)

    There is no plan to largely eliminate plastics.

    Lewis further assures us:

    “For both palm oil and soy, we have sustainable sources for one hundred percent of what we sell within the UK and in Central Europe, and about forty percent in our Asia business. So we have a commitment to get to one hundred percent in total.”

    As discussed within this series, there is no such thing as sustainable palm or soy, produced at industrial scale. There are only billion dollar certification schemes conceptualized by WWF et al. which excel in the art of greenwashing in order to protect and maintain guilt-free consumption in the Global North. Displacement, landgrabbing, and bulldozing biodiversity/death of sentient life are the price those in the Global South must pay for those in the Global North to spread Nutella on their morning toast and other irrelevant things we consume in exchange of our natural world. In the face of a climate emergency with twelve said years to stave off collapse, one cannot be expected to give up Nutella*, Unilever Dove “beauty bars”, and other “essentials” the Global North cannot be expected to go without. [*Ferrero who manufactures Nutella, purchased Nestlé’s U.S. confectionary business in 2018. Halloween in the Global North is a palm oil bloodbath that literally continues unabated.]

    In regard to the decimation of the Earth’s remaining forests (many lost to palm and soy monoculture), the President of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvadaro assures us:

    “Now we have shown that it’s possible to reverse deforestation. We’ve done that in the last decades. We reached twenty percent of our coverage with forests, and we managed to increase that to fifty percent, currently.”

    Yet, the September 26, 2018 scientific paper The ephemerality of secondary forests in southern Costa Rica demonstrates that half of Costa Rica’s regrown forests are gone within two decades: “Secondary forests are vital parts of the ecosystem, but in Costa Rica many of them are re-cleared before achieving old-growth levels of biodiversity.” [Source] What is equally grotesque is the fact that no one questions what has happened to the living sentient animals that must have existed in these cleared swathes of forests. In the spectacle, stunning animals and wildlife who many humans empathize with are exploited via (stunning) visuals as a means to create acquiescence and even desire for a global “New Deal For Nature”.

    In real life, utilizing language and framing – the single reference of “biodiversity” creates a collective acceptance of “afforestation”, land acquisitions and theft via “conservation”, and carbon markets (inclusive of REDD+). With the application of a single word, coupled with a false market solution, all conjured images of sentient animals facing ominous peril are instantly saved then filed away. Out of sight, out of mind, out of existence. As Western societies become more and more disconnected from the natural world, it becomes much easier to sell “solutions” that accept the death and subsequent loss of diverse tree communities, insects, amphibians, flora and fauna. This can be witnessed today for climate mobilizations that first and foremost demand “green” energy technologies, technologies which promise the further annihilation of life in the natural world.

    There is certainly more to be deconstructed in the WWF business feature film, but let us digress. One only has to follow the work of Stephen Corry to observe the torture, rape, murder and displacement of Tribal Peoples carried out under the WWF banner of “conservation”. It is well documented and horrific. However, having conditioned society to no longer read beyond 140 characters or so, it is an easy feat to sell the “New Deal For Nature” when your advertising content contains the most beautiful images found in our human existence – the physical planet and all of her life forms.

    Climate change is a direct product of capitalism and will not be mitigated by more capitalism. Ecological devastation, resource depletion, and collapsing ecosystems are all a direct result of capitalism. This destruction of our natural world will not and cannot be halted by more capitalism – regardless of what colour or adjective is placed in front of it.

     

     

    End Notes

    [1] The Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (CLG), a group hosted by the University of Cambridge’s Programme for Industry, describes itself as comprising “business leaders from major UK, EU and international companies who believe that there is an urgent need to develop new and longer-term policies for tackling climate change.” In September 2008 18 corporate executives signed a letter from the UK CLG to the leaders of the three largest UK political parties — supporting the UK Climate Bill before the parliament and support for the European Union adopting a target of a 30% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. In the letter, the UK CLG stated that, in the context of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, it supported including unspecified “existing technologies must be deployed rapidly and a range of new technologies must be brought to market” (E.ON, one of the signatories to the letter, was touting a raft of new power stations it was proposing across Europe as being “CCS-ready”).

    The inclusion of the CEOs of E.ON UK and BAA as signatories to the letter drew a scathing response from Ben Stewart, the Greenpeace communications director. “This is hypocrisy of the purest strain. It’s astounding that E.ON would call for action on climate change when they’re agitating to build Britain’s first coal-fired power stations in decades. It makes an environmentalist’s jaw drop to see the BAA logo on this letter when they’re trying to expand airports across the nation,” he told the Guardian. “This is like Howard Marks [a convicted drug smuggler] calling for a crackdown on pot. If the executives of these companies want action on climate change they should immediately lock themselves in their boardrooms and not come out until Kingsnorth and Heathrow expansion have been dropped.” [Source: Sourcewatch]

    In 2010, The Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change was identified as a partner in the TckTckTck campaign, co-founded by Greenpeace. [Source] [2] “C40 Cities connects 96 of the world’s greatest cities to take bold climate action, leading the way towards a healthier and more sustainable future. Representing 700+ million citizens and one quarter of the global economy, mayors of the C40 cities are committed to delivering on the most ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement at the local level, as well as to cleaning the air we breathe. The current chair of C40 is Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo; and three-term Mayor of New York City Michael R. Bloomberg serves as President of the Board. C40’s work is made possible by our three strategic funders: Bloomberg Philanthropies, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), and Realdania.” [Source] In 2011 a formal merger transpired between C40 and CCI’s Cities Program, forged by President Clinton and then Mayor of New York City and C40 Chair, Michael R. Bloomberg. [Source] [3] Full list: Climate Week NYC 2019 sponsors and partners include Salesforce, McKinsey, Bank of America, Engie Impact, Unilever, AT & T, Estee Lauder, International Copper Association, Orsted, Exelon, PWC, IKEA, BT, National Grid, TCI Co., ABInBev, Trane, Morrison Foerster, Natixis, ClimateWorks, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, NYC Official Guide, Global Citizen (youth and climate activism partner), We Mean Business, Kigali, Raw, Alchemy Mill, 3Degrees, The New Republic, Nationale Postcode Loteri, UN Climate Action Summit.  [Source] [4] The Climate Group: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund also acts as an incubator for in-house projects that later evolve into free-standing institutions – a case in point being ‘The Climate Group’, launched in London in 2004. The Climate Group coalition includes more than 50 of the world’s largest corporations and sub-national governments, including big polluters such as energy giants BP and Duke Energy, as well as several partner organizations, one being that of the big NGO Avaaz. The Climate Group are advocates of unproven carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), nuclear power and biomass as crucial technologies for a low-carbon economy. The Climate Group works closely with other business lobby groups, including the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). The IETA has worked consistently to sabotage climate action. The Climate Group also works on other initiatives, one being that of the ‘Voluntary Carbon Standard’, a global standard for voluntary offset projects. One marketing strategist company labeled the Climate Group’s campaign ‘Together’ as “the best inoculation against greenwash”. The Climate Group has operations in Australia, China, Europe, India, and North America. It was a partner to the ‘Copenhagen Climate Council’.

     

     

     

     

    The New Suits of Capitalist Developmentalism: The New Green Period of Capitalism and its Ecological and Citizen Avant-garde

    Jun 13

    2019

    2

    Celebrity [Capitalism | Humanitarianism | Neoliberalism], Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

    5G Climate Emergency to Save Capitalism Climate Strikes Economic Growth Extinction Rebellion NPIC

    The New Suits of Capitalist Developmentalism: The New Green Period of Capitalism and its Ecological and Citizen Avant-garde

    Kaosenlared

    May 21, 2019

    By Miquel Amorós

     

    [*Translated from Spanish to English via DeepL translator – Original version in Spanish here.]

     

    The new green period of capitalism and its ecological and citizen avant-garde.

    10 Eco-Friendly Luxury Fashion Brands – Armani [Source]


    The capitalist world is debating in an unprecedented ecological crisis that threatens its continuity as a system based on the pursuit of private profit. From the pollution of air, water and soil to the accumulation of waste and rubbish; from the depletion of natural resources to the extinction of species; from the urbanizing tide to climate change; it seems that a sword of Damocles hangs over the market society. Leaders from all spheres of activity are concerned about unstoppable environmental degradation, including a reorganization of production and consumption according to inevitable ecological imperatives. Many people are convinced that the capitalist system of exploitation cannot be maintained in any other way. The contradiction between growth (the accumulation of capital) and its destructive effects (the ecological disaster), will have to be overcome with a compromise between industry and nature, or better between their respective spectacular representation: on the one hand, the high executives and on the other, the patented ecologists. We are entering a new period of capitalism, the “green” stage, where new gadgets and technological systems – “renewable” energy plants, electric cars, GMOs, big data, 5G networks, etc. – will try to harmonize economic development with the territory and the resources it contains, thus facilitating “sustainable” growth and making the current, motorized and consumerist way of life compatible with the natural environment, or better yet, with what remains of it.

    Xiuhtezcatl Martinez – Barneys The Window. Photographed by Roe Ethridge / Styled by Brian Molloy / BOGLIOLI K2 Wool Hopsack Two-Button Suit / COMME DES GARÇONS PLAY Men’s Chuck Taylor 1970’s High-Top Sneakers [Source: Barneys New York]

    The “energy transition” is but one aspect of the “economic transition” towards ecocapitalism, which, starting from the wild (neoliberal) incorporation of nature into the market, now reaches a phase where mercantilization will be regulated by corporate and state mechanisms. It is an industrial, financial and political operation of great importance that is going to change everything so that nothing changes, so that everything remains the same.The new technologies introduced after 1945, in the postwar period, (manufacture of cements, fertilizers, additives and detergents, more powerful engines, additives, thermal power stations, “atoms for peace”, etc.) were the factors that triggered the plundering of resources, the emission of pollutants and metropolitanization, exponentially increasing the power of transnational corporations. The economic growth became a destructive element of first order, but also, in the major cause of social stabilization, of a much greater efficiency than the unions or the workers parties. Consequently, developmentalism came to shape the policies of all kinds of governments. Employment was the worker’s only means of gaining the status of consumer, motorist and inhabitant of the periphery, so that the creation of jobs then became the primary objective of the “political class”, both right-wing and left-wing. The immediate interests of the wage-earning masses integrated in the market were aligned with those of the businessmen and the parties, to the point of firmly opposing any ecological corrective that endangered growth and, consequently, jobs. Ultimately, “dying of cancer is preferable to dying of starvation,” as some said. Unfortunately, workers have been strong supporters of business continuity, urbanization and parliamentarism, not caring about the negative impact this could have on their environment, their freedom or their lives. That is why the ecological conscience has crystallized almost exclusively in sectors that are inactive or almost so, such as academics, neo-rurals, precarious, students or pensioners. The fight against noxiousness has before it a social barrier that is difficult to overcome as long as the defence of the workplace is a priority for the majority of the population; if the contradiction is not overcome, the defence of the institutions will take precedence over the defence of the territory and the autonomy of the struggles.It is up to the state to channel the protests, encourage the formation of a pragmatic ecological elite and pave the way for the new green capitalism, if necessary by promulgating a “climate alarm state”.

    Faced with a politically and socially blocked situation, the international ruling class takes the initiative by trying to direct the long march of the techno-industrial economy towards profitable “sustainability” for its own benefit and without real opposition, either by eliminating old jobs, or by creating new ones. The destruction continues and even increases, but it is certainly about saving capitalism, not the planet. Extractive ecology produces profits even in the short term; however, markets are not strong enough to initiate a process of “green” reconversion, nor are technological innovations alone, in view of which the first steps depend largely on the State. It is up to the state to channel the protests, encourage the formation of a pragmatic ecological elite and pave the way for the new green capitalism, if necessary by promulgating a “climate alarm state”. As a result, the ecological crisis – which today is presented as a climate issue – becomes trivially political. Meanwhile, the environmental movement is infiltrated by agents of the multinationals and bought with funds of various origins, resulting in a political network of influences at the service of a new kind of capitalism. The same thing happened with the NGOs. At that moment, the purge of extremisms is necessary for the transformation of the green party of decomposition into an instrument of the dominant order. The message of moderation obedient to the little belligerent slogans would not reach the manipulable masses if the anti-system “fundamentalists” were not isolated as soon as possible, or as the informal hierarchies of ecologism-spectacle say, “bridged”.

    Targeted demographics – Promotional illustrations/video for Green New Deal

    The movement against climate change has given rise to a registered “brand”, Extinction/Rebellion, which covers the environmentalist flank of left-wing citizenry, giving it arguments in favour of state mediation of the crisis. Those who appeal to the state certainly cannot be branded as “radicals,” since while they are against “extinction,” they are not against capital. Nor against any concrete responsible; one of its principles reads as follows: “we avoid accusing and pointing at people, because we live in a toxic system”. No concrete individual (no leader) can be considered guilty of anything. For a climbing mentality, not all leaders, not all capitalists, are equal, and ecological reforms can even be beneficial to the majority. They are potential allies and benefactors. Thus, the declared objectives of eco-citizenship do not go that way. They limit themselves to pressuring governments to force them to “tell the truth to the citizens”, to take “decarbonizing” measures foreseen in the “energy transition” and to decree the creation of “supervising citizen assemblies”, true political springboards for the arrivists. Their weapon: the non-violent mobilization of 3.5% of the “citizens”. No revolutions, because they imply violence and do not respect “democracy”, that is, the system of parties and ranks. They do not want to put an end to the capitalist regime, they want to transform it, making it “circular” and “carbon neutral”. We will not overlook the fact that the majority of waste is irrecyclable and that the production of “clean” energies implies the consumption of enormous quantities of fossil fuels. The professionals of citizen ecology do not want to destroy the State either, the great tree under whose shadow their personal careers thrive and their placement strategies work. The ecological crisis is reduced by this captive ecologism to a political problem that can be solved by the heights thanks to a Roosevelt-style Green New Deal: a new pact for the global economy between the world’s ruling class, the political bureaucracy and its environmental advisors that imposes measures for the reduction of polluting emissions and the storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide that the multiple conferences on climate change have failed to impose. Something extremely suspicious, like everything that comes from the system. The “dual” citizen strategies are “symbiotic”, not ruptured. Ecosystems would be restored by harmonizing conflicting interests from within. Duality consists precisely in collaborating (acting in symbiosis) with the institutions on the one hand, and mobilizing the catastrophe-sensitive masses on the other. However, the mobilizations are nothing more than a spectacular display of purely symbolic support. They do not aspire to much, as they do not question the status quo, not saying a word about the symbiosis of governments to those who are pressured by markets, growth or globalisation.

    It has been proven that since the Johannesburg summit in 2002, if not before, the capitalist world is aware that its uncontrolled functioning produces such a level of destruction that it is in danger of collapsing. It is more than evident that despite the resistance to regulation by countries whose stability and influence depend on hard extractivism or unhindered development, capitalism as a whole has entered a green developmental phase and is trying to establish controls (Agenda 21, creation of the Green Climate Fund, fifth IPCC report, Paris Agreement, the 24 different COPs). This explains the epidemic of realism and opportunism that has taken over the ecological media “in action” to the point of provoking an avalanche of demands for employment in the political-administrative field. The militants do not want to close their doors, especially when there is a good remuneration, so that all the ideals are kept in their pockets. In truth, it is not only the capitalists who would benefit from a state of alarm. The new subsidized ecologism follows in the wake of “green” developmentism based on “renewable” industrial energies, and sustains the alarmist leaders of capitalism against the negationists. All their efforts are devoted to adjusting the industrial and consumerist way of life with the preservation of the natural environment, despite the fact that the results have not been flattering until today: greenhouse gas emissions, far from being reduced as established by international agreements, have reached record figures. With the optimism of a newly enlightened novice, they want economic growth, necessary for the survival of capitalism, and the territory, necessary for the conservation of biodiversity, at least in appearance, to be marvelous, no matter how much the global temperature continues to rise and the climate is degrading. Incomparable advantages of the symbiotic method and the reformist narrative!


    Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War, Neta C. Crawford, Boston University, June 12, 2019

    Those responsible for global warming and pollution, and those responsible for precariousness and exclusion are the same, but those who fight them are often not. They are two battlefields, the one of imbalance and the one of inequality, which do not finish converging and not because a cohort of vocational bureaucrats appears under the stones, trying to carve out a future for themselves by acting as an intermediary. Aspiring leaders have their days numbered because ordinary people lose their meekness when their means of subsistence are affected and they no longer allow themselves to be domesticated with the ease of days of abundance in less aggressive climates. The weakness of world-capital lies not in the climate, not even in health, but in supplies. The day when the techno-industrial system – either from the markets, or from the State – stops satisfying the needs of a large part of the population, or in other words, when due to the climate or any other factor the supply fails, the era of insurrections will come. A failed system that hinders the mobility of its subjects and puts them in immediate danger of starvation is a corpse system. It is probable that in the heat of the protest, community structures will be recomposed, fundamental to ensure the autonomy of the revolts. If civil society succeeds in organizing itself on the margins of institutions and bureaucracies, then ecological struggles will converge with wage struggles, as reflected in the praxis of a unified social conscience. And that slogan heard in the French rebellion of the “yellow vests”: “end of the month, end of the world” will reveal all its meaning.

    Miguel Amorós


    Talks on 12 May 2019 at the book exchange fair in L’Orxa (Alicante) and on 18 May at the Biblioteca Social El Rebrot Bord, Albaida (Valencia).

    May 06

    2019

    5

    350.org / 1Sky, Amnesty International, Avaaz, B Team [Managed by Purpose - the PR Arm of Avaaz], Greenpeace, Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism, World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

    BECCC Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Extinction Rebellion Greenpeace IPBES Pacifism as Patholgy Social Engineering The Financialization of Nature World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

    Extinction Rebellion Training, or How to Control Radical Resistance from the ‘Obstructive Left’

    May 6, 2019

    By Cory Morningstar

     

     

    “New Power” – “The ability to harness the connected crowd to get what you want”

    – Jeremy Heimans, co-founder Purpose/Avaaz, B Team Expert

     

    Above: XR local coordinator training document. Diagram: The “US” circle on the top signifies Extinction Rebellion. The middle circle identifies “mostly obstructive” political activists (“hard left”) that must be bypassed in order to reach the bottom circle. The bottom circle represents the non-political citizens, the target audience of XR.

    Background

    Extinction Rebellion (XR) officially launched on October 31, 2018. On November 2, 2018, a video was uploaded to the Extinction Rebellion YouTube account. The video documents the training session held by XR co-founder Roger Hallam: “This was filmed at the Extinction Rebellion Local Coordinator training in Bristol. Roger Hallam explains some the key dynamics of building a mass movement from the level of personal resilience to creating system change.”

    Here, it is critical to remind oneself, that this is the XR mass organizing model for the mobilization of a global citizenry. Consider between the official launch on October 31, 2018, in the UK, to December 6, 2018, it grew to over 130 groups, across 22 countries. By January 29, 2019, the Extinction Rebellion groups spanned across 50 countries. On April 27, 2019 XR reported they were nearing 400 branches globally.

    The global expansion is being led by Margaret Klein Salamon [Source], founder of The Climate Mobilization, who launched the Extinction Rebellion US Twitter account on October 31, 2018 – the same day as the launch of Extinction Rebellion in the UK. The Extinction Rebellion demands are not only complementary to The Climate Mobilization’s emergency strategy now in motion; they are a mirror image of it with the slogan, “Tell the Truth”. [Further reading: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The House is On Fire! & the 100 Trillion Dollar Rescue, ACT IV]

    Training the XR Local Coordinators

    Above: Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam

    During the training session, Hallam draws a chart with three circles. The small circle on the top signifies Extinction Rebellion – people that want to get things done. The middle circle is quickly identified as the contentious one. This circle identifies the “mostly obstructive”, highly political, a “hard left”, which must be bypassed in order to reach the bottom circle. The bottom circle, the largest in size, represents the non-political citizens, the target audience of XR: “The people who’re shitting themselves and want something to be done but aren’t highly political.” [Source: XR Local Coordinator Training]

    Hallam:

    “I’m just going to finish on something that’s a bit of a taboo subject, okay? But it’s another major issue you’re going to find when you organize, which is difficult, political people.

     

    Okay, so I’m going to do a little chart here.

     

    You usually find, like most of us people in this room, that are really political, but we’re really practical because we want to get some things done. Okay?

     

    And then below us, in inverted commas, there’s another group of people that are really political and don’t want to get things done, because they’re so political. (lots of laughter). I will separate those people out in a minute.

     

    And then below that, this is like a thousand times bigger, they really want to do something well there actually not political, you see what I mean.

     

    These people really want to get things done. Then they go down here and try to involve these people, and these people basically grind it to death.”

    Hallam speaks of the dangers posed by the “extreme hard left” viewpoints, “extreme intersectionalism” (“we need to be all perfect and that sort of stuff”), extreme desire for diversity, “extreme veganism”, etc. His examples are deliberately misleading and ridiculous. His mention of anarchism provokes more laughter.

    Hallam concedes “and often they’re right” yet has zero interest in empowering this group to further empower the bottom “non-political” masses targeted by XR. Rather, his aim is to recruit the ones that can be persuaded into adopting pragmatism, while silencing those that refuse to conform.

    In the Rebellion business, ethics isn’t a driving force, rather it is a detriment:

    “Look, all the most effective movements have a central concept and that concept is balance. Balance the pragmatic need and the ethical imperative to change society versus the need to be eternally ethical.”

    The message is clear – target the practical and pragmatic. Distance yourself from the self-centered “purists”.

    “They’re [the 20%) not actually interested in political effectiveness. They’re interested in a political approach that makes them feel good.”

    Although XR claims, “We are working to build a movement that is participatory, decentralised, and inclusive” – this runs in stark contrast to XR’s own conduct:

    “The name of the game is to bypass these people, or at least recruit the little bit of them that get it … and go down here. And that’s how we’ve managed to mobilize thousands of people in three months. By having a public meeting. And if the public meeting is constructed around participative principles, you won’t have the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] guy standing up at the end. Everyone’s feeling good and he does a rant about how it has to be socialist, otherwise it’s rubbish. Which brings everybody down. It happens over and over again. And how we do that, we don’t have a Q & A. Q&A’s encourage nerdy people and absolutists, (laughter), we all know this, right? I mean you can have a Q&A if you’re super confident and you’re in a group of people that are generally like, in the real world, but if you have a public meeting 8o% of the people will be normal people, who are basically interested in the issue, and 20% of the people will be political absolutists. And they will there to appropriate your energy.”

    And this ideology upheld by Hallam is the very foundational ideology being taught, encouraged and nurtured by Extinction Rebellion. Hallam: “This is how you mobilize lots of people.”

    This , in essence, forms the key strategy of Extinction Rebellion. To isolate radical voices and to dominate the narrative. While targeting the non-practical and pragmatic. A narrative and an orchestrated campaign that serves the ruling class. To give a faux sense of inclusion, while mocking those who have, first and foremost, an allegiance to the Earth. Framing those who recognize that the very capitalist system destroying all life on our finite planet, will not and cannot be magically reformed to save us, as “political absolutists”. As Hallam effectively frames those identified in the middle circle as not “normal”, he seeks assurances from his students by ending sentences with a pleasant “yeah?” and “okay?”, at which point – largely due to the power of conformity in a group setting – they agree. Laughter ensues. There is no challenge to Hallam’s diatribe. The deliberate framing of those that do not conform as “obstructive” is effective social engineering.

    Although Extinction Rebellion takes no position against capitalism, Hallam has no issue with taking a swipe at socialism. Using the Mondragon experiment in Spain as an example, Hallam explains that the central concept must be balance, “not socialism or anything”.

    These are the main points captured by/for the XR Local Coordinators:

    “They’re [the middle group] not interested in political effectiveness, they’re interested in things being perfect and good. This is not a personal judgment, but it won’t help.”

     

    The majority, to be herded like cats (GCCA/TckTckTck – Global Call for Climate Action) are “[T]he people who’re shitting themselves and want something to be done but aren’t highly political.”

     

    “Don’t have a Q & A. This allows the extreme people who want it to be one way to bring everyone else down.”

     

    “80% are normal people [and] 20% political absolutists. There to appropriate your energy.”

     

    “It’s not about climate change information, it’s about the emotional way that we say it – needs to create that emotional response, personal reactions are incredibly powerful.”

    For XR leadership, the enemy of Rebellion is not corporate dominance such as Unilever or Volans (as recently confirmed by XR Business). The enemy of Rebellion is not the capitalist economic system devouring everything in its path. The enemy of the Rebellion is the radical activist, prepared to defend the Earth “by any means necessary”.

     

    Pacifism as Pathology

    “In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the ‘human rights’ discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.” —  Arundhati Roy, How to Think About Empire

    Hallam recommends to his students that they study: “The Psychology of Persuasion“, “The Radical Think Tank” (“How to Win“), and “This is an Uprising” by Mark Engler (with glowing forewords by 350.org’s Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein).

    Here, is another orchestrated and ongoing effort to further pacify the working class in servitude to the state. One would be wise to toss “This is an Uprising” and instead read “Bloodless Lies: Book Review of This is an Uprising” (November 7, 2016). This is an excellent example of what those enmeshed in the non-profit industrial complex do not want you to read.

    Rather than educating citizens why it is paramount that we become revolutionaries in order to protect the last vestiges of the natural world, Hallam encourages his newly-minted coordinators to embrace the role of “generalists”. [XR Generalists: “run meetings, be good with people, know how society changes, etc.; Revolutionary theorists – hard work is already done!; Books to read – This is an Uprising (Mark Engler)”] [Source]

    +++

    The Elites in Service to Capital

    As touched upon in the conclusion of the Manufacturing Greta Thunberg for Consent series, ACT VI, Extinction Rebellion ties to some of the world’s most powerful NGOs at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex (Avaaz, 350.org, Greenpeace et al.). A largely white-led movement serving white power.

    XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook, is also highly influential with decade-long ties to the tech industry. In his workshop, Hallam chuckles when he laments, “Like Gail, she’s got these connections with the elites. She’s on the phone with George [Monbiot]”. Bradbrook’s “connections with the elites” is no exaggeration. Featured in “The Financial Times”, the prestigious publication writes of Bradbrook: “Clad in a crimson coat and matching hat as she dashes between fundraising discussions with a London hedge-fund owner and meetings to rally Extinction Rebellion volunteers…” Indeed, “activism” has never been so en vogue, and a £50,000 donation by a hedge-fund owner to Extinction Rebellion [Source], raises no eyebrows whatsoever. It is safe to say that the hallowed out remnants of Western environmentalism have reached a new stage of commodification and normalization of such. This is not rebellion. This is business. Of course Bradbrook is not the only elite at the helm.

    Above: Farhana Yamin at the prestigious Extinction Rebellion headquarters [Photo: Vice]

    Farhana Yamin is “one of the movement’s leading voices” in Extinction Rebellion (Financial Times). Yamin who “spent 27 years in UN climate negotiations” and “helped midwife the 2015 Paris Agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions” serves as a board member/trustee to Greenpeace. [Source: The rise of Extinction Rebellion, The Financial Times, April 12, 2019]

    “Yamin, the international lawyer, who is also a trustee of Greenpeace UK and will soon take up an advisory role at the World Wildlife Fund, wants to build a bridge with existing organisations to forge a much bigger “movement of movements”. “We need to tap into the new form of leadership that’s being asked of us now,” she says. [Source: “Extinction Rebellion, inside the new climate resistance”, The Financial Times, April 10, 2019]

    Former Vogue “climate warrior” (2015), Yamin is the founder and CEO of Track 0: “Track 0 is an independent, not-for-profit organization serving as a hub to support all those transitioning to a clean, fair and bright future for future generations around the world compatible with the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. We convene leaders and provide strategic research, training, advice, communications and networking support to governments, businesses, investors, philanthropies, communities and campaigns run by civil society.”

    Partners of Track 0 include GCCA (TckTckTck), CAN (Climate Action Network), Avaaz, ClimateWorks (The Climate Group, We Mean Business), The Rockefeller Foundation, E3G (founder of GCCA), The Prince of Wales Corporate Leaders Group, European Climate Foundation and Chatham House. [Full list]

    Advisory members of Track 0 include Sharon Johnson, “CEO Havas Media Re:Purpose”. This is incredible yet not surprising as Havas created the 2009 TckTckTck campaign a decade ago. Other advisory members include Betsy Taylor (served on boards of One Sky which merged with 350.org, Ceres, The Climate Mobilization, etc.), and Bernice Lee, Director, Climate Change at World Economic Forum.

    One can glance through the Track 0 “Individuals & Organizations on Track” section to understand who is considered “on track” for “net zero” by Yamin et al. Certainly not those obstructionists found in Hallam’s middle circle.

    In addition to founding Track 0, Yamin is an associate fellow at Chatham House and a member of the Global Agenda Council on Climate Change at the World Economic Forum.

     

    Above: Track 0, Twitter

    Yamin served as an adviser to the European Commission on the emissions trading directive from 1998-2002, later serving as special adviser to Connie Hedegaard, EU Commissioner for Climate Action. “She is lead author of three assessment reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on adaptation and mitigation issues. She continues to provide legal, strategy and policy advice to NGOs, foundations and developing nations on international climate change negotiations under the UNFCCC.” [Source]

    As discussed in “A Decade of Strategic and Methodical Social Engineering”, while the International Policies and Politics Initiative and GCCA controlled the “movement” at COP15,  the same forces also controlled the message via the Carbon Briefing Service (CBS). The news service was launched by Jennifer Morgan (WWF, WRI, Greenpeace,etc.) and Liz Gallagher (E3G) in late 2014 with additional funding by the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Villum Foundation and Avaaz. [Source] Yamin was a participant of the invitation only group. [Source]

    In 2015 Yamin attended a week-long retreat hosted by Avaaz. [Source]

    Those who have read my past work as well as the Greta series, will know Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund are both founders of GCCA (TckTckTck) – and are both at the helm of this faux movement. These NGOs and others at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex are tasked with creating another “Paris moment” momentum needed for the coming financialization of nature to be implemented in 2020 (#NewDealForNature) – as well as the unlocking of monies needed for the fourth industrial revolution (to save capitalism itself).

    Above: Track 0, Twitter

    Above: Avaaz endorsement by Christiana Figueres [Source: Avaaz website]

    Above: Track 0 highlights, September 24, 2014

    Here we witness the social-organizational psychology experts grooming tomorrows “new champions“, “global shapers” and “new power” “thought-leaders” as determined and ultimately dictated by the world’s most powerful elites. In the 21st century, psychology is not only an extremely important tool in influencing public opinion, it is now considered to be perhaps the single and most important tool. The necessity to comprehend the mental processes, desires and social patterns of the populace at large cannot be understated. Working in lock-step with controlled media and the best marketing executives foundation money can buy, today’s faux activists, thought-leaders and media lapdogs are the very mechanisms of modern-day perception.  – The Pygmalion Virus in Three Acts [2017 AVAAZ SERIES | PART II]

    +++

    [Further reading: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – A Decade of Social Manipulation for the Corporate Capture of Nature, ACT VI – Crescendo]

    +++

    In 1966, Stokely Carmichael stated: “And that’s the real question facing the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we’ve been into for the last hundreds of years?”

    This is the real question facing legitimate activists today. Are we tearing down the institutions, or keeping them propped up? Extinction Rebellion has been tasked with the propping up of the very institutions we must dismantle. There is a reason manufactured “environmentalists” and celebrities are recognized as key influencers. It is a deliberate undertaking that Hallam recommends “Rules for Revolutionaries” (based on US Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential run), rather than highlighting true revolutionaries such as Marilyn Buck, Malcolm X, or the land defenders on the frontlines today. The ones who often receive no press (until they are murdered). The ones that would belong to Hallam’s middle circle. It is a burying of radical political resistance. A reframing of resistance – into an obedient compliance. Note that Rules for Revolutionaries is written by Zach Exley, current advisor to US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It is notable that praise for the book, from a bevy of authors includes Robert B. Reich, author of Saving Capitalism.

    The influencers for the ruling classes are worth their weight in gold.

    We Mean Business – Top Ten Climate Change Influencers, Twitter

    British actress/celebrity Emma Thompson, Extinction Rebellion festivities, April 19, 2019

    Emma Thompson for Global Optimist. The Climate Optimist campaign was launched in 2017 by The Climate Group in partnership with Futerra

    Emotion – Not Information

    Another critical imperative Hallam highlights for mass mobilization is “emotion – not information”. Hallam laments that the people who will lead the “rebellion” will be young people:

    “The last thing to reiterate is the emotion – not the information … so the people that are going to lead this rebellion are going to be young people, 14 & 15 year olds …omg – a 14 year-old is in tears, right?, on television, about what’s happening…”

    Thus, a key strategy for XR was (and continues to be) “How to engage with younger people – youth mobilisation, talks in schools/colleges, figuring out how to engage on ‘youth’ social media.” [Source]

    We Mean Business is ecstatic over the climate strikes. As is Christiana Figueres.

    Figueres, an anthropologist, economist and analyst having studied at London School of Economics and Georgetown University presided over the negotiations that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement. For this achievement Ms. Figueres has been recognized as “forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy”. With almost four decades of experience in multilateral negotiations, high-level national and international policy, coupled with extensive involvement in the corporate/private sector, in 2016, TIME magazine named Figueres one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

    Today, Figueres serves as vice-chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy; member of the board of directors of ClimateWorks; World Bank Climate Leader; B Team leader, leader of Mission2020 (“exponential transformation” focusing on six sectors that will play a key role in municipal governments and “Green New Deals”); and board member of the World Resources Institute.

    Christiana Figueres (top right corner) podcast series: It’s Going To Be Tremendous

    When the oppressor and the oppressed find themselves cheering as one, this is indeed “tremendous” for the elites. Yet, as the designs of the ruling elites take hold, which is already well under way, we will soon recognize that the citizenry themselves were grossly manipulated to usher in a nightmare that would only further their own demise.

    [Further reading: So who exactly is Christiana Figueres?]

    Above: The We Mean Business newsletter, April 30, 2019

    April 30, 2019: “Welcome to the April edition of the We Mean Business coalition newsletter…Amid fresh waves of protests demanding accelerated climate action, more and more businesses and policy makers are stepping up and delivering the level of systemic change required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

    We Mean Business – “a coalition of organizations working with thousands of the world’s most influential businesses and investors.” The founding partners of We Mean Business are: Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) (full membership and associate members list), CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), Ceres, The B Team, The Climate Group, The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

    The Climate Group was incubated by Rockefeller Brothers Fund as an in-house project that later evolved into a free-standing institution.

    Together, these groups represent the most powerful – and ruthless – corporations on the planet, salivating to unleash trillions of dollars for the fourth industrial revolution. This, coupled with the financialization of nature, will create new markets, reboot global economic growth, and most importantly, rescue the global economic capitalist system that is destroying our biosphere.

    We Mean Business, February 20, 2019: “People are desperate for something to happen.” Twitter

    Christiana Figueres, B Team Leader [Source]. The B Team is a founder of We Mean Business

    Emotion To Mask Information: BioEnergy Carbon Capture Storage

    “The Institute has a unique and unrivalled membership including governments, global corporations, private industry and academia. Amongst its representation, are the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Japan and Australia, and multinationals such as Shell, ExxonMobil, Toshiba, Kawasaki and BHP.” — The Global CCS Institute, website

    In the May 3, 2019 Extinction Rebellion newsletter (#20), the subject line reads “Parliament meets our first demand!” In the body of text: “There’s plenty of more obvious good news, though – most prominently Parliament’s declaration of climate and environment emergency.” What XR does not share with the public is that the UK CCC climate legislation was a victory for the carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry. In similar fashion to the financialization of nature, carbon capture legislation and projects are making huge strides behind closed doors – with zero opposition.

    Global CCS Institute, May 2, 2019, Twitter:

    “The Institute welcomes @theCCCuk report, which recommends that the UK commits to cutting its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to net-zero by 2050 and highlights the crucial role #carboncapture and storage needs to play to achieve this goal.  #NetZeroUK #climateaction”

    A zero emissions industrial civilization is not possible. For the continuance of industrial civilization, CCS is a necessity.  This is the promise of unabated business as usual. The future of energy will be dominated by the burning of our remaining forests, coupled with CCS. Akin to the depleted uranium left for future generations to contend with, CCS will inject the increasing CO2 into the ravaged Earth. This is the gift to be left to Greta Thunberg and the youth she inspires.  A gift to span generations.

    More than this, “net zero” does not mean zero emissions. And it never did. Yet another inconvenient truth is that ‘The terms ‘net zero emissions’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ are interchangeable. This is the beauty of language and framing.

    “Carbon Neutral is a term used to describe the state of an entity (such as a company, service, product or event), where the carbon emissions caused by them have been balanced out by funding an equivalent amount of carbon savings elsewhere in the world.” Carbon neutrality is most often sought/achieved through carbon offsetting (purchasing offsets, trading and projects).

    Question by Richard Branson’s The Elders NGO to Farhana Yamin (2014): How is carbon neutrality different to ‘net zero emissions’?

    Answer by Yamin: “The terms ‘net zero emissions’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ are interchangeable.”

    Q: Global News, Dec 3, 2018: What is net-zero emissions?

    A: Catherine Abreau, executive director of the Climate Action Network: “In short, it means the amount of emissions being put into the atmosphere is equal to the amount being captured.”

    Militarism – as one of the key drivers of climate change, ecological devastation, and death of millions, remains a non-issue. The global “green new deals” guarantee further imperialism and an escalation in wars. These realities have been deliberately and successfully removed from the conversation. They are buried in the 20% circle with the purists.

    “The evidence makes it clear. CO2 needs to be removed from the atmosphere, known as carbon dioxide removal (CDR), using negative emissions technologies (NETs) to meet global warming targets. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is emerging as the best solution to decarbonise emission-intensive industries and sectors and enable negative emissions.” — March 14, 2019, Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Storage, The Global CCS Institute

     

    “[F]or BECCS technology to be truly effective in reducing CO2 emissions, massive tracts of arable land need to be cultivated and these are not always available, or easily utilised.” — The Global CCS Institute

    Emotion to Mask Information: The Financialization of Nature

     

    The next phase for the implementation of the financialization of nature commenced April 29, 2019 with the IPBES Global Assessment gathering (the IPCC for Biodiversity).

    The “first global biodiversity assessment in 14 years”, will be released on May 6, 2019, with the expected “summary for policymakers” section. We can expect a top “scientific endorsement” for a full package of financialization of nature policy tools, including global metrics for valuation, commodification and offset schemes.

    The five-day gathering was held last week at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, ending on May 4, 2019.

    There were no protests.

    Above: John Elkington: Co-founder of Volans, B Team expert (founded by Richard Branson, The B Team is a co-founder of We Mean Business), member of the WWF Council of Ambassadors, and Extinction Rebellion Business signatory (along with Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion)

    Together, these deals read like the biggest land grab since Britannia ruled the waves. This is the big deployment of measurement and financial instruments that the corporate sector, finance and ruling classes have developed. Every little bit of sequestration will be used to further satisfy natural capital ambitions under the guise of climate protection.

    The public face of this grotesque undertaking are the campaigns “New Deal For Nature” and “Voice For The Planet”. These are being led by WWF – co-founder of GCCA. The NGOs comprising the GCCA have played the lead role in orchestrating the global mobilizations for climate change over the past decade, in full servitude to their funders.

    The “Voice For the Planet” is especially egregious, as it is presented by the World Economic Forum “Global Shapers” youth group.

    The gross exploitation of youth for capital expansion rivals only the gross exploitation of Indigenous peoples. The appropriation and utilization of Indigenous imagery to promote market solutions is long documented.

    The world’s most powerful corporations and NGO partners appropriate Indigenous culture imagery for emotive branding as they unleash and uphold market “solutions” which further displace Indigenous peoples. They undermined the 2010 Indigenous led People’s Agreement and then buried it. They speak of Indigenous protection – while they actively promote “green” marketing schemes and “green new deals” that will further displace Indigenous peoples. That will further accelerate the ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

    Promotional illustrations/video for Green New Deal by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis for support of the New Green Deal

    +++

    They exploit the global youth to steal the natural world the beneath their feet.

    They exploit the love for nature – to further enslave nature.

    As GCCA co-founder WWF aids and abets Indigenous displacement, beatings and deaths, under the guise of conservation, GCCA partners are silent. This is the normalizing of a continued colonization repackaged under the guise of conservation and “green”.

    Industrial civilization – is the enemy of the natural world. We defend industrial civilization – or we defend the planet. This is the choice. The question is, which side are we on?

    And the answer to that question is perhaps the most terrifying thing of all.

    “No One Believed in Capitalist Schemes and Promises Any More” part of the new “Scenes from the Revolution” series. Acrylic on canvas, 30″x30″, Artist: Stephanie McMillan

     

     

    [Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.]

     

    Further resources:

    “Trees don’t grow on money – or why you don’t get to rebel against extinction”, by Tim Hayward

    Climate Capitalists, by Winter Oak Press

    “This Changes Nothing, The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality”, by Clive Spash

    Video: Selling Extinction, by Prolekult

    Between the Devil and the Green New Deal

    “New Power” – “The ability to harness the connected crowd to get what you want” – Jeremy Heimans, co-founder Purpose/Avaaz, B Team Expert

    Mar 27

    2019

    0

    Social Engineering

    Catastrophism, Disaster Management and Sustainable Submission

    libcom

    March 27, 2019

    Originally published in April, 2008

     

     

    In this book first published in 2008, Jaime Semprun and René Riesel examine the attempt by predominantly First World governments and NGOs to utilize the specter of an environmental apocalypse as an alibi to save “industrial civilization” by imposing a rationed form of “survival”, justified by a terroristic propaganda campaign based on fear, enforced by an expansion of the state’s coercive powers, and facilitated by the mass conformism and resignation that “industrial society” has induced in the population by creating an “anxiogenic environment” of “insecurity and generalized instability”; “[f]or the fears proclaimed by the experts … are in reality nothing but orders”.

    Catastrophism, Disaster Management and Sustainable Submission – René Riesel and Jaime Semprun

    “Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.”

    Étienne de la Boétie
    Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

    Preliminary Clarifications

    The final extinction to which we are being dragged by the perpetuation of industrial society has over the last few years become our officially recognized future. Whether considered from the point of view of energy shortages, climate disruption, demographics, refugees, the pollution or sterilization of the environment, or the artificialization of life, from all of these points of view simultaneously or from a few others too, since there is no shortage of categories of catastrophism, the reality of the ongoing disaster or, at least, of the risks and dangers posed by this process, is no longer only grudgingly admitted; today, it is constantly being reported in detail by government and media propaganda. As for us, who were so often accused of apocalyptic complacency due to the fact that we took these phenomena seriously, or were branded as “passé” for having noted the impossibility of choosing between the reality and the promise of industrial mass society, we hereby announce that from this very moment on we shall desist from adding anything to the hideous scenes of total ecological crisis that are being depicted from so many angles by so many certified experts, in so many reports, articles, television programs, films and books, whose data is diligently compiled by government or international agencies and the relevant NGOs. These eloquent warnings, when they come to the chapter about how to respond to such pressing dangers, generally address their appeals to “humanity” and exhort it to “radically modify its aspirations and its way of life” before it is too late. Note that these injunctions are actually addressed, if one wants to correctly translate their pathetic moralizing into a somewhat less ethereal language, to government leaders, international institutions, or even a hypothetical “world government” that the situation will require. After all, mass society (that is, those who have been integrally formed by it, whatever their illusions in this respect may be) never talks about the problems it claims to “manage” except in terms that make its perpetuation a sine qua non. Thus, while the collapse is underway, it can only try to postpone for as long as possible the dislocation of the ensemble of desperation and madness that this society has become; it can conceive of no other way to do this, whatever anyone may say, than by reinforcing all means of coercion and making individuals submit more completely to the collectivity. This is the real meaning of all those appeals to an abstract “humanity”, the old disguise of the social idol, even if those who voice them, taking advantage of their experience in the University, industry or management (which are all the same thing, of course), are motivated for the most part by less lofty ambitions and only dream of someday being able to get a leadership position in an ad hoc group; meanwhile, significant parts of the population are prepared to volunteer for the dirty work of decontamination or the protection of goods and people.

    We expect nothing from a putative “general will” (which is assumed to be good by those who invoke it, or at least susceptible to becoming good as soon as it is subjected to a severe enough reprimand to correct its illegitimate inclinations), any more than from a “collective consciousness of the universal interests of humanity” which at such a level has no way to form, not to speak of being put into practice. We therefore direct this text at individuals who are already opposed to the increasing collectivism of mass society and who have not ruled out associating with others in order to fight against this oversocialization. In this way we believe that we are being faithful, in our opinion more so than if we were to have ostensibly perpetuated its rhetoric or its conceptual framework, to the most authentic qualities of the social critique in the context of which we came of age forty years ago. Thus, regardless of its deficiencies, so abundantly evident in hindsight, or, if you prefer, in view of the disappearance of the movement which it sought to penetrate, the principle quality of that critique is the fact that it was the work of individuals without any specialty or authority backed by an ideology or by a socially recognized career (“specialized knowledge”, as they say now); individuals, therefore, who, having chosen a side, did not express themselves, for example, as representatives of a class that was preordained to carry out its revolution, but as individuals who sought the means of mastery over their lives and only expected others, likewise “without qualities”, to know how to act on their own account to re-appropriate control over the conditions of their existence.

    Since we only rely, for the purposes of deflecting this sinister course of affairs in a more felicitous direction, on what individuals will do of their own accord—and perhaps most importantly on what they will refuse to do—we shall make no predictions. Prophecies proclaimed in an oracular tone, which so often inflicted such harm on the old revolutionary critique, are less appropriate today than ever. We have often been criticized for allegedly having a predilection for the morbid, when all we were trying to do was to faithfully describe the changing world, which is a necessary prerequisite for any attempt to transform it. The few quotations that will be encountered in notes are for the purpose of demonstrating the continuity of our reflections, to further develop the ones that are still relevant now or to correct, where necessary, erroneous or imprecise formulations. This one, in any event, can be left as it stands: “We do not reject […] what exists and is breaking down in an increasingly noxious manner in the name of a future that we claim to represent more faithfully than its official owners. We think, to the contrary, that they represent the future perfectly, the entire future that can be extrapolated on the basis of the present degradation: it is, furthermore, the only future they represent and we can leave it to them in its entirety” (“Preliminary Discourse”, Encyclopédie des Nuisances, November 1984).

    I

    In just the last few years, the parallel between the environmental collapse that took place on Easter Island long ago, and the one that is currently unfolding on a planetary scale, has become a perfect summary of our historic situation. It would appear that the exhaustion of that island ecosystem was effectively due to the foolish pursuit of a particular kind of productivism: in that case it involved the construction of those sinister statues known the world over, symbols of a desolation their manufacture augured; just like the monumental esthetic of today’s megacities. Popularized by Jared Diamond, we shall soon become acquainted with this image of our planet spinning in infinite space, just as stripped of resources in its disaster as Easter Island was, lost in the middle of the Pacific, even in the propaganda of Électricité de France about the “energy sources of tomorrow”, among which, of course, nuclear has its place; which, redeemed by climate disruption, will be so useful for us in order to power, for example, the already indispensable desalination plants; or even to produce via hydrolysis the hydrogen that will so advantageously replace petroleum as the fuel of motorized alienation.

    So the mystery of Easter Island is solved; but there is no mystery at all concerning the future of world society, which can be made totally clear thanks to scientific knowledge: that is the real message being disseminated by the propaganda. The currently exhaustive knowledge of the catastrophe that overwhelmed a small group of primitive people utterly lacking any idea of an ecosystem to preserve, serves to guarantee the knowledge that we possess concerning our own ongoing catastrophe. All kinds of well informed experts hardly prone to paranoid hallucinations thus inform us with all the authority at their disposal that “the old millenarian fears” now have, “for the first time, a rational basis” (André Lebeau, L’Engrenage de la technique. Essai sur une menace planétaire, 2005).

    II

    Günther Anders’ theory of the “world-laboratory”, according to which the “laboratory” became co-extensive with the planet at the time of the first nuclear weapons tests, has been positively recuperated, without any rebellious or critical intention whatsoever: as a bland confirmation of our confinement in the experimental protocol of industrial society. There once was history, but now there is only integrated “resource” management. Duly modeled, with all the required parameters, the historical process is reduced to a calculable result; and all this, coincidentally enough, precisely at the moment when the experts possess an unequaled and constantly growing power of calculation. The fate of humanity is therefore scientifically sealed: all that remains is to optimize the preservation of its fragile terrestrial biotope. That has been the program of scientific ecology and it is becoming the program of all governments.

    III

    Musil observed that “the peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them”, gave rise, under the pretext of a love of truth, to “a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke”. And Adorno pointed out a little later, concerning “the activities of science, which is on the point of bringing the last remnants of the world, defenseless ruins, under its yoke”, in which intellectual energy has certainly been prodigiously displayed, but only in particular socially controlled directions: “The collective stupidity of the research technicians is not simply an absence or regression of intellectual faculties, but a proliferation of the thinking faculty itself, which consumes thought with its own strength. The masochistic malice of young intellectuals springs from the malignance of their disease”.

    In all the discourses of scientific catastrophism what clearly stands out is the same delight they all display when it comes to telling us about the unavoidable constraints that will from now on burden our survival. The technicians of the administration of things rush to announce with a triumphant air the new misfortune, the one that finally renders otiose all disputes concerning the government of men. State catastrophism is an openly avowed endless propaganda campaign in favor of planned survival; that is, for a version that is managed in a more authoritarian manner than the one that currently exists. Ultimately, after so much data is evaluated and so many deadlines are estimated, its experts have only one thing to say: that the immensity of what is at stake (of the “challenges”) and the urgency of the measures that must be adopted nullify the idea that the burden of social coercion could be lightened, so natural has it become.

    You can always count on the old leftists, the most strident of all when it comes to denigrating the revolutionary aspirations of forty years ago. On the pretext of having renounced their former beliefs, they are still marking time, with the same passion with which they once intoned the slogans of their former groupuscules, disseminating the new slogans of submission: “The era does not incite the invention of another providential utopia to make the world a better place. It only forces us to submit to the imperatives of life so that the planet can remain viable” (Jean-Paul Besset, Comment ne plus être progressiste … sans devenir réactionnaire, 2005). For the imperatives of life certainly deserve the sense of history to justify “the dictatorship of the most knowledgeable, or those who consider themselves to be the most knowledgeable”; and it surely shows a certain realism when one expects the ecological state of emergency to give rise to, rather than a revolution, the establishment of a finally effective bureaucratic collectivism.

    In these calls to submit to the “imperatives of life”, freedom is systematically slandered in the image of the remorseless consumer, whose incorrigible individualism, propelled by the hedonism of ’68, has, as everyone knows, ravaged the planet with complete impunity. To respond to the threat—particularly that of the “climate crisis”, which the promoters of catastrophism like to compare with “the shadow of fascism that spread over Europe during the thirties”—the only choice will be to either submit penitently to the new directives of ecological collectivism, or pure nihilism; anyone who refuses to take responsibility, to participate with enthusiasm in this citizen-based management of planetary waste, thus exhibits the profile of the potential terrorist.

    IV

    Since we have been so often accused of defeatism, and above all precisely of catastrophism, it is perhaps surprising that we are now, when the catastrophe is like a movie trailer that is projected again and again on every screen, with regard to the future, declaring our hostility to what could nonetheless seem to be an accession to consciousness, or at least incipient lucidity. But such surprise would be groundless, because it would imply a kind of double entry bookkeeping: with regard to both what we said in the past, and what the experts who have become such alarmists are saying. We are not talking about the same catastrophe,1 and the total catastrophe they are talking about is nothing but a fragment of the real catastrophe.

    V

    In order to prevent any misunderstanding, we must nonetheless make it clear that the critique of catastrophist representations by no means implies that we view them, as is sometimes done, as mere inventions without the least basis, spread by governments in order to assure submission to their orders, or, more perversely, by groups of experts who have an interest in advancing their careers by disproportionately dramatizing their “field of research”. Such a denunciation of catastrophism is not always the affair of people who defend one or another sector of industrial production that is particularly implicated, or even industry as a whole. Thus, we witness the case of curious “revolutionaries” who maintain that the ecological crisis concerning which we are now inundated with information is ultimately nothing but a spectacle, a decoy by which domination is trying to justify its state of emergency, its authoritarian consolidation, etc. We can clearly discern the motive for such an expedient skepticism: the desire to salvage a “pure” social critique, one that only wants to take reality into account insofar as it gives a new lease on life to the old schema of an anti-capitalist revolution condemned to appropriate, of course by “superseding it”, the existing industrial system. As for the “proof”, the syllogism goes as follows: given that media information is obviously a form of propaganda for the existing social organization and that said information now concedes a great deal of attention to various terrifying aspects of the “ecological crisis”, therefore this crisis is nothing but a fiction invented to disseminate the new slogans of submission. Other deniers, as will be recalled, applied the same logic to the extermination of the European Jews: given that the democratic ideology of capitalism obviously was only a false disguise of class domination and that said ideology made ample use during the postwar years of Nazi horrors in its propaganda, therefore the extermination camps and gas chambers can only be inventions and staged frame-ups. In that case it was also largely a matter of salvaging the canonical definition of capitalism by refusing to acknowledge its “aberrant” development (that is, a development that was not foreseen by their theory). And even before that, during the Spanish Civil War, there were intransigent extremists who blamed the revolutionaries for confronting fascism without first having abolished the State and wage labor.

    VI

    Just as we do not have any intention of adding anything to the catastrophist inventories of a “total ecological crisis”, we shall not undertake an assessment of the elements upon which they are based, nor shall we quibble regarding the details of one aspect or another of the ravages they catalog. For the essential points of this infernal catalog of threats has finally been authenticated by “the entire scientific community”, as documented by the States and international institutions; they are also promoted by the media, quite pleased at the prospect of exploiting such a fruitful “gold mine”, and consecrated by industrial investment in “sustainable development”. Their conclusions, that is, in everyday language, the choices that should be addressed or the nature of the challenges that will have to be faced, will from now on be debated without interruption. Since the admitted ambition of these catastrophist experts is to initiate such “debates”, it should not be surprising that they see this as involving something like “consciousness raising”. What is more surprising is that people who are not experts look at it the same way, and that these people sometimes venture to declare themselves enemies of industrial society.

    If we do not see it this way at all, but to the contrary, as an augmentation of false consciousness, this is not due to an excessive taste for paradox or some perverse spirit of contradiction. For it is something that we have been forced to admit, despite our convictions, and for some time now.

    The irreversible degradation of terrestrial life due to industrial development has been described and denounced for over fifty years. Those who explained the process, its cumulative effects and the predictable points of no return, thought that consciousness-raising would put an end to it by leading to some kind of change. For some, this change would take the form of reforms actively implemented by governments and their experts; for others, it was principally a matter of a transformation of our way of life, the precise nature of which remained generally somewhat vague; finally, there were even those who thought, more radically, that it was the entire existing social organization that had to be overthrown by a revolutionary transformation. Regardless of their differences concerning the means that should be employed, all shared the conviction that knowledge of the magnitude of the disaster and its unavoidable consequences would lead at least to a certain questioning of social conformism, or even to the formation of a radical critical consciousness. In short, they expected that the spread of such knowledge would not be a vain undertaking.

    Contrary to the implicit postulate of all “critiques of harmful phenomena” (and not only that offered by the Encyclopédie des Nuisances), according to which the deterioration of the conditions of life are a “factor of rebellion”, we are compelled to state that the increasingly more accurate knowledge of this deterioration was easily integrated into submission and above all became a component of adaptation to the new forms of survival in an environment of extremes. It is true that, in the so-called “emerging” countries, from the very moment they are engulfed by the industrial disaster, there are still mass uprisings of the peasant communities in defense of their way of life against the brutal pauperization that economic development is imposing on them, but such uprisings can dispense with the kind of knowledge and “ecological consciousness” with which the NGOs seek to enlighten them.

    When the official recognition of the ecological crisis (especially in the form of “global warming”) led to alleged “debates”, the latter were strictly delimited by the grossly progressivist representations and categories that even the least insipid catastrophist discourses uncritically pronounce. It never occurs to anyone to consider catastrophism for what it really is, to understand it based on what it is saying now about present reality, its causes and the deterioration that it seeks to anticipate.

    VII

    In all the representations disseminated by catastrophism, in the way they are elaborated as well as in the conclusions they inspire, we see above all an astonishing accumulation of denials of reality. The most obvious is the one that refers to the ongoing, and already consummated, disaster, which is hidden behind the image of the hypothetical catastrophe, when it is not calculated or extrapolated. In order to be able to understand the extent to which the real disaster differs from the worst scenarios announced by catastrophism, we shall attempt to define it in a few words, or at least specify one of its principle features: by utterly ruining all the material foundations, and not just the material ones, on which it is based, industrial society creates such conditions of insecurity and generalized instability, that only an increase of organization, that is, of submission to the social machinery, can still cause this collection of terrorizing uncertainties to pass for a habitable world. This will give you a good enough idea of the role actually played by catastrophism.

    “Another world” was, after all, “possible”: our world, concerning which one must ask just what it has in common, in any sense, with the more or less humanized world that preceded it and of which, once the latter became a clean slate, this world declared itself the heir because it vitrified the corpse of the old world.

    VIII

    To provide examples of precocious lucidity with regard to the process whose culmination we are now witnessing, the same sublime authors are always quoted, whom nobody otherwise ever actually reads; otherwise the claim that the disaster has already been practically consummated would not seem so extraordinary. We shall cite a relatively little known example, which proves in any case that defining modern history as a continuously advancing process of imprisonment within industrial society is no abstraction, a posteriori reconstruction or fantasy steeped in a noxious defeatism. Narrating his travels through Spain between 1916 and 1920, Dos Passos recounts the words spoken in a café by a “syndicalist” who had recently escaped from prison (it is to be understood that in the Spain of those years a syndicalist was something very different from what goes by that name today; and that Spain’s neutrality during the First World War proved to be favorable for an economic “take-off”): “We are buried under industrialism just like the rest of Europe. Our people, even our own comrades, are rapidly acquiring the bourgeois mentality. We are in danger of losing all our hard-fought gains…. If we had been able to seize the means of production when the system was young and weak, we would have developed it gradually for our benefit: we would have been able to make the machine a slave to man. Every day that passes renders this more difficult” (Rocinante vuelve al camino, 1923).

    IX

    In connection with its implicit postulate which holds that the accurate knowledge of the deterioration of the environment would necessarily be a “factor of rebellion”, the critique of harmful phenomena has tended to concede an exorbitant role to concealment, the lie and the secret: according to an old schema, if the masses knew, if the truth was not hidden from them, they would revolt. Modern history, however, has not been unproductive of examples of the contrary, which instead illustrate, in said masses, a rather consistent determination on their part not to rebel in spite of what they knew and even—from the extermination camps to Chernobyl—a refusal to understand despite the evidence; or at least to behave, in spite of all the evidence, as if they did not understand. Against the unilateral explanation by way of “secrecy”, we must recall that the “French nuclear power program” was approved and implemented publicly (unlike the “final solution”). Does anybody really believe that transparency, if it had been extended from the very start to the millirems and picocuries, to the calculation of the “maximum allowable exposures” and debates on the effects of “low doses” of radiation, would have prevented universal support for civilian nuclear energy, for “atoms for peace”? You did not have to have a PhD in nuclear physics to have had more than enough information to get a fair idea of what the development of the nuclear industry was and what it implied. The same goes for genetic engineering. On the other hand, since the principle mechanisms of the “ecological crisis” have been recognized, confirmations of its effects continue to accumulate, and new factors come to light, and “positive feedbacks” are defined; and all of this is explained and broadcast without being concealed from the public, in fact, quite the opposite is true. However, the apathy with regard to these “problems” is even greater today than it was thirty or forty years ago. Could anyone imagine a demonstration the size of the one at Malville (1977) taking place today against the ITER project, which is even more senseless than the Superphoenix? The cyberactivists would rather dress up like extras and perform as the backdrop to the summit meetings of heads of State. The explanation for this absence of any reaction, even as the winds blowing from Chernobyl were leaving their mark, is very simple: in the seventies, France was still feeling the impact of the effects of ’68. One must therefore conclude that rebellion, the taste for freedom, is a factor of knowledge, and not the reverse.

    It is of course true that concealment and the lie have been utilized a thousand times by industries and States; this is true now and it will be even more true in the future. There are all kinds of operations that must be conducted with the greatest discretion and which are best brought to light only as faits accomplis. But since the principle fait accompli is the very existence of industrial society, submission and its imperatives can calmly proceed to introduce increasingly more extensive zones of transparency within this society: the citizen perfectly inured to his work as consumer is eager for information in order to establish his balance sheet of “benefits and risks”, while, for their part, each and every polluter engages likewise in an attempt to escape blame by slandering the competition. Thus, there will always be raw material for “revelations” and “scandals”, as well as merchants prepared to process it: alongside the dealers in poisons, the dealers in journalistic exclusives, the indignation of the citizenry and sensationalist investigative reports.

    Under these circumstances, the essential aspects of the disastrous course we have embarked upon have never been secret at all. Everything necessary to understand where “development” is leading us has been at our disposal for decades: its magnificent results spread everywhere, at the speed of an oil slick or the construction of a “new city” next to the highway. The fetishism of quantitative knowledge has made us so stupid and so short sighted that anyone who says that a little esthetic sense—as long as it is not acquired in art school—is all it takes to pass an informed judgment on such matters is considered to be a dilettante. In reality, it was largely artists and writers who were the first to declare their revulsion at the “new world” that was being established. But rather than criticizing them and the sometimes ridiculous narrowness of their points of view—which was precisely what allowed them to concentrate on this aspect of the world—in order to discount them in advance by defining them as “reactionaries” (more recently, certain Young Turks of postmodern radicality—We shall mutate together in the chaos and ecstasy of barbarism!—have rehabilitated this polemic in the form of a parody, attacking a hypothetical “man of the Ancien Régime”), it would be more correct, and more dialectical, to accuse the adepts of social critique of being quacks who were blind to such symptoms, as if the ugliness of everything was nothing but an insignificant detail, and only offended the bourgeois esthete. Even the best representatives of social critique, obeying a kind of progressivist superego, almost always refrained, and did so for a very long time, from any critiques that could have exposed them to the charge of being “old fashioned”. The celebrated Situationist International did not expel the neo-urbanist Constant for his hideous plexiglass models, which are so highly esteemed today, of cities with buildings made of titanium and nylon, roof-top airports and suspended plazas from which one could enjoy “a splendid view of the traffic on the highways below” (I.S., No. 4, June 1960).

    Stendhal’s aphorism is still valid, but reversed: ugliness is the promise of unhappiness. And the decline of esthetic sensibilities goes hand in hand with that of the capacity for happiness. One must be quite hardened to misfortune, desensitized like a person who has been repeatedly bludgeoned by duties, in order to be able, for example, to contemplate without anguish, in an old photogravure book, photographs of the landscapes of the Mediterranean shoreline before that focal point of civilization was extinguished, back in the days when no one ever spoke about the environment. (It is of course true that life then was not “idyllic”, we shall happily concede this fact to imbeciles: it was better than idyllic, it was a life that was alive.) One begins to torture oneself into being convinced that the brutally imposed dynamism of production possesses its own beauty that one must learn to appreciate (now, that is estheticism!), and one rapidly descends to a condition of being absolutely incapable of perceiving what is terrifying about this brutality and this display of power. For there is no need for Geiger Counters or toxicological analyses in order to understand just how deadly the world of the commodity is: before suffering from it as a consumer, everyone must endure it as a worker. The catastrophe hypostatized and projected into the future has already taken place here, in everyone’s everyday existence, in the form of “details … which are anything but minute details”, in the words of Siegfried Kracauer, who also said: “We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is major events which most determine a person” (Die Angestellten. Aus dem neuesten Deutschland, 1929. English translation published under the title, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, Verso, 1998).

    X

    Faced with the spectacle offered by our contemporaries it is sometimes hard to avoid the impression that they have ended up loving their world. Obviously, this is not the case; they are only trying to adapt to it; they have to “get a grip” and are helped along in this by being prescribed tranquilizers, while they have the vague feeling that their body is falling apart, that their spirit is lost, that the passions they surrender to miscarry. However, since they can no longer love anything but this parasitic existence that is now proclaimed to be without any alternative, they cling to the idea that, since the society that subjects them to the tortures of permanent competition also supplies them with the psychotropic drugs that allow them to endure those tortures and even to enjoy them (in conformance with the model of the Stakhanovites of hedonist-careerist heroism that the spectacle holds up for emulation), it will also be capable of perfecting the compensations in exchange for which they have resigned themselves to depending on it for everything.

    This is why, well trained in the sophisms of resignation and the consolations of impotence, they can remain unperturbed amidst the cascade of sinister predictions in which they are inundated. One might think that the apparent urgency and significantly mandatory nature of their official sanction, as much as their content, would arouse at least some anxiety in even the most confident citizen. And this anxiety would have plenty of reasons to turn into panic when confronted by the inability to imagine any practical solution for the emergency, one that could lead one to have faith in the incongruous hodge-podge of principled petitions, moral injunctions and appeals to renounce certain techno-commercial conveniences (in exchange for other more sustainable ones) which describes practically everything that can be explicitly opposed to the perspective of a “final extinction” or, more correctly, of an end of the world that is rationally predicted this time. The fact that this is not the case, that catastrophism is being tranquilly disseminated throughout the social body, is denounced precisely for being a form of denialism by the most extreme catastrophists, those who supplement “scientific” prediction with the hope for social renewal, or even a “change in our way of life”. But they think that this denialism affects only the “threats” whose list they update on a daily basis, when it consists principally in representing as threats, which is just what they are doing, what is in fact a present reality: social practices and relations, managerial and organizational systems, harmful phenomena, toxic chemicals, pollution, etc., which have produced and continue to produce in the most tangible way deleterious effects on living beings, the environment and human society. This can be proven without resorting to statistical indices: it is enough to breathe the air of the cities or to watch a group of sports fans.

    In the light of the long journey that we have undoubtedly travelled along the roads of the end of the world, it will be conceded that it is impossible to take catastrophism and its threats seriously; it is just as impossible as judging the disaster of world society by what the latter says about it. The representation of the catastrophe is the offspring of established power: praise for its technical resources, for its scientific qualities, for its exhaustive knowledge of the ecosystem that now allows for the best possible regulation of the latter. But since it was precisely these intellectual and material means that served to build this world that is now threatened with destruction, this giant with feet of clay, and which are now being employed to make the diagnosis and prescribe the remedies, it does not seem too bold to suggest that both are equally dubious, and that both are condemned to failure.

    XI

    Any reflection on the state of the world and on the possibilities for intervening to change it, if it begins by recognizing that its point of departure is, hic et nunc, an already fully consummated disaster, encounters the need, and the difficulty, of discerning the depths of this disaster where it has produced its principle destruction: in the minds of men. For this task there is no accurate instrument of measurement, no dosimetrical files, and no statistics or indices to which reference can be made. This is probably why so few have ventured to explore this terrain. There is a lot of talk going around about an “anthropological” catastrophe, concerning which it has not been decided whether this catastrophe must be situated in the death throes of the last “traditional” societies or in the fate that awaits the poor people of modern societies, perhaps because there is still some hope that the former can be preserved and the latter integrated. However, it is thought that the last word on this subject has been pronounced when it is denounced as a product of “neoliberal” perversity, seemingly recently invented by the famous “economic globalization”: this makes it possible to avoid acknowledging the fact that, after so many years and so many “anti-imperialist” slogans, this aspect of the disaster has something to do with a logic of universalization that has been underway for a long time and which implies much more than a simple “westernization of the world”.2 The innumerable syncretisms—halfway between local idiocy and the universality of the market—that contribute to such a powerful acceleration of this machinery of standardization (the Indian, Chinese, etc., economic booms, which benefitted from regional particularities, that is, from the human material that previous forms of oppression have so effectively prepared) prove that there is no servitude, ancient or modern, that cannot be harmoniously combined—in that special meaning of the word harmony for which post-bureaucratic Russia provides such a magnificent example—with submission to total society; not to speak of the absolutely unprecedented monstrosities that are produced as soon as this modernity clashes with those regions of the world which have yet to experience their economic booms: one need only think of the spread of AIDS or the child-soldiers of Africa. Generally speaking, however, no one dares to cast a furtive glance at what is happening there with regard to the possibilities and desires of real men. Speaking plainly, although using the usual terminology: in the “North” as well as the “South”, the middle class, the “marginalized” and the “excluded” think and want the same things as their “elites” and the “owners of the world”.

    A hackneyed cliché, used in an attempt to provide a dramatic illustration of the “dead ends of development” and to call for repentance, asserts that in order to guarantee an average American lifestyle for the world population, we would have to have six or seven planets just like Earth. Obviously, the real disaster is, instead, the fact that this “lifestyle”—in reality a parasitic, shameful and degrading life whose stigmata, easily visible in those who bear them, receive their finishing touches with the facelift of cosmetic surgery—seems desirable to and is effectively desired by the immense majority of the world’s population. (This is why the vulgarity of the nouveau riche can be displayed with such complacency, without preserving any trace of bourgeois composure and discretion: they arouse envy—despite everything they still need bodyguards—but not the hatred or the contempt that were the prelude to the revolutions of the past.)

    Furthermore, certain advocates of the “curtailment of economic growth”, probably not entirely convinced of the feasibility of their recommendations, sometimes refer to the need for a “cultural revolution” and finally call for nothing less than a “decolonization of the imagination”! The vague and soothing nature of such pious wishes, concerning which nothing is said about how they are to be fulfilled, besides evincing an orientation towards state and neo-state recruitment that is certainly consubstantial with the anti-growth proclamations, appears to serve the purpose of repressing the intuition of the serious conflict that will inevitably be entailed by an attempt to destroy or even to seriously consider destroying the totalitarian society, that is, the technological macrosystem to which human society has been reduced.

    Ever since medical science has made available the machinery that ensures a kind of maintenance service for semi-corpses, and thus indefinitely prolongs their last days, it is often said, with respect to the decision that has to made regarding these living dead, the decision—which, whether you like it or not, you will have to make some day, whether for financial reasons or perhaps ethical reasons—to interrupt this semblance of survival; it is said, then, with great eloquence that they will have to be disconnected. The transposition to total society, where all of humanity finds itself subject to connections and intubations of all kinds, is in this case applied to the lone individual. But it also illustrates why it is nearly impossible for the inhabitants of this closed world to imagine being disconnected from the machinery of artificial life: if some of them, among the most over-equipped, enjoy, if the opportunity arises, as an experience, material scarcity, it takes the form of an vacation on an organized trekking expedition, with its cell phone and the certainty of the flight home in a jet. And one could truly ask oneself, and justifiably so, what ruinous condition this human species would come to if it were to be definitively deprived of the impulses transmitted by its machinery. So that the improvement of its connective apparatus is for many the most realistic solution: “The only escape for our children: to put on a suit implanted with all the biosensors that Moore’s law has been able to supply us with in order to feel, see and touch virtually, to swallow a good dose of euphoric drugs and to go at the end of each week to the country of their dreams with their favorite star, to a beach from before the sixth extinction, with their eyes fixed on their visor screens, without a past and without a future.” This is not an excerpt from some homage to the visionary genius of the Philip K. Dick of The Days of Perky Pat; it is the conclusion of a very well documented work (Jacques Blamont, Introduction au siècle des menaces, 2004) written by one of the members of the scientific establishment who, having come to the end of his professional career and settled into retirement, sings like a canary.

    XII

    The belief in techno-commercial rationality and its benefits has not collapsed under the blows of the revolutionary critique; it has only been obliged to moderate its pretensions with regard to the few “ecological” realities that it has no choice but to admit. Which is to say that most people still support it, along with the kind of happiness it promises; and that they will only accept, by degree or by force, self-discipline, minor constraints, etc., in order to preserve this survival concerning which they now know there is not an unlimited supply; this survival that will instead be rationed. The catastrophist representations that are so massively disseminated are certainly not conceived to induce a renunciation of such an enviable way of life, but to induce acceptance of the restrictions and regulations that will allow it, so it is hoped, to last forever.

    How can you believe in something like “peak oil”? When what you see is, for the most part, a shocking multitude of motors, machines and vehicles of every type, to speak in terms of necessary rationing, low emission cars, renewable energy thanks to the ethanol industry, etc., is to desert the side of the truth.

    What all these catastrophist representations have in common is the persistent ideal of technical rationality, the determinist model of objective knowledge; it consists, then, of conceding more reality to the representation that the instruments of mediation allow to be constructed than to the reality itself (what is “directly lived”); it consists, in fact, of granting the status of knowledge only to that which has passed through the filter of quantification; it consists in believing, now and forever, despite so many denials, in the efficiency promised by such knowledge. The determinist postulate of a future that is calculable by extrapolation is, in its current version of black futurology, just as illusory as it was in its rose-colored, euphoric version of the fifties (a version that makes us laugh today when we compare it with what has actually transpired). In the scenarios and models of the catastrophe, those parameters are privileged whose development and effects appear to be measurable, in order to save at least the idea of some possible action or adaptation. But in reality, the scientists know nothing, or at least nothing certain, about the processes they insist on modeling; neither about the depletion of petroleum reserves, nor about future demographic trends, or even about the timing and the precise effects of a process of climate change that is nonetheless not very far advanced. (What can be known in the last instance, and there are those who have already done so, is to quantify—in billions of dollars—the contribution of biodiversity to the world economy.) The same is true with respect to pollution and contamination of all kinds: the inventory of their combined and cumulative effects reflects, after a long delay, and only vaguely, the complex and terrible reality of the generalized poisoning, which is actually impossible to apprehend with techno-scientific means.3

    If we say that the reality of the disaster is incomprehensible by using the very means that contributed to bringing it about, we do not thereby mean to say, as will be understood, that this reality is any less overwhelming than the way it has been depicted for us by those same means.

    XIII

    The two principle traits of the progressivist mentality, in its heyday, were the faith in the capacity of science and technology to rationally dominate the totality of the conditions of life (natural and social) and the conviction that in order for them to do so, individuals had to submit to a collective discipline capable of ensuring the smooth functioning of the social machine, so that security would be assured for all. We see that these traits, far from having been erased or attenuated, are even more marked in that shamefaced progressivism comprised by catastrophism. On the one hand, the latter expresses its firm belief in the possibility of acquiring a precise knowledge of all the “parameters” of the “environmental problems” and therefore in the possibility of controlling them and “solving them”; on the other hand, it accepts as obvious that this can only be achieved by means of coercive measures imposed on individuals.

    No one, however, can ignore the fact that, in the image and semblance of the always-lost war waged by the deranged public health establishment against microbes, every step forward in securitization has brought in its wake new dangers, previously unknown risks and never before suspected plagues; whether with regard to urbanism, where the “criminogenic” spaces spread along with increasing control, segregation and surveillance; or in industrial livestock farming, the sterilized environment of hospitals and the laboratories of catering, where, from Legionnaire’s Disease to SARS, new epidemic illnesses prosper. The list is too long to recount here. But none of this discourages the progressivist. It would seem, to the contrary, that each new failure of securitization gives him reassurance in his belief in a general tendency “towards improvement”. As a result it is completely useless to attempt to reason with him, as the naïve souls do who enumerate for him the “ravages of progress”.

    The way that certain texts of a critical inspiration have defined modern technology as “totalitarian” has at times seemed unfair. Modern technology could indeed be totalitarian, if one takes the prophecies of propaganda literally, which announce a perfect control, a definitively securitized world; in short, the perfected police utopia. (In this sense, for example, the accusation has been leveled against biometric control that, as it develops, it will render “all critique and all dissent” “impossible”; it is, however, the other way around: the resignation of all thought is what allows for and requires the establishment of this control as well as all the other kinds.) In reality, totalitarianism (in a precise historical sense) has never itself attained the police perfection to which it aspired and which its propaganda always presented as being on the verge of realization, after another round of executions (where it came closest to this achievement, in Maoist China, it was only at the price of the chaos with which we are all familiar). It is in precisely this aspect, however, that an essential trait of totalitarianism as perpetual motion resides; that of projecting a perfectly chimerical goal: the way it removes its delirious assertions to control from the present, by pretending that only the future will reveal their merits, guarantees that as long as it maintains its most organized apparatus in full force, the Party, its members will be incapable of being influenced by either experience or argument. The militant who has accepted this first assassination attempt against common sense will accept anything: no fiasco, no refutation of the ideology by reality will ever disturb him. His identification with the movement and with absolute conformism seems to have extirpated his faculty of being affected by his most direct experience. In this sense, in any case, it can be said that modern science and technology are, as organizations, like a totalitarian mass movement; and not only (as Theodore Kaczynski pointed out) because the individuals who participate in them or identify with them obtain a sense of power, but also because once they have accepted this profoundly insane goal which is the total control over the conditions of life, once all common sense has been abdicated in this way, no disaster will be big enough to make these fanatical progressivists see the light. To the contrary, they will perceive such a disaster as one more reason to reinforce the technological system, to enhance securitization, to enforce denominations of origin for food products, etc. This is how one can become a catastrophist without ceasing to be a progressivist.

    XIV

    As a form of false consciousness spontaneously born from the soil of mass society—that is, from the “anxiogenic environment” that has been created everywhere—catastrophism thus expresses first of all the fears and sad hopes of all who expect their salvation from a securitization based on the reinforcement of coercive measures. It is also perceived, however, sometimes clearly enough, as an expectation of a completely different kind: the aspiration for a break with the routine, for a catastrophe that would really be a culmination that would clear the air, casting down, as if by magic, the walls of the social prison. The taste for this latent catastrophe could be satisfied by means of the consumption of the numerous products of the entertainment industry that were manufactured for just such a purpose; for the bulk of the spectators, this discharge of anxiety-pleasure will be enough.

    Outside the market, however, some propose other fictions, more theoretical or political, that “make them dream” of the downfall of a world. These speculations concerning the redemptive catastrophe have their more sophisticated versions in the ideologues of “curtailing economic growth” who speak of a “pedagogy of catastrophes”. But the most intrepid Marxists also want to believe that the “self-destruction of capitalism” will leave a “vacuum” that will constitute the tabula rasa upon which we might at last feast at the banquet of life. They remain in the orbit of denial, since they do not recognize the unified ruin of the world and its inhabitants except in order to immediately get rid of it by grace of “self-destruction” and to deceive themselves with this fantastic fairy tale: a humanity that emerges intact from its collapse into industrial modernity, more ready than ever to revive its innate love of freedom, without getting at all entangled—maybe because it uses Wi-Fi?—in the cables of its connectedness.

    There are, however, harder theories, truly extremist in their idea of salvation through catastrophe, in which not only is the catastrophe given the job of producing the “objective conditions” of emancipation, but also its “subjective conditions”: the kind of human material that such scenarios require to personify a revolutionary subject. The whole range of fictions of this kind can be found in the Vaneigem of 1967: “When a water pipe burst in Pavlov’s laboratory, not one of the dogs that survived the flood retained the slightest trace of his long conditioning. Could the tidal wave of great social upheavals have less effect on men than a burst water pipe on dogs?” The only difference, certainly noteworthy, is that the “miracles” that were then attributed to the “battle for freedom” are now expected from a catastrophic collapse, that is, from harsh necessity. The proponents of such theories believe that even more deteriorated conditions of survival will lead, in the most devastated, ravaged and polluted zones, to such an absolute degree of poverty and to such misfortunes that what will then happen, on a universal scale, at first chaotically and sporadically, and later, with the multiplication of those enclaves where the insurrection will become a matter of life and death, is that an “authentic catharsis” will take place, thanks to which humanity will be renewed and will accede to a new consciousness, one that will be simultaneously social, ecological, living and unitary. (This is not a caricature, but a faithful summary of the last chapter of Michel Bounan’s book, La folle histoire du monde, 2006.) Others, who proclaim that they are more interested in the organization and the “experimentation of the masses” already see the decomposition of all social forms as an “opportunity”: just like Lenin, for whom the factory trained the army of the proletarians, for these strategists who are betting on the reconstitution of unconditional solidarities of the clan type, the modern “imperial” chaos is training the gangs, fundamental cells of their imaginary party, that will combine into “communes” in order to join the insurrection (The Coming Insurrection, 2007). These catastrophilic fantasies all agree in their declared gratification with the disappearance of all forms of collective discussion and debate by means of which the old revolutionary movement had tried to organize itself: the one makes fun of the workers councils, the others make fun of the general assemblies.

    To get a more precise idea of what we can expect from a collapse of the material conditions for survival, as well as a return of the clan-forms of solidarity, it would seem advisable to take a look at the testing ground of the Middle East, a kind of infernal incubator where each agent takes turns sowing his monstrous seeds on a foundation of runaway ecological and human disaster.

    XV

    We might easily, after the manner of a certain semi-critical sociology, relate the various modalities of catastrophism with hierarchically distinct social milieus, and point out how each one of them develops its corresponding false consciousness, idealizing as a “solution” the professional or voluntary managerial activity each performs in disaster management. Such myopic perspicacity, however, leaves out the most salient point: the fact that there is almost no one who refuses to endorse the authentic proscription of freedom that the diverse catastrophist scenarios unanimously declare, regardless of their differences in other respects. For even where they are not directly interested in regimentation and they speak of emancipation, it is only in order to postulate that this emancipation will be imposed as a necessity, not as something desired in itself and consciously pursued.

    Such is the power of industrial enclosure, and the scale of the unified deterioration of thought that it has achieved, that those who still have the courage to fight against being completely swept away by the current and proclaim their willingness to resist, seldom escape, however much they condemn progress or technoscience, the need to justify their denunciations—or even their hope for a saving catastrophe—with the data supplied by the bureaucratic experts and with the determinist representations that such data allow them to uphold. All of this is undertaken to disguise the laws of History—the very same ones that are going to ineluctably lead us from the reign of necessity to that of freedom—as scientific proofs; according to which, for example, Carnot’s theorem will put an end to industrial society, once the exhaustion of fossil fuels requires it—or at least its managers—to embark upon a convivial curtailment of economic growth and the enjoyment of life.

    Our epoch, which is otherwise so obsessed with the resources we are all so familiar with, and with the hypothesis of their exhaustion, has never bothered to make forecasts about those other resources, which are inexhaustible by their very nature, to which freedom can provide access: beginning with the freedom to think contrary to the ruling representations. The trite objection will be raised that no one escapes the prevailing conditions, that we are not any different, etc. And, of course, who can boast that they are doing anything but adapting to the new conditions, “getting by” in the face of such overwhelming material realities, even if one does not become so unconscious as to feel satisfied with it except for this or that detail? Instead, no one is forced to adapt intellectually, that is, to accept the fact that they have to “think” using the categories and the terms imposed by managed life.

    XVI

    At the beginning of his Reflections on History, Burckhardt observed that knowledge of the future, if it were possible (which, in his opinion, it was not), would imply “a confusion of all desire and endeavor. For desire and endeavor can only unfold freely when they live and act ‘blindly’, that is, for their own sakes and in obedience to inward impulses”. Our epoch, when it refers to itself, believes it can read the future in its computer models, on whose screens the calculus of probabilities, if not the laws of thermodynamics, traces its Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. But it will probably see it, to return to Burckhardt’s intuition, as the effect rather than the cause of the torpor of historical energy, of the loss of the taste for freedom and for autonomous intervention; or at least it will have to consider that where humanity has lost a certain vital courage, where it has lost the impulse of acting directly on its fate without certitudes or guarantees, it is no longer fascinated and shocked by the projections of official catastrophism.

    XVII

    To once again parody a celebrated incipit, we may say that the whole life of world industrial society now presents itself as an immense accumulation of catastrophes. The success of the propaganda advocating authoritarian measures (“Tomorrow it will be too late”, etc.) is based on the fact that the catastrophist experts present themselves as simple interpreters of forces that can be predicted. But the technique of infallible prediction is not the only one that was recuperated from the old revolutionary prophecy. This scientific knowledge of the future effectively serves to introduce the old rhetorical device of the crossroads, according to which “humanity” is confronted by a choice that is thus posed on the model of “socialism or barbarism”: the salvation of industrial civilization or collapse into barbarous chaos.4

    The trick in this propaganda consists in simultaneously asserting that the future is the object of a conscious choice, one that humanity can supposedly make collectively, as one man, with full knowledge once instructed by the experts, and that this future is ruled by an implacable determinism that reduces this choice to that of life or death; that is, living in accordance with the orders of the organizers of planetary salvation or dying because we have not abided by their warnings. A choice like this is therefore reduced to an imposition, which resolves the old problem of knowing whether men love servitude, since from now on they will be compelled to desire it. As Latouche so poignantly asserts, with a simplicity that might not be intentional: “Ultimately, who rebels against the protection of the planet, the preservation of the environment, the conservation of fauna and flora? Who supports climate change or the destruction of the ozone layer?” (Le pari de la décroissance, 2006). According to Arendt, the problem of totalitarian domination was “to fabricate something that did not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species’” (The Origins of Totalitarianism). On a devastated Earth, which will be effectively transformed, by means of the technical artificiality of the survival that will still be possible, into something like a “spaceship”, this program will cease to be a chimera of domination so as to become instead a demand on the part of the dominated.

    “Enlightened false consciousness”, as it was called by a certain author who came to such a bad end that there is no point mentioning his name, was obliged to submit daily to such a quantity of overwhelming information with regard to the dangers that threaten industrial society and the life of those who are imprisoned within it—all of us—that it accepted with obvious relief the hypothetical scenarios supplied by the experts and disseminated by the media. For, no matter how bleak they may be, they at least allow for the organization, in accordance with a coherent plan, of a disaster which it would otherwise refuse to understand. We have long known that, in the countries that are called, by default, democratic, since they are not totalitarian, the information that is so excessively abundant, and now the “society of knowledge” of the internet, due to the need created by explanation, is an essential aspect of propaganda. Therefore, in the current mobilization to “save the planet”, the catastrophist representations transmit, together with their explanatory schemas, positive slogans: they dictate the new rules of behavior and disseminate correct thinking. For the fears proclaimed by the experts (“If we do not radically change our lifestyle”, etc.) are in reality nothing but orders.

    This has allowed the manufacture of consensus to concede the title of “ecological consciousness raising” resulting from its own operations, to the docile readiness to repeat its slogans and submit to its requirements and prescriptions. It celebrates the birth of the reeducated consumer, the eco-citizen, etc. And just as in the epoch when it had to inculcate the rules of behavior required by abundant consumption, nowadays, when it is necessary to get people to adopt the rules of rationed and rationalized survival, children are the first targets of the propaganda, those who must scold their parents like the television commercials have taught them (“Without your help, the antibiotics will no longer work”). One hesitates, of course, to continue to speak of children when speaking of these beings who are so precociously well versed in all technological operations and disciplines, and who are now so uniformly informed regarding biodiversity and its degradation, the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, etc. They zealously memorize the testimony of the campaigns to inculcate a sense of responsibility (“The whole is what counts”) and vigilantly prosecute the correction of their progenitors. Aware of the fact that the latter, and adults in general, will have to render accounts concerning what they have done to “preserve the planet that they will receive as their inheritance”, they do not refrain from demanding that starting this very moment they must respect the slogans. Trained in this fashion as a militant citizenry, they will denounce to the green police the non-compliant whom they detect among their friends and family. And this is hardly an extrapolation in view of a very official pamphlet that, several years ago, instructed the youth with recommendations like these: “I separate my garbage, I report on any water leaks…. I take note of any restrictions issued by the town council in case of drought and transmit them to my parents…. I will not let my parents smoke in dry brushland….”

    XVIII

    However closely they may be interwoven, we shall distinguish, for the purposes of a quick summary, the principle catastrophist representations of the future that are spread by propaganda and we shall see how they lead us not only “to swallow the poison of servitude without finding it bitter”, but also to find it delicious and redemptive.

    We shall rapidly pass over the apocalyptic school, which speculates on a possible annihilation of the human species whose model remains the nuclear holocaust. A salaried philosopher could of course have an interest in perpetuating a tedious commentary—a pathetic rehash of the most obsolete Anders—on the need to “think in the shadow of the future catastrophe” (Jean-Pierre Dupuy), but it is primarily due to its nature as a diffuse representation of a horrifying end, nourished by diverse fictions produced by the culture industry, that this apocalypticism influences the most common form of resignation with the carpe diem of the reprieved death sentence, thus reinforcing acceptance with the feeling of an unexpected new lease on life.

    The school of global warming is obviously the one that counts the largest number of supporters, since it is the one that benefits from the most constant media support. What is effectively tranquilizing about this “inconvenient truth” is the fact that it attributes the multiple dangers and hazards to which we are now exposed to a single factor (the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases). Although the exact course of the warming is still quite uncertain both with regard to its tempo and its effects—while we are all nonetheless educated enough to be capable of speaking about permafrost, albedo and even clathrates and the “oceanic conveyor belt”—the scenario of climate change allows for the promotion of a whole range of “solutions” that simultaneously rely on the State, industry and the individual discipline of the conscious and responsible consumer: fiscal, industrial-ecological (including nuclear), planetary geo-engineering, imposed but also voluntary rationing measures, and even those modern indulgences purchased by those who fly in passenger jets who pay for “emissions credits”.

    The school of resource depletion, which is often associated with the warming school because of its appeal to rationing and its advocacy of alternative energy, speculates above all on the depletion of reserves of fossil fuels, but also on the depletion of reserves of water, arable land, biodiversity, etc. This multiple catastrophe is debated and subjected to the most precise measurements every day because knowledge is accumulating as fast as its object is disappearing. Here, too, in order to impose “a change of course”, a “more austere society”, etc., resort is had to the State, industry, good citizenship, etc.

    The school of pollution is represented by a wide array of experts and counter-experts who form the great battalion of the “watchdogs”. Strictly specialized by virtue of their positions, they record in detail, according to scientific criteria, the already observable or foreseeable effects of the innumerable forms of pollution (agro-industrial processes, hormone disruptors, genetic damage, nanotechnologies, electromagnetic waves), without forgetting the “classics” (chemical and nuclear), and are usually careful not to trespass beyond the limits of their specialties, except to denounce a “public health threat”. Such precaution with regard to critique has not been enough, however, to prevent the spread of a feeling, based on experience but fully documented thanks to them, of the practically definitive contamination of the environment. And although the protean reality of a pathogenic environment is inconsistent with the hopes for salvation from technology and with the fervent appeals of the citizen’s movement for managerial vigilance, it is nonetheless very advantageous for the multiplication of hygienic and sanitary obsessions, in the service of which everyone has to work constantly in order to preserve a health that is almost entirely beyond our reach. This false, privatized “narcissistic” consciousness of very real dangers now supports a vast sector of commodity production (from “organic” foods to nutraceuticals). It is only by understanding the fact that this obsessive form of taking responsibility allows one to remain blind to the disaster is it possible to explain, for example, the fact that the city council of Naples, the capital of a region of Italy that is world-renowned for its varied toxic waste dumps managed by the Camorra, could decree in November 2007 the prohibition of smoking in its public parks without provoking universal ridicule (this measure, to the contrary, seemed so wise that the city of Verona in turn adopted a similar one on the following day).

    Finally, the school of chaos emphasizes social and “geopolitical” dislocation. Unlike the most common catastrophist representations, this school does not conceal the fact that the “great ecological crises” will not take place in a climate of universal peace and the relaxation of international tensions. It is not satisfied, unlike the “geostrategic” reflections of certain media journalists and analysts, with compiling the inventory of the zones of breakdown of the stillborn “new world order”, and is at the same time aware of the dispersal of the means of destruction, the end of the State monopoly on violence and the various forms of emerging “brutalization”. It has even provided evidence of a process of dehumanization that is not without its connections to the universal spread of the new technological environment. Completely incapable of proposing anything that would even resemble a solution, since it does not call for “correct worldwide governance”, it obviously does not generate much of an echo.

    XIX

    It might seem excessive, or even absurd, to assimilate the dominant catastrophist representations to a propaganda campaign. Just consider, however, the discrete way the nuclear industry and its notable contribution to the quality of our environment have been blurred together—in preindustrial epochs we would have said, “dovetailed”5 —in the catalogue of threats elaborated by the catastrophist experts. The so-called civilian nuclear industry, concerning which we know how easily it can cease to be civilian in order to return to its original military vocation, is sometimes mentioned by the heralds of the school of chaos with reference to the risks of “dissemination” and “proliferation” it poses in the matter of armaments; less frequently, it is mentioned by other observers due to the proven release of contaminants after various “incidents”. Most often, however, it acquires a much more honorable place in the arsenal of technological remediations, thanks to which it is alleged that we will overcome the looming difficulties in order to reach the Promised Land of a sustainable economy. Some wax enthusiastic over fusion, a true panacea that will usher us into that “hydrogen economy” that the illuminati of revolution via industrial progress have even come to see as the sole prerequisite still lacking for the realization of communism. Others, more prudently, point out that it will take at least a century, in the best case scenario, to master this marvelous energy source; and that, in the meantime, the only solution for reducing greenhouse gases is to immediately start building new nuclear power plants, with the so-called “Third Generation Reactors”, which might be a little less safe than their successors, of the “Fourth Generation”, but which are already available. These propagandists who characterize actually existing nuclear energy as clean energy, or almost clean, are among the most active boosters of the scenario of climate crisis. And for this job they do not need to be officially accredited by the Atomic Energy Commission or discretely in the pay of the nuclear industry: it is enough for them to have a realistic view of the period of “energy transition” through which industrial society must pass. Besides the ecologist-cyberneticist Lovelock, there are many catastrophist experts who emphasize the particularly irresponsible character of continuing the debates over the virtues and inconveniences of nuclear energy, when China is building one coal fired power plant each week and is planning to add several tens of millions of cars to its roads each year. Other experts, more numerous yet, are content not to broach this controversial topic of the indispensable resort to nuclear energy, which might somehow mar for them the panorama of a future sustainable society. As for the rest, none of them bother to point out the derisory contribution of nuclear energy to total energy production, whether with regard to today’s situation—France included—or in the event of an eventual intensive resurgence of nuclear energy. The same kind of silence is applied to the question of the availability over the next century and a half of coal reserves and the conditions that might facilitate overcoming the objections (cost, “capture” of CO2) against the utilization of so-called coal to liquid technologies and that would allow for the production of fuel by the liquifaction of coal.

    XX

    After having dared to point out that “the accurate diagnoses of Lester Brown, Nicolas Hulot, Jean-Marie Pelt, Hubert Reeves and many others, which inevitably conclude with an appeal to ‘humanity’, are nothing but watered down sentimentalities”, the journalist Hervé Kempf recently invited us to “understand that the ecological crisis and the social crisis are only two faces of the same disaster” (How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth, 2007). In a way, what he is proposing is therefore the elaboration of a social critique of harmful phenomena. We shall pass over the hardly novel nature of this theoretico-journalistic scoop. However old this news is, his intention is laudable and meritorious, coming from someone who is such a beginner on this terrain. One is therefore curious to discover just what this “environmental specialist” of the newspaper Le Monde means when, during the course of his “radical political analysis of the current relations of domination” he feels compelled to address “ecological anxiety” without delay: “Within the next ten years we will have changed course.” Because despite everything Kempf is an “optimist”: “solutions are appearing”, “from Seattle and the protest against the World Trade Organization”; “the social movement has awakened” and the oligarchy could be divided (and one sector of it “might be clearly shifting towards support for civil liberties and the common good”); “journalism could awaken”; and the “prostrate” left could be renewed by “uniting the causes of inequality and ecology”. As we shall see, there is no chance that social critique and the analysis of the relations of domination will lead to nothing more radical than the denunciation of the villainies of the predatory oligarchy and the greed of the “mega-rich”.

    Although none of this is any more convincing or enlightening than an anthology of the best of Le Monde Diplomatique of the last twenty years, Kempf is interesting, and even instructive, for what he does not say. Since his critical enterprise omits, in an exemplary fashion, any analysis or even any mention of the most important and certainly the most visible aspect of the “current relations of domination”, the one that a 20th century devastated by the “transitional totalitarianisms”, in Mumford’s formulation, has bequeathed to our century: the bureaucracy. In this way, as always happens in the inoffensive substitutes for critique that seek to question economic development without ever taking the State’s responsibility into account, the best contributions of a century of social critique are, innocently and quite conveniently, condemned to oblivion.

    Without going all the way back to the anarchist polemic against Marxist statism, it is in the organized workers movement, that is, in the political and social framework of the workers struggles, where the formation of a modern bureaucracy was first observed and analyzed, one that was different from the old bureaucracy of State officials. Michels and, before him, Machajski (Le Socialisme des intellectuels) quickly identified some features of what would soon, in Russia, become a new class by way of the totalitarian seizure of power. In parallel with this development, in the countries where the relations of production were still dominated by private capitalists, the rationalized organization of mass production and consumption (the need to coordinate the labor that an increasingly more comprehensive division of labor was smashing into tiny pieces) was gradually giving birth to a bureaucracy of managers; at the same time, the Great Depression compelled the United States to regiment private capitalism, establish regulatory economic mechanisms, undertake vast public works projects to absorb unemployment, etc., the inception of a system of planning which become known as the New Deal. This tendency towards the bureaucratization of the world, within which the renovation of totalitarian methods of rule by fascism and Hitlerism seemed to be foreshadowed, was theorized by Rizzi, and later by Burnham, in an apparently objective form but in actuality in the form of apologetics (in the name of the “sense of history”), which, applied to such repugnant realities, was original enough at the time. After the Second World War and the defeat of the fascist form of totalitarianism, a defeat brought on by extremely irrational strategic choices (the Stalinist form, although more irrational in terms of economic management, owed its membership on the winning team to the fact that it had managed to survive for several decades), the development of a managerial bureaucracy was continued, together with that of a “scientific research” establishment that had undergone an equal degree of bureaucratization during the war and was afterwards put directly at the service of industry: the organization and division of labor in the factory itself were extended everywhere with commodity abundance. But it was primarily in the State bureaucracies (first in nation-states, and then, perhaps even more so, in the supranational organizations) where the influence of the planners, managers and other technocrats, who are considered to be, and who view themselves as, the embodiment of the superior rationality of capitalism understood as a “system”, flourished. The cybernetic ideology—from which, we should recall, the notion of an ecosystem is derived—corresponds to this ascendant phase of the bureaucracy of experts and expresses their anti-historical illusions, just like structuralism, which is its offshoot in the “human sciences”.

    During the late sixties, and above all during the seventies, in response to the critique that so many people, and particularly the youth, directed against the production and consumption of commodities, a program of bureaucratic-ecological stabilization of the economy began to take shape among the planners, who were forced to admit that we were now immersed in an “out of control race” to catastrophe. During that epoch a Marxist could have correctly expressed ironic disdain for this new manifestation of false consciousness on the part of a handful of experts who, after having deceived themselves regarding the real scope of their activity when they were planning an infinitely organized growth, were now content to reverse that ideological representation by now expressing their belief that they could impose a program of “zero growth” on capitalism that is incompatible with its very essence; our Marxist could have also pointed out, and with no less accuracy, that “the ecologists refrain from specifying exactly what social and political forces they think they can rely on in order to carry out such a revolution in the machinery of the capitalist State” (Pierre Souyri, La dynamique du capitalisme au XXè siècle, 1983). This same author would go on to add some extremely sensible observations, which bring us to the heart of our argument: “The alarmist campaigns regarding the planet’s resources and the pollution of nature by industry do not actually portend any intention on the part of capitalist circles of putting an end to growth. Rather the contrary. Capitalism is now up to its neck in a phase in which it will be forced to mobilize a whole range of new technologies of energy production, mineral extraction, recycling of wastes, etc., and to transform a part of the natural elements essential for life into commodities. All of this heralds a period of intensified technological research and innovation that will require enormous investments. Scientific data and ecological consciousness are used and manipulated in order to construct the terrorist myths whose purpose is to cause the efforts and sacrifices that will be indispensable for the new cycle of capitalist accumulation that it is proclaiming to be accepted as absolute imperatives.” (Ibid.). The perspective thus outlined—in a posthumously published work that was written before 1979, when the author died—had the merit of conceiving the possibility that, without going beyond the limits of the capitalist mode of production, the contradiction between the latter’s objective dynamic and an authoritarian regulation of the economy in the name of ecological rationality could be overcome.

    In consideration of the fact that a permanent regime of “crisis management” has now been established, one might ask if it is the bureaucracy of experts that has risen to power or whether it is power that, amidst the collapse of industrial society, descended to within the reach of the experts. This would most likely be a mistaken way to understand the issue. For who assumes the responsibility for disaster management, or is prepared to do so? They have never ceased to ply the waters of power, and to cross them. It would be tiresome to provide a detailed description of these networks, since it is not our purpose to write a sociology of organizations. In the final accounting, no one who is even slightly aware of what planet he lives on will be surprised by the connivances, the cooptations and the exchanges of favors that ensure the recruitment of new staff members for the teams and bureaus. It was here, among the designers and agents of the development programs that were implemented in the post-war era, where a minority of dissident insiders—some would even declare themselves “opponents of growth”—would begin to “raise the alarm” without losing their foothold, or their influence with their friends, within the institutions, the seminars, and think tanks, which pragmatically incorporate the advocates of an ecological critique purged of any connection to social critique. A “win-win” scenario: the so-called dissidents provide the technoscientific arguments that the institutional mainstream elements are eager to hear so they can speak the same language; the latter, joined by the mainstream environmentalists who are even more eager to find someone who will listen to them in the big international organizations, embody that representation of “civil society” that is so indispensable for all institutional lobbying strategies.

    In any case, contrary to the views of the devotees of a melodramatic and conspiratorial fiction-critique, this changing of the guard in “the coopted cast that manages domination” is carried out in the full light of day and orchestrated with a great deal of fanfare, “displayed on the stage of the spectacle”; and the least that can be said about it is that it is not perceived like the bolt of lightning, “which is only seen when it strikes”. It will soon be forty years since it was first announced, through the mouths of wise oracles, that time is running out, that we have no more than ten years to change course, and to confront this radically new, “magnificent but terrible” challenge, etc.6 (In 1992, 1,600 scientists, among whom were 102 Nobel Prize winners, issued a “warning to humanity” in which they claimed that “we only have one or two decades before we lose any chance to escape the threats that menace us and the perspectives for the future of humanity will be drastically curtailed”.) One could laugh at a state of emergency that was declared with such a distant deadline, but the explanation for it is quite simple. All that is required is that, once a certain threshold has been crossed in the violations of natural equilibriums, the so-called “negative externalities”, the capitalist management should learn to recognize their positive potential and should come to see them, in the form of the only “consciousness raising” that can be activated by the catastrophist experts, as a perpetually profitable gold mine which in order for it to exploit, it only needed to convince customers and shareholders.

    XXI

    In response to those beautiful souls who were offended when an American manager hastened to define the tsunami of December 2004 as a “marvelous opportunity” (“which has been very profitable for us”), it is relevant to point out that by saying this he was only expressing, although in a rather inopportune manner, a reality of capitalism (see Naomi Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, The Nation, May 2, 2005). It does, however, demonstrate a certain ingenuousness to trace the beginnings of this “disaster capitalism”—a formula which is itself a variety of pleonasm—to the devastation of Central America by Hurricane Mitch (October 1998) and to give first place under this rubric to the foreign operations of the U.S. government and the World Bank, planned to simultaneously prepare the next military interventions and the reconstruction of countries slated for destruction. (In this connection, however, we have seen how New Orleans, devastated by a hurricane, was delivered over to the same firms as Iraq and Afghanistan, so as to be rebuilt prettier and cleaner, more quaint and less black.) The unleashing of innumerable calamities, with their unforeseen combinations and brutal escalations, is universally inaugurating a fabulous opportunity for construction projects for the planetary trusts of capitalism.

    Regarding global warming it is occasionally said, in order to provide the indispensable note of optimism, that grapes will soon be cultivated in Great Britain, wheat will be grown in Siberia, or that with the melting of the Arctic ice new sea routes will open up and make it possible to search for the oil that surely lies beneath the Polar ocean. But these corroborative reports only very partially explain what kind of Northwest Passage is being opened up by the debacle of nature for the benefit of economic rationality, especially when it will be necessary to manufacture everything from scratch, an entire artificial life, with its increasingly more expensive, that is, profitable, technological surrogates and palliatives. On the model of the “Terraforming” projects conceived for creating more or less survivable conditions on those planets accessible to space travel, so-called “geo-engineering” techniques have been proposed, since it is the Earth itself which has now become a hostile and uninhabitable planet and thus the location for the first experiments in territorial management on the scale of the solar system. NASA and the major American research labs have thus discovered the opportunity to promote an “environmental version” of the anti-ballistic missile defense program known as “Star Wars”. (Edward Teller, the same man who engineered the downfall of Oppenheimer and directed the development of the Hydrogen Bomb, and later inspired the “Strategic Defense Initiative”, was one of the first people—in 1997—to publically advocate geo-engineering.)

    These grandiose projects, which the most reasonable climatologists reject due to the “unpredictable effects” they could set in motion, call to mind the ravings of a mad scientist. There are also other more prosaic, although no less representative examples of the “marvelous opportunities” offered by an Earth that has now become unlivable. Industrial ecology now has plans for sustainable cities or eco-cities “with zero emissions”, waste recycling, solar energy and all the electronic conveniences. These new colonial cities will be built—in an architectural style that will of course be respectful of local traditions—first of all in China or Abu Dhabi, model cities for the technological imperialism that has earned a certificate of environmental quality. But the research departments of the engineering firms have set to work everywhere in expectation of the new rules that ecological governance will dictate. In his euphoria after “la Grenelle de l’environnement” (“The Grenelle Environment Round Table”) which sought to establish market quotas, a certain businessman naturally adopted the martial airs of the Kolkhoz director proclaiming the goals of the Five Year Plan and the slogans of the Great Leap Forward of the sustainable economy: “national mobilization … ecological emergency … defense of our planet … our children’s future”; without forgetting to emphasize that “the political will for the renovation and the construction of ecological houses, neighborhoods and even cities represents for industry a formidable growth opportunity” (Gérard Mestrallet, president of Suez, “L’environnement, catalyseur d’innovation et de croissance”, Le Monde, December 21, 2007). To put the finishing touches to this picture and also in the interests of parity, we shall also quote a directive on sustainable development issued by the group Veolia-Environnement that is no less enthusiastic: “‘Green’ construction and renovation are in progress, it is an immense, abundant, thrilling and very promising market, so much so that the new El Dorado of today is clean tech construction, that is, clean technologies with reference to the imperious need to reduce the carbon footprint of all the world’s buildings, in conformance with the established road map” (Geneviève Ferone, 2030, le krach écologique, 2008).

    XXII

    The role that has always been played by wars over the course of modern history to accelerate the fusion of State and economy is well known. And it is precisely a war that must be waged in order to conquer a nature that has been ravaged by the previous operations of economic rationality and replace it with a integrally produced world that is better-adapted to alienated life.7 One of the American propagandists for the ecological-bureaucratic reconversion of capitalism (less hallucinatory than Rifkin with his end of work and his hydrogen economy), Lester Brown, has explicitly called for a “wartime mobilization” and has proposed the model of the reconversion of the productive apparatus that was carried out during the Second World War; he did, however, highlight the difference that, since this time it is a question of “saving a threatened planet and a civilization in danger”, the “economic reconstruction” must not be temporary but permanent. Recalling “the year 1942, which witnessed the greatest expansion of industrial production in the country’s history” (an American poet who had served as a soldier in the European theatre summarized it this way: “For every artillery shell that Krupp fires, General Motors returns four”), he is thrilled by the memory of such a total mobilization, with its rationing and its authoritarian organization: “That mobilization of resources showed in a matter of months that a country and, in fact, the world could rebuild its economy quickly if it was only convinced of the need to do so”. Excited by the example of the vast massacre provided by the industry of that era, he expressed in the style of public relations what the previous era had expressed through indoctrination: “We have the technology, the economic instruments and the financial resources necessary […] to steer our society away from its declining course and to put it on a path that would allow it to continue to pursue economic progress” (Plan B 2.0: Rescuing A Planet Under Stress And A Civilization In Trouble, 2006).

    This almost perfect prototype of the ecolocrat, a catastrophist expert for almost forty years, is certainly not the only person who “has a plan” (others speak, for example, of a “Climate Marshall Plan”), but his has the incontestable merit of being formulated in the American style, with a straightforward brutality and an absolutely clear conscience, without the rhetorical precautions and the circumlocutions that entangle the left wing statists and the members of the more or less anti-growth civil society movement here in Europe. Written according to the standards of bureaucratic management (graphs, tables, statistics and calculations of financing various projects; we can even acquaint ourselves with the cost, “due to the loss of potential income”, of the “diminution of the Intellectual Coefficient linked to prenatal mercury toxicity”: 8.7 billion dollars), it does not attempt to conceal the fact that it is calling for a concentration of power: “What the world needs now is not more oil, but more government”. This “road map” for an ecologically correct disaster capitalism has not, however, offended anybody, so advanced now is the education of the public recommended by this same road map (“The need for media governance also ushers in the parallel need for political governance”). So Lester Brown can be quoted favorably, by Latouche for instance, at the same time that he brags about being aware of a hypothetical threat of “ecofascism”.

    An almost universal consensus has been established, then, in just a few years, among the defenders of “our civilization” regarding the need for reinforced governance to confront the total ecological crisis; and it is necessary to deduce from this fact that the “neoliberal” detour is coming to an end, during which capitalism restored the profitability of its investments by drastically reducing not only its wage bill but also its “extraordinary state expenditures”. It has at times been attempted to precisely date this change of course, placing it in retrospect in the year 2005, since after that date the signs of an ideological aggiornamento (modernization) in the sphere of power began to multiply; in particular, the “Stern Report” of October 2006: “This document removes ecology from the political arena, occupied for thirty years by the NGOs and the anti-liberal [sic] leftist parties, and definitively inserts it into the heart of the development of contemporary capitalism” (Jean-Michel Valentin, Écologie et Gouvernance mondiale, 2007). But in reality the open collaboration of environmentalist groups, NGOs, corporations and government officials goes back in certain sectors to the nineties.

    The attempt at an ecological-bureaucratic reorganization that is currently underway is by no means a cold-blooded “rationalization” procedure. It is taking place in the midst of the catastrophe, since in the heat of the burning world the various bureaucracies responsible for the specialized management of each sector of mass society are approaching their fusion point. The already initiated process can only be accelerated by the financial crisis that is putting an end to a speculative cycle, but which is, in itself, more a manifestation of the fact that the approach of the ecological deadlines announced so often will dissuade capitalism (much more effectively than any grandiloquent denunciations of “financial madness”) from giving itself too much credit. (In this way, the collapse of real estate speculation in the United States is also an effect of the end of cheap oil.) The project of capitalism’s ecological adjustment arrives in time for the reorganization of production, especially that of the vast sector of “public works”—which includes “civil engineering”—the heavy industry of a “new industrial revolution” whose utopian model is Dubai, “which produces its water through desalination, regulates its temperature, filters the sun’s rays, controls all the parameters of life in order to realize the ideal oasis; where time, climate and the world tarry in a perfect present” (Hervé Juvin, Produire le monde. Pour une croissance écologique, 2008). In this post-historical utopia, the dream of an “escape from nature” (“The supreme achievement is in our grasp: that nothing will ever happen, anywhere, ever, that we have not decided ourselves”, ibid.), survival, organized and regulated as a whole by disaster management, will be sold to us at retail prices in the production of commodities.

    XXIII

    The bureaucracy of experts that emerged with the development of planning, manufactures for all the managers of domination a common language and the representations thanks to which the latter understand and justify their own activity. With its diagnoses and forecasts, formulated in the neo-language of rational calculation, it cultivates the illusion of a technoscientific control of “problems”. Defending the program of an integrally managed survival is its job. It is this bureaucracy that regularly issues alerts and warnings, counting on the emergency it proclaims to enable it to be more directly associated in the management of domination. In its campaign for the establishment of a state of emergency, it has never lacked the support of all the left wing statists and other citizenists, and will henceforth hardly encounter any resistance from the managers of the economy, since most of them view the perspective of an endless disaster as a permanent resurgence of production through the quest for “ecocompatibility”. One thing that is now certain is that when the time comes for the application of the old Keynesian recipe of public works programs, summarized in the formula “digging holes in order to fill them up again”, there will be enough “holes” already dug, devastation to repair, wastes to recycle, pollution to clean up, etc. (“We will have to repair what has never been repaired, manage what no one has ever before had to manage”, ibid.).

    The training of this new “labor corps” is already on a war footing. Just as the New Deal obtained the support of practically all the leftist intellectuals and militants in the United States, the new ecological course of bureaucratic capitalism is mobilizing on a world scale all the “kind-hearted apparatchiks” of environmental and humanitarian just causes. The latter are young, specialists, enthusiastic, competent and ambitious: trained in battle, in the NGOs and other associations, in leadership and organization, they feel capable of “driving things forward”. Convinced that they embody the higher interests of humanity, and of having history on their side, they are equipped with an absolutely clear conscience and, as if that were not enough, the knowledge that the laws are on their side: the laws that are already on the books and all those which they hope to promulgate. For they want more laws and regulations, and this is where they agree with the rest of the progressives, “anti-liberals” and militants of the State party, for whom “social critique” consists, in the style of Bourdieu, in calling upon the “ruled” to “defend the State” against its “neoliberal dismantling”.

    Nothing is more indicative of the way the catastrophism of the experts is something different from a “becoming conscious” of the real disaster of alienated life than the way it strives to make every aspect of life and each detail of personal behavior into an object of state control, subject to rules, regulations and prohibitions. Every expert converted to catastrophism knows he is a depository of a fragment of the true faith, of the impersonal rationality that is the essential ideal of the State. When he directs his accusations and recommendations at political leaders, the expert is aware of the fact that he represents the higher interests of collective management, the imperatives of the survival of the mass society. (He will speak of the “political will” that is required when referring to this aspect of the issue.) The management of the experts is Statist not only because of its habits, because only a reinforced State can apply its solutions: it is structurally Statist, in all its methods, its intellectual categories and its “membership criteria”. These “Jesuits of the State” have their idealism (their “spiritualism”, as Marx called it), the conviction that they are working for the salvation of the planet; but this idealism often reverts in everyday practice to a vulgar materialism, in the eyes of which there is not one single spontaneous manifestation of life that cannot be reduced to the status of a passive object susceptible to being administered: in order to impose the program of bureaucratic management (“producing nature”) it is necessary to combat and eliminate everything that exists independently, without the aid of technology, and which therefore must be irrational (as were, until just yesterday, the critiques of industrial society that proclaimed its foreseeable disaster).

    The cult of impersonal scientific objectivity, of knowledge without a subject, is the religion of the bureaucracy. And among its favorite devotions is, for obvious reasons, statistics, the State science par excellence, which effectively attained this status in the militarist and absolutist Prussia of the 18th century, which was also the first society, as Mumford observed, to apply on a grand scale to education the uniformity and impersonalism of the modern public school system. Just as at Los Alamos the laboratory was transformed into a prison, what the world-laboratory is now announcing, as the experts represent it, is a barracks ecology. The fetishism of data and the puerile respect for anything that can be presented in the form of an equation has nothing to do with the fear of error, but rather with the fear of the truth, which the non-expert can formulate without any need for numbers. This is why the non-expert must be educated and informed so that he can submit in advance to the ecological-scientific authority that will dictate to him the new rules, which are so necessary for the smooth functioning of the social machine. In the voices of those who passionately repeat the statistics that are disseminated by catastrophist propaganda, it is not revolt that resounds, but submission in advance to the states of emergency, the acceptance of the disciplinary regimes to come, and support for the bureaucratic power that pretends, through the use of coercive measures, to assure collective survival.

    XXIV

    If we were to subscribe to the formula of Nougé (“Intelligence has to have teeth, because it attacks problems”), we would be tempted to concede only a very mediocre intelligence to Latouche, the leading thinker of the “anti-growth” movement, that ideology that presumes to be a radical critique of economic development and its “sustainable” products. He provides evidence of a distinctly professorial talent, which verges sometimes on genius, of being able to make a mess of everything he touches and to transform any critical truth, by translating it into the neo-language of the anti-growth tendency, into an insipid and sanctimonious vulgarity. We must not, however, assume that he deserves all the credit for a suave and edifying dullness that is the result of a certain kind of politics: the one the left-wing experts use to attempt to mobilize their troops by recruiting all those who want to believe that we can “escape from development” (that is, from capitalism) by remaining within it. We shall therefore refrain from judging the writings of Latouche as personal works (in this respect, the genius of language is more cruel than any judgment could ever be: his prose faithfully reflects the content of his works). That such a stew, in which all the clichés of eco-compatible citizenism float, could be presented as the bearer of any kind of subversion—even if it were only of a “cognitive” sort—itself gives you an idea of the reigning conformism. On the other hand, with regard to our present topic, Latouche is perfect: he is a master when it comes to flattering the good conscience and nourishing the illusions of the subordinate personnel who still cling to “the social fabric” and who will soon be hired for jobs in the disaster management industry. This is what he calls, at the beginning of his most recent breviary (Petit traité de la décroissance sereine, 2007), supplying “a useful working tool for any executive director of any group or any committed politician, particularly at the local or regional level”.

    It should be recalled that the program of those who want to “curtail economic growth”, as it is conceived by Latouche as well as both the decaying citizenism and ecologism in search of a way to rebuild, is reminiscent of the one sketched in 1995 by the American Rifkin in his book The End of Work. Even then he intended to “announce the transition to a post-commodity and post-wage labor society” by way of the development of what Rifkin calls the “third sector” (which roughly translates into French as the “associative movement” or “social economy”); and by the encouragement towards that end of a “mass social movement” “capable of putting pressure on both the private sector and the public authorities” “to achieve the transfer of a part of the enormous benefits of the new information economy towards the creation of social capital and the reconstruction of civil society”. But the anti-growth movement is instead counting on the harsh necessities of the ecological and energy crises, on the basis of which they propose to found so many other virtues, in order to put “pressure” on industrial corporations and the States. Meanwhile, the militants of the anti-growth movement must practice what they preach and show how pedagogically austere they are, in the vanguard of a kind of rationing baptized as “voluntary simplicity”.

    Precisely because the advocates of curtailing economic growth present themselves as the bearers of the most resolute will to “escape from development”, it is among them that one can best measure both the depth of the guilt they have to feel (inverted in self-flagellation and commandments to virtue) and their lasting imprisonment in the categories of “scientific” argumentation. The thermodynamic fatum fortunately exempts us from having to choose which road to take: it is the “law of entropy” which constitutes the only alternative to the road of curtailing economic growth. With this Egg of Columbus, laid by their “great economist” Georgescu-Roegen, the supporters of the anti-growth movement are confident they have the irrefutable argument that cannot but convince at least businessmen and leaders of good faith. If not, the consequences, which are predictable and calculable, will compel them to make the inevitable decisions (as Cochet says, whose book Pétrole apocalypse often quotes Latouche: “At one hundred dollars a barrel for petroleum, civilization will have to change”).

    Defining society as thermoindustrial likewise permits the discounting of everything now taking place in regard to coercion and recruitment, and everything that does not contribute, or only makes a small contribution, to the exhaustion of energy resources. All such factors are happily passed over, especially when one is an accomplice in public education or other forums. Attributing all our problems to the “thermoindustrial” nature of this society is therefore easy enough, as well as simplistic, for the purpose of satisfying the critical appetite of arriviste fools and cretins, the last remnants of ecologism and the “associative movement”, which comprise the grassroots of the anti-growth movement. The care taken not to offend these grassroots with overly crude truths, by flattering them with a smooth transition to “the joyous rapture of shared austerity” and the “paradise of a convivial curtailment of economic growth”, leads Latouche, who is not after all an idiot, to such voluntary poverty, words of wisdom on the electoral circuit or papal encyclical as the following: “It is becoming increasingly more likely that, beyond a certain point, the growth of GDP translates into a reduction of well-being”; or even, after having dared to impute the desolation of the world to the “market system”: “All of this confirms the doubts we have expressed about the incompatibility of capitalism with a society of the curtailment of economic growth” (Le pari de la décroissance, 2006).

    Although most advocates of the curtailment of economic growth feel that it is premature or inadvisable to formally create an “Anti-Growth Party” and that it is preferable at this point to attempt to “influence debate”, it is nonetheless the case that there is a kind of party waiting in the wings, with its informal hierarchy, its rank and file militants, its intellectuals and experts, its leaders and its smooth-talking politicians. All of this works marvelously in the virtuous conventions of a citizenism which it is careful not to upset with any sort of critical excess: above all, it is crucial not to offend anyone at Le Monde diplomatique, to be nice to the left and parliamentarism (“The radical rejection of representative ‘democracy’ has something excessive about it”, ibid.) and, more generally, to progressivism, by not giving the impression of indulging in nostalgia, technophobia, or anything that might be considered to be reactionary. The “transition” to the “escape from development” must be conducted vaguely enough so as not to impede the scams and con games that are ritually denounced as “professional politics”: “The compromises that may have to be made regarding the means of transition must not lose sight of the goals with respect to which we must not make any compromises” (Petit traité de la décroissance sereine, 2007). Latouche recites these goals in a style worthy of the schools for Party cadres: “We must recall these eight objectives that are capable of unleashing a virtuous circle of serene, convivial and sustainable curtailment of economic growth: reevaluate, reconceptualize, restructure, redistribute, relocate, reduce, reuse, and recycle” (ibid.). With regard to what is to be reused and recycled, Latouche is the first to set an example, repeating again and again from one book to another the same pious wishes, statistics, indices, references, examples and quotations. Going around and around in his “virtuous circle”, he nonetheless tries to innovate and has thus enriched his catalog with two more Rs (reconceptualize and relocate) since the era when the glorious proposal to “undo development, rebuild the world” was issued under the aegis of UNESCO (Survivre au développement : De la décolonisation de l’imaginaire économique à la construction d’une société alternative, 2004). What is not so easy to understand is the absence of a ninth commandment, to reappropriate, having cleansed the word of any revolutionary taint (the old “Expropriate the expropriators!”); thus decontaminated, it nonetheless fits like a glove on the expedited enterprise of recuperation to which the anti-growth movement has devoted itself in order to supply itself in the blink of an eye with a gallery of presentable precedents (where we now find “an anarchist tradition within Marxism, rejuvenated by the Frankfurt School, councilism and situationism”, Petit traité de la décroissance sereine).

    According to Latouche, the “gamble of curtailing economic growth […] consists in thinking that the attraction of the convivial utopia combined with the pressure of the requirements for change is capable of creating a situation that is favorable for a ‘decolonization of the imagination’ and arousing sufficient ‘virtuous behaviors’ that are conducive to a reasonable solution: ecological democracy” (Le pari de la décroissance). But, with respect to the “requirements for change”, we see clearly just what the advocates of the curtailment of economic growth are good for—to take over, with their calls for self-discipline, from the propaganda for rationing, so that, for example, industrial agriculture will not run out of water for irrigation—but on the other hand it is harder to understand just what attraction could be exercised by a “utopia” whose “semi-electoral” program claims to make room for happiness and pleasure by proposing to “stimulate the ‘production’ of relational goods”. Certainly, no one would precipitously put their faith in lyrical outbursts about shrinking futures;8 but there is hardly any danger that such a thing would happen when these beggars appear with their funereal faces and begin to declaim, with the enthusiasm of a socio-cultural emcee, their promises of the “joy of life” and convivial serenity. The unfortunate attempts to inject a little fantasy into their austerity are as inspired as those of Besset, who sings of the beauty of surrealism as a prefect at the inauguration of the René Char library in a certain provincial city. Happiness seems to be such a new idea to these people, and the idea that they have of it is so similar to the joys promised by a macrobiotic banquet, that there is no other remedy than to suppose that they will die of boredom or that some casseur de pub9 has called their attention to this fact. Now they are basically devoted, particularly in their “theoretical” journal Entropy, to proving that they are big fans of art and poetry. So now we are seeing this in posters and flyers (“On Sunday afternoon at the offices of the groups of Moulins-sur-Allier, from 3:30 to 5:00, the club of local poets and the association of Breton sculptors will present an entertaining performance, followed by an ecological snack”).

    The ideology of the curtailment of economic growth was born in the milieu of experts, among whom, in the name of realism, they would like to include in a “bio-economic” accounting those “real costs to society” incurred by the destruction of nature. It preserves the indelible stamp of its origins: despite all the usual talk about the “re-enchantment of the world”, its aspiration, in the style of any technocrat of the Lester Brown type, remains that of “internalizing the costs in order to achieve an improved management of the biosphere”. It preaches voluntary rationing to the rank and file, to set a good example, but demands from government measures from the highest levels: redistribution of the tax burden (“ecotaxes”), subsidies, regulations. If on occasion it ventures to profess anticapitalism—in total contradiction of proposals such as that of a “universal basic income”, for example—it never dares to profess antistatism. Its vaguely libertarian tint only serves to placate part of the public, and to provide a touch of very consensual and “anti-totalitarian” leftism. In this manner the unreal alternative between “ecofascism” and “ecodemocracy” serves primarily to avoid any mention of the bureaucratic reorganization currently in progress, in which one serenely participates by agitating in favor of consensual regimentation, hyper-socialization and conflict resolution. The fear that is expressed in this childish dream of a “transition” without struggle is much more a fear of some disorders in which freedom and the truth could be embodied and cease to be academic questions, rather than a fear of the catastrophe the threat of which it brandishes in order to make their leaders repent. Which is why, quite logically, this curtailment of the growth of consciousness ends up finding what it was looking for in the virtual world, where one can, without feeling guilty, travel “while having only a limited impact on the environment” (Entropy, No. 3, Fall 2007); as long as, however, one forgets that in 2007, according to a recent study, “the information technology sector, worldwide, has made just as much of a contribution to climate change as air transport” (Le Monde, April 13-14, 2008).

    XXV

    However much Latouche manages to refrain from excess in carrying out his “iconoclastic duty”, the movement to curtail economic growth also has its revisionists, who invite it to dare to appear for what it really is and to once and for all beware of that subversive attire that is so unbecoming to it: “An initial proposal for consolidating the idea of a peaceful curtailment of economic growth would be to clearly and unequivocally renounce revolution as a goal. To damage, destroy or overthrow the industrial world seems to me to be not only a dangerous folly, but also an open appeal to violence, just like the project of overthrowing the social classes was in Marxist theory” (Alexandre Genko, “La décroissance, une utopie sans danger?”, Entropy, No. 4, Spring 2008). Even Besset himself, despite the fact that he is the spokesman for Hulot and a supporter of “la Grenelle de l’environnement” as “a first step in a project of transition towards an ecological, social and cultural transformation of society”, finds it difficult to follow this up with a more moderate caveat: “Considering the magnitude and the complexity of the task, long-winded proposals or doctrinaire catechisms will not exactly be of much help…. However much we accompany the curtailment of economic growth with sympathetic adjectives—convivial, equitable, happy—the thing will not be pleasant … the transition will be terrible, and the break with the past will be painful” (ibid.). These bitter warnings make it clear enough in their own way why the recommendations of the movement for the curtailment of economic growth by no means constitute a program whose content will provide an opportunity for debate, and concerning what kind of compulsory musical score will determine how they play their minuet (decrescendo cantabile), by way of an swan song for an epoch of industrial society: a “new art of consumption” among the ruins of commodity abundance.10

    The image of what was not so long ago referred to as the “free world”, has actually hardly varied at all since Yalta: that democratic conformism, armored in its certainties, its commodities and its enviable technologies, was certainly somewhat shaken for a moment by the revolutionary unrest of 1968, but the “fall of the wall” seemed to assure it of a kind of eternal life (some then spoke expeditiously of the “end of history”) and it thought it could congratulate itself that its poor relatives would want to have their turn, and as soon as possible, at access to such delights. Later, however, it had to begin to experience unease at the number of cousins it had, especially the most distant ones, and to ask itself if they were really related, when they recklessly set about increasing their “carbon footprints”. What disturbs the whole world is no longer only the classic scenario of overpopulation, where, despite the increase in productivity, food supplies would prove to be insufficient for meeting the needs of a growing population, but an unprecedented situation in which, with a stable population, the threat is an excess of modern people living modern lives: “If the Chinese or the Indians have to live like us….” Faced with this “catastrophic reality”, the technological panaceas with which we still want to deceive ourselves (nuclear fusion, human transgenesis, colonization of the oceans, space exodus to other planets) hardly bear the aspect of radiant utopias, except for a few enlightened ones, but instead look like palliatives that will in any event come too late. It will therefore be necessary to continue to preach about “hard sacrifices” and “painful breaks” to populations that are going to have to “decline by several stages in the scale of food, mobility, production and lifestyle” (Besset); and, with respect to the new industrial powers, there will have to be a return to protectionism in the name of the fight against “ecological dumping”, in the hope that as a result there would be a more conscious appraisal of the “environmental costs” and the measures that should be adopted to deal with them (a reorientation that is currently embodied in China by Pan Yue).

    The “urgent requirements” that the realism of the experts takes pleasure in repeatedly proclaiming are exclusively those that impose the preservation and planet-wide generalization of a condemned industrial way of life. The fact that they can only be applied within a system of needs whose dismantling would allow us to confront, amidst the insane complications of the managed society and its technological orthopedics, the vital problems that only liberty can address and solve, and the fact that this rediscovery of material obligations confronted without intermediaries could be, in itself, in the activity itself, a form of emancipation, are ideas that none of those people who speak to us of the immense dangers created by our entry into the anthropocene era dare to openly and clearly expound. When someone ventures to timidly suggest something of this kind—that depriving ourselves of the comforts of industrial life might not be such a painful sacrifice, but rather the contrary, an immense relief and a sensation of finally returning to life—he is generally pressured to retract his statements, and he is aware of the fact that he would otherwise be tarred with the brush of antidemocratic terrorism, or even of totalitarianism or ecofascism, if he were to follow his argument to its logical conclusions; this explains the proliferation of works in which certain pertinent observations are diluted in an ocean of reassuring considerations. Almost nobody conceives of the advocacy of their ideas not as a banal strategy to win over public opinion on the model of lobbying but rather as a commitment within a historical conflict, in which one strikes without seeking any other ally than an “offensive and defensive pact with the truth”, as a Hungarian intellectual said in 1956. For this reason one cannot but feel terrified at the unity of points of view, the absence of any independent thought and of any really dissident voice. If we take modern history into account, even if it were only the last century, it is dizzying to note, on the one hand, the variety and the audacity of so many positions, hypotheses and contradictory opinions, of whatever kind, and, on the other hand, what has now replaced all of that. In response to the brainwashing to which so many still living protagonists have voluntarily delivered themselves, in the best cases they will sometimes respond reasonably to these historical works, but they will feel that they belong to paleontology or the natural sciences, so far removed are these authors from imagining that the elements they bring to light could have any critical use today.

    The taste for respectable conformism, and the hatred and the panic-stricken fear of history, except as a univocal signpost, have reached such a point that compared to what today passes for a member of the civil society movement—with his moderate and polite indignations, his priestly hypocrisy, his cowardice in the face of any direct conflict—any left wing intellectual of the fifties or sixties would almost seem like an indomitable libertarian brimming over with combativity, imagination and humor. Seeing such mental standardization, one could very well believe that one is seeing the result of the activities of a thought police. In reality, support for consensus is the spontaneous product of the feeling of powerlessness, of the anxiety that it implies and the need to seek the protection of the organized collectivity via a complete abandonment to the total society. To cast any doubt whatsoever upon the certainties democratically sanctioned by general consent—the benefits of internet culture or those of high tech medicine—could cause one to be suspected of a deviation with respect to received opinion, it could even lead to independent thought or even a judgment passed against alienated life as a whole. And who can be allowed to do such a thing? All of this cannot but bring to mind the motto of the militant’s submission, perinde ac cadaver, as it was formulated by Trotsky: “The Party is always right”. But whereas in the totalitarian bureaucratic societies coercion was perceived as such by the masses, and it was a terrible privilege of militants and apparatchiks to have to believe in the fiction that a choice was possible—for or against the socialist fatherland, the working class, the Party—that is, to have to constantly put to the test an orthodoxy that was never really secure, that privilege has been democratized today, although with less dramatic effect: no opposition to the good of society, or to what society declares to be necessary. It is a civic duty to be healthy, to be culturally up-to-date, to be connected to the net, etc. Ecological imperatives are the latest irrefutable argument. Who is not, of course, opposed to pedophilia—but, above all, who is opposed to the preservation of the social organization that will allow humanity, the planet and the biosphere to be saved? Here is the real mother lode for an already vigorous and widespread “citizen” personality.

    In France, what is especially noteworthy is that this frightened submission adopts a particularly oppressive, almost pathological form; but in order to explain it there is no need to resort to a psychology of national character: it is simply because here conformism has had to work overtime in order to shore up its certainties. Since it is necessary for it to condemn in advance the denial that was inflicted on it forty years ago, that critique of modern society and of its “system of illusions” delivered by the revolutionary uprising of May 1968, and which fleetingly penetrated the collective consciousness, inscribed on the ephemeral public space that gave rise to its wild existence. A rival of Latouche in the movement to curtail economic growth, who emphatically declared himself to be “republican” and “democratic”, that is, statist and electoralist, thus expressed his fear that “extremist and maximalist theories and practices” would reinforce in the youth those defects that appear to come natural to them, “such as hatred of institutions or the wholesale rejection of society” (Vincent Cheynet, Le Choc de la décroissance, 2008).

    XXVI

    Subjected to a campaign of exaggeration every ten years, and this time converted, to put an end to it once and for all, into a deafening racket, the scandal of the “cultural revolution” that the French May supposedly was recuperates, augmented by the contributions of a multitude of false witnesses, the interpretation of the events which was immediately offered at the time by those who did not deny that they were reactionaries. Although the relative restraint shown in the repression that followed the crisis certainly did not in any way resemble the Bloody Week,11 there was no lack of either sociologists (some of whom were quite mistreated in the agitation that preceded the uprising) or commentators and journalist-cops who rapidly vomited up their bile. Concerning that movement without either leaders or representatives (but which some individuals sought to manufacture as soon as possible), in which the most insignificant public buildings were occupied and which, nonetheless, was so lacking in rationality that no one ever even thought of investing the Champs-Élysées or the National Assembly, what can be said about it that will deprive it of its ability to frighten people, except that it was in reality nothing but a pantomime, a psychodrama of baby-boomers playing at revolution, a recreational release valve that the “consumer society” offered its spoiled children, that is, a non-event in the final analysis? It is an enduring irony that “the May events” has become the usual name given to the obsessive vacuity of this non-event.

    Piling up on this inaugural falsification that was the stupid journalistic image of the “student commune”, the successive layers of false representations confidently deposited on the occasion of each commemoration tell us instead about the epoch that produced them, and about the persistent difficulty in assimilating the insult that the uprising inflicted on the acuity of the analysts of that era, including all its intellectuals as well as its PhDs in revolution. But it likewise shows that what had led to so much effort and so much controversy over so many years had not ceased to be perceived as a vague threat of dissolution of the entire existing order: it had finally come to discussing, following the model of revisionism a la Furet—for whom the French Revolution unfortunately went wrong because of the existence of revolutionaries—a “demonization of power which is corroding the pillars of coexistence and discrediting the very possibility of a transformative politics” (“Mai 68, quarante ans après”, Le Débat, March-April 2008). Since the irritating “mystery of ‘68” still involves the question of how, starting with a very restricted agitation, whose declared goal was the destruction of the University, so many people enthusiastically participated in the critique in acts of “everything that can be criticized”, it will be understood that almost all of its historical enemies—certified experts or actors credentialed by their frequent appearances on TV—will henceforth join a reassuring consensus in favor of the idea that it is finally nothing but an “impossible legacy”, according to the judicious formula of one of these experts. One could not be more faithful to the truth nor is there any better way to express it than to say that that attempt to reject all the different forms of alienation, old and new, has left nothing for the use of those who, in order to condemn it or to praise it, have ever more confidently proclaimed that the main effect of the movement was to overthrow the archaisms that still restricted French society and which prevented it from carrying out its comprehensive modernization.

    This capitalist modernization, well advanced under Gaullism, probably would have been carried out anyway, but the various leftist sects played a supporting role in it that was falsely attributed to the uprising. It is known that only after the end of the uprising, and during the early days of the return to order, once their organizations were reconstituted which had been dissolved by a State that was looking for an enemy whose motives it could understand—and which it opportunely discovered in these sectarian and hierarchical groups, whose methods and goals were radically opposed to the essence of what the occupations movement was and what it had attempted to accomplish—these leftist groupuscules acquired, in just a few years, an influence and a visibility of which they could have only dreamed previously. What they did with this influence was invariably grotesque and revolting; some, who had not all become senators, believing that May was a dress rehearsal of the seizure of the Winter Palace, while others, convinced that they were the embodiment of a new Resistance and that they were on the road towards civil war, dreamed of popular tribunals and summary executions. All of this collapsed very quickly, but by way of the decomposition of all their political illusions and ambitions, which they renounced without, however, renouncing their style and their worst methods, the leftists managed to create a new identity for themselves in a kind of “cultural leftism” whose impact, and whose unequalled contribution to our finally liberated and truly modern customs, is recognized by the whole world. There are those who often express how fortunate it was that, in its stage of delirious mimicry with regard to the military imagination of bureaucratic regimentation, French leftism did not join the flight forward into terrorism, as occurred shortly afterwards in Italy and Germany. One can, however, frame the question somewhat differently and discern that its sectarianism, its ideological dementia, its sacrificial militantism, in short, the whole ensemble of the practices and effective reality of these groups was sufficient, without the need to proceed to the propaganda of the deed, to produce the same effects, by destroying a revolutionary generation in the making, infecting it with ideology and inducing it to loathe subversion as a result of its repugnant play acting. This was the first contribution made by leftism, as negative as it was decisive, to the success of the modernization project whose course had been led to a temporary detour by May ‘68.

    XXVII

    Gustav Janouch relates Kafka’s disappointed comments after watching a workers demonstration pass by, its flags flying in the wind: “These people are so convinced and so sure of themselves, and are in such a good mood…. They rule the street and think therefore that they rule the world. But they are mistaken. Behind them are the secretaries, the officials and the professional politicians, all the modern sultans, for whom they are paving the way to power…. The revolution is evaporating and all that remains is the mud of a new bureaucracy”. (It was later in the same passage that he would state: “The chains of a tortured humanity are made of office paper”.) Although very muddy, what will be left after the evaporation of the revolution this time cannot be defined as a “new bureaucracy”. The replacement of the personnel of domination took place, of course, but in the usual way of a new generation taking the place of the old in the framework of the existing society. (This was at least understood by the Minister of the Interior during the period of the reestablishment of order when he said, sarcastically enough: “All of these young leftists will end up as deputies or mainstream journalists”.) If the revolution was lost in the muck, this was due to the promotion of new customs, propagated by those same people who had devoted their principle efforts to containing and channeling the flood and which were rapidly adopted by those who had been their spectators to the end; what is most significant is the fact that this spread of pleasant customized freedoms that constitute the customs of the slaves of an advanced society is presented by most commentators, even when they attempt to be critical of such a “market individualism”, as the specific content of that unfinished revolution; not as one of its effects, in conformance with a “classic” process of recuperation, but as its essence and its most profound meaning.

    Ever since social revolutions have existed and ever since they have been defeated, we have witnessed restorations that have employed the most varied methods; but we have never before seen them succeed, so rapidly and with such little repression, in carrying out such a disarmament of consciousness. Anyone who took part in the revolutionary unrest of May and then saw Paris in the autumn of 1968 would understand immediately, unless he preferred to deceive himself, what a variety of faces the counterrevolution adopted on that occasion, and would get a sense of just what they all had in common. Along the endless vistas of asphalt streets, it was not so much the ubiquity of the police that characterized the reestablishment of order as the murky happiness of the Directory: a kind of revanchist binge dictated their liberated behaviors to the Muscadins et Merveilleuses12 of a relieved middle class, all the more prepared to surrender body and soul to the revolutionary fashion, and especially to that of the liberation of lifestyles, insofar as it had aspired for several years to enjoy a lifestyle that was more in keeping with the various appliances it had been able to acquire. This was the occasion when leftism made its second contribution, this time a positive one, to modernization. But it was first necessary for its most extremist variants in the microbureaucratic imposture to reach, by way of demagogy and deception, their point of putrefaction.

    Concerning the manner in which part of that “untamed youth”—which was the only fragile “heir” of May—joined the manipulative activism of leftism, it has been characterized as “a kind of ‘after the fact’ Leninism” (Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, 2002). Nonetheless, for such a recruitment campaign to be successful, leftism had to add a great deal of adventurism and spontaneist demagogy to its Leninism; or should we say, its Leninism-Stalinism, since it was primarily the Maoists who excelled in this genre, as they would later with regard to media repentance, the promotion of youth culture and festive makeup. At the vanguard of this process of decomposition, an unprecedented “anarcho-maoist” current attempted, as early as 1970, to diversify its range of influence and to confer a more pop culture image on the squalid routine of the militant, adapting the idea of a “revolution of everyday life” to the sinister blindness about the “liberation” of Vietnam on the part of the local Stalinists and other monstrosities regarding the “Cultural Revolution”. At the same time, the importation of the American-style “counterculture” spread the worst clichés of a slovenly consumption, spiced up with the drugs of transgression, in an ideological melting-pot that here in France, and perhaps also in its country of origin, in any case signified an impressive step backwards. All of this culminated during the course of the seventies in a mass hedonism, conventional insofar as it was proudly displayed, to which the most fragile element of the modern social critique contributed its touch of complacent “subjectivity”.13 The renunciation on the part of the leftists of their most draconian ambitions for revolutionary leadership was utilized above all, in the name of certain conveniently rediscovered “individual liberties”, to make up for the time wasted in militant mortification in order to adopt the effervescent style of consumption that would from then on be customary. In this way, the obscene safety valve of the “slave festival” gave way after a few years, as it spread to more and more layers of society, to a festive slavery patronized by the government.

    The suddenness and the historical violence of the French May implied the requirement that the “reestablishment of order” would be, more than just a restoration, the accelerated perfection of the new order of the commodity against which May had rebelled. In order to be complete, this brief sketch of the role that the various leftisms played in this respect must also mention the manner in which the latter, by recruiting the bulk of their troops from the student milieu, applied to their future cadres, who were manufactured as quickly as possible to respond to certain growing needs, techniques of training and manipulation that anticipated those that now prevail in the world of the “enterprise” and in much of social relations. In fact, by imposing a kind of interdisciplinary program, the leftists in effect contributed, where the University still lacked such expertise, to the inculcation of new aptitudes and to the forging of the necessary character traits for the graduates of this dual degree program, preparing them for the optimal execution of the tasks that would henceforth be their responsibility in the continuation of the modernization process; the flexibility they were made to display in order to submit to the tortuous political lines pronounced by their respective leaderships could finally be fully utilized. Some sociologists, who had passed from a “critical sociology” to a “sociology of critique”, more attentive to the positive dimensions of the social bond, have attempted long after the fact to give a theoretical form to the phenomenon and have discerned in it a new spirit of capitalism. The trick consists in situating libertarian assertions and the critique of alienation under the ad hoc category of “artistic critique” and in presenting this as something that is quite different from a pure “social critique” that refers exclusively to exploitation and hierarchy, which authorizes the accusation of the “artistic critique” for “playing the game of a particularly destructive liberalism”. It should not be surprising that Jean-Claude Michéa has proclaimed as “definitive” the “analysis” of that pair of pedants (Boltanski-Chiapello), but curiously he was not the only one, for there were some from whom we could have expected more lucidity regarding such a claim to re-found social critique ex cathedra.

    XXVIII

    If we have engaged in this quick summary of the falsifications of the French May—deliberately attending to just this one aspect—it is not because we feel absolutely compelled to do so by some “duty to memorialize” dictated by the ten-year commemorative celebrations. What, in our view, justifies these retrospective observations is the recent appearance, after so many years of slanders or slanderous eulogies, of a new wave of commentators who claim to defend ’68 even in its most anti-bureaucratic aspects, and who continue to slander it, since according to them we must interpret (in the style of the book by Kristin Ross quoted above, which was published in France by Le Monde diplomatique)14 the “social movement” of December 1995, Seattle and other rejections of “the liberal new world order” as a continuation, an “afterlife”, of “May”. We would only like to point out that, contrary to one of the most admirable features of the occupations movement (its matter-of-fact rejection of the State, of legality and of any “social dialogue”), the “anti-liberal” protests do nothing but deplore the disappearance of the “social State” and its “culture of public service”, stooping so low as to demand its restoration. Nor is it irrelevant to point out that the post-’68 era has witnessed—in addition to a “festivism” that, now that the storm has put out the fires of the party, no longer requires a great deal of boldness to attack—a diversified supply of segmented egalitarian protests, all of which are unified by their reformist conformism which, when not engaging in apologetics for, avoids any criticism, even of a purely verbal nature, of the central realities of technological and commercial alienation. This is of course true of the statist metastases called associative movements. But it is well known that protests like neo-feminism or the homosexual movements that at least fought against the persistence of particularly repugnant ancient alienations, have been able to embody, by means of French theory, a very effective vanguard of normalization and social conformism in which it is hard to discern, with regard to everything from equal rights to gay marriage, just which prescriptions belong to the domain of the politically correct and which to that unitary thought whose expression until not so long ago aroused such passions. In the mouths of its volatile anti-liberal, another-world-is-possible and anti-growth avatars, the civil society movement formulates and uniformly develops “the social demand for protection from the catastrophe”. Its discouraging example thus contributes a useful complement to the classical critique of bureaucracy. The latter applies to the way the State imposes its rules and its control over society. From now on, it is society itself—by means of any men whatsoever who mobilize to combine their various anxieties and to manufacture the image of an alleged “civil society”—which also demands rules and control. It cannot be overemphasized, everything else being equal, how much this muddy land exhibits disturbing similarities with what Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, designated as the grey zone of the Lager.

    XXIX

    In his critique of the works in which Burnham first popularized Rizzi’s theory of the bureaucratization of the world, Orwell pointed out how the fascination with the spectacle of force had led Burnham, before he ended up following the crowd and joining the anticommunist propaganda of the Cold War, to overestimate the efficiency of the organization that he called “managerial”, although at the risk of attributing this same irresistible efficiency to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia due to the circumstances of the time. Orwell noted that this way of predicting the linear continuation of what was then taking place and speaking of “processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end”, without sufficiently accounting for the slowness of the whole historical process and what we would today call “sociological inertia”, “is bound to lead to mistaken prophecies, because, even when it gauges the direction of events rightly, it will miscalculate their tempo” (“James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution”, 1946). In a later text (“Burnham’s View of the Contemporary World Struggle”, 1947), Orwell once again addressed this tendency “to reduce history and its complex processes to a pure logical schema” and to that kind of “realism” that falsifies the perception of reality, and which in this case leads Burnham to attribute an ineluctable character of necessity and unstoppable efficiency to the bureaucratic concentration of power. An effect similar to that of the “power worship now so prevalent among intellectuals” may be observed in the fascination with regard to the technological system, its rapid growth and its “Blitzkriegs” against nature: they are the same monotonous delusions of infallible rationality, of sudden and brutal transformations, of historical destiny that is sometimes terrible but always grandiose.

    For its part, social critique, even when it deserved the name, often succumbed to some of these mistakes: it either indulged in irony regarding the blunders and mistakes of the leaders, made fun of the incoherence and ridiculous failures of their projects, gloated over the “internal contradictions” which, inevitably, undermined the existing society; or else, on the contrary, as a result of a desire for lucidity with respect to the progress of alienation and thus wanting to emphasize, against all the revolutionist illusions, the perfection of domination, conceded to the latter an efficiency, and sometimes even a rationality, that was capable of allowing it to appear to be indestructible. Obviously, the danger always exists that one could fall prey to exaggeration and simplification when one is describing an ongoing process, in this case one that is leading to the establishment of a “green bureaucracy”. But in reality it was almost indispensable to exaggerate in order to make people see precisely in what sense the “new course” of domination cannot be considered a simple face-lift, what the Anglo-Saxons call greenwashing. We are not unaware, however, of how far the bureaucratic project of the sustainable management of disaster, from the moment when it goes beyond a call for taking responsibility when brushing our teeth by turning off the tap or for car-pooling when going to the ecological supermarket in order to reduce our carbon footprint, runs into too many obstacles, both external and internal, to effectively achieve any kind of stabilization on a world scale. (After all, according to its own confession, only on that scale can any results be obtained.) The disaster management whose broad outlines we have attempted to trace will achieve its most striking successes in the countries that are already the most civilized, and most accustomed to over-socialization. And even there it will not, like every bureaucracy, obtain more than a simulation of efficiency. However rapid bureaucratization may develop, precipitated by the states of emergency that it will have to decree, it will “resolve” nothing: it will have to confront, with its enormous means of coercion and falsification, the spread of all kinds of plagues and their unforeseeable combinations. But the intellectual satisfaction of knowing that it is condemned to failure is not much of a consolation for us, especially since this outcome promises what may be a long period during which industrial society will be collapsing on top of us. There is thus no place for any computations regarding its possibilities or any speculation regarding what comes “later”. For the time being it is already successfully stifling, and is doing so with an incomparable efficiency, any attempt to sustain a social critique that must be both anti-state and anti-industrial. In this respect we may venture to draw a parallel with the historical situation of the revolutionaries between the two world wars, at a time when one had to be both anti-fascist and anti-stalinist; the use of the fascist threat by the Stalinism of the popular front is similar in many ways to the statist propaganda now being disseminated regarding the risks of ecological collapse: the same concealment of the real historical causes, the same blackmail of urgency and efficiency, the same manipulation of universally acknowledged noble sentiments.

    XXX

    The obstinate refusers who attempt to cast doubt upon the benefits, whatever they may be, which the propaganda for oversocialization insists on imposing against all the evidence, and who refuse to enlist with the Sacred Union for the salvation of the planet, can prepare to be treated in the near future as deserters and saboteurs were in times of war. The “state of necessity” and the shortages that will accumulate will first of all force the acceptance or demand for new forms of servitude, in order to preserve what can be preserved of guaranteed survival even if it is only partially successful in this endeavor. (And everyone knows how things stand where no one can boast of such historical conquests.)

    The course of this strange war, however, will not fail to create opportunities to engage in the critique in acts of the bureaucratic blackmail. Or, to put it slightly differently: one can predict entropy, but not the rise of something new. The role of the theoretical imagination is still that of discerning, in a present crushed by the probability of the worst-case scenario, the diverse possibilities which nonetheless remain open. Trapped like everyone else within a reality that is as unstable as it is violently destructive, we shall not overlook this datum of experience, which seems to us to be appropriate for resistance: that the action of a few individuals, or of very restricted human groups, can have, with a little luck, effort and will, incalculable consequences.

    April 2008

    Translated from the Spanish edition: René Riesel and Jaime Semprun, Catastrofismo, administración del desastre y sumisión sostenible, Pepitas de Calabaza, La Rioja, Spain, 2011, 131 p.

    • 1. “The most profound and most real historical catastrophe, the one that in the last instance determines the significance of all the others, resides in the blind persistence of the immense majority, in the resignation of all will to act on the causes of so much suffering, in the inability to even subject them to lucid examination. This apathy will be shattered, over the course of the next few years, in an increasingly more violent manner, as a result of the collapse of all guaranteed survival. And those who represent and support that survival, cultivating a fragile status quo of reassuring illusions, will be swept aside. The emergency will be imposed on everyone and domination will have to speak at least as loudly and as clearly as the facts themselves. It will all the more easily adopt the terrorist tone that is all the more natural for it the more it will be justified by effectively terrifying realities. A man suffering from gangrene is in no position to discuss the causes of his illness, or to oppose the authoritarianism of amputation.” (Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 13, July 1988).
    • 2. “One would have to be a Marxist from the Collège de France to be unaware of the fact that the commodity is essentially, in its quality as a social relation, the annihilation of all qualitative particularity and all local uniqueness in favor of the abstract universalization of the market. If one accepts the commodity, one must accept its world-in-becoming, of which each particular commodity is an agent, even before they were manufactured in Taiwan” (Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Remarques sur la paralysie de décembre 1995, March 1996).
    • 3. “The first and most important of these necessary conditions for scientific knowledge was to draw a hard and fast line between the artificial environment of observation and experimentation on the one hand, and the confusion of the world on the other…. The procedures and techniques which have been implemented in the artificial environment of experimentation have so profoundly penetrated the world, they are so completely mixed with it to such an extent that it has become impossible to disentangle even the causes from the effects and there is nothing left that one can know through observation; neither the functioning of a mechanical system that is closed on itself, nor any nature that is not altered by artificialization. Therefore, we can say that science, which in order to be built had to ‘sacrifice’ the world in theory, has ended up by sacrificing it in practice, and has in the process also destroyed itself, since the position of the pure observer that was that of the scientist has by all considerations become unsustainable” (Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Remarques sur l’agriculture génétiquement modifiée et la dégradation des espèces, February 1999).
    • 4. “Ecologism recuperates all of this and adds its technobureaucratic ambition to supply the measure of everything, to reestablish order in its way, transforming itself, as a science of the generalized economy, into a new mode of thought of domination. ‘Us or chaos’, the ecolocrats and recycled experts say, those promoters of a totalitarian control they seek to exercise, in order to overtake the catastrophe in progress. It will therefore be them and chaos” (Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 15, April 1992).
    • 5. An untranslatable play on words involving estomper (“to blur, to tone down”) and the double meaning of the verb gazer (“to veil, to dissimulate, to wrap in bandages”, but also “to poison with gas, to gas”). (Note from the Spanish translation.)
    • 6. “Ecologism, otherwise, has not been remiss in becoming political; such a good predisposition could not go unused. From 1972 forward, a multitude of summits and reasonably specialized and alarmist reports were coming to the rescue […]. This is how, after 1987, the international community began to speak of a commitment to sustainable development, a clumsy chimera whose universal success in itself summarizes the progress attained by the imprisonment in the industrial mentality” (René Riesel, Los progresos de la domesticación, 2003).
    • 7. “The ecological state of emergency is simultaneously a war economy that mobilizes production in the service of common interests as defined by the State, and an economic war against the threat posed by protest movements that might unequivocally criticize it” (“Appeal to All Those Who Would Rather Do Away with Harmful Phenomena than Manage Them” [1990], Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 15, April 1992).
    • 8. “ … lendemains que décroissent”, an allusion to the “singing futures” (“des lendemains que chantent”), an old slogan of the French Communist Party. (Translator’s note from the Spanish edition).
    • 9. Casseurs de pub (“Destroyers of Advertising”) is a French magazine edited by Victor Cheynet whose views are similar to the postulates of the movement for the curtailment of economic growth. (Translator’s note from the Spanish edition).
    • 10. “Thus, at the very moment that the flight forward of industrial society is irreversibly leading it to collapse, it has chosen to privilege the exchange of Jesuitical arguments about control—scientific, or perhaps civil—over the merits of the public management of this collapse or over the precautions that will have to be adopted in order to make this collapse bearable. How is it possible to see this as anything but a controversy over the customs or table manners that one has decided to observe in the pool of Medusa?” (René Riesel, “Communiqué” of February 9, 2001, at Montpellier, Aveux complets sur les véritables mobiles…, 2001).
    • 11. May 21-27, 1871, when the Paris Commune was crushed and thousands of its supporters were executed by the troops of Versailles. (Note from the Spanish edition.)
    • 12. Muscadins (“dandies”) et Merveilleuses (“fabulous divas”); Fops, Incredibles … names given during the French Revolution to the realists, who called attention to themselves by their affected and elegant attire that verged on the ridiculous, and who made their first appearance in the counterrevolutionary Paris of the Directory. (Note from the Spanish edition.)
    • 13. “The true vanguard of adaptation, leftism (and especially where it was least connected to the political lie) preached, then, practically all the impostures that are now the common currency of alienated behavior. In the name of the struggle against the routine and against boredom, it denigrated any persistent effort, and any appropriation, which requires patience, of real abilities: subjective excellence was supposed to be, like the revolution, instantaneous” (Jaime Semprun, L’Abîme se repeuple, 1997).
    • 14. Published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press.

    →

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – A Decade of Social Manipulation for the Corporate Capture of Nature [ACT VI – Crescendo]

    Feb 24

    2019

    17

    Amnesty International, Avaaz, B Team [Managed by Purpose - the PR Arm of Avaaz], Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Conservation International, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Nature Conservancy, Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Oxfam, Pacifism as Pathology, Purpose [Public Relations Arm of Avaaz], Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Sierra Club, Social Engineering, TckTckTck, Union of Concerned Scientists, Whiteness & Aversive Racism, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

    #NewDealForNature (IUCN) 350.org Amnesty International Avaaz BirdLife International Blended Finance Taskforce Cambridge Conservation Initiative Climate Finance Partnership European Commission Extinction Rebellion Fauna & Flora International Friends of the Earth GCCA Green New Deal Greenpeace Greta Thunberg International Policies and Politics Initiative (IPPI) New Climate Economy New Deal for Nature Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Stockholm Institute UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) University of Cambridge WEF World Resources Institute World Wildlife Fund WRI

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – A Decade of Social Manipulation for the Corporate Capture of Nature [ACT VI – Crescendo]

    February 24, 2019

    By Cory Morningstar

     

    This is ACT VI of the six-part series: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The Political Economy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

     

    The final act of this series is dedicated to Greta Thunberg and the youth she has inspired across our fragile planet. The upper echelons of power have every intention to capture and channel this energy – and use it to maintain the current power structures. They are already in the process.

    We have reached the Brave New Moment where there is no longer a distinction between our “movements” and the corporate forces that have been created to further our oppression and servitude – all in compliance to economic growth and capitalism for the world’s ruling class. All of this to be achieved on the backs of the most vulnerable – our youth. Hegemonic forces are salivating over the global waves of youth mobilization demanding action on climate change.

    The paradox is this – the youth are their vehicle. Their resistance sequestered and redirected directly back into the very system that will destroy the same future they march to save. When children from even the wealthiest of families (monetary wealth being the epitome of “success” in the West) are part and parcel of an epidemic of depression in our society – we need to question why we would do anything that would prop-up a failing system that benefits so few – at the expense of so much.

    Let this knowledge serve as a weapon for resistance.

    +++

     

    The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

    [Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [Addenda: I] [Book form] [Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI] [ACTS VII & VIII forthcoming]

    • A 100 Trillion Dollar Storytelling Campaign [A Short Story] [Oct 2 2019]

    • The Global Climate Strikes: No, this was not co-optation. This was and is PR. A brief timeline [Oct 6 2019]

     

    Volume I:

    In ACT I, I disclosed that Greta Thunberg, the current child prodigy and face of the youth movement to combat climate change, served as special youth advisor and trustee to the foundation established by “We Don’t Have Time”, a burgeoning mainstream tech start-up. I then explored the ambitions behind the tech company We Don’t Have Time.

    In ACT II, I illustrated how today’s youth are the sacrificial lambs for the ruling elite. Also in this act I introduced the board members and advisors to “We Don’t Have Time.” I explored the leadership in the nascent We Don’t Have Time and the partnerships between the well established corporate environmental entities: Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, 350.org, Avaaz, Global Utmaning (Global Challenge), the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

    In ACT III, I deconstructed how Al Gore and the Planet’s most powerful capitalists are behind today’s manufactured youth movements and why. I explored the We Don’t Have Time/Thunberg connections to Our Revolution, the Sanders Institute, This Is Zero Hour, the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal. I also touched upon Thunberg’s famous family. In particular, Thunberg’s celebrity mother, Malena Ernman (WWF Environmental Hero of the Year 2017), and her August 2018 book launch. I then explored the generous media attention afforded to Thunberg in both May and April of 2018 by SvD, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers.

    In ACT IV, I examined the current campaign, now unfolding, in “leading the public into emergency mode”. More importantly, I summarized who and what this mode is to serve.

    In ACT V, I took a closer look at the Green New Deal. I explored Data for Progress and the targeting of female youth as a key “femographic”. I connected the primary architect and authors of the “Green New Deal” data to the World Resources Institute. From there, I walked you through the interlocking Business & Sustainable Development Commission, the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, and the New Climate Economy – a project of the World Resources Institute. I disclosed the common thread between these groups and the assignment of money to nature, represented by the Natural Capital Coalition and the non-profit industrial complex as an entity. Finally, I revealed how this has culminated in the implementation of payments for ecosystem services (the financialization and privatization of nature, global in scale) which is “expected to be adopted during the fifteenth meeting in Beijing in 2020.”

    In the final act, ACT VI [Crescendo], I wrap up the series by divulging that the very foundations which have financed the climate “movement” over the past decade are the same foundations now partnered with the Climate Finance Partnership looking to unlock 100 trillion dollars from pension funds. I reveal the identities of individuals and groups at the helm of this interlocking matrix, controlling both the medium and the message. I take a step back in time to briefly demonstrate the ten years of strategic social engineering that have brought us to this very precipice. I look at the relationship between WWF, Stockholm Institute and World Resources Institute as key instruments in the creation of the financialization of nature. I also take a look at what the first public campaigns for the financialization of nature (“natural capital”) that are slowly being brought into the public realm by WWF. I reflect upon how mainstream NGOs are attempting to safeguard their influence and further manipulate the populace by going underground through Extinction Rebellion groups being organized in the US and across the world.

    With the smoke now cleared, the weak and essentially non-existent demands reminiscent of the 2009 TckTckTck “demands” can now be fully understood.

    Some of these topics, in addition to others, will be released and discussed in further detail as addenda built on the large volume of research. This includes stepping through the looking glass, with an exploration of what the real “Green New Deal” under the Fourth Industrial Revolution will look like. Also forthcoming is a look at the power of celebrity – and how it has become a key tool for both capital and conformity.

     

     

     

    A C T   V I

     

     

    March 10, 2014:

    “… the divestment campaign will result (succeed) in a colossal injection of money shifting over to the very portfolios heavily invested in, thus dependent upon, the intense commodification and privatization of Earth’s last remaining forests, (via REDD, environmental “markets”  and the like). This tour de force will be executed with cunning precision under the guise of environmental stewardship and “internalizing negative externalities through appropriate pricing.” Thus, ironically (if in appearances only), the greatest surge in the ultimate corporate capture of Earth’s final remaining resources is being led, and will be accomplished, by the very environmentalists and environmental groups that claim to oppose such corporate domination and capture.” — McKibben’s Divestment Tour – Brought to You by Wall Street [Part II of an Investigative Report, The “Climate Wealth” Opportunists]

     

    The Chaperone

    chap·er·one Dictionary result for chaperone: 1. a person who accompanies and looks after another person or group of people. Synonyms: companion, duenna, protectress, escort, governess, nursemaid, carer, keeper, protector, bodyguard, minder.

    For the final segment of this series, let’s circle back to where we began. With Greta Thunberg.

    During the January 2019 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Thunberg’s celebrity was fully utilized to give those in the public realm an  illusion of a newfound “compassionate capitalism”. This was especially true for the WEF Ocean Day Programme in which Thunberg was featured on the panel “What Will a Changing Ocean Mean to Us, Our Jobs and Markets?” While those on the panel (including Angel Gurría, Secretary-General, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) spoke of the ocean as a market at risk (“if we don’t save the oceans that is a 24 trillion dollar loss”), Thunberg’s innocence created a veneer of legitimacy over the grotesque objectification of nature. Meanwhile, Al Gore, sat on the “Taking Action for The Ocean” panel (“the ‘ocean economy’ is estimated to account for 3%-5% of global GDP, with assets worth $24 trillion. How can the world tap into the ocean economy while protecting it from environmental collapse?”) discussing the global climate strikes (as a pivotal sign of change – approx. 30m:10s in) and the necessity to assign monetary value to nature. Of course, the key pivotal moment for the exploitation of Thunberg (and the very purpose of her global construct) came at the moment she spoke her much-publicized words “Our house is on fire. I’m here to say, our house is on fire.” These words  echoed the outlined text in the strategy paper entitled, “Leading the Public Into Emergency Mode” almost verbatim. The strategy, authored by the Climate Mobilization Project, outlines a “wartime-style mobilization, akin to the American home front effort during World War II”. [ACT IV]

    The Climate Mobilization Project: “Al Gore calls for WWII-scale climate mobilization” [0m:53s]

    +++

    Above: World Economic Forum panel: “What will a changing Ocean mean to us, our jobs and markets?”  From left to right: Haley Edwards, moderator, correspondent, TIME Magazine, Sharan Burrow, General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation, Katherine Garrett-Cox, Gulf International Bank, and Greta Thunberg



    Above: January 25, 2019, Twitter

    The above photograph of Thunberg on her way home from Davos, was shared on social media on January 25, 2019.  The woman accompanying Thunberg in the photo, as well as the person who shared the photograph, is not Thunberg’s mother nor her grandmother. Rather, she is Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. And this is where all the pieces of our elaborate puzzle finally fit into place.

    Above: January 25, 2019, twitter

    Above: January 22, 2019, Twitter, tagged users: Al Gore, World Economic Forum, Sharan Burrow,  Greenpeace International

    During the gathering, while Thunberg’s presence was being exploited in multiple ways, one being an attempt to add both legitimacy and diplomacy to the Oceans conference, Morgan was present at far more intimate discussions – those that focused on the “New Deal for Nature”.

    Above: World Economic Forum YouTube Channel: “Davos 2019 – A New Deal for Nature”, published February 9, 2019

    Above: January 24, 2019, Twitter, New Deal For Nature, Global Shapers, World Economic Forum, Davos

    Above: “22-25 January 2019. We’re rallying world leaders to act for the planet, our one home. Add your voice to demand for a sustainable future for all. – WWF AT WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM – ADD YOUR VOICE” [Source]

    One not familiar with the inner workings and functions of the non-profit industrial complex might wonder why the executive director of Greenpeace International be invited to attend a discussion regarding the implementation of “payments for ecosystem services” (PES), global in scale. That is, monetary value being assigned to all nature, under the guise of environmental protection. That is, the financialization and privatization of all nature – on the entire Earth.

    And here we must pay attention.

    Morgan is the former global climate change director of Third Generation Environmentalism (E3G). Prior to E3G she led the Global Climate Change Program for the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). Morgan has worked for the US Climate Action Network (USCAN), the European Business Council for a Sustainable Energy Future and for the Federal Ministry of Environment. She served as senior advisor to the German Chancellor’s chief advisor, advised former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and currently serves on Germany’s Council for Sustainable Development.

    Above: 1998: “Jennifer Morgan, Climate Policy Officer, WWF, seated with Andrew Kerr, WWF, who presented the WWF report on Climate Change and Human Health” UNFCCC COP-4, THE FOURTH MEETING OF THE CONFERENCE OF THE PARTIES TO THE UN FRAMEWORK CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 2 – 13  November, 1998 [Source]

    But more importantly than all the above job titles, is Morgan’s role in relationship to the upper echelons of power: her prior position as the global director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute. [Bio][Source]

    The 2019 World Economic Forum (which features Morgan’s publications and blog posts on its website) was not the first instance of Morgan’s involvement in the coming “New Deal For Nature”. During the closing remarks of the Global Landscapes Forum on December 9, 2018, at COP24, Morgan stressed that in addition to shifting global focus from the oil and transportation sectors to land and forests, additional cooperation was required to reach consensus on the New Deal for Nature:

    “We also need much improved cooperation for a new deal for nature to be agreed on at the next CBD cop in 2020 setting decisive biodiversity guidelines for climate action.” — Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International – Closing remarks, Global Landscapes Forum, COP24, Dec 9, 2018

    The truth is that Morgan’s career as a darling and confidante of the elite establishment has been long established. Her perseverance and sound navigation within the interlocking directorate of the non-profit industrial complex has brought her to this very moment.

    Above: May 14, 2013, Jennifer Morgan, Rainer Baake, Lutz Weischer, Carol Browner, World Resources Institute, Flickr

    Above: January 25, 2019, World Economic Forum, Davos, Greta Thunberg

    Above: Former Vice President of the USA, Al Gore (The Climate Reality Project and Generation Investment) and Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Jennifer Morgan. ClimateHub, COP24, Katowice, Poland [Source]

    Above: Al Gore, New Deal for Nature via the UN Sustainable Development Goals, WEF, Davos, 2019

    Above: November 28, 2018, Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Facebook [Source]

    Above: January 23, 2019, Green New Deal

    Above: November 3, 2015, Jennifer Morgan (@ClimateMorgan), World Resources Institute, The Climate Group, The Climate Reality Project

    Here it is critical to recognize that the World Resources Institute is a founding partner of Global Campaign for Climate Action (GCCA), and that the New Climate Economy – a project of Global Commission on the Economy and Climate launched in 2013 – is also founded by the World Resources Institute.

    What the New Climate Economy is expressing when it states that, “the shift to a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy is only one – potentially small – part of a much broader economic transition that is under way” is this: the transformation of global finance via the economic valuation and payment for environmental services.

    “The failure to price our natural capital, on which our wealth and well-being depends, is a serious failure in the global capital market. Worth many trillions of dollars in financial assets, the global capital market shapes the world we live in, and which our children will inherit.” — Kitty van der Heijden, Director, World Resources Institute Europe and Africa, Finance for One Planet, 2016

    Birds of a Feather: World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund  & Stockholm Environment Institute

    “Unfortunately, many environmental non-governmental organisations have bought into this illogical reasoning and justify their support as being pragmatic. Neoliberal language is rife across their reports and policy recommendations and their adoption of natural capital, ecosystems services, offsetting and market trading. These new environmental pragmatists believe, without justification, that the financialisation of Nature will help prevent its destruction.” — from the paper This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality authored by Clive L. Spash, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

     

    Above: November 14, 2017, “Stronger Together for Climate Action”: L-R: Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever, Pascal Canfin, CEO, WWF France, Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director, Greenpeace International, Ramiro Fernández, Avina, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Global Leader, WWF Climate and Energy Practice, and Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr., Governor of California. Photo: IISD/ENB, Herman Njoroge Chege [Source]

    “We need the CBD [Climate Change and Biodiversity] to attain the highest political relevance and develop a far higher shared vision if we are to reach a New Deal for Nature and create a Paris-style moment for biodiversity in 2020.” — November 15, 2018, media release,  WWF Rallies Behind the Call for a New Deal for Nature and People [Emphasis added]

    As discussed in ACT V of this series, the board of directors overseeing the World Resources Institute represent the very upper tiers of the ruling class.

    Also disclosed was that Helen Mountford is the program director for the New Climate Economy project and director of economics at World Resources Institute. Prior to this appointment, Mountford served as deputy director of environment for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Beyond its formal research partnerships, the New Climate Economy is aligned with the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, International Energy Agency, regional development banks, UN agencies and the OECD.

    World Resources Institute is a key co-founder in the social engineering apparatus, GCCA (TckTckTck), which officially launched in 2008. Long before the elite forces declaration of a climate emergency that we witness unfolding today, scientists and academia had already recognized that the industrial scale of our collective objectification and destruction of nature had proceeded to such scale, it threatened the collapse of industrial civilization (exploiting and enslaving most – for the benefit of few). Of course, long before this, the Indigenous could see the writing on the wall as the European pursued his conquering of nature in blind earnest.

    Markets have finally conquered the Western world. Our society is now maxed out on debt and economic growth has not only stagnated, it is on a downward spiral. Today, we find ourselves in a culture so disconnected from reality that it considers economic growth far more valuable than the planetary ecosystems that sustain all life.

    As this series has and will further demonstrate in this closing segment, the GCCA coalition was designed, financed and orchestrated by the same entities now set to unlock 100 trillion USD and simultaneously implement the privatization/financialization of nature via the New Deal For Nature (payments for ecosystem services) to be agreed upon by 2020. As demonstrated in ACT IV – the urgency we bear witness to today, is due to a fear far greater than the collapse of the planetary biosphere, that is – the collapse of the capitalist economic system.

    [Background reading on both the World Resources Institute and the New Climate Economy: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent: The New Green Deal is the Trojan Horse for the Financialization of Nature, February 13, 2019]

    World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund, and the New Climate Economy are at the helm of the financialization of nature. Also at the helm is the Natural Capital Coalition (collaborating with both World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund), which represents over 300 of the world’s most powerful and egregious corporations while engaging “many thousands more“.

    The New Climate Economy research partner, the Stockholm Environment Institute has a well-oiled revolving door between itself and the World Wildlife Fund. The institute has generous funding to the tune of 260 million SEK in 2017 (approx. 28 million USD) including almost ten million SEK from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As a side note, we can add that the Stockholm Environment Institute gave a presentation at a climate function on May 4, 2018 (“Welcome to the Power of Capital“) with both Ingmar Rentzhog, CEO of We Don’t Have Time and Malena Ernman (WWF Environmental Hero Award, 2017, and Thunberg’s mother.]

    On November 21, 2017, it was announced that Pavan Sukhdev was appointed as president of WWF International: “Pavan Sukhdev, former director of the UN Environment Initiative for a Green Economy, has been appointed President of WWF International.” Sukhdev, former managing director of the Markets Division of Deutsche Bank, would launch the findings of the TEEB study in 2010, the acronym standing for ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity,’ an initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The Natural Capital Coalition was formerly the TEEB for Business Coalition.

    “Stockholm is home to two institutions, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Stockholm Environment Institute, which have done a great deal of research to better understand and apply the concepts of Natural Capital to the way we manage ecosystems and the economy.  Johan Rockström, Executive Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and a group of 28 academics proposed a new Earth system framework in 2011 for government and management agencies to use as a tool to support sustainable development.” — Stockholm: Natural Capital of the World, September 23, 2019

    On February 13, 2019, The Guardian published the article, School Climate Strike Children’s Brave Stand Has Our Support – “We are inspired that our children, spurred on by the noble actions of Greta Thunberg and other striking students, are making their voices heard, say 224 academics”. Those endorsing the letter included Annemarieke de Bruin, researcher, Stockholm Environment Institute, Dr Alison Dyke, Stockholm Environment Institute, Dr Jean McKendree, Stockholm Environment Institute and Corrado Topi, ecological economist, Stockholm Environment Institute.

     

    • April 17, 2015, Jennifer Morgan, World Resources Institute, The Climate Reality Project, The Climate Group

    A Decade of Strategic and Methodical Social Engineering

    “Citizen protests and legal actions against companies, governments and individuals will undoubtedly become an increasing leverage opportunity in support of this emergency approach and have already begun.” — Club Of Rome The Climate Emergency Plan, launched with We Don’t Have Time and Global Utmaning, December, 2018

    Above: TckTckTck Flickr: “The Press Conference of the ‘Beds are Burning’ Launch in Paris was well attended as Kofi Annan, David Jones, Mélanie Laurent, Manu Katché and many other supporters of the campaign made their appearance.”

    “The objective was to make it become a movement that consumers, advertisers and the media would use and exploit.” — TckTckTck Havas Pager

    GCCA (TckTckTck) was founded by a small group of NGOs, including World Resources Institute (WRI), 350.org, Greenpeace, Avaaz and World Wildlife Fund. It is partnered with over 470 members, including: ClimateWorks (founded in 2008 by the Hewlett, Packard and McKnight foundations), which is discussed further on in this segment. Climate Week NYC 2014 (September 22-26), an annual initiative of the Climate Group, was marketed in conjunction with the People’s Climate March that took place on September 21, 2014. Climate Week NYC was founded in 2009 as a partnership between The Climate Group, the United Nations, the UN Foundation, GCCA/TckTckTck, the Carbon Disclosure Project, the Government of Denmark and the City of New York.

    The march was organized by GCCA/TckTckTck, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Climate Nexus (a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), 350.org (incubated by the Rockefeller Foundation), the Rasmussen Foundation and USCAN.

    The Climate Group business campaigns “are brought to you as part of the We Mean Business coalition.” [Source]

    Video: We Mean Business Momentum – Catalyst for the 2014 “People’s Climate March” [Running time: 1m:39s]:

     

    “The Strategic Plan 2018-2022 lays out WRI’s approach and priorities for the next five years. WRI’s approach is to help catalyze and advance non-incremental shifts in policy and behavior, unusual political, social and corporate partnerships, to be understood in the context of “movements” rather than policy shifts.” — Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Concept Note, Support to World Resources Institute, Implementation of the Strategic Plan 2018-2022

    Through the GCCA/TckTckTck coalition a decade of social engineering went unnoticed. The September 21, 2014 People’s Climate March and the global marches that would follow, such as Rise Up mobilizations, “Work Parties”, Power Shift gatherings, etc. etc. had multiple purposes with multiple desired effects which were incredibly successful for those at the helm. To “Change Everything We Need Everyone” was a signal. A behavioural engineering cue that would coalesce a camaraderie between the citizenry and corporate power to become “stronger as one”. All focus would be kept far away from the key drivers of climate change (militarism, the capitalist economic system dependent on infinite growth and exploitation, industrial agriculture/*livestock, etc.) which could be made to be, like the Indigenous led 2010 People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, invisible. Instead, this energy would be  directed to the discourse of “clean energies” as the singular most important solution for our multiple ecological crises. The belief in two objects was sufficient for an entire populace to be reassured that there would be zero sacrifice. The Western lifestyle could continue unabated. The solar panel and wind turbine directive took centre stage. The crowd roared in applause. The singular focus of “renewable energy” became an eco-fetish of the Western populace, the targeted demographic. [*sentient beings, formerly recognized as animals.]

    The ten-year social engineering effort also led to a transition from environmentalism into full-blown yet undetected anthropocentrism. Over a ten year span, “environmentalism” moved from that of protecting nature, to demanding a roll-out of green technology, industrial in scale, that would further plunder nature. The natural world became irrelevant as the desire for green technology superceded environmental protection. Wind turbines and solar panels replaced images of trees and insects as the new symbols of our natural world. Saving the industrial civilization that is killing off all life became paramount to saving the ecosystems that all life depends on. These ideologies slowly took hold until “movements” become nothing more than lobby groups for green energy. Volunteers marching for capital, global in scale. To suggest that Edward Bernays would be impressed would be an understatement. Such is the beauty of social engineering and behavioural change.

    Yet, to fully understand how we arrived at today’s dismal precipice, we must first revisit the past.

    In 2009, over a span of five months GCCA/TckTckTck and affiliated partners registered 15.5 million names worldwide on its online petition for a ” fair, ambitious and binding climate change agreement.” Many marketing firms outside of Havas helped achieve this, including the corporate communications and public affairs agency Hoggan & Associates of which DeSmogBlog co-founder Jim Hoggan is president and founder. Hoggan’s client list includes corporate creation TckTckTck, Canadian Pacific Railway, Shell and ALCOA. DeSmogBlog may “expose” Shell on occasion, yet Hoggan & Associates has no problem raking in Shell cash to, in their own words, “…help clients identify the optimum frame and establish it in the public mind. [Source]

    “THE MOST PRESSING ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM WE FACE TODAY IS NOT CLIMATE CHANGE. It is pollution in the public square, where a smog of adversarial rhetoric, propaganda and polarization stifles discussion and debate, creating resistance to change and thwarting our ability to solve our collective problems.” — Jim Hoggan, co-founder of DeSmogBlog [Source: Hoggan & Associates]

    [Further reading: EYES WIDE SHUT | TckTckTck exposé, January 6, 2010]

    The day before the international climate negotiations kick off in Cancun, the global TckTckTck campaign and its partners presented UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres Photo: Ivan Castaneira/tcktcktck

     

    Kelly Rigg, Executive Director of TckTckTck, speaks during the opening ceremony of Climate Week NYC in New York, September 20, 2010 (Photo by Ramin Talaie/Corbis via Getty Images)

     

    In 2014, Kelly Rigg, executive director of TckTckTck from 2009–2014, was credited as the key organizer for the 2014 People’s Climate March:

    “Large groups, like 350.org, Avaaz or the Sierra Club, and the numerous grassroots organizations (1,300 by some estimates) don’t just start magically working together to rent buses, secure police permits and make signs specific to their interests. There has to be a vision into which they all buy, a big enough umbrella under which everyone can stand. Building that umbrella—particularly for the international organizations—was Rigg’s work, work that includes important leadership lessons relevant to anyone trying to mobilize large groups with diverse interests and agendas. Her work can be seen as a road map for how to herd cats.“ Forbes, Sept 25, 2014: Leadership Lessons from The People’s Climate March [Emphasis added.]

    Prior to her role at GCCA/TckTckTck, Rigg served as deputy campaigns director for Greenpeace International from 1998-2003, and as its project coordinator from 1982-1993. [Source] In addition, Rigg is founding director of the international consultancy, Varda Group co-founded in 2003 with Rémi Parmentier. GCCA/TckTckTck is identified as a Varda client, as is Greenpeace, Ceres (350.org divestment partner), Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, WWF, Nature Conservancy, WCBSD, UNEP, etc. [Client List]

    Having started his career at Friends of the Earth France, Parmentier also holds an extensive history with Greenpeace spanning 27 years, as well as extensive relations with multilateral bodies:

    “Rémi Parmentier has been involved in the process of Rio +20 from the start. He participated in the intersession meetings and the Preparatory Committee in New York with “informal consultations” on behalf of various international organizations and alliances. Previously, as the Political Director of Greenpeace International, in the Summit of Johannesburg in 2002, Parmentier was the negotiator and protagonist of the agreement between the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and Greenpeace International on the Kyoto Protocol.” [Source] [Emphasis added]

    Parmentier also served as deputy executive secretary for the Global Ocean Commission (2013-2016) which was launched in February 2013. Inés de Águeda who serves as the communications officer for the Global Ocean Commission, is also an associate at the Varda Group.

    Commissioners of the Global Ocean Commission include/have included José María Figueres (co-chair), President of Costa Rica from 1994 to 1998, brother of Christina Figueres, former president of the Carbon War Room, David Miliband, John Podesta (chair of the Center for American Progress and a former White House chief of staff ), Sri Mulyani Indrawati (managing director at the World Bank), Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organization and other high profile individuals.

    Here we can add that José María Figueres served as a director of the World Wildlife Fund, the World Resources Institute, and the Stockholm Environment Institute. He was also the first CEO of the World Economic Forum and later served as  CEO of Concordia 21. [Source] [Further reading: Under One Bad Sky | TckTckTck’s 2014 People’s Climate March: This Changed Nothing, September 23, 2015]

    And the following information would too come as no surprise, if only the populace could see through the fog of faux environmentalism.

    Alnoor Ladha is a founding partner and the head of strategy at Purpose. With its expertise in behavioural change, Purpose is most renowned for its White Helmets campaign – a 21st century hybrid-NGO serving NATO states. Ladha is a founding member and the executive director of the Purpose project, The Rules. Ladha serves on the board of Greenpeace USA where its executive director, Annie Leonard, has co-founded Earth Economics. Yet another institution created to aid, abet, and, most importantly, profit off the financialization of nature scheme, now well underway as demonstrated in this series. Leonard’s Earth Economics [4] is a member of divestment partner CERES, which is in turn a partner of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Purpose (PR arm of Avaaz) manages The B Team (co-founder of We Mean Business) the official address of which, is the office of Purpose.

    The link between most, if not all of these NGOs, institutions and high-level individuals, is the shared desire for carbon markets and/or the implementation of payments for ecosystem services (PES).

    “Since the 1970s, several waves of privatization have swept the world. In 2017, the Privatization Barometer concluded that “the massive global privatization wave that began in 2012 continues unabated”. According to the rights expert, that wave has been driven not only by Governments and the private sector, but also by international organizations, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the United Nations.” — Human rights at risk from tsunami of privatization, Third World Network, November 16, 2018

    Above: Kelly Rigg, Founding Director, Varda Group, US: The Economics of Sustainable Development, 16-19 June, 2012 | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Photo: International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) website

    +++

    “The second issue is the issue of reductions of emissions. There must be radical reductions of emissions starting from now. In our view, by 2017 we should cut, developed countries must cut by 52%, 65% by 2020, 80% by 2030, well above 100 [percent] by 2050. And this is very important because the more you defer action the more you condemn millions of people to immeasurable suffering.” — Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator of the G77, December 11, 2009, COP15

    In 2008, as the global climate change director for E3G,  Jennifer Morgan (executive director, Greenpeace International) played a central role and lead catalyst in the formation and launch of the GCCA – the aforementioned coalition first conceptualized in 2006. [1] With extensive experience in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, Morgan was the ideal choice.

    “With an overall budget of USD 6.8 million—over 95 % of which came from foundation funding—the GCCA was undoubtedly the most well-funded global climate campaign of 2009.” Grants for the 2009 GCCA/TckTckTck campaign (created by Havas Worldwide/Euro RSGG in collaboration with Kofi Annan‘s Global Humanitarian Forum) morphed to eleven million USD. [2]

    In 2013, the International Policies and Politics Initiative (IPPI) was established by five foundations: the European Climate Foundation (ECF), ClimateWorks Foundation, Oak Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) and the Mercator Foundation. The initiative would act “as a platform where foundations and grantees meet to strategize on how international political and policy levers can catalyse more ambitious policies at the domestic level.” The ClimateWorks Foundation was largely operated by the McKinsey & Company, an acting advisor to Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room. [3]

    The GCCA would greatly benefit the IPPI:

    “The GCCA and the TckTckTck campaign offer a potent example of how foundation funds—and most significantly those of the Oak Foundation—were mobilized for capacity building purposes in the run-up to Copenhagen.” — [Source, p. 73]

    Morgan, by this time serving with the World Resources Institute, was the ideal person to coordinate the IPPI platform in the run-up to and during the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) held in Paris. Morgan was chosen to lead IPPI due to her vast experience in the international climate realm coupled with her World Resources Institute (WRI) affiliation. In essence, this was a signal to corporate power that its interests would be protected. [“The WRI, given its director’s links with governments and international institutions like the World Bank, was seen as a legitimate partner in the eyes of the funders.”] [Source: The Price of Climate Action-Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, 2016, p. 101]

    And while IPPI and GCCA controlled the “movement”, the same forces also controlled the message via the Carbon Briefing Service (CBS). The news service was launched by Jennifer Morgan (WRI) and Liz Gallagher (E3G) in late 2014 with additional funding by the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Villum Foundation and Avaaz. [Source]

    The description on the E3G website describes CBS as “a joint E3G-WRI Platform providing political analysis and intelligence to a wide range of actors in the run up to the Paris 2015 climate change negotiations”. Consider that the communications distributed via the CBC “ownerless” network began with the following  notice: “This briefing is confidential and not for public circulation. You have received it due to your relationships with CBS members and networks.” Invitation only CBS participants included: Iain Keith (Avaaz), Jamie Henn (350), Camilla Born (E3G), Liz Gallagher (E3G), Mohamed Adow (ChristianAid), Monica Araya, Martin Kaiser (Greenpeace Germany), Farhana Yamin (TrackO), Wael Hmaidan (CAN International), Bill Hare (Climate Analytics), Pascal Canfin (WRI), Michael Jacobs (Grantham), Alden Meyer (UCS), Tim Nuthall (ECF), Alix Mazounie (RAC-France). [Source]

    “IPPI is focused on using the ‘Paris moment’ to increase the scale and pace of change.” — Jennifer Morgan, World Resources Institute, [Source, p. 5]

    By utilizing GCCA, IPPI, CBS and outside “progressive media”, in conjunction with collaborating NGOs and institutions that comprise the non-profit industrial complex, the creation of the “Paris moment” would be achieved.

    Havas Worldwide (creator of the TckTckTck campaign) was recognized as a convening partner of the COP21 Earth To Paris campaign with collaborating partners identified as 350.org and Avaaz (GCCA/TckTckTck founders), Ceres, The Climate Reality Project, The Nature Conservancy, We Mean Business, the World Bank (via Connect4Climate) and a host of others. Long before the conference had even concluded, it was announced that during a live-streamed summit on December 7th and 8th, the Earth To Paris partners would deliver “a new universal climate change agreement.”[Source]

    United Nations Development Programme Press Release, October 29, 2015:

    “Earth To Paris, a coalition of partners helping to drive awareness about the connection between people and planet as well as the need for strong climate action, announced it will host “Earth To Paris—Le Hub” a two-day, high-impact, live-streamed summit on 7 and 8 December in Paris during COP21 — the United Nations climate conference to deliver a new universal climate change agreement.”

    The fact that a “new universal climate change agreement” was announced on October 29, 2015, a month prior to the conference actually taking place, was lost on the populace. [From TckTckTck, to Air France, to “Earth To Paris”, Havas Worldwide Continues to Hypnotize]

    “As the establishment rave in Paris winds down, the chimera of clean energy propels industrial societies toward nuking the future. The new age ghost dance, as an expression of social despair, has led to progressive self-delusion that promises us the world, if only we believe. Stepping through the looking glass, one can examine the metrics of messaging by establishment social media and philanthropy, that, combined, is the driving force of the non-profit industrial complex. — Jay Taber, Rave New World

    IPPI, as coordinated by Morgan, was created as a “discrete ECF programme” which would “work behind the scenes.” “While the ECF had given rise to the original idea and while it housed its dedicated staff, IPPI was very much presented as an autonomous and “unbranded” initiative (“unbranded” as in not linked to any particular organization”). [Source, p. 101]

    Video: Beyond Davos, 2015 – Mobilizing consumers and ownerless movements as explained by Avaaz/Purpose co-founder Jeremy Heimans. Introduction by Paul Hilder (Avaaz, Here Now/Purpose). [Running time: 3m:39s]:

     

    “Although civil society groups are assumed to be normatively motivated […] they are nonetheless embedded in a global capitalist economy and have quite specific material requirements that must be fulfilled in order to operate successfully.” — Lipschutz and McKendry, Social Movements and Global Civil Society, August, 2011

    Lipschutz and McKendry (quoted above) further elaborate: “to be successful, an organization must survive and, in a marketbased environment, this means finding ways to generate the funds necessary to sustain operations”. [5] Yet, it is more than this. Those at the helm, as this series has demonstrated, share the same ideologies and Western mindsets as the capitalists and corporations whose interests they serve.

    The IPPI brought together the influential players: Greenpeace, WWF, 350.org, Avaaz, CAN International, Oxfam, E3G, The Climate Group and the World Resources Institute. The formation of GCCA was one commonality between many of these NGOs and think tanks coupled with extensive involvement in the international climate arena coupled with strong affiliations with negotiators and the UNFCCC secretariat. [Source: The Price of Climate Action-Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, 2016 [p. 101 and p. 118]

    “The role of Avaaz is particularly revealing in this respect. In other words, it was not a case of promoting one approach among many but of making sure that the IPPI approach was the only approach while maintaining a false sense of pluralism both inside and on the margins of the climate negotiations. Core contributors to the IPPI strategy went to extraordinary lengths to prevent fellow non-state actors from “getting in the way” of a positive diplomatic outcome in Paris.” — The Price of Climate Action-Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, 2016, Edouard Morena] [p. 133]

    The Key Foundations

    To be clear, the IPPI is not the only case of foundation involvement and influence in the climate policy realm. However, it is one of the most “successful,” given how influential it has proven to be. Most policies (if not all) are driven by corporations via the largest and most influential foundations and think tanks created and financed by profits from these very same corporate entities.

    The field of climate philanthropy regroups a fairly small number of large players.  A 2010 study for the Foundation Center, showed that in 2008, 25 foundations accounted for over 90% of all climate change funding. More recent data from the same source discloses that six foundations—Oak, Packard, Hewlett, Sea Change, Energy, Rockefeller—accounted for approximately 70% of climate change policy funding in 2012. [Source, p 10]

    In 1989, Environmental Defence Fund, WWF and Greenpeace, with foundation backing, launched the Climate Action Network (CAN) which Jennifer Morgan also presided over in her career at USCAN. One foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which financed regional offshoots of CAN, would comment in it’s 1993 annual review, that these “global preachers” “played a central role beginning in the early days of the climate change debate”. [Source, p. 32]

    It is here that we must jump forward to the present day.

    In the article “Philanthropy Teams Up With Institutional Investors to Fight Climate Change,” published on September 7, 2017, the need for a new approach that will unlock capital for new climate infrastructure at scale is highlighted:

    “[B]ecause climate change represents such an extraordinary threat, it’s imperative we compress the dynamics of innovation and scale through new approaches. That’s why Planet Heritage Foundation… a global investment advisory firm that works with institutional investors to channel capital into “climate infrastructure” sectors such as clean energy, water, and waste-to-value. These investors — sovereign funds, pensions, endowments, insurance companies, family offices, and foundations — represent more than $80 trillion in assets and are the only stakeholders other than governments with the capacity to invest at a scale… After only a year, the Aligned Intermediary model is already demonstrating promise in this regard…

     

    “In partnership with Sarah Kearney (PRIME) and Alicia Seiger (Stanford University), we initially attracted grant funding totaling $500,000 from four philanthropies — the Hewlett Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the ClimateWorks Foundation, and Planet Heritage Foundation — for research that demonstrated the potential of our model.” [Emphasis added]

    One year later, at the One Planet Summit in NY on September 26, 2018, the Climate Finance Partnership, coordinated by the Task Force on Philanthropic Innovation and Aligned Intermediary, announced the new instruments for unlocking capital at scale:

    “Efforts to blend capital in order to engage and mobilize large-scale institutional capital toward climate solutions took a notable step forward on September 26 at the One Planet Summit in New York, when French President Emmanuel Macron and BlackRock’s Larry Fink announced the Climate Finance Partnership (CFP). The CFP consists of a unique combination of philanthropies, governments, institutional investors, and a leading global asset manager. The parties, including BlackRock, the Governments of France and Germany, and the Hewlett, Grantham, and IKEA foundations, have committed to work together to finalize the design and structure of what we anticipate will be a flagship blended capital investment vehicle by the end of the first quarter, 2019.

     

    The partnership, coordinated by the Task Force on Philanthropic Innovation and the Aligned Intermediary, an investment advisory group, was designed and structured specifically to use a layer of government and philanthropic capital to maximize private capital mobilization toward climate-related sectors in emerging markets.” [Emphasis added]

    The Blended Finance Taskforce (ACT IV of this series) is comprised of fifty icons of finance including the MacArthur Foundation (World Resources Institute), the Rockefeller Foundation and the ClimateWorks Foundation. [Full list]

    The same article sheds light on the “violent agreement” to unlock $100 trillion USD:

    “A detailed analysis by the World Bank found that while $100 trillion is held by pension funds and other institutional investors, these same investors allocated less than $2 trillion over a 25 year period into infrastructure investment in emerging markets. And the fraction of that investment that could be considered green, clean, or climate-friendly was negligible.

     

    So, what can be done? Whether you choose to look through the lens of unprecedented challenge or unprecedented opportunity, there is violent agreement that institutional capital needs to be “unlocked” (a favorite word on the climate conference circuit) and mobilized quickly and at scale.” [Emphasis added]

    The foundations involved in climate policy from inception, that continue to work hand-in-hand with select NGOs and NGO leaders, are the same foundations to benefit from the Climate Finance Partnership. The roadmap to unlocking 100 trillion dollars is identified in pension funds. The roadmap to the privatization and financialization of nature, global in scale, is the interlocking directorate of the non-profit industrial complex, a matrix of overlapping highways of hegemony.

    On December 12, 2017, at the One Planet Summit, Frank Bainimaramai, COP23 President and Prime Minister of Fiji, stated:

    “…after all when we talk about tapping into the vast amounts of institutional capital for climate solutions we are largely talking about the retirement savings of ordinary hard-working citizens and we need to honor the expectation of being good stewards with the money…”

    To be clear: The money for multi-billion-dollar corporations – to create privatized services and industries, under the guise of environmental protection, is going to be PAID FOR BY THE PUBLIC – BUT THE PUBLIC WILL NOT OWN THEM. (For this would be communism – a detestable idea in the Western world.) For the corporate sector, it’s no risk – all profit. Anything that fails – the public is on the hook.

    John D. Rockefeller once stated that, “the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.” Truer words were perhaps never spoken.

    The skill and precision in achieving the protection and expansion of the capitalist economic system is today nothing less than extraordinary. By utilizing the non-profit industrial complex, the world’s most powerful oligarchs need not force their will onto society. Rather, akin to what Aldous Huxley prophesized in his fictional novel Brave New World, we have been manipulated and engineered to demand the very “solutions” that will further empower those that destroy us.

    “The climate Glitterati, such as, M. Bloomberg, L. DiCaprio, N. Stern, C. Figueres, A. Gore, M. Carney. All of these people have huge carbon footprints, and they fly around the world in private jets to inform us what to do about climate change. They are supported by a whole cadre of senior academics promoting offsetting, negative emissions, geo-engineering, CCS, green growth, etc. These are all ‘an evolution within the system.” — Kevin Anderson, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research [Source]

     

     

     

    Underway: The Monetization of Social Capital

    André Hoffmann is a Swiss industrialist belonging to one of the wealthiest dynasties in Europe. He served as vice-president of WWF from 2007-2017 and as WWF honorary chair from 1998-2017. He is president of the MAVA Foundation (a key funder of the Natural Capital Coalition) and vice- chairman of the board for Roche, the pharmaceutical and chemical giant founded by his family. [Bio]

    Roche is the world’s largest biotech company. It is headquartered in Switzerland and has operations in over 100 countries. As one of the early adopters of the Natural Capital Protocol, the pilot summary report made mention that “an important point raised by the study was the fact that Roche generates considerable unaccounted for positive social value from use of their products and other socially responsible activities, which likely far outweigh any negative environmental impacts.” [Source] [Emphasis added]

    The above disclosure opens up yet another layer of depravity. If we can assign monetary values to nature – we can assign monetary values to culture as well. Enter the assigning of monetary value to “social capital” in the language of “social capital markets”. [Social Capital Markets website: “dedicated to catalyzing world change through market-based solutions.”]

    NextBillion was launched in May 2005 by the World Resources Institute. The “development through enterprise” project  shares an interest in the development of social capital. In 2010, the William Davidson Institute (WDI) at the University of Michigan joined the World Resources Institute as partners in ownership of NextBillion. As of December 4, 2012, NextBillion is managed exclusively by WDI, which is focused on providing private-sector solutions in emerging markets.

    “Social Capital Markets is Dedicated to Accelerating a New Global Market at the Intersection of Money + Meaning”.  — Social Capital Markets Website

    The 2017 Social Capital Protocol states that, “integrating approaches between social and natural capital” are driven by the same purpose and based on the same concepts and principles as the Natural Capital Protocol developed by the Natural Capital Coalition. [p. 6]

    Although the social capital concept is still in its infancy [“the measurement and valuation of social capital is a relatively new concept”], its goals are clear: “Over the coming years, the Social Capital Protocol initiative will shape and drive collaborative action to achieve four goals.” The last goal can best be described as what will be the coup de grâce for the last vestiges of human normality: “Enable companies to capitalize on their implementation of the Social Capital Protocol by ensuring the finance community and capital markets recognize and reward social value creation.” [p. 5]

    Again, as with the Natural Capital project/coalition, World Resources Institute plays a key role: “These principles align with the current principles of the Natural Capital Protocol, which itself builds on guidance from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the World Resource Institute (WRI)/WBCSD Greenhouse Gas Protocol, and the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB).” [p. 10]

    A new financial system that allows a corporation such as Roche, the world’s largest biotech company, to measure and account for positive social value” as a means of offsetting “negative environmental impacts” is a great tool indeed. It is little wonder that Hoffman would have invested in its development.

    Hoffmann also serves as senior advisor at Chatham House and numerous other boards, including the World Economic Forum, the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and SYSTEMIQ.

    Here it can be noted that Jeremy Oppenheim, the lead and former programme director of the New Climate Economy, is the founder and managing partner of SYSTEMIQ: “While giving full value to the natural ecosystem, these alternatives need to be economically viable and able to replicate at scale… We envisage successful models rapidly becoming a ‘bankable asset class’ for regular investors.” [Source] Oppenheim also serves as chair of the Blended Finance Taskforce. John E. Morton who serves as senior advisor to the Blended Finance Taskforce is a fellow to the European Climate Foundation. Two SYSTEMIQ associates serve as the project leads to the Blended Finance Taskforce. [Source] Suffice to say, all roads lead to the Climate Finance Partnership and the New Climate Economy.

    André Hoffmann’s father, Luc Hoffmann served on the first international board of the WWF (co-founders include Goddfrey Rockefeller). In addition to his contributions to the founding of WWF, Luc Hoffmann also founded WWF France and WWF Greece. He served as honorary vice-president to WWF until his death in 2016. [Source]

    In addition to the support provided to the WWF, Luc Hoffmann served as director of Wetlands International, was vice-president of the IUCN (World Union of Nature Conservation) and established the International Bank of Arguin Foundation in Mauritania. This is important to recognize, as in 2013, this project received the “first international payment for marine ecosystem services” [Source: The case of the Banc d’Arguin National Park, Mauritania]

    +++

    October 29, 2018, WWF Press Release, “WWF Report Reveals Staggering Extent of Human Impact on Planet”:

    “A global deal for nature, similar to the Paris Climate Agreement, can ensure that effective conservation methods continue, and more ambitious goals are set.”

    The report states that “the biggest drivers of current biodiversity loss are overexploitation and agriculture, both linked to continually increasing human consumption.” Yet, nowhere does it mention the ecological impacts of militarism. As a collective, we have become so conditioned to this incredible “oversight”, that we no longer take notice of its omission. The report draws attention to agriculture, but not to industrial livestock with its staggering ecological impacts coupled with its grotesque cruelty. It draws attention to increasing number of mountain gorillas – just prior to Jane Goodall’s promotional support of a fourth industrial revolution in January of 2019, in Davos. A revolution that consequently demands fivefold the minerals and metals we are already using as fast as we can. The very same metals that cause the conflict and resulting death of Congolose men, women and children – and gorillas. Here we can only conclude what those in the Global South have always known: technological “progress” is always intended to serve the West at the expense of what life and what resources remain.

    As we peel back the layers, the “New Deal for Nature” is even more egregious than the Green New Deal. Yet, if the NGOs can create enough collective hype around the Green New Deal, in servitude to their funders, the more sinister deal can be brought into legislation without opposition. This bears resemblance to the anti-pipeline NGO campaigns. While Americans were hypnotized by a single pipeline, American business magnate Warren Buffett built a 21st century rail dynasty to ship oil via rail, and the oil continued to flow – only even faster.

    Storytelling

    “… and I will say this to our colleagues from Western civil society — you have definitely sided with a small group of industrialists and their representatives and your representative branches. Nothing more than that. You have become an instrument of your governments.” — Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator of the G77, December 11, 2009, COP15

    Above screenshot: In the 2012 David Blood lecture (video), “Breakthrough Capitalism Forum – David Blood”, one can view the sponsorship in the background. At the top of the screen, we can identify speakers/sponsors Jeremy Leggitt of Solar Century & Carbon Tracker, and Jennifer Morgan of WWF, to name two. [See full list of Breakthrough Capitalism partners.] [Source]

    To demonstrate an example of “storytelling” employed to appease the public and feign opposition to those destroying our planet, we can look at the following Greenpeace International press release: January 25, 2019, “Profit, Not People, Clearly Remains Davos Elites’ Priority. As the World Economic Forum in Davos draws to a close, Greenpeace International Executive Director, Jennifer Morgan, stated:

    Greenpeace came to Davos looking for moral, business and political leadership, and we did not find it. It is deeply disturbing that, as the world tinkers on the brink of a climate catastrophe, avoiding further temperature rise is not at the very centre of all of the meetings of CEOs and world leaders. The solutions are in front of them and they need to prioritise solving this crisis, join the youth who are leading the way forward and thus be on the right side of history.

     

    Yesterday there were 32,000 school strike students on the streets of Belgium and today children are taking to the streets of Berlin clamouring for an early coal phase-out. The youth are demanding to be heard, the question is, why isn’t the Davos elite responding with the scale and pace required? Short-term business interests and making a greater profit, whatever the cost to others, clearly remains the Davos elites priority. We have no time to waste. In the powerful words of Greta Thunberg, we need to ‘get angry, and form that anger into action.'”

    An excerpt from the January 16, 2019 press release by Morgan a week prior, as a lead-up to the WEF in Davos, stated:

    “Make no mistake we are in a climate emergency and that emergency must dominate next weeks annual World Economic Forum gathering in Davos…. The Fourth Industrial Revolution could totally reimagine the way we approach solutions to the climate crisis. But only if this revolution is in service of solving climate change.” [Source]

    This is very much the green light for the climate strikes in which Greenpeace plays the leading role – in the background.

    Above: February 7, 2019, UKYCC tweet. Tagged users: Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, Greta Thunberg, People & Planet (The UK’s largest student network), UKSCN, YouthStrike4Climate and Friends of the Earth

    Voice for the Planet

     

    “Voice for the planet was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019 by the Global Shapers. The aim, to showcase the growing movement of people around the world calling for a new deal for nature and people: urgent global action  to address the current crisis for nature.” [Source: Voice for the Planet website]

    The twenty-two organizations supporting the campaign (registered to WWF-UK) include: The Climate Reality Project, World Resources Institute, WWF, Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy and UNDP. [Accessed February 20, 2019] [Full list]

    Global Shapers

    Voice for the Planet leads us to Global Shapers, a global community of “change-makers” – supported by grant and community partners. Founded in 2011 by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Global Shapers is a defacto training center for young people under the age of 30 that can shape the world as envisioned by WEF, Al Gore, Jack Ma et al. With more than 7,000 members, the Global Shapers community spans 369 city-based hubs in 171 countries.

    Here again we have the youth being trained to destroy their own futures as sacrificial lambs to capitalism.

    Serving on the Global Shapers board of directors is David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of the  Carlyle Group, and Jack Ma, executive chairman of the Alibaba Group and co-founder of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition.

    Partners include: The Climate Reality Project, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, Procter and Gamble, Reliance Industries, Oando, GMR Group, Hanwha Energy Corporation, Rosamund Zander and Yara International.

    “Lastly, thanks to collaboration with the Climate Reality Project, more than 292 Global Shapers were able to join U.S. Vice President Al Gore at the Climate Reality Leadership Corps training. Global Shapers joined the training that took place in Berlin, Pittsburgh, Mexico City and Los Angeles, as well as during regional SHAPE events, to learn how to lead the global fight for climate solutions.” — Global Shapers Annual Report 2017

    The Global Shapers is a grotesque display of corporate malfeasance disguised as good. As an example, under the heading “accelerating change,” is the “Coca-Cola Shaping a Better Future Grant Challenge”. In 2017 the award was given to the Bogotá Hub in order to “foster peace and reconciliation in conflict-torn areas of Colombia.” What the youth enraptured by Global Shapers will not be told is that Coca-Cola has a long and sordid history of murdering union leaders in Columbia.

    As discussed in the addendum “The Branding of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – By Any Means Necessary” (February 15, 2019), more and more, youth are being recognized and targeted as key drivers of economic growth and influence:

    “We are becoming increasingly aware that solutions to our global challenges must purposefully engage youth, at all levels – locally, regionally, nationally and globally. This generation has the passion, dynamism and entrepreneurial spirit to shape the future.” —Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum [Emphasis added]

    This growing body of research is not lost on the power elite that gather annually at Davos, nor on the World Economic Forum that hosts them. Nature Conservancy, January 4, 2019, Ten Groups to Watch in 2019:

    “The Revolution Will Be Snapchatted. Forget your John-Hughes-movie stereotypes. Today’s teens are civically active, globally minded —and they nearly unanimously agree that we need to do more to address climate change. A study of 31,000 youth from 186 countries found that climate change is their number one concern (surpassing terrorism, poverty and unemployment.) Over 90% agree that science has proven that humans are causing climate change, and nearly 60% plan to work in sustainability.” [Emphasis in original]

    The survey Nature Conservancy highlights has been conducted by Global Shapers. This has nothing to do with goodwill or the well-being of youth. This is simple metrics in order to identify, understand, and ultimately exploit, the targeted  audience.

    In the polling conducted for the 2017 Global Shapers annual survey report, one area of interest is the section concerning “sense of responsibility and responsiveness.” When asked who has the greatest responsibility in making the world a better place and thereby the power to address the most important global and local issues, the first choice is ‘individuals'(34.2%)”. Compare this to 9% of votes feeling the responsibility is with “global and large national companies”. [“The top choice is constant regardless of gender, age, regions, Human Development Index, Corruption Perceptions Index or income level.”]

    In essence, we have youth – many from states whose contribution to climate change is almost nil – who have been convinced to believe their own impact is far greater to ecological devastation than corporations, the economic system itself, or even the global war industry.

    Another insight garnered from the survey: “Does the feeling of responsibility translate into any concrete actions? Young people were asked whether they would be willing to change their lifestyle to protect nature and the environment, to which 78.1% responded yes“. And this is the primary reason for feigned concern by the world’s most powerful capitalists – how the youth can be exploited as consumers.

    Meanwhile, on the “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode” Front

    “IF THERE’S NO ACTION before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” — Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Nov. 17, 2007

     

    “We still have a chance to turn things around, though. A major body of research led by The Nature Conservancy shows it is still possible to achieve a sustainable future for people and nature—if we take massive action in the next 10 years. – January 4, 2019

    Meanwhile, in terms of the authorities in the “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode” front, we have the very same groups that brought us into the fold of the 2009 TckTckTck campaign for COP15 (“a movement that consumers, advertisers and the media would use and exploit”) – that were then able to “herd the cats” for the People’s Climate March orchestrated in 2014 – and are now tasked with mobilizing the populace again for the final crescendo, requiring even larger unprecedented numbers. Hence, we have headlines such as “The Human Survival Summit: The Next Wave Of Climate Change Protests Is Coming – Greenpeace and Amnesty International unite in push for greater civil disobedience.” [January 25, 2019]

    The irony here is that both Greenpeace and TckTckTck threw all the world’s most vulnerable citizens under the bus in 2009 during the tenure of Kumi Naidoo who served as executive director of both organizations. Today, a decade later, Naidoo now leads Amnesty International as its secretary-general. In 2011, Amnesty International, by utilizing the behavioural economics of hatred, was instrumental in leading the illegal war on the sovereign nation of Libya – Libya being the most prosperous country in Africa under the leadership of Libyan revolutionary Muammar Gaddafi. Libya quickly became a war torn nation in a permanent state of chaos as hundreds of thousands of citizens perished (and continue to do so to this day). Yet, the elite institutions and oligarchs that finance it, control it and wield it as a weapon in the service of imperialism and patriarchy, would like you to believe that they actually have concern over the climate and human rights:

    “Greenpeace International, which has traditionally focused on environmental issues, and Amnesty International, which has concentrated on human rights, are co-launching a Summit for Human Survival later this year to encourage nonviolent protests and other interventions that force greater action on climate change.

     

    The idea of the Summit, said Naidoo, is not for it to dictate or try to coordinate centralized actions but rather to unite individuals and organizations so that they can collaborate in pushing for change. He pointed to new forms of protest such as the Extinction Rebellion movement, one of the many youth-driven civil disobedience movements focused on climate change. It began in the U.K. and is now launching chapters across the globe, including in the United States. Naidoo added that big international NGOs aren’t organizing this mobilization and that this sort of decentralization should be encouraged.”

    And this too is a lie.

    Having initially intended to write extensively in this segment about Extinction Rebellion, the need to do so is no longer paramount. It is simply sufficient to point out the fact that The Climate Mobilization NGO (whose founder is the author of the aforementioned paper “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode,” that collaborates with 350.org, The Leap and many others) has been working with Extinction Rebellion since at least last September [6]. This reveals why the Extinction Rebellion group was catapulted into international super stardom by The Guardian et al while far greater actions by land defenders in the Global South go ignored for eternity.

    If that is not sufficient substantiation for some readers, it is fact that 350.org, Avaaz, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have all been in dialogue with the Extinction Rebellion co-founders, whom, with The Climate Mobilization, are very much in favour of such collaboration. [Interview with ER co-founders by The Climate Mobilization founder, December 6, 2018]:

    Bradbrook    “…at the start of this campaign in back in early October we did an occupation of Greenpeace’s offices. It was very friendly.  We took cake and flowers and everybody hid the horns from Roger so it couldn’t go around blowing the horns because we wanted to keep it really lovely…

     

    We are having conversations with organizations, [] conversation with [] some of the [] bigger online platforms even than 350.org. It’s always an important balance to figure out how you have a relationship with any kind of NGO so that there’s not big compromises being asked for, and watch this space on that front. I think I shouldn’t pre-announce things on here that aren’t being agreed yet with everybody else, but we yeah we are definitely talking to other organizations. More tricky than you think, quite often.”

     

    Hallam       “…so this is a very serious sort of proposition that we’re putting to some of the [] NGOs which are, I think a lot of the people in the NGOs know this as well. I mean a lot of people know what’s coming and I think this opens up a really interesting space in progressive culture in the countries we’re in.  For the first time for a generation or two is to basically create a united front as it were people working together on a common agenda and I’ve been personally really surprised by how open some of the people have been at Greenpeace and Avaaz and various other organizations to the notion that, yes, we need to have as mass participation in civil disobedience and that’s going to be the future, we’ve run out of other options.”

    The NGO relationships formed with Extinction Rebellion explain the deliberately vague three demands behind the Extinction Rebellion “movement” – a vagueness that goes largely unnoticed – while one particular demand is as clear as the light of day. While imperialism, capitalism and militarism – the main drivers of ecological devastation and climate change are nowhere to be found, there is something that is found buried in the FAQ section:

    Question: “WHY HAVEN’T YOU GOT MORE TANGIBLE WINNABLE STEPPING STONE GOALS THAT WOULD BUILD MORAL[SIC] AS YOU WIN?”

    Extinction Rebellion: “We have. We say the Government must reverse current policies inconsistent with acknowledging the climate emergency – there is much to be achieved there. For example banning fracking and dropping plans for a third runway at Heathrow. And reversing their decision to crush renewable energy investment while doubling down on fossil fuels. A massive Green New Deal is absolutely vital, possible and necessary.”

    Here, one must ask why a UK group would identify a US campaign as a primary focal point of its demands. The answer is that not only were US NGOs already officially involved with Extinction Rebellion as early as September 2018 while simultaneously being aggressive proponents of the New Green Deal, but even more importantly, these NGOs, at the bequest of their benefactors, also had global designs for Green New Deals. The New Deal For Nature would be helped along after popularizing the language of “new deal” in order to mask its ugly intent. The New Deal for Nature, saturated with holistic linguistics and emotive hooks, lies in the dark shadows of the Green New Deal and climate strikes – waiting.

    In the October 31, 2018 article covering the very first Extinction Rebellion action, published by the aforementioned DesmogBlog, a reference to a “new deal for nature” goes undetected:

    “Extinction Rebellion’s declaration of rebellion comes a day after a report by the WWF found that many species’ populations have declined on average by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014 largely due to human activity.

     

    The report said: ‘Decision makers at every level need to make the right political, financial and consumer choices to achieve the vision that humanity and nature thrive in harmony on our only planet.’

     

    The WWF called for ‘a new global deal for nature and people’ to halt wildlife decline, tackle deforestation, climate change and plastic pollution and is backed by ‘concrete commitments from global leaders and businesses.'”

    The fact that Extinction Rebellion does not include capitalism, imperialism or militarism – the primary drivers of the ecological assault against the Earth, in conjunction with the omission of other underlying structural causes, has raised important questions on if this vehicle can perhaps still be utilized to organize and build community.

    Here, the question must be, why would we choose to lend our name to strengthen a BRAND that cites “a massive new deal is absolutely vital,” yet deliberately omits the fact that stopping capitalism, imperialism and militarism and other forms of oppression that are just as vital. This is worse than an oversight. It is a disgrace. Even more tragic is the fact that collectively we’ve been conditioned to such an extent, we are no longer even cognizant of such blatant hypocrisies.

    As an ongoing coup against the sovereign state of  Venezuela led by the US and Canada accelerates – Extinction Rebellion fails to mobilize their groups, now international in scope. They not only fail to mobilize, they fail to speak of it. With its arms opened to imperial NGOs such as Avaaz and Amnesty International, the writing was already on the wall before the first action took place.

    Adding to this, is the fact that Extinction Rebellion is yet another group that chooses to stay absolutely silent on the commodification and objectification of nature – another tell-tale warning sign.

    We must lend our support and engage in small but connected resistance groups that work together to tear down the structures oppressing not only ourselves – but foremost, our brothers and sisters in the Global South. This means crushing the drivers of imperialism.

    [Essential reading for youth: CHE GUEVARA TALKS TO YOUNG PEOPLE. “Between 1959 and 1964, freedom fighter Che Guevara delivered a number of speeches to youth groups and students to inspire and educate them about the revolution. This is a collection of these speeches – a collection of thought as iconic as Che Guevara’s image. He remains a hero to many, and represents a form of socialism that is hard to deny.”] [Download]

    The Last Vestiges of Ethics and the Corporate Capture of Nature

    This series has disclosed very ugly truths. It is our ethical and moral duty to share this knowledge. Only then, can the tide turn. The era of “green shaming” must come to an end. [Trust Nothing – John Steppling] It has been used as a weapon to ensure our silence for long enough.

    This is 350 – born out of The Rockefeller Foundation. This is Avaaz – an instrument of empire – up to its neck in the blood of Libyan and Syrian men, women and children while campaigning for climate action as it creates acquiescence for wars. This is Greenpeace that cited the world must not exceed a global temperature increase of  1°C in 1997 only to demand a full 2°C in 2009. This is Friends of the Earth, who has served on the board of Ceres, since its inception – that also cited 1°C in 2001 as the global temperature that the Earth must not exceed. This is a cabal that has placed capital and corporate interests over environmental protection and Indigenous rights – time and time again.

    “Many of you equally, and I will say this, and I would have never thought that one day I will accuse a civil society of such a thing. Dividing the G77, or helping divide the G77, is simply something that should be left to the CIAs, the KGBs and the rest [not the NGOs].— Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator of the G77, December 11, 2009, COP15

    Clive L. Spash, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria, writes: “The Paris Agreement signifies commitment to sustained industrial growth, risk management over disaster prevention, and future inventions and technology as saviour. The primary commitment of the international community is to maintain the current social and economic system. The result is denial that tackling GHG emissions is incompatible with sustained economic growth. The reality is that Nation States and international corporations are engaged in an unremitting and ongoing expansion of fossil fuel energy exploration, extraction and combustion, and the construction of related infrastructure for production and consumption. The targets and promises of the Paris Agreement bear no relationship to biophysical or social and economic reality.” [This Changes Nothing: The Paris Agreement to Ignore Reality, Globalizations, 2016 Vol. 13, No. 6, 928–933]

    Thunberg has stated repeatedly that her strike will continue “until Sweden is aligned with the Paris Agreement.” Therefore, by her own statements, this is the singular, overall purpose and goal of the strikes, now global in scale. A Paris Agreement that unlocks everything which has been disclosed in painstaking detail within this series.

    On February 21, 2019, the European Commission was the latest to embrace and promote Thunberg: “The teenager opened a European Commission event in front of President Jean-Claude Juncker where she told politicians to stop ‘sweeping their mess under the carpet for our generation to clean up.'” Here again, Thunberg’s demands, on behalf of the youth participating in the climate strikes, are identified:

    “We want you to follow the Paris agreement and the IPCC reports we don’t have any other manifests or demands. Just unite behind the science. That is our demand.” [Video]

    Here we have three key players of capitalist hegemony, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the European Commission – all promoting Thunberg in unprecedented fashion. Institutions housing individuals that systematically pillage the planet in exchange for economic growth, power and profits have been magically moved to protect the planet.

    What is unbeknownst to the populace is the fact that all three of these institutions are founding architects/partners of the Climate Finance Partnerships which is aligned with Blended Finance Taskforce. The Climate Finance Partnership was formed under the leadership of French President Emmanuel Macron who announced the partnership on September 26, 2018 at the One Planet Summit held in New York. The One Planet Summit is organized by the Government of France jointly with the UN, the World Bank Group and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Partners of the Climate Finance Partnership include the Governments of France and Germany.

    February 23, 2019: “De Franse president Macron ontving het Zweedse klimaatmeisje Greta Thunberg (rechts naar Macron) en een delegatie van Youth for Climate, onder wie Anuna De Wever (tweede van rechts) en Kyra Gantois (eerste van links).” [Source]

    The Climate Finance Partnership was created in order to propel forward the New Climate Economy. Both being key vehicles to unlock the 100 trillion dollars identified in pension funds while simultaneously implementing the economic valuation and payment for environmental services (payments for ecosystems services) hidden within the Sustainable Development Goals. The privatization of nature will transform global finance. Those most responsible for the destruction will be assigned as the new “stewards of national natural capital.”

    One can only hope that this series has  finally divulged once and for all who and what such powerful NGOs represent: oligarchs, corporate finance and capital. The NGOS at the helm of non-profit industrial complex must be recognized as the world’s most powerful lobbying arm for green technology. This comes at the expense of nature, not for the protection of nature. Again, reality turned on its head. This is why the non-profit industrial complex must be starved out of commission – by withdrawing our consent. Up to this point its power stems from its false claim of representing civil society. We must make it clear that it does not.

    A combination of pictures shows European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker greeting 16-year old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg at a conference in Brussels, Belgium February 21, 2019. REUTERS/Yves Herman

     

    We have planetary boundaries that we must live within if life on Earth is to continue in some shape or form. These boundaries are non-negotiable. We can lie to ourselves all we want, in all of our anthropocentric glory, but it won’t change the reality. We can paint it green, we can share our illusions in glossy brochures and make them go viral on shiny screens – the biosphere does not give a flying fuck. If our society was actually sane, we would recognize these said “solutions” as delusions – but sadly that is not the case. Disconnected from nature – and more and more, disconnected from each other – we are lost.

    Nature doesn’t deal.

    “And that’s the real question facing the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we’ve been into for the last hundreds of years?” — Black Power by Stokely Carmichael, 1966

    We can end this grim instalment by reflecting upon what Indian author Arundhati Roy so articulately summarized almost fifteen years ago on August 16, 2004: “The NGO-ization of resistance.” We can say that tragically, yet unequivocally, the NGO-ization of resistance in the West is a fait accompli.

    The NGO-ization of resistance, Arundhati Roy, August 16, 2004 [Running time: 5m:51s]:

     

     

    End Notes:

    [1] “Officially launched in 2008, the GCCA’s origins date back to April 2006 when representatives from some of the largest environmental and developmental groups—Oxfam, Greenpeace International, Greenpeace Brazil, WWF International, WWF India, the World Council of Churches, Friends of the Earth and the Union of Concerned Scientists—convened in Woltersdorf (Germany) to discuss the possibility of developing a common platform to mobilize the wider public and thereby bolster the climate negotiations.” [p. 70]

    “In 2009, its core funders were the Oak Foundation, the Sea Change Foundation, the Turner-affiliated Better World Fund, the Prince Albert II Foundation of Monaco and the Government of Québec. With a total contribution ofUSD 5 million in 2009, the Oak Foundation was by far the GCCA’s main donor (the Sea Change Foundation coming second with USD 1.5 million). [p.69]

    It was founded on “[connecting] the intelligence gathering and sophisticated advocacy provided by numerous NGOS in order to target and maximize the collective impact of groups on every continent” (GCCA 2009).” [p.71] [Source: The Price of Climate Action-Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, published in 2016 by Edouard Morena] [2] The GCCA made over USD 3 million worth of grants to partner organizations in support of their communications and campaigning activities. As they explain in their 2009 Annual Report, ‘most grants were awarded to support national and regional campaigning (including for rapid response actions and national hubs), with the remaining funds for global campaign and communication actions’. In other words, the GCCA, while not a foundation per se, acted as a de facto regranting organization, selectively distributing funds to push through a common message. What is more, GCCA grants had a leveraging effect by enabling partners to mobilize further funding—both internally and externally—for GCCA-related activities. According to its 2009 Annual Report, ‘partners reported a further total of more than eight million in funds leveraged from their own organisations plus additional sources for activities carried out with financial support from the GCCA’. [Source: The Price of Climate Action-Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, published in 2016 by Edouard Morena] [p.72] [3] “IPPI is presented as “a new platform for philanthropic cooperation to catalyse greater ambition on climate through activities and processes taking place at an international level” (ECF 2014, 26). It is “designed to help philanthropy identify opportunities for international collaboration, develop joint strategies, and pool and align grant making to achieve greater overall impact.” It acts as a platform where foundations and grantees meet to strategize on how international political and policy levers can catalyse more ambitious policies at the domestic level. [Source: The Price of Climate Action-Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, published in 2016 by Edouard Morena] [p. 5] [4] “Earth Economics, with the support of our Community Partners and Advisors, maintains the largest, spatially explicit, web-based repository of published and unpublished economic values for ecosystem services. With generous funding from our sponsors, in 2012 Earth Economics began porting our internal database to a web-based service. The Ecosystem Service Valuation Toolkit (EVT) portal was launched at Rio +20 in June 2012. The Researcher’s Library and SERVES were previewed at the ACES Conference in December 2012.”

    [5] Funds are required to both finance participation and facilitate lobbying activities— through joint initiatives, platforms, dialogues, reports, campaigns, outreach activities, and the creation and upholding of informal relationships of trust between NGOs and the UNFCCC secretariat and/or members of government delegations (Caniglia et al. 2015 , 241; Caniglia 2001 ; Dodds and Strauss 2004 ). [Source: The Price of Climate Action-Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, published in 2016 by Edouard Morena] [p. 6] [6] Gregory Schwedock, NY, NY, USA is the director of digital organizing for the Climate Mobilization Project (2014-present). He identifies himself as  coordinator for Extinction Rebellion from September 2018 – present. [Source: LinkedIn]

     

     

    [Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation and Counterpunch. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can support her independent journalism via Patreon.]

    Edited with Forrest Palmer, Wrong Kind of Green Collective.