Today in the Sunday Telegraph my colleague Christopher Booker breaks possibly the most important environmental story since Climategate: a devious plan, truly Blofeldian in its scope and menace, by a hard-left-leaning activist body to gain massive global political leverage and earn stupendous sums of money by exploiting and manipulating the world carbon trading market.
My cynical prediction is that this vitally important story will gain little traction in the wider media, especially not with organisations like the BBC. Why? Because the activist body in question has a lovely, cuddly panda as its motif, and a reputation – brainwashed into children from an early age – for truly caring about the state of our planet. What’s more, this latest campaign by the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) is very easy to spin as something unimpeachably noble and right. After all, what kind of fascistic, Gaia-hating sicko would you have to be NOT to applaud a delightful heartwarming scheme to buy up whole swathes of the beauteous, diversity-rich, Na’avi-style, Truffula-tree dotted Amazon rainforest to preserve it for all time from the depredations of evil loggers, cattleranchers and other such profiteering scum?
Hence the understandably cautious tone in Booker’s opening par:
If the world’s largest, richest environmental campaigning group, the WWF – formerly the World Wildlife Fund – announced that it was playing a leading role in a scheme to preserve an area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of Switzerland, many people might applaud, thinking this was just the kind of cause the WWF was set up to promote. Amazonia has long been near the top of the list of the world’s environmental cconcerns, not just because it includes easily the largest and most bio-diverse area of rainforest on the planet, but because its billions of trees contain the world’s largest land-based store of CO2 – so any serious threat to the forest can be portrayed as a major contributor to global warming.
Only after this nod to fashionable concerns is Booker able to stick in the knife:
If it then emerged, however, that a hidden agenda of the scheme to preserve this chunk of the forest was to allow the WWF and its partners to share the selling of carbon credits worth $60 billion, to enable firms in the industrial world to carry on emitting CO2 just as before, more than a few eyebrows might be raised. The idea is that credits representing the CO2 locked into this particular area of jungle – so remote that it is not under any threat – should be sold on the international market, allowing thousands of companies in the developed world to buy their way out of having to restrict their carbon emissions. The net effect would simply be to make the WWF and its partners much richer while making no contribution to lowering overall CO2 emissions.
WWF, which already earns £400 million yearly, much of it contributed by governments and taxpayers, has long been at the centre of efforts to talk up the threat to the Amazon rainforest – as shown recently by the furore over a much-publicised passage in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s claim that 40 per cent of the forest is threatened by global warming, it turned out, was not based on any scientific evidence, but simply on WWF propaganda, which had wholly distorted the findings of an earlier study on the threat posed to the forest, not by climate change but by logging.
Read the full story here. Then, for even more grisly details – about how, for example, the WWF’s scheme rides roughshod over the interests of native peoples, in way that might rather shock those who think of the organisation purely in terms of that cute panda – turn to Richard North’s comprehensive analysis at Eureferendum. The work North and Booker have done exposing the great AGW scam is quite beyond admiration. Truly they are the McIntyre and McKitrick of British journalism.
But why does the story matter so much? Because it goes to the heart of what is truly the most shocking and evil aspect of the Global Warming Industry: the way democratically unaccountable – but quite astonishingly well-funded – activist groups like the WWF (annual income: £400 MILLION) have been able to subvert the scientific process, and coax and bully politicians into making policies which will benefit the environment barely one jot, but which will fleece the taxpayer, increase energy bills, and make a handful of filthy rich investors even richer. If this scheme ever comes off – and it still might, if Americans are foolish enough to vote for Cap and Trade – then the WWF will have the financial clout of decent mid-ranking economy and a political influence as great as any G8 nation. For WWF, read New World Order.
Related posts:
- After Climategate, Pachaurigate and Glaciergate: Amazongate
- ‘Global warming’: time to get angry
- Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick
- Memo to Prince Charles: CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is plant food.
In this case the expert on the book who had not read it is a climate “scientist” with a snout/trough interface:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/16/donna-laframboises-new-book-causing-reviews-in-absentia-amongst-some-agw-advocates/
Objective – taking one’s prejudices seriously
Scientifically literate – expressed as gobbledegook to confuse
amoral fantasy world – not 1984
revisionist – not socialist
environmentalism – like all isms, a form of OCD
perfectly good English degree from Oxford – jealousy
without any legitimate foundation – see “amoral fantasy world”
peer-reviewed – liked by Lack
infantile – without sophistry
my hypothesis – breach of copyright
Ben Goldacre – approved bigot (cogn Billy Bragg)
You’ve pretty much summed up Govt, the UN’s IPCC and their crony climate change scientists (sizzling sensationalists) …and they’ve been at it for over 10 years
“..lowest form of life..”
Yep all forms of Govt and its crones are the very toilet of humanity and eevry country
Hung yourself with your own rope there stupid
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, James. It’s best just to accept that people who are right are always hated irrationally by those who are on an ideological crusade to promote some kind of left-wing or right-wing money wasting scheme, in the name of protecting the environment.
Yes there’s a large noise to signal ratio and you have to search for the diamonds. But isn’t that true of mainstream journalism which has never peddled so much trash and lies in its actually pretty appalling (and in the main dishonest) history
It’s also exposed alot of journalists not only to superior and sharper brains but tough cross examination of anything sloppy or badly researched. Previously journos could gob off freely without retort except for the odd angry readers letter.
The web has shaprened everything up massively …although TV and newspapers remain aloof in their ivory towers (probably why they’re still total garbage)