Category: Climate Change Scam

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Creative (Climate) Communications — Effectively Marketing Psuedo-Science

No joke. There actually is a book out on how to “effectively communicate” on climate change. Loads of logical fallacies and emotional manipulation.

1. Important Links


(Other articles on climate change scam)
https://canucklaw.ca/the-climate-change-scam-part-1/

CLICK HERE, for the article in the ironically named “Scientific American” journal, authored by Max Boykoff, to promote his book.

CLICK HERE, for link to book sale.

2. Site Promoting Book

Conversations about climate change at the science-policy interface and in our lives have been stuck for some time. This handbook integrates lessons from the social sciences and humanities to more effectively make connections through issues, people, and things that everyday citizens care about. Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding that there is no ‘silver bullet’ to communications about climate change; instead, a ‘silver buckshot’ approach is needed, where strategies effectively reach different audiences in different contexts. This tactic can then significantly improve efforts that seek meaningful, substantive, and sustained responses to contemporary climate challenges. It can also help to effectively recapture a common or middle ground on climate change in the public arena. Readers will come away with ideas on how to harness creativity to better understand what kinds of communications work where, when, why, and under what conditions in the twenty-first century.

Includes strategies that help people have productive conversations about climate change that involve listening and adapting rather than just trying to win an argument
-Bridges sectors and audiences, bringing together important material for undergraduate and graduate courses
-Shows the importance of being creative in communications about climate change in the twenty-first century – many businesses, institutions, and collectives can benefit from this, not just students and academics

Reading through this, you will notice that the topic of additional reading and research never comes up. There is no push to understand other perspectives or review scientific findings.

Instead, the focus is on using sociological and psychological techniques to convert normies to your position, without actually providing evidence. This is all about language and emotional manipulation.

Ironically, there is science involved here. But instead of science relating to researching “climate change”, the research focuses on how to change people’s minds. Seems that the priorities are all backwards.

Item #1: Strategies that help people have productive conversations. Presumably this is ways to insert climate change topics into otherwise normal talks.

Item #2: Cram more of the propaganda into university classes.

Item #3: Be innovative about #1 and #2.

3. The Scientific American Article

From synthesizing this work, I distill these lessons into some important “rules of the road.”
-Be authentic.
-Be aware.
-Be accurate.
-Be imaginative.
-Be bold.
From there, additional features on the road map help to navigate toward resonant and effective communications.
-Find common ground on climate change.
–Emphasize how climate change affects us here and now, in our everyday lives.
-strong>Focus on benefits of climate change engagement.
–Creatively empower people to take meaningful and purposeful action.
–“Smarten up” communications about climate change to match the demands of a 21st-century communications environment.

The first items on this list would only make sense if truth was actually a goal. Be aware and be accurate are good principles.

However, climate change advocates tend to be extremely dismissive of different ideas, opinions, facts and research. A commitment to being accurate would undermine the sense of superiority that many possess.

Find common ground and emphasizing the effects are attempts to emotionally manipulate people by inserting the topic in places where it really doesn’t belong. Indeed, the goal seems to be to make “everything” about climate change. Make it an omnipresent issue.

Lately, climate change has imposed itself on the public sphere. Through extreme events linked to changes in the climate, new scientific reports and studies, and rejuvenated youth movements (along with many other political, economic, scientific, ecological, meteorological and cultural events and issues) climate change has been increasingly difficult to ignore.
.
But you wouldn’t really have picked up on that in the first round of the U.S. Democratic party primary debates that took place in Miami, Florida. As 20 candidates made their case to the American people, it was striking how minimally and shallowly they discussed climate change.

To be fair, in a debate (10 people each over 2 days), there isn’t much chance to give long answers.

However, the author, Max Boykoff, makes the point — and will repeatedly make this point — that everything is connected to climate change. He takes the Anita Sarkessian approach, though not with gender.

Sadly, this illustrates a contradiction we have been living with for some time. That is this: amid extensive research into the causes and consequences of climate change, climate communications—and thus, conversations about climate change in our lives—have remained stuck.

There are many reasons. Among them:
-Climate change is still regularly treated as a single issue. This was clearly on display in the debates, and even during the paltry time devoted to surface-level discussions of climate change.
-There has continued to be inadequate funding provided to support sustained and coordinated social science and humanities research into what constitutes more effective climate communications.
-We have all been short on creativity, and we generally have stuck to ineffective climate communications approaches (e.g. merely scientific ways of knowing) as we muddle along.

Interesting take on the problem. Max Boykoff goes on about how the science is sound, but that we just aren’t making any headway in communicating the solutions.

Yes, climate change is still treated as a single issue (that part is true). The author’s goal is to make it an issue of everything. Again, the Anita Sarkeesian technique.

All the money that we pay in various carbon tax schemes apparently aren’t needed for climate change research. Rather, they are needed to SHARE THE RESULTS of the climate change research.

Boykoff seems to believe that it is the “strictly scientific” approach to sharing research that keeps people from seeing what is before their eyes. Seems condescending.

<

p style=”padding:2px 6px 4px 6px; color: #555555; background-color: #eeeeee; border: #dddddd 2px solid”>Yet climate change is a collective action problem that intersects with just about every other area of life. It traverses critical issues such as public health, jobs, education, inequality, poverty, violence, trade, infrastructure, energy, foreign policy and geopolitics. While everyday people clearly have the capacity to care, they reasonably often focus on immediate concerns, such as issues of job security, local school quality, crime and the economy. In recent years, however, it has become more and more clear that these issues are interlinked with climate change.

So, in making these connections, we can more effectively get to the heart of how we live, work, play, find happiness and relax in modern life, shaping our everyday lives, lifestyles, relationships and livelihoods.

Apparently we are too naïve to see the forest for the trees. Ordinary people have lives to live. We don’t spend every waking moment trying to connect aspects of our lives with climate change.

Again the author assumes, with no evidence, that every major aspect of your life is connected to climate change. It must all be pointed out.

Of course, Boykoff will never get into the conflict-if-interest that plagues climate change research. Most of it is funded with a certain outcome expected. Remember, if you aren’t concluding that climate change is a threat to humanity, then you likely won’t be funded anymore. Why keep financing climate research if it isn’t an emergency?

There has been an urgent need to improve communications about climate change at the intersections of science, policy and society. With that in mind, I wrote Creative (Climate) Communications. It is essentially a handbook that bridges sectors and audiences to meet people where they are on this critical 21st-century challenge. In the book I integrate research from the social sciences and humanities that has provided insights into better understanding what communications work, where, when, why and under what conditions.

I also examine how to harness creativity for more effective engagement. I integrate these lessons by assembling what I call features on a “road map” along with “rules of the road.” The guide is then meant to help as researchers and practitioners proceed with both ambition and caution into struggles to effectively address the many issues associated with climate change.

Although Boykoff doesn’t come right out an say it, book is about marketing techniques. What tactics are most persuasive and under what circumstances? People can’t straight up accept “facts and truth”, it needs to be pointed out again and again.

In short, most people are too stupid to see the big picture. Boykoff implies it, but doesn’t not actually state it.

Through this guidance, I seek to help maximize effectiveness and opportunities and minimize mistakes and dead ends in a resource-, energy- and time-constrained environment. In putting this together, I also emphasize that successful and creative climate communications strategies must be tailored to perceived and intended audiences and can be most effective when pursued through relations of trust. And I underscore that context is critical; cultural, political, social, environmental, economic, ideological and psychological conditions matter.

Move away from hard data and facts. Use “soft techniques” to sell it. To once more point out the obvious, everything is connected to climate change.

I also argue that an expanded approach involves processes of listening and adapting rather than winning and argument or talking people into something. Authentically considering other points of view fosters meaningful exchanges and enhances possibilities for finding common ground. Facts established through scientific ways of knowing about climate change are important, but they are not enough. We therefore need to enlarge considerations of how knowledge influences actions, through experiential, emotional, visceral, tactile, tangible, affective and aesthetic ways of learning and knowing about climate change.

Facts aren’t enough. Tell people again and again, that climate change impacts everything. Look for more subtle ways to get your message across.

4. Reflection On This Article


To address the elephant in the room: it is darkly amusing to post in “Scientific American” about scientific methods to convince people to accept pseudo-science about climate change.

Boykoff mentions several times about considering other peoples’ perspectives. But this is hypocritical considering the amount of times “skeptics” or “deniers” are ridiculed or scorned for trying to find out the truth.

Boykoff also neglects any mention or idea that any of the “climate change” findings might be exaggerated or flat out wrong.

It seems the climate-change industry has given up on science, and instead focuses its efforts on trying to market their agenda.

Might be worth buying the book just to do a thorough debunking of it. Understand your enemy after all.

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Guest Post: Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal

1. Guest Posting Here

This article is not mine, but the creation of a YouTuber and writer who goes by the handle “BOLD Like a Leopard”. Feel free to check out the channel, there is some interesting content on it.

2. Important Links

CLICK HERE, for message from Mark Ruffalo and Bill McKibbons.
CLICK HERE, for Bill Nye suggests jailing climate deniers.
CLICK HERE, for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders wanting to declare “climate emergency”.
CLICK HERE, for the climate emergency declaration.
CLICK HERE, for manifesto “Lead Public Into Emergency Mode”.

CLICK HERE, for AOC’s June 2018 primary.
CLICK HERE, for tweet claiming we can’t afford an economy that is based on use of fossil fuels.
CLICK HERE, for Sunrise Philadelphia calling for a demonstration.
CLICK HERE, for a live tweet.
CLICK HERE, for Malcolm Nance.
CLICK HERE, for Louise Mensch.
CLICK HERE, for Momentum Core Team.
CLICK HERE, for the Momentum trainers.
CLICK HERE, for efforts to establish a “climate debate”.
CLICK HERE, for Saikar Chakrabarti admitting the Green New Deal was about changing the economy, and the environment was just a pretext.

3. Sunrise Movement & Green New Deal

Once the domain of scientific debates and science fiction disaster movies, the subject of climate change and its influence on natural disasters has now become a major topic of contention among the Hollywood jet set, children’s cartoons, and naturally as a result public officials and policy makers. Much of the discussion over climate change has been shrouded in controversy largely due to acrimonious debate over who has the proper professional standing on how severe the crisis is, whether human activity is the main catalyst of current trends, and if or how government policy must be applied to address it. However, the organizing tactics, funding, and structure of the organizations pushing climate change legislation like the Paris Climate Accord and the Green New Deal suggests a larger goal in mind, one that involves a power grab far beyond environmental and industrial emissions policy. The Sunrise Movement is being cited as a fresh youth-infused answer to the fossil fuels industries, and it is being touted by climate change activism patriarch William McKibben as having “cracked the code of the American political system”. This statement is correct, and Sunrise is hacking into the mainframe of American politics, but if McKibben were truthful he would not be omitting his own role in their germination, as well as the intersection of the group with the Boston-based Ayni Institute and its Momentum Community program. The growing stake that these groups have in the political landscape are not a natural outgrowth of a changing public consciousness, but rather one more chess piece in a grand power grab.

We’ll see what happens. . .

In 2016 TV entertainer Bill Nye, host of the children’s show “Bill Nye the Science Guy” speculated that jailing “climate deniers” may be appropriate. “We’ll see what happens. Was it appropriate to jail people from the cigarette industry who insisted that this addictive product was not addictive, and so on?” Nye responded when asked.

Unfortunately, this high handed attitude toward the discussion shows that much of the climate change action side of the argument has despaired of properly making their case against their opponents, the “climate skeptics”. The activists scoff at accusations that they are “alarmists”, but their public statements show that they are ratcheting up statements consistently in order to create a sense of panic that climate trends are sloping toward an apocalyptic event:

  • On July 9 Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a joint resolution that they wanted Congress to declare a national emergency over climate change.
  • As documented by the Climate Emergency Declaration, there are 740 jurisdictions that have declared a climate emergency including Scotland, Wales, the Republic of Ireland, as well as London and the Australian cities of Sydney and the Australian Capital Territory among others.
  • There is now a group across Europe dedicated to whipping up the public into a climate emergency frenzy known as “Extinction Rebellion”. The movement is led by clinical psychologist Dr. Margaret Klein Salamon (the “Climate Psychologist”) and she published a manifesto called Leading The Public Into Emergency Mode originally in 2016.

Salamon’s manifesto was endorsed by Bill McKibben on the Climate Mobilization website where he is described as the “Movement Leader”.

According to one of its grant donors, the Guerilla Foundation, Extinction Rebellion (XR) was given between $20 and $40 thousand in order to promote “a fundamental change of the UK’s political and economic system to one which maximises well-being and minimises harm”. In the grant description point number 9 figures prominently in their Theory of Change: “Create a distributed organising model based in ‘momentum’ organising and holocracy (training from the Ayni institute / Carlos Saavedra). This is basically a hybrid of mass protest and structure based organising. Much of this is explained in the book This is an Uprising”. The book in question was written by the brothers Mark and Paul Engler, both of them former Occupy Wall Street activists themselves deeply affiliated with the Ayni Institute.

The Shame Game

While at times climate activists engage in rhetorical threats like Nye or grandstanding like Sanders and the other emergency sponsors, the value that they appeal the most to is shame. This is why the United Nations, European Parliament, Swedish Parliament and numerous other bodies have hosted the 16 year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg to speak about climate justice. Speaking about when she will be 75 years old, she asked whether her children would “ask why you didn’t do anything while there was time to act. You say you love your children above all else, and yet you’re stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” Thunberg went on to tearfully decry the 6th mass extinction of species and the acidification of the oceans.

Another statement that Thunberg makes echoes Salamon verbatim:
“Imagine there is a fire in
your house.
What do you do?
What do you think about?”

The idea of using children to shame adults for their poor policy is an understandably ingenious strategy, but it typically yields nothing in terms of policy. In 1982 a ten year old named Samantha Smith wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to ask him if he was going to vote for a war. Smith’s letter was personally answered by Andropov, and compared her to Tom Sawyer’s friend Becky and invited her to the USSR, where she spent two months as Andropov’s guest on a tour, and she was a “goodwill ambassador” for peace before dying in a plane crash at age 13 in 1985. By then both Andropov and his successor Konstantin Chernenko had both died of old age. Tragic as her story was, Samantha Smith’s story is a footnote in history as there was no major movement behind her personal initiative.

The shame tactic has been mass-produced by the Sunrise Movement in its push to promote the issue of climate change as being an issue of primary concern in the minds of the next generation of youth voters. Sunrise was formed ostensibly by two activists, Varshini Prakash and Sara Blazevic. Both of them are former activists of the Fossil Fuel Student Divestment Network, a campaign by college students to get their colleges to withdraw investments in energy companies. Both of them were involved in student sit-ins at their colleges, Blazevic at Swarthmore in 2015, and Prakash at UMass-Amherst in 2016 where activists were arrested for civil disobedience.

Now they are trying to take the climate change movement to a broader, and younger, forum. But in comments to Energy & Environment News (E&E News) they make it very apparent that their movement is a response to failures of previous groups that they have been active in. In it, their fellow co-founder Evan Weber openly muses about how Sunrise is attempting to compensate for the same flaws that he encountered while he was an activist with Occupy Wall Street. It should be noted that while Prakash and Blazevic are the face of the movement, Weber is listed on its 2016 IRS Form 990 (when it was named US Climate Plan) as the President and Executive Director, and he was listed by the climate action website Grist.orgGrist.org as a former Occupy activist and founder of the US Climate Plan. Weber had also been an activist along with fellow Wesleyan University activist Michael Lichtash for US Climate Plan who traveled to the COP20 Climate Talks in Lima, Peru in 2014. At the time they were already claiming that delaying the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the US was “a step toward climate justice”. At the time all were in one way or another linked through McKibben’s 350.org organization.

The Guru of Green Activism

During the Obama Administration’s tenure, McKibben and 350.org fought doggedly to force the President and his cabinet not to let the pipeline proceed. In 2015 the Nebraska Supreme Court removed legal hurdles to building of the Keystone XL, meaning that it would need approval from several cabinet-level officials including Secretary of State John Kerry, himself a public advocate for climate change action by governments. Until then much of the process had been tied up as conservation and activism groups battled with TransCanada (the builder) in the courts. McKibben was asked if Kerry could salvage his reputation on climate change if he approved the pipeline. According to POLITICO he answered: “No. Keystone’s obviously a keystone,” he said in an email. “Approve that and the rest is happy talk — you can’t cut carbon without cutting carbon.” For months Kerry waffled over the decision while continuing to condemn fossil fuel producers, but in November 2015 he came through for McKibben and denied the pipeline’s permit application. However when Donald Trump was inaugurated as president he approved the Keystone XL pipeline within his first three days by executive order and continues to fight against challenges to it in court.

The issue at hand is not the activism itself, but the veneer of popular will. McKibben has made a long career out of claiming to be the underdog fighting against the corporate fossil fuel industry, and to be sure they are not exactly a sympathetic opponent. There’s also legitimate concern over carbon consumption and its effects on oceans and wetlands leading to extinction of species. He formed 350.org in 2007 based on the notion that 350ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be the acceptable level in order to mitigate the harmful effects of climate change. However, the standing that McKibben has within the movement is not a result of any professional knowledge or accomplishment, he is in fact a former New Yorker writer who majored in journalism at Harvard. He then wrote The End of Nature in 1989, the book that is considered to have started the climate change movement. However, as Reason observed when reviewing his 2010 follow-up Earth, humans have adapted to the rising sea levels warned about by climate alarmists like McKibben, using the example of Boston which has reclaimed land consistently since 1775 despite rising sea levels. At one point McKibben and others climate alarmists like Jim Hansen used the global warming trends to raise public consciousness about environmental issues. But according to him, that was during a period when they were “naïve”. However, the new tactic of his supporters is to mask the existing climate movement that he began with The End of Nature in 1989 and institutionalized in the 2000s with 350.org through a youth activist group like Sunrise whose events he frequently headlines. As many climate skeptics point out the ability of climate alarmists to excite public attention diminishes when their predictions are not fulfilled, such as when Gore predicted in 2006 that the glaciers of Mt. Kilimanjaro would melt within a decade. Another member of 350.org’s board of directors, Naoimi Klein, has evaded responsibility for advocating for the Green New Deal while also being a long-time apologist for the Chavez regime that made Venezuela’s entire economy dependent on oil exports.

McKibben was also a major activist during the lead-up to COP21, the 2015 climate change conference where the Paris Agreement on Climate Change was drafted. On November 30 he wrote an opinion in Foreign Policy called “The Paris Climate Talks Will Be a Historic Success. And a Historic Disaster. ” Paris He participated in the climate marches occurring during the event, and even headlined with Klein the Pathway to Paris live concert on December 4 along with Radiohead lead vocalist Thom Yorke, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea and other rock superstars. But by December 13, as the conference had just wrapped up, he claimed that it had fallen short.

“The irony is, an agreement like this adopted at the first climate conference in 1995 might have worked. Even then it wouldn’t have completely stopped global warming, but it would have given us a chance of meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius target that the world notionally agreed on.”

Some on the political left were too jaded to take McKibben seriously, and began to characterize his activism as “greenwashing”. They noted that the agreement did much to boost the profile of the international NGO Avaaz that backed the climate march and other events, but little to accomplish anything. They also made it public that Dow Chemicals, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and even BP had been sponsors the Climate Group that had organized the conferences. What McKibben needed to do was inject some steroids into the movement so as to gain ground on those detractors.

Why “grassroots”?

In the same article claiming Paris had fallen short, McKibben made a statement that demonstrated his intentions going forward: “But what this means is that we need to build the movement even bigger in the coming years, so that the Paris agreement turns into a floor and not a ceiling for action.”

McKibben’s influence is felt deeply largely due to the usefulness of his cause to various statesmen and former politicians. In 2010 he wrote an opinion article for GristGrist claiming that Al Gore was “kicking butt” over climate change. In 2016 he became a backer of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and wound up on his five member delegation to the Democratic National Party’s platform writing committee for that year’s election. However this was a summit that led to nowhere as the party continued to accept contributions from the fossil fuel industry. Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton received $967,336 from them during that cycle, leading by far any other Democrat in any elected position. The crusade against fossil fuels had to enter a new phase, and the US Climate Plan (founded in 2014) went through a rebranding becoming Sunrise. Since then they have made several inroads in electoral politics including getting eleven state legislators elected throughout the US, including five in Pennsylvania.

Besides Sanders, the Green New Deal advocates can numerous other candidates for 2020 that have endorsed it or proposed their own versions of it:

  • New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in December 2018 a city-wide divestment from fossil fuel companies and a lawsuit against them, a measure cheered by McKibben’s 350.org. In March the Mayor named McKibben to the OneNYC Advisory Board. De Blasio’s new city-wide rules targeting energy usage by sky-scrapers were announced in May at Trump Tower.
  • Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has made climate change the centerpiece of his tenure in office and his presidential campaign vowing to commit to a 100% renewable energy system by 2035. This was praised by McKibben on May 3, and on May 30 another McKibben acolyte Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker issued a raving review in Yale 360.
  • One candidate McKibben may be less bullish about is Tom Steyer, an erstwhile donor. In 2016 in the run-up to the election the two sat down for a joint interview on the need to make climate change a signature issue. Steyer’s TomKat Charitable Trust has given generously to 350.org, and at one point the former hedge fund manager and the environmentalist were joined at the hipjoined at the hip in their efforts to support fossil fuel divestment. Steyer’s public image has diminished since 2016 due to his sensationalist efforts to support the impeachment of Donald Trump including funding The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP).

Not long after the 2018 midterm election Sunrise activists occupied the office of Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Speaker of the House. They also ambushed Sen Diane Feinstein (D-CA) in February. Within a day McKibben had written a response in the New Yorker saying he imagines that Feinstein “would like a do-over of her colloquy”. In the same opinion article, McKibben mentioned Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg, and claimed that the Green New Deal was hatched by the Sunrise Movement.

But this is untrue, and McKibben knows that. The original Green New Deal was written in 2008 by the New Economics Foundation when many of the Sunrise activists were not even in high school. The authors included Guardian editor Larry Elliott, Andrew Simms of the NEF, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party and others. Another version, the “Global Green New Deal” was adopted by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2008. The American version of the Green New Deal is HR 109 which was introduced by Ocasio-Cortez. No one from Sunrise was involved in drafting it, and if everyone was being above board it would be admitted that there was no coherent “Green New Deal” when it was supported during the 2018 election cycle; so the activists and politicians were endorsing a policy proposal prior to its existence.

Messaging the GND

Does anyone really believe that it was Sunrise activists that wrote the legislation? Even in her own office, Ocasio-Cortez has four staff members, none of whom are members of it. Corbin Trent and Saikat Chakrabarti, her press secretary and chief of staff respectively, are former members of Justice Democrats, but not of Sunrise. The nexus that drives them all together is one of the policy’s most effective and most successful activists, Justice Democrats’ communications director Waleed Shahid who is also a senior leader of the Working Families Party. Based in Philadelphia, Shahid was instrumental in campaigning for the legislative election success in Pennsylvania as well as propelling Ocasio-Cortez to power by focusing on her June 2018 primary.

While McKibben is an overall mastermind of the movement, Shahid is often a point man that issues day to day messages that are often picked up by Ocasio-Cortez and other elected officials regarding climate change, while also directing the defense to the inevitable backlash. A case in point was a June 21 tweet where Ocasio-Cortez claimed that an oil refinery explosion and fire was evidence of an “existential crisis” due to climate change. Up until then very few had made that observation about the accident. However, Shahid had issued a tweet earlier that day claiming that “we can’t afford an economy based on fossil fuels”. Sunrise Philadelphia called for a demonstration within five minutes of Shahid’s tweet. During the confrontation with Sen. Feinstein during the middle of the afternoon on a Friday Shahid was live tweet echoing Sunrise Bay Area’s account in order to hype the event. He issued a total of 23 tweets that day (Feb. 22) regarding the incident, including fighting with delusional mainstream anti-Trump activists Malcolm Nance and Louise Mensch who accused Justice Democrats of uploading the video and using Russian disinformation tactics.

Like the Engler brothers, Shahid was one of the earliest core team members of the Ayni Institute and Momentum Community. Blazevic is also an alumnus of the Ayni Institute, and is a Momentum Trainer along with fellow Sunrise co-founders Will Lawrence and Diyanna Jaye. The derivative of the Momentum training is to create nominally decentralized cells (called “hubs” by Sunrise) that organize on the local level to push a progressive agenda.

But the decentralized organizing is irrelevant when the ideology of Sunrise is not dependent on the membership. The leaders of the movement all come from 350.org, the agenda is set by the ideologues like McKibben and Klein, and the day-to-day messaging is directed by the powers behind the throne like Shahid. Ultimately a green economy is a secondary goal of the movement. So far during the Democratic 2020 primary season, the movement has somewhat successfully lobbied for a “climate debate” between candidates. However, in a moment of surprising candour, Chakrabarti let slip the real truth:

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. 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.”

So that leads to a concluding question: If McKibben, Salamon, and Klein were portraying the climate crisis as a global emergency on the level of World War II, then why are they pushing a piece of legislation that according to its main legislative advocate was not originally about climate change?

4. Information About The Author

YouTube: BOLD like a Leopard:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqafJgJiTZik1KreMJgy4Eg
Gab.com: https://gab.com/StarScream85
Minds.com: https://www.minds.com/ChefLeopard
BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/bFrSR277N5TG/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChefLeopard
For donations: https://www.subscribestar.com/chefleopard

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CCS #7: Climate Bonds A $100T Industry; Int’l Econ Forum Of The Americas

(All brought to you by Power Corporation. Who does that even surprise in this day and age?)

1. Debunking The Climate Change Scam

The entire climate change industry, (and yes, it is an industry) is a hoax perpetrated by the people in power. See the other articles on the scam, the propaganda machine in action, and some of the court documents in Canada. Carbon taxes are just a small part of the picture, and conservatives are intentionally sabotaging their court cases.

2. Important Links

(1) https://forum-americas.org
(2) https://forum-americas.org/montreal/2019-edition/speakers/
(3) https://forum-americas.org/montreal/partners/
(4) https://forum-americas.org/montreal/press/videos/
(5) https://www.climatebonds.net/
(6) https://fcm.ca/en/programs/municipalities-climate-innovation-program
(7) https://fcm.ca/en/programs/municipalities-climate-innovation-program
(8) ttps://farmlead.com
(9) https://www.wri.org/our-work/project/global-commission-adaptation
(10) https://asiafoundation.org
(11) https://www.theclimategroup.org
(12) https://www.wise-qatar.org/
(13) https://www.worldenergy.org/
(14) https://www.proteinindustriescanada.ca
(15) https://www.atmos.illinois.edu/cms/One.aspx?siteId=127458&pageId=151986

Note: the above is only a portion of the organizations that speakers represented at the June assembly in Montreal. There are plenty more.

Several of the speakers all have connections to the climate change fraud, and are pushing the “sustainable development agenda”. Of course, this is on top of several sitting politicians.

3. Mission And Background

The Conference of Montreal, presented for the first time in 1995 by the International Economic Forum of the Americas, is committed to heightening knowledge and awareness of the major issues concerning economic globalization, with a particular emphasis on the relations between the Americas and other continents.

The Conference also strives to foster exchanges of information, to promote free discussion on major current economic issues and facilitate meetings between world leaders to encourage international discourse by bringing together Heads of State, the private sector, international organizations and civil society.

This all seems harmless enough. But who exactly are these speakers who will undoubtedly influence sitting Premiers and Cabinet Ministers?

The 2019 Montreal event was held June 10-13. While there were many speakers, let’s look at a few.

4. Climate Bonds Initiative, $100 Trillion Industry

Climate Bonds Initiative FUNDERS include:

  • Rockefeller Foundation
  • European Climate Foundation
  • Climate Works Foundation

Sean Kidney addressed the forum as one of the speakers. Now, what does his organization do exactly?

Climate Bonds Initiative is an international, investor-focused not-for-profit. We’re the only organisation working solely on mobilising the $100 trillion bond market for climate change solutions.

That’s right. This institution is looking to set up a $100 trillion bond market for the climate change industry.

From their 2nd half of 2018 report, on the bond market released their report. This addressed the “Sustainable Banking Network”.

In 2018, the Climate Bonds Initiative partnered with the Sustainable Banking Network Green Bond Working Group and IFC to develop a mapping of existing guidelines and green bond frameworks in emerging markets. Following a survey, case study interviews and a review of 13 country and regional green bond frameworks, the first ever Green Bond Market Development Toolkit was developed including:
.
Aligning with international good practices, learning from peers, and developing common approaches are ways that can be taken by SBN members to accelerate local green bond market development. Alignment with other jurisdictions also enables cross-border issuance and investment.
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Local market conditions must be accounted for and local market players should be involved in the design of an appropriate national guidance. Countries may choose to adopt either a principle based approach or more stringent regulation. A phased approach may be suitable for many.
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Market integrity and credibility are key components of green bond markets. Guidance should therefore include mechanisms for ensuring quality
.
SBN members have noted the value of harmonising where possible with global definitions of “green”, “social” and “sustainability” bonds and assets. Global definitions and common categories of what qualify as impact projects and sectors will build the credibility of bonds among international investors.

Not going to quote the entire report, but the summary is pretty short (4 pages), and well worth a look.

Worth noting though: what happens when the climate change industry goes under? Will all of those bonds become worthless? Do they grow in value only as long as people keep buying into it?

5. Global Commission On Adaptation

Edward Cameron is an advisor for the Global Commission on Adaptation. He also spoke to the Montreal Forum.

The Global Commission on Adaptation seeks to accelerate adaptation action and support by elevating the political visibility of adaptation and focusing on concrete solutions. The Commission will demonstrate that adaptation is a cornerstone of better development, and can help improve lives, reduce poverty, protect the environment, and enhance resilience around the world. The Commission is led by Ban Ki-moon, 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Kristalina Georgieva, CEO, World Bank.

Okay, this Commission is basically an extension of the UN. It’s goal is increasing visibility of climate change agenda, and pushing for it to be increased in political spheres.

It is partnered with the World Resources Institute, and covers your typical UN nonsense

  • Climate
  • Energy
  • Food
  • Gender
  • Forests
  • Sustainable Cities
  • Water

6. The Climate Group

Amy Davidson, the Executive Director of the Climate Group, addressing the Montreal panel as well. Their business partners are here, and it surprisingly includes Facebook. Let’s look at the work her group does.

OUR MISSION
Accelerating climate action.
OUR GOAL
A world of no more than 1.5°C of global warming and greater prosperity for all.
HOW WE DO IT
-We bring together powerful networks of businesses and governments, which shift global markets and policies, towards this goal.
-We act as a catalyst to take innovation and solutions to scale. And we use the power of communication to build ambition and pace.
-We focus on the greatest global opportunities for change.

Here is an attachment of their press and briefings. To summarize, it is to push the climate change “mitigation and adaptation” on the rest of the world.

7. Global Optimism

Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican citizen and was the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010-2016.
.
During her tenure at the UNFCCC Ms. Figueres brought together national and sub-national governments, corporations and activists, financial institutions and NGOs to jointly deliver the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, in which 195 sovereign nations agreed on a collaborative path forward to limit future global warming to well below 2C. For this achievement Ms. Figueres has been credited with forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy.
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Ms. Figueres is a founding partner of Global Optimism Ltd., a purpose driven enterprise focused on social and environmental change. She is currently the Convenor of Mission 2020, Vice-Chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, World Bank Climate Leader, ACCIONA Board Member, WRI Board Member, Fellow of Conservation International, and Advisory Board member of Formula E, Unilever and ENI.

Okay, yet another organization pushing the climate change (or is it still global warming?) agenda. A secretary for the UN Convention on Climate Change.

8. How Will This Forum End?

To be fair, there are plenty garden variety corporate executives there. But the climate change hoax is being pushed by several speakers to an audience with real power.

Perhaps the most disturbing is the Climate Bonds Initiative. It is downright creepy to be pumping so much money and energy into what is obviously a fraud. Buying bonds or credit doesn’t reduce pollution, though it is a great way to take advantage of guilt ridden people.

The conference ended June 13. How many favours, or “investments” has Canada committed from the events of this gathering?

After all, the Federal Government did buy a pipeline that was stalled indefinitely in court challenges. Buying into these groups, including climate bonds, is not much of a leap.

Interesting to see what comes of this.

Posted on

Kirsten Jenkins: Humanizing Sociotechnical Transitions Through Energy Justice

1. Go Check Out Uppity Peasants Site


This is a fairly new site, however, it has some interesting content on it. Well researched, it will give some alternative views on how we are really being controlled. It you haven’t been there, what are you waiting for?

2. About The Authors


CLICK HERE, for the profile of Kirsten Jenkins. Side note: no shocker she has cited Frank Geels.

CLICK HERE, for Benjamin Sovacool.

He is a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), due to be published in 2022, and an Advisor on Energy to the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Innovation in Brussels, Belgium.

He has played a leadership role in winning and managing collaborative research grants worth more than $19.6 million, including those from the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. National Science Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program of Denmark, the Danish Council for Independent Research, and the European Commission. In the United Kingdom, he has served as a Principal Investigator on projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

CLICK HERE, for Darren McCauley.

3. The Paper Itself

Humanizing sociotechnical transitions through energy justice: An ethical framework for global transformative change
Kirsten Jenkins, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Darren McCauley

Not even kidding. That is the title of the paper.

ABSTRACT
Poverty, climate change and energy security demand awareness about the interlinkages between energy systems and social justice. Amidst these challenges, energy justice has emerged to conceptualize a world where all individuals, across all areas, have safe, affordable and sustainable energy that is, essentially, socially just. Simultaneously, new social and technological solutions to energy problems continually evolve, and interest in the concept of sociotechnical transitions has grown. However, an element often missing from such transitions frameworks is explicit engagement with energy justice frameworks. Despite the development of an embryonic set of literature around these themes, an obvious research gap has emerged: can energy justice and transitions frameworks be combined? This paper argues that they can. It does so through an exploration of the multi-level perspective on sociotechnical systems and an integration of energy justice at the model’s niche, regime and landscape level. It presents the argument that it is within the overarching process of sociotechnical change that issues of energy justice emerge. Here, inattention to social justice issues can cause injustices, whereas attention to them can provide a means to examine and potential resolve them

This article is the first time I have encountered the term “energy justice”. Rather than simply dealing with a problem in a scientific and factual way, the authors add some social-justice element to it. The abstract doesn’t really explain how this works. Hopefully the body will.

Thus, it calls for greater engagement with the three-tenet energy justice approach (distributional justice, procedural justice and justice as recognition) when planning for more sustainable transitions.

Energy justice apparently consists of:

  • Distributional justice
  • Procedural justice
  • Justice as recognition

Okay, but that doesn’t really explain what it is.

Amidst serious sustainability challenges, transitions frameworks have evolved to either conceptualize or facilitate decarbonised energy systems that provide both security of supply and universal access to energy; a process that it is widely acknowledged will require new ways of producing, living and working with energy (Bridge et al., 2013; Heffron and McCauley, 2018; IEA, 2008; Mernier, 2007). In aiming to implement sociotechnical solutions, governments are increasingly utilising the language of transitions, and the concept has begun to feature in the energy policies of countries including Denmark, Switzerland and the United Kingdom (UK)

Some points that should be addressed:

  • They are quite blunt (and proud it seems) that their language is filtering into government activity.
  • Provide universal supply of energy? Is this meant to be some sort of socialist or communist idea?
  • Has it sunk in that if you remove all Carbon forms of energy that it will reduce supply, and make your universal supply harder to obtain?
  • When you say a “new way of living”, does this mean reducing the standard of living in the West to ensure that everyone has access to the same amount of energy?

Yet despite ongoing debates about ethics or justice across many fields of literature (including extended discussions between antagonist camps that have gone on across the history of political philosophy), one social element missing from transitions frameworks is explicit, practice oriented engagement with the energy justice concept and related approaches to justice concerns. Eames and Hunt (2013) draw attention to the fact that considerations of equity and justice are underrepresented within the sociotechnical transitions literature and the wider energy transitions debate, despite the fact that the concept of sustainable development, the target of many transition plans, is inherently rooted in these core notions (Hopwood et al., 2005). Transitions literatures can also fail to give due consideration to issues of landscape, health and existing property values too (Jefferson, 2017).

More points to be looked at:

  • This seems a shameless attempt to turn what is supposed to be an environmental issue into a “social justice”, and hence blur the lines.
  • “Equity and justice” and terms that need to be rammed into discussions.
  • It appears that including “social justice” would be a way to better market their ideas. They don’t seem to make an actual connection though.
  • If a platform needs to latch on to overused buzzwords to sell itself, then it’s probably not a very good platform.

Failure to adequately engage with questions of justice throughout the transition process is dangerous. It may lead to aggravated poverty, entrenched gender bias and non-participation as outcomes or by-products of ‘blinkered’ decision-making. Indeed, without a focus on justice, transitions may fail to acknowledge the burdens of having too much energy, such as waste, over-consumption and pollution, or from not having enough, where some individuals lack access, are challenged by under-consumption and poverty, and may face health burdens and shortened lives as a consequence of restricted energy choices (Sovacool et al.,2016a). This paper therefore utilizes the energy justice concept as a way of engaging with these ethical dilemmas within pre-existing transitions frameworks.

More nonsense which requires a response:

  • There is an obsession with redefining terms to suit an agenda.
  • This is energy we are talking about, not poverty, gender bias, or non-participation. That’s right, they really played the “gender” card here.
  • Burden of having too much? Can I assume the solution is to force sharing? Or rather, to force “rich” nations to hand over energy supplies?
  • Engaging with these ethical dilemmas? You haven’t demonstrated any sort of cause and effect yet.

The origins of the energy justice literature is largely reported as coming from activist accounts of energy issues using the environmental justice frame – a precursor to the energy justice concept which shares overlapping philosophical groundings

That’s right. A bunch of activists made this up.

Specifically, as environmental justice is commonly defined as the distribution of environmental hazards and access to all natural resources; it includes equal protection from burdens, meaningful involvement in decisions, and fair treatment in access to benefits……….. This approach forms the basis of the energy justice approach and framework. However, mentions of its core notions also appear elsewhere, including in the guise of the “three A’s” of availability, accessibility and affordability

It reads like the sort of nonsense one would get in a gender studies class. Only thing is that “energy” is being substituted for here.

note in this regard, that even ‘a “low-carbon” transition has the potential to distribute its costs and benefits just as unequally [as historical fossil-based transitions] without governance mindful of distributional justice’ or, as an extension, without attention to the issues of justice as recognition and due process–energy justice tenets we explore below. We argue that the energy justice concept provides one way of filling this gap.

Here, we get into some straight up Communism. Is it true that costs and benefits don’t impact everyone equally? Yes. However, there is no practical way to do this. Either you would have to forcefully arrange differences in benefits and costs to “make things right”, or you would have to alter everyone’s standard of living so that they were equal.

Guess the road to Hell could use a re-paving.

Throughout, we present three main claims, each coinciding with a level in the MLP model; the niche, regime, and landscape:

(1) That the energy justice concept can expose exclusionary and/or inclusionary technological and social niches before they develop, leading to potentially new and socially just innovation;

(2) That in addition to using the MLP to describe regimes, the energy justice framework provides a way for these actors to normatively judge them, potentially destabilising existing regimes using moral criteria;

(3) That framing energy justice as a matter of priority at the landscape level could exert pressure on the regime below, leading to the widespread reappraisal of our energy choices, and integration of moral criteria.

(1) Sounds like a way to vilify or outcast technology that is scientifically sound, because it doesn’t meet their criteria.
(2) Appears to be a method of using peer pressure and social pressure as a way of destabilizing systems.
(3) Comes across as more overt propaganda.

This governance focus means that the socio-technical literature increasingly acknowledges the political dynamics related to the process through which innovations scale, diffuse or entrench. We focus here on the most prominent socio-technical transitions framework, the multi-level perspective (MLP). The MLP takes the form of a series of nested levels, the niche, regime, and landscape

Nothing scientific. Purely political manoeuvering.

Analysis through the energy justice lens reveals that although electric vehicles (EVs) do have laudable environmental (and social) attributes, they can be exclusionary in the sense that they can perpetuate already widening gaps between the wealthy and poor, as well as potentially raising new forms and geographies of injustice – distributional and justice as recognition concerns.

I thought the point was protecting the environment. But here, they talk about how electric cars will not impact everyone equally, even if they do have considerable environmental benefits. Again, is this an argument in favour of socialism or communism?

Equal opportunity v.s. equal outcome.

In addition to applications in niches, the energy justice framework can support the current role of the MLP to describe regimes by providing a means for policy actors to normatively judge them—exposing unjust practices and resultantly, increasing regime ‘humanisation’. We illustrate this first through the exploration of nuclear power and hydroelectric power production, regimes in which there is some consensus that technological development and lock-in raises issues of justice, or injustice. We identify that the metrics, frameworks, or checklists presented above – as well as the three-tenet framework of energy justice more generally – provide a means of normatively judging both planned and current energy and future sociotechnical regimes, leading to potential re-evaluation of our energy selection criteria. These approaches also recognise the need to politicise the actualisation of energy justice itself.

Finally some honesty. This is a political agenda.

And working to “humanize” a movement? What happened to simply relying on scientific consensus?

4. Conclusions From The Paper

Energy decisions are all too frequently made in a moral vacuum, culminating in a strong normative case for combining the literature on sociotechnical transitions with concepts arising from energy justice. Moreover, we illustrate that energy justice can play a role at each level of one of the more expansive sociotechnical transitions frameworks, the MLP. Within this latter contribution, (1) the energy justice concept could expose exclusionary niches, (2) provide a means for actors to normatively judge regimes, and (3) through the framing of energy justice at the landscape level foster the reappraisal of our energy choices and integration of moral principles. Across all stages of this argument, we present a case for not only mitigating environmental impacts of energy production via sociotechnical change, but doing so in an ethically defensible, socially just way.

To repeat, this is not about environmental protection. It is about blending a social justice causes and lingo into an unrelated topic.

Our caveats come as recognition of the intricacies of politics and political processes around energy transitions and energy justice. For as Meadowcroft (2009) highlights, long-term change is likely to be even messier and more contested than the transitions literature discusses. Indeed, there are likely to be political aspects that approaches such as the MLP are ill equipped to negotiate, and trade-offs that a tenet approach to energy justice cannot entirely resolve.

This may be the most honest thing they say. Politically, this is a very tough sell. They also admit that there “energy justice” approach will not answer the hard questions.

Nonetheless, they still cover those facts in academic jargon.

5. My Own Thoughts

The authors keep repeating that they are just “framing the issue”. In reality, they are publishing propaganda.

There is nothing scientific that the paper adds. There is no building on previous work, or fact checking of previous research. It is entirely about manipulating people to their cause by pretending it is a “social justice” issue. This is blatant activism, masquerading as science.

I also noticed a lot of overlap with the Frank W. Geels article. Do they merely cite each other, or do they just republish the same articles over and over again?

This environmental movement seems to have a lot of self-inflicted problems. For example, this obsession with “energy justice” and other non-issues actually stonewalls progress that they could have made.

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Frank Geels & Disruptive Innovation Framework

(From actual academic writing: Frank W. Geels)

(More academia: Sustainable Consumption Institute, Manchester University)

(Clayton Christiansen and “Disruptive Innovation” video)

(From the Uppity Peasants site)

1. Go Check Out Uppity Peasants Site


This is a fairly new site, however, it has some interesting content on it. Well researched, it will give some alternative views on how we are really being controlled.
Go check out “Uppity Peasants“.

2. Important Links


CLICK HERE, for the Sustainable Consumption Institute & Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, The University of Manchester, Denmark Road Building, M13 9PL, Manchester, United Kingdom.
CLICK HERE, for Clayton Christiansen and “Disruptive Innovation”.
CLICK HERE, for SCI Collective Action & Social Movements.
CLICK HERE, for SCI Social Inequality.
CLICK HERE, for Multi-Level Perspective on Sustainability.
CLICK HERE, for a Wiki explanation of disruptive innovation.
CLICK HERE, for removing the innovator’s dilemma.

CLICK HERE, for the Climate Change Scam Part I.
CLICK HERE, for Part II, the Paris Accord.
CLICK HERE, for Part III, Saskatchewan Appeals Court Reference.
CLICK HERE, for Part IV, Controlled Opposition to Carbon Tax.
CLICK HERE, for Part V, UN New Development Funding.

3. Quotes From The Geels Article

Disruption and low-carbon system transformation: Progress and new challenges in socio-technical transitions research and the Multi-Level Perspective

This will be elaborated on, but is about subverted the status quo, or “disruption”. Worth pointing out, that although these types of articles are published and marketed as “science”, they are anything but.

As this title would suggest, the article is extremely political. The concern is not about science itself, but how to “sell” the science. And the agenda here is searching for political methods of implementing the transition to a Carbon free

ABSTRACT
This paper firstly assesses the usefulness of Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework for low-carbon system change, identifying three conceptual limitations with regard to the unit of analysis (products rather than systems), limited multi-dimensionality, and a simplistic (‘point source’) conception of change. Secondly, it shows that the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) offers a more comprehensive framework on all three dimensions. Thirdly, it reviews progress in socio-technical transition research and the MLP on these three dimensions and identifies new challenges, including ‘whole system’ reconfiguration, multi-dimensional struggles, bi-directional niche-regime interactions, and an alignment conception of change. To address these challenges, transition research should further deepen and broaden its engagement with the social scienceseconomy.

The usefulness of Christiansen’s disruptive innovation framework? While used in a business sense, it appears to be a way for entrepreneurs to get into a market or business. However, in this context it is used as disrupting an environmental policy.

It is mildly (or downright) creepy that the author, Frank Geels, openly suggests that research should broaden its engagement with social sciences. In plain English, this means merging, where scientific research is viewed through a “social” lens.

Christiansen’s “Disruptive Innovation Framework” is explained in the above video. Also see “disruption in financial services“.

Christensen [4] made important contributions to the long-standing debate in innovation management about new entrants, incumbents and industry structures. He argued that disruptive innovations enable new entrants to ‘attack from below’ and overthrow incumbent firms. Christensen thus has a particular understanding of disruption, focused mainly on the competitive effects of innovations on existing firms and industry structures. His framework was not developed to address systemic effects or broader transformations, so my comments below are not about the intrinsic merits of the framework, but about their usefulness for low-carbon transitions.

Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework offers several useful insights for low-carbon transitions (although similar ideas can also be found elsewhere). First, it suggests that incumbent firms tend to focus their innovation efforts on sustaining technologies (which improve performance along established criteria), while new entrants tend to develop disruptive technologies (which offer different value propositions). Second, it proposes that disruptive technologies emerge in small peripheral niches, where early adopters are attracted by the technology’s new functionalities. Third, incumbent firms may initially overlook or under-estimate disruptive technologies (because of established beliefs) or are not interested in them, because the limited return on-investments associated with small markets do not fit with existing business models. Fourth, price/performance improvements may enable disruptive technologies to enter larger markets, out-compete existing technologies and overthrow incumbent firms

Worth pointing out right away, Geels has no interest in the “intrinsic merits” of the disruptive innovation framework that Christiansen talks about. Rather, he focuses on applying that technique to reducing/eliminating Carbon emissions from society.

Christiansen’s idea could be applied fairly practically to business, where new players want to establish themselves. However, Geels “weaponizes” this idea and wants to apply it with the climate-change agenda.

Geels also makes it obvious that overthrowing incumbents is a priority. Again, Christiansen’s writings were meant with the business approach, and trying to start your own, but Geels “repurposes” it.

While Christensen’s framework focuses on technical and business dimensions, the MLP also accommodates consumption, cultural, and socio-political dimensions. Although co-evolution has always been a core concept in the MLP, this is even more important for low-carbon transitions, which are goal-oriented or ‘purposive’ in the sense of addressing the problem of climate change. This makes them different from historical transitions which were largely ‘emergent’, with entrepreneurs exploiting the commercial opportunities offered by new technology

[27]. Because climate protection is a public good, private actors (e.g. firms, consumers) have limited incentives to address it owing to free rider problems and prisoner’s dilemmas. This means that public policy must play a central role in supporting the emergence and deployment of low-carbon innovations and changing the economic frame conditions (via taxes, subsidies, regulations, standards) that incentivize firms, consumers and other actors. However, substantial policy changes involve political struggles and public debate because: “[w]hatever can be done through the State will depend upon generating widespread political support from citizens within the context of democratic rights and freedoms” ([28]: 91).

Again, Geels hijacking a legitimate business concept, but using it for his enviro agenda.

How to implement this? Taxes, subsidies, regulations, standards for businesses and consumers. Use these to regulate and influence behaviour.

Geels rightly says that widespread political support will be needed. But he frames the climate change scam as a way to protect rights and freedoms. Nice bait-and-switch.

Conceptually, this means that we should analyse socio-technical transitions as multi-dimensional struggles between niche-innovations and existing regimes. These struggles include: economic competition between old and new technologies; business struggles between new entrants and incumbents; political struggles over adjustments in regulations, standards, subsidies and taxes; discursive struggles over problem framings and social acceptance; and struggles between new user practices and mainstream ones.

Despite Geels’ article being published in the Journal, “ENERGY RESEARCH AND SOCIAL SCIENCE”, this anything but scientific. If anything, it seems analogous to the “lawfare” that Islamic groups perpetuate on democratic societies.

While Geels promotes economic competition, this is anything but a fair competition. He also calls for:

  • Political struggles over regulations
  • New standards
  • Subsidies
  • Taxes
  • Discursive struggles over problem framings & social acceptance
  • Struggles between new and mainstream user practices

There is nothing scientific here. This is a call for using “political” manoeuvering for achieving social goals.

The importance of public engagement, social acceptance and political feasibility is often overlooked in technocratic government strategies and model-based scenarios, which focus on techno-economic dimensions to identify least-cost pathways [32]. In the UK, which is characterized by closed policy networks and top-down policy style, this neglect has led to many problems, which are undermining the low carbon transition.

• Onshore wind experienced local protests and permit problems, leading to negative public discourses and a political backlash, culminating in a post-2020 moratorium.

• Shale gas experienced public controversies after it was pushed through without sufficient consultation.

• Energy-saving measures in homes were scrapped in 2015, after the Green Deal flagship policy(introduced in2013) spectacularly failed, because it was overly complicated and poorly designed, leading to limited uptake.

• The 2006 zero-carbon homes target, which stipulated that all new homes should be carbon-neutral by 2016, was scrapped in 2015, because of resistance by major housebuilders and limited consumer interest.

• The smart meter roll-out is experiencing delays, because of controversies over standards, privacy concerns, and distribution of benefits (between energy companies and consumers).

While these points are in fact true, Geels suggests that problems could have been avoided if there was sufficient public consultation. This is wishful thinking.

These points raise many legitimate concerns with the eco-agenda. Yet Geels shrugs them off as the result of not engaging the public enough.

Christensen and other innovation management scholars typically adopt a ‘point source’ approach to disruption, in which innovators pioneer new technologies, conquer the world, and cause social change. Existing contexts are typically seen as ‘barriers’ to be overcome. This ‘bottom-up’ emphasis also permeates the Strategic Niche Management and Technological Innovation System literatures. While this kind of change pattern does sometimes occur, the MLP was specifically developed to also accommodate broader patterns, in which niche-innovations diffuse because they align with ongoing processes at landscape- or regime-levels [9].

The MLP thus draws on history and sociology of technology, where processual, contextual explanations are common. Mokyr [58], for instance, emphasizes that “The new invention has to be born into a socially sympathetic environment” (p. 292) and that “Macro-inventions are seeds sown by individual inventors in a social soil. (.) But the environment into which these seeds are sown is, of course, the main determinant of whether they will sprout” (p. 299). So, if radical innovations face mis-matches with economic, socio-cultural or political contexts, they may remain stuck in peripheral niches, hidden ‘below the surface’.

Since low-carbon transitions are problem-oriented, transition scholars should not only analyse innovation dynamics, but also ‘issue dynamics’ because increasing socio-political concerns about climate change can lead to changes in regime-level institutions and selection environments. Societal problems or ‘issues’ have their own dynamics in terms of problem definition and socio-political mobilization as conceptualized, for instance, in the issue lifecycle literature [59,50]. Low carbon transitions require stronger ‘solution’ and problem dynamics, and their successful alignment, which is not an easy process, as the examples below show.

These passages go into marketing strategies, and ways to “frame an argument”. Notice not once does Geels suggest doing more research, or checking the reliability of existing data. Instead, this is a push for emotional manipulation and shameless advertising.

Invention has to be born into a socially sympathetic environment. Science be damned.

There are also positive developments, however, that provide windows of opportunity. Coal is losing legitimacy in parts of the world, because it is increasingly framed as dirty, unhealthy and old-fashioned, and because oil and gas companies are distancing themselves from coal, leading to cracks in the previously ‘closed front’ of fossil fuel industries. The UK has committed to phasing out coal-fired power plants by 2025 and several other countries (Netherlands, France, Canada, Finland, Austria) also move in this direction, providing space for low-carbon alternatives, including renewables.

I would actually agree that coal being phased out would benefit society. However, Geels makes it a “marketing” issue rather than a scientific one. Coal is “increasingly framed” as dirty. Notice that the actual science, such as from this site, are very rarely described.

Following chemical reactions takes place in the combustion of coal with the release of heat:
C + O2 = CO2 + 8084 Kcal/ Kg of carbon (33940 KJ/Kg)
S + O2 = SO2 + 2224 Kcal/Kg of sulfur (9141 KJ/Kg)
2 H2 + O2 = 2 H2O + 28922 Kcal/Kg of hydrogen (142670 KJ/Kg)
2C + O2 = 2CO + 2430 Kcal/Kg of carbon (10120 KJ/Kg)

4. Geels’ Conclusions

The paper has also identified several research challenges, where the transitions community could fruitfully do more work. First, we should broaden our analytical attention from singular niche-innovations (which permeate the literature) to ‘whole system’ change. This may involve changes in conceptual imagery (from ‘point source’ disruption to gradual system reconfiguration) and broader research designs, which analyze multiple niche-innovations and their relations to ongoing dynamics in existing systems and regimes. That, in turn, may require more attention for change mechanisms like add-on, hybridisation, modular component substitution, knock-on effects, innovation cascades, multi regime interaction.

Second, we should better understand regime developments. Existing regimes can provide formidable barriers for low-carbon transitions. Incumbent actors can resist, delay or derail low-carbon transitions, but they can also accelerate them if they reorient their strategies and resources towards niche-innovations. The analysis of niche-to-regime dynamics (as in the niche empowerment literature) should thus be complemented with regime-to-niche dynamics, including incumbent resistance or reorientation. Additionally, we need more nuanced conceptualizations and assessments of degrees of lock-in, tensions, cracks, and destabilisation.

Third, we need greater acknowledgement that socio-technical systems are a special unit of analysis, which spans the social sciences and can be studied through different lenses and at different levels. The recent trend towards deepening our understanding of particular dimensions and societal groups is tremendously fruitful, because disciplinary theories offer more specific causal mechanisms. But, as a community, we should complement this with broad analyses of co-evolution, alignment, multi-dimensionality and ‘whole systems’.

This all sounds elegant, but read between the lines. It is about influencing public perception. Whenever academics, lawyers or politicians seem to make things confusing we need to ask: are they trying to obscure their goals?

5. More About Frank W. Geels

Selected publications of Geels
If you would like a broader cross section of Geels’ work, perhaps these publications will be of interest.

  • Geels, F.W., Berkhout, F. and Van Vuuren, D., 2016, Bridging analytical approaches for low-carbon transitions, Nature Climate Change, 6(6), 576-583
  • Geels, F.W., Kern, F., Fuchs, G., Hinderer, N., Kungl, G., Mylan, J., Neukirch, M., Wassermann, S., 2016, The enactment of socio-technical transition pathways: A reformulated typology and a comparative multi-level analysis of the German and UK low-carbon electricity transitions (19902014), Research Policy, 45(4), 896-913
  • Turnheim, B., Berkhout, F., Geels, F.W., Hof, A., McMeekin, A., Nykvist, B., Van Vuuren, D., 2015, Evaluating sustainability transitions pathways: Bridging analytical approaches to address governance challenges, Global Environmental Change, 35, 239–253
  • Penna, C.C.R. and Geels, F.W., 2015, ‘Climate change and the slow reorientation of the American car industry (1979-2011): An application and extension of the Dialectic Issue LifeCycle (DILC) model’, Research Policy, 44(5), 1029-1048
  • Geels, F.W., 2014, ‘Regime resistance against low-carbon energy transitions: Introducing politics and power in the multi-level perspective’, Theory, Culture & Society, 31(5), 21-40
  • Geels, F.W., 2013, ‘The impact of the financial-economic crisis on sustainability transitions: Financial investment, governance and public discourse’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 6, 67-95
  • Geels, F.W., 2012, ‘A socio-technical analysis of low-carbon transitions: Introducing the multi-level perspective into transport studies’, Journal of Transport Geography, 24, 471-482
  • Geels, F.W., Kemp, R., Dudley, G. and Lyons, G. (eds.), 2012, Automobility in Transition? A Socio Technical Analysis of Sustainable Transport, New York: Routledge
  • Verbong, G.P.J. and Geels, F.W., 2010, ‘Exploring sustainability transitions in the electricity sector with socio-technical pathways’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 77(8), 12141221 Verbong, G.P.J. and Geels, F.W., 2007, ‘The ongoing energy transition: Lessons from a sociotechnical, multi-level analysis of the Dutch electricity system (1960-2004)’, Energy Policy, 35(2), 1025-1037
  • Geels, F.W., 2002, ‘Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: A multi-level perspective and a case-study’, Research Policy, 31(8/9), 1257-1274

Frank Geels publicly available CV
Education
• Ph.D., Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, Twente University of Technology (Jan. 1998- July 2002), Netherlands. Supervisors: Arie Rip and Johan Schot. Title PhD thesis: Understanding the Dynamics of Technological Transitions: A co-evolutionary and socio-technical analysis.
• Masters degree in Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society, Twente University of Technology (1991-1996)
• Bachelor degree in Chemical Engineering, Twente University of Technology (1989-1991)

For what it’s worth, his formal education is pretty impressive. Where I lose respect is when he deviates from scientific argument in favour of political discourse. What could be very interesting work is corrupted be having an agenda.

His undergraduate degree is chemical engineering, which again, is very respectable. However, his Masters and PhD show a deviation from science and research.

While there are many other such authors, Frank W. Geels is a good case of what happens when political agendas and manoeuvering creep into science.

A morbidly fascinating topic. Check out some of his other publications.

Posted on

CCS #14: UN’s New Development Financing (The Bait-and-Switch)

(Ways to raise money)

(Sources of money for health initiatives)

An internationally concerted carbon tax could raise $250 billion per year…

(Page 13)
In this vein, a tax of $25 per ton of CO2 emitted by developed countries is expected to raise $250 billion per year in global tax revenues. Such a tax would be in addition to taxes already imposed at the national level, as many Governments (of developing as well as developed countries) already tax carbon emissions, in some cases explicitly, and in other cases, indirectly through taxes on specific fuels

…and a small currency transaction tax could add an estimated $40 billion…

1. Debunking The Climate Change Scam

CLICK HERE, for #1: major lies that the climate frauds tell.
CLICK HERE, for #2: review of the Paris Accord.
CLICK HERE, for #3: Bill C-97, the GHG Pollution Pricing Act.
CLICK HERE, for #4: in 3-2 decision, Sask. COA allows carbon tax.
CLICK HERE, for #5: controlled opposition to carbon tax.
CLICK HERE, for #6: controlled opposition Cons ==> Supreme Court.
CLICK HERE, for #7: climate bonds pitched as $100T industry.
CLICK HERE, for #8: Joel Wood pitching various pricing options.
CLICK HERE, for #9: Mark Carney and UN climate finance.
CLICK HERE, for #10: Goldman Sachs, Obama, Clinton, Chicago CX.
CLICK HERE, for #11: Coronavirus, Pirbright Inst, Gates, Depopulation.
CLICK HERE, for #12: AOC and the “Green New Deal”.
CLICK HERE, for #13: UN seeks new development financing.

CLICK HERE, for BOLD Like A Leopard Guest Posting.

2. Important Links


UN.new.development.financing.2012.178pages
CLICK HERE, for the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime.
CLICK HERE, for UN Sustainable Development Goals.
CLICK HERE, for Devex article explaining debt-for-development.
CLICK HERE, for World Bank explanation for debt-for-development trade.
CLICK HERE, for debt swaps for sustainable development.
CLICK HERE, for loss of sovereignty article.
CLICK HERE, for an IMF article on debt swaps.

3. This Is The Bait:

(From Page 10)
Two main sources are considered: taxes levied on international transactions and/or taxes that are internationally concerted, such as the air-ticket solidarity levy, financial or currency transaction taxes and carbon taxes; and revenues from global resources, such as SDR allocations and proceeds derived from the extraction of resources from the global commons, through, for example, seabed mining in international waters. Proposals on potential sources of finance for international development cooperation in both categories have been discussed for decades, although most of these, with the exception of the proposal on an airline levy, have not yet been adopted.

So what kind of “revenues” are raised?

  • taxes on international transactions
  • internationally concerted taxes
  • air-ticket solidarity levy
  • financial or currency transaction taxes
  • carbon taxes

This is how bait-and-switch works:
(1) Raise money using cause A.
(2) Actually spend the money on cause B.

4. And Here Is The Switch:

An array of other options with large fundraising potential have been proposed (see figure O.1 and table O.1), but have not been agreed upon internationally thus far. These include taxes on financial and currency transactions and on greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the creation of new international liquidity through issuance of special drawing rights (SDRs) by the International Monetary Fund IMF), to be allocated with a bias favouring developing countries or leveraged as development financing. Though their potential may be high, these proposals are subject to political controversy. For instance, many countries are not willing to support international forms of taxation, as these are said to undermine national sovereignty.

There are also challenges in the use and allocation of funds mobilized internationally. Most existing innovative financing mechanisms earmark resources upfront for specific purposes, as is the case for the global health funds. There are perceived benefits in doing so. Advocates argue that the earmarking helps build political support and attract funds by establishing a clear link between fundraising and popular causes. This may come at a cost, however, since earmarking funds can limit domestic policy space for channelling resources to nationally defined priorities.

This explains why there is the bait-and-switch. Countries are not willing to support international taxation. Therefore it is necessary to raise money under the pretense of “environmentalism”. It also shows that the UN feels little resistance to misleading the public on where money is being used for.

(From Page 10)
Some innovations focus on intermediation mechanisms designed to better match funding and needs by facilitating front-loading of resources (which include several mechanisms channelling resources to global health funds and some debt-for-development swap mechanisms), by mobilizing public means to guarantee or insure natural disaster risks or technology development for public causes, or by securing specific-purpose voluntary contributions from the private sector for official development cooperation. Various mechanisms of these types do exist, but they are not large in size.

Several global funds that act as allocation mechanisms are generally also considered to come under the rubric of innovative development financing. Disbursement mechanisms in the health sector include the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, UNITAID and the GAVI Alliance. These mechanisms collect financing directly from sources or through intermediary financing mechanisms. UNITAID is the only disbursement mechanism that obtains the bulk of its financing from an innovative source, the air-ticket solidarity levy. Other funds rely mainly on traditional sources of financing.

Though the bulk of money raised is collected under the pretense of “environmentalism”, the UN makes it clear that the cash will be spent on a few “other” purposes.

  1. Global Health Funds
  2. Debt-for-Development Swap Mechanisms

5. UN Violates Own Convention


From the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime

Article 4(1)

Article 4. Protection of sovereignty
1. States Parties shall carry out their obligations under this Convention in a manner consistent with the principles of sovereign equality and territorial integrity of States and that of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other States.
2. Nothing in this Convention entitles a State Party to undertake in the territory of another State the exercise of jurisdiction and performance of functions that are reserved exclusively for the authorities of that other State by its domestic law.

Article 5

Article 5. Criminalization of participation in an organized criminal group
1. Each State Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences, when committed intentionally:
(a) Either or both of the following as criminal offences distinct from those involving the attempt or completion of the criminal activity:
(i) Agreeing with one or more other persons to commit a serious crime for a purpose relating directly or indirectly to the obtaining of a financial or other material benefit and, where required by domestic law, involving an act undertaken by one of the participants in furtherance of the agreement or involving an organized criminal group;

Consider that the New Development Financing involves obtaining huge sums of money under false pretenses. While the publics are told that much of this revenue will be for environmental causes, it becomes clear from later in the document that it will be spent on other purposes (such as debt-for-development and health care causes).

Taking money for purposes other than what is advertised is fraud.

6. Debt Conversion Mechanisms

(Page 86) Debt-conversion mechanisms
Debt conversion entails the cancellation by one or more creditors of part of a country’s debt in order to enable the release of funds which would otherwise have been used for debt-servicing, for use instead in social or environmental projects. Where debt is converted at a discount with respect to its face value, only part of the proceeds fund the projects, the remainder reducing the external debt burden, typically as part of a broader debt restructuring.

Debt to developing nations can be “forgiven”, at least partly, if certain conditions are met. However, the obvious question must be asked:

Can nations be loaned money they could never realistically pay back, in order to ensure their compliance in UN or other global agenda, by agreeing to “forgive” part of it?

(Page 86) Debt conversion first emerged, in the guise of debt-for-nature swaps, during the 1980s debt crisis, following an opinion article by Thomas Lovejoy, then Executive Vice-President of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), in the New York Times in 1984. Lovejoy argued that a developing country’s external debt could be reduced (also providing tax relief to participating creditor banks) in exchange for the country’s taking measures to address environmental challenges. Estimates based on Sheikh (2010) and Buckley, ed. (2011) suggest that between $1.1 billion and $1.5 billion of debt has been exchanged through debt-for-nature swaps since the mid–1980s, although it is not possible to assess how much of this constitutes IDF, for the reasons discussed in box III.1.

If debt can be forgiven in return for environmental measures, then why not simply fund these environmental measures from the beginning? Is it to pressure or coerce otherwise unwilling nations into agreeing with such measures?

(Page 88)
There have been two basic forms of debt-for-nature exchanges (Buckley and Freeland, 2011). In the first, part of a country’s external debt is purchased by an environmental non-governmental organization and offered to the debtor for cancellation in exchange for a commitment to protect a particular area of land. Such transactions occurred mainly in the late 1980s and 1990s and were generally relatively small-scale. An early example was a 1987 deal under which Conservation International, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental non-governmental organization, bought $650,000 of the commercial bank debt of Bolivia (now Plurinational State of Bolivia) in the secondary market for $100,000, and exchanged this for shares in a company established to preserve 3.7 million acres of forest and grassland surrounding the Beni Biosphere Reserve in the north-east part of the country.
In the second form, debt is exchanged for local currency (often at a discount), which is then used by local conservation groups or government agencies to fund projects in the debtor country. Swaps of this kind are generally much larger, and have predominated since the 1990s. The largest such swap came in 1991, when a group of bilateral creditors agreed to channel principal and interest payments of $473 million (in local currency) into Poland’s Ecofund set up to finance projects designed to counter environmental deterioration. The EcoFund financed 1,500 programmes between 1992 and 2007, providing grants for conservation projects relating to cross-border air pollution, climate change, biological diversity and the clean-up of the Baltic Sea (Buckley and Freeland, 2011).

We will “forgive” your debt if:
(1) A portion of your land is off limits; or
(2) Debt converted to currency to fund “projects”

Debt For Health

(Page 89)
Since the development of debt swaps in the 1980s, there has been a diversification of their uses to encompass social projects, most recently in the area of health under the Debt2Health initiative, which was launched by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2007 to harness additional resources for its programmes. Under Debt2Health, a donor country agrees to reduce part of a loan ineligible for debt relief under global initiatives such as the HIPC and Multilateral Debt Reduction Initiatives, in exchange for a commitment by the debtor to invest (in local currency) half of the nominal value of the debt in programmes approved by the Global Fund. The Global Fund is committed to devoting all of the funds thus generated to financing programmes in the country rather than overhead costs (Buckley, 2011c).

Debt For Education

(Page 90)
In addition to the uses described above, debt swaps have also been successfully implemented for education and development.2 Clear delineation among the various types of swaps is often problematic, however, as debt-for-development swaps typically provide funding for environmental, health and/or education projects.
……..
. Although nominally debt-conversion operations, these Contracts stipulate that debtor countries are to continue to service these debts in full, while receiving, however, an equivalent amount of new ODA grants tied to specific programmes when they do so (Agence Française de Développement, n.d.). Thus, resources are not redirected from debt servicing to other uses; rather, potential fiscal savings from debt-service reduction are forgone, the resources instead being directed to specific uses (Buckley, 2011a). These transactions thus cannot be considered to constitute IDF

So in these cases the debt isn’t really forgiven. The indebted nation will still have to make payments, while other money will be coming in for other purposes.

The funding generated by debt swaps is closely tied to their designated end use (although the effectiveness of this depends on monitoring mechanisms). While this effective earmarking of budgetary funds indicates a trade-off with policy space, the debt relief provided by converting debt at a discount (where the debt would otherwise have been serviced) releases resources for use in accordance with national priorities. However, the exclusion of relevant ministries and limited civil society participation in the design and implementation processes may undermine coherence with medium-term national development strategies.

To make absolutely clear, this debt forgiveness isn’t free. There is always some trade off. Here, it seems to be having your nation’s sovereignty eroded in return for being cut a break.

While all of this is couched in very pretty rhetoric, one really has to ask what is really the costs?

7. “Voluntary” Pesticide Use In Crops


Here is one such “pull measure” (page 98)

The World Bank is currently developing agricultural projects based on pull mechanisms through the Agricultural Pull Mechanism (AGPM) initiative, with the objectives of increasing production, reducing losses and enhancing food security for small farmers. There are six pilot programmes currently being developed, which are expected to be launched in June 2012. Their objectives are:
-To develop distribution networks for bio-fortified crop varieties (high pro-vitamin A cassava, maize and sweet potato, and high in iron beans) in Africa
-To promote the development and use of new hybrid rice varieties in South Asia
-To develop improved fertilizers and fertilizer production processes
-To promote adoption of improved post-harvest storage technologies
-To incentivize the use of biocontrol mechanisms against aflatoxin contamination of crops
-To promote development and use of a vaccine against peste des petits ruminants in livestock in Africa

Interesting. How much of this is done in the first world?

8. Now Comes Climate Change

(Page 120)
The unprecedented global improvements in average living standards over the last two centuries have come at the cost of serious degradation of the natural environment. The most serious environmental threat is climate change, brought about by global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In addition to considerable expenditure for adaptation, climate change necessitates a fundamental shift in development strategies towards a much less carbon-intensive model, and a major reduction in reliance on fossil fuels.

While climate change arises overwhelmingly from historical emissions in developed countries, it impacts disproportionately the well-being and livelihoods of people in developing countries. This makes a compelling case for the assumption by richer countries of the costs of mitigation and adaptation

Read the next several pages. While the paper talks at length about how to “raise” money for climate change causes, it is surprisingly vague about how this money will actually be spent. There are some bland references to technology, but no specifics.

The paper cites “Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases” but CO2 is the only one to actually be named.

Furthermore, the UN tries to promote mass migration to the West. However, this would be illogical, since on average, Western nations leave a much bigger “footprint” than others do.

While “financing” climate change efforts features prominently in later sections of the paper, it gives no real information on how the money would be put to use.

9. Is This Predatory?

From the Journal of Politics and Law Article (see here).

Budget constraints are severely undermining the capacity of governments of developing countries to provide their people even the most basic of social services. This lack of finance is in turn caused by several factors including, among others, huge military spending, pervasive corruption and large repayments of debts owed to the developed world. These factors, either singly or in combination, eat up government funds that can otherwise be spent on education, health, housing and other social services. Economists have a better way of describing it – these factors ‘crowd out’ essential public spending designed to benefit the people. (Note 1) As a result, these governments are unable to steer their countries towards the path of economic development and entire peoples are unable to enjoy the most fundamental of economic, social and cultural rights“

This is what we are financing.

Our leaders take from us, claiming it is for efforts to “protect the environment”. Money is then spent abroad in the developing world, often awarded in the form of loans. When such nations cannot pay back the money they owe, they become indebted to their creditors. This is usually bodies like the UN or IMF.

Bait: Tax to save environment
Switch: Predatory loans to developing world.

This is the bait-and-switch. It is highly unethical to take advantage of people like this.

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