This is the second of three essays about the history of
the green agenda. Like the first essay, which told the story up to the Rio
Earth Summit of 1992, it is an updated précis of parts of a much longer article, written
in 2023. That article can be found here: [[i]].
Post-normal science
In the early 1990s, two academics, Silvio Funtowicz and
Jerome Ravetz, came up with an idea they called “post-normal science” (PNS). They
claimed this was a new way to use the outputs of science, when standard methods
of risk and cost-benefit analysis were insufficient.
Post-normal science describes itself as a problem-solving
strategy. It seeks to replace the objectivity and rigour of honestly done
science with something much woollier, that it calls “quality.” It seeks the
involvement in the decision process of “all those who wish to participate in
the resolution of the issue.” And through a concept of “extended facts,” it
allows ideas that are not facts to be treated in debate on an equal basis with
facts.
Green activist politicians, it seems, saw in PNS a chance to
sideline objective science when analysing risks, costs and benefits in environmental
matters. So, they could enable activists to direct policy debates towards
outcomes that suit their agendas, even when the facts were not supportive. And to
prevent objective risk or cost/benefit analysis on environmental policies.
Anti-car policies in the UK
After Rio, the UK media started promoting anti-car policies.
Our TV screens showed (staged) pictures of rural roads chock-a-block with cars.
Of traffic jams in foggy weather, with smoking exhaust-pipes. Of the aftermaths
of accidents. It was hard, even then, to avoid thinking that we drivers were
being set up. And organizations that should have defended us, like the
Automobile Association, not only abdicated their responsibility, but even took
part in the witch-hunt.
This was the start of a long strand of deep green policies
in the UK, dedicated to taking away our personal mobility. This was not driven only
by mandating reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. But under
the monikers of “air pollution” and later of “clean air,” activists have sought
to make driving increasingly difficult and unaffordable for ordinary people. “Safety,”
also, has been used as an excuse to place draconian restrictions on us.
The history of anti-car policies in the UK is a long one. I
shall, therefore, defer further consideration to a separate essay or set of
essays.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development
Next, “big business” got in on the act. Samuel Curtis
Johnson Jr., long-time chairman of S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. of Racine,
Wisconsin, was a very strong supporter of green causes. In 1995, he was a
founder of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). This
organization has worked closely with the United Nations ever since.
Today, the WBCSD describes itself as “the leading
community of global businesses making sustainability performance a key driver
for competitiveness.” And its more than 250 members include Amazon, Apple,
Google, IBM, McDonald’s, Microsoft, MasterCard and Visa, banks, Big Pharma, car
manufacturers, energy companies, oil companies, food companies, management
consultants, and more. A who’s who of rich and often “woke” multi-nationals.
The Second Assessment Report
The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report appeared in 1995. The
scientists initially concluded that: “we have no yardstick against which to
measure the manmade effect.” But this wasn’t good enough for the politicians.
They detailed Sir John Houghton, then chairman of the Scientific Assessment
Working Group of the IPCC and also on the UK government’s “Panel on Sustainable
Development,” to get it changed.
Houghton ordered Ben Santer, one of the chapter lead
authors, to change the conclusion of his chapter. It became: “The body of
statistical evidence … now points towards a discernable human influence on
global climate.” And the Summary for Policymakers concluded: “The balance of
evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”
Was this not a case of fabricating “evidence” to suit the desired
policy? Done by a senior official of the UK government?
The Kyoto Protocol
In 1997, the United Nations Conference of the Parties (CoP)
meeting took place in Kyoto. There, many countries adopted the Kyoto Protocol. This
“operationalizes the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by
committing industrialized countries and economies in transition to limit and
reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in accordance with agreed individual
targets.” China, India and Brazil, sensibly, chose to stay out.
As part of this, European Union members, of which the UK
at the time was one, agreed to a binding reduction of CO2 emissions to
an average of 92 per cent of 1990 levels during the period 2008 to 2012.
Perversion of the precautionary principle
But perhaps the most significant single thing Samuel Curtis Johnson
did to help along the bad policies being imposed on us today, was to host the
so-called Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle in 1998. This
formed one of the major steps, with which activists succeeded in perverting a
philosophical concept called the “precautionary principle.”
This principle started from a common-sense idea: “Look
before you leap.” Or even “First, do no harm.” But in several stages, they
perverted it into an excuse for governments to take political action against
any risk, even if there is no evidence that the risk is significant, or even a
real problem. And without taking any account at all of the costs versus
benefits of that action to those affected by it, either.
The details of how they carried out this perversion are
sufficiently long, that I will delegate that subject to a separate essay of its
own.
The Millennium Summit
In 2000, the UN held a Millennium Summit. This led to an agreement
between all the UN member states on a set of “Millennium Development Goals,”
which were to be achieved by the year 2015.
This was the start of the tyrannical and all-pervasive
culture of arbitrary, often collective, and ever tightening targets and limits
in matters environmental, which has plagued our lives ever since. The EU has been
probably the most eager of the spreaders and enforcers of this culture. But it
was the UN that, most of all, drove the process along.
The Third Assessment Report
The IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, in 2001, was the one
in which Michael Mann’s now-infamous “Hockey Stick” graph appeared. Based on tree
ring measurements, it had a flat “blade” showing global temperatures as being stable
until about 1900, then rising precipitately. It got viral publicity. It was
eventually discredited (though that process took far longer than it ought to have
done), and it had disappeared entirely by the 2013 report.
The BBC
Then there’s the BBC. In early 2006, the BBC held a meeting
of what they claimed were “the best scientific experts” to decide their policy
on climate change reporting. When the list of attendees was eventually
unearthed, it included only three scientists; all alarmists. It also included
the Head of Campaigns for Greenpeace.
In that same year, the BBC decided to cut the broadcast time
allowed to those skeptical of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming
(CAGW) meme. They sought to deny us skeptics the right for our views to be
heard, and the right to call witnesses – including our experts.
Since then, the BBC has often edited interviews with
skeptics in a biased way, that made their arguments appear less credible than
they actually are. And despite having being ticked off by its regulators, the
BBC has continued to maintain a strongly alarmist stance.
The Stern Review
In 2006, the Stern Review was published. This was an
(apparent) attempt to provide a cost versus benefits analysis for policy action
or inaction on reducing CO2 emissions. It was biased towards
political action, and the uncertainties in the numbers on both costs and
benefits sides were enormous. Moreover, it made some unreasonable assumptions,
which were called out even by mainstream economists.
I plan to address the costs versus benefits saga for CO2
emission reductions in some detail in a separate, later essay.
The Fourth Assessment Report
The IPCC’s fourth assessment report (AR4), issued in
2007, had its problems too. They could not produce any more accurate estimate
of the global climate sensitivity (how much temperature rise there would eventually
be from a doubling of CO2) than the 2001 report had. Indeed, the
range of uncertainties went up.
But when skeptics looked in detail at the many references in
the report, it cited several reports from the World Wildlife Fund and
Greenpeace! So much for the IPCC assessing “the state of scientific, technical
and socio-economic knowledge.” This was just activist pals citing activist
pals. Yet the IPCC won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize for this report!
The Climate Change Act 2008
Ironically, on the day of the vote on the UK’s 2008 climate
change bill, it snowed in London. The Guardian reported that London had its
first October snow in more than 70 years!
The cost versus benefit numbers were based on the Stern
review. Not only were they dubious, but they had a huge range of uncertainty
too. They were not fit for purpose. Yet the politicians went ahead regardless.
This was extremely dishonest and reckless towards us, the people who would be
expected to pay for the policies they were putting in place.
They also set up a system of five-year “carbon budgets.”
Very Soviet.
Climategate
On to November 2009, and “Climategate.” This was a release
of e-mails from the climate research unit (CRU) at the University of East
Anglia. It showed, to those who bothered to look, that alarmists had interfered
with the review and publication process for papers on which the IPCC was
supposed to rely. They had dropped, spliced or misrepresented data to produce
alarming effects. They had refused to share data to allow others to replicate
their work. They had plotted to delete data to evade Freedom of Information
requests. They had conspired against journal editors who published skeptical
papers. And more. What they were doing was not science. Nor was it honest.
The UK government commissioned no less than three inquiries
into Climategate. First, a parliamentary committee, which seemingly chose to
avoid the most important questions. Second came the Oxburgh inquiry, which did
not interview any critics of the CRU, and did not address work done for the
IPCC. The third inquiry, under Muir Russell, again avoided answering the
important questions, and the ones it did investigate were largely irrelevant. So,
all the important issues “fell through the gaps” between the three inquiries.
The Copenhagen CoP meeting
At the 2009 CoP meeting in Copenhagen, an agreement was
made that “actions should be taken to keep any temperature increases to below 2
degrees C.” The 2 degrees Celsius figure seems entirely arbitrary.
The EU committed to reducing CO2 emissions to
80 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020, or 70 per cent if other countries were
willing to do the same.
The Doha CoP meeting
At the Doha CoP in 2012, the “rich nations” agreed in
principle to discuss a “loss and damage” mechanism. Raising the spectre of
politicians using such a mechanism as an excuse to saddle the people they are
supposed to be serving with whatever exorbitant costs they fancy. Without ever
having to prove that any of the claimed “damage” was actually caused by the
people they are saddling with those impositions.
The Fifth Assessment Report
The IPCC’s fifth assessment report appeared in 2013. It gave
no central estimate for climate sensitivity at all! Apparently because of “a
lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.” It
gave a “likely” range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius per doubling of CO2.
Skeptical expert Richard Lindzen said of it: “It is quite amazing to see the
contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international
climate agenda going.”
The Sustainable Development Goals
In September 2015, the UN convened a “Sustainable
Development Summit,” attended by more than 150 world leaders. These included
then UK prime minister David Cameron. At that meeting, they agreed a document
called Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
This was, in essence, an update to and extension of the Millennium Development
Goals.
As this agenda (otherwise known as Agenda 2030) is
driving a lot of the maniacal policies that are being imposed on us in the UK
right now, I shall defer the detail to a later essay.
The Paris CoP meeting
In late 2015 there was another CoP meeting, this time in
Paris. At which, the politicians sought to reach a binding agreement to keep
global temperatures below some completely arbitrary limit. Not that anyone has
ever shown that restrictions on CO2 emissions, however large, would
actually achieve this target or any other. If we don’t know what caused the
earlier warm and cold periods, how can we know that another warm – or cold –
period might not kick in again, without human intervention?
The “limit” touted prior to Paris was 2 degrees Celsius
above “pre-industrial levels.” But in 2015, it looked, before the El Niño which
started in that year, as though global warming had stopped, and was not going
to reach 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, or anywhere near it. So, they decided
to lower the limit from 2 degrees to 1.5! Moving the goalposts, no?
The main commitment was: “Holding the increase in the global
average temperature to well below 2°C
above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature
increase to 1.5°C
above pre-industrial levels…” But they also committed to making progressive
greenhouse gas reductions, that will go on and on for ever! So, there
can never be an end to this process. The alarmists will not, under any
circumstances and regardless of the evidence, ever admit that the “global
warming” problem, even if it ever was real, has been solved.
And the further through the agreement you read, the more it
sounds like an Enabling Act for a world government in all things environmental,
in which the “Conference of the Parties” and the United Nations together play
the part of Big Brother.
The Katowice CoP meeting
The 2018 CoP meeting in Katowice, Poland, was nothing but an
alarm-fest. It was addressed by among others, David Attenborough, Greta
Thunberg and Al Gore. Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the UN, moaned: “We’re
running out of time. To waste this opportunity would compromise our last best
chance to stop runaway climate change. It would not only be immoral; it would
be suicidal.” And they actually expected us to believe any of that crap?
To sum up: The green religion
Looking at all these things together, you may well find
yourself, as I have, thinking of deep green environmentalism as a religion. An
extremely intolerant one, at that. Not unlike the Catholic church from the late
15th century through the Counter-Reformation. And you may find
yourself comparing its leaders and its acolytes with those that sought to
subject innocent people to the Inquisitions.
But today’s green religionists are even worse, in one
respect at least, than the 15th-century Catholic popes and clerics.
They are dishonest, deceitful and reckless, to a level that once you start to
piece together the evidence, you will find absolutely incredible.
They have made it easier for activists to win policy
battles, even if their opponents have all the evidence. They have sought to
sideline the use of objective science in risk and cost-benefit analysis on
green policies. And they have “persuaded” (through carrot or stick?) many of
the largest commercial organizations into publicly supporting their agendas.
They have fabricated “evidence” to suit policy. They have
perverted the precautionary principle into a licence for government to take
action against any risk, no matter how small or how unproven. They have
collaborated with the UN and the EU to impose on us all a tyrannical culture of
arbitrary, often collective, and ever tightening targets and limits. Which,
they plan, will continue to be tightened for ever.
They have suppressed the voices of skeptics. They have
cited their activist pals in what are supposedly scientific reviews.
“Scientists” among them have acted in dishonest ways, that are in no way
scientific. And instead of following up and punishing these malfeasances, the
UK government whitewashed them.
But there is one big problem for those, that have been
doing these things to us for so long. The dishonesty and deceit with which they
have acted is so huge, that it cannot remain veiled for ever. And the veils
that have covered their tracks are now beginning to tear. When people at last wake
up to what has been going on over the green agenda, there will be hell to pay.
And I don’t think that will be all that long now.
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