Guest essay by Leo Goldstein
My essay The Command & Control Center of Climate Alarmism discussed the centralized structure of climate alarmism, and introduced the term Climate Alarmism Governance (CAG) to define its command & control center. The fact that most alarmist groups and their multiple activities are centrally coordinated or even directed raises a natural question about their central motives and goals. The impression that these groups believe in the IPCC theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is contradicted by their widespread opposition to the use of nuclear power and to building new hydro power plants. Hydropower is obviously a renewable energy source.
The same groups oppose natural gas power, which emits 3-4 times less carbon dioxide per kWh compared with coal power. There are many more contradictions in the CAG’s statements and actions. It seems to be aware that its “scientific base” is fake, and purposefully makes illogical and impossible demands to thwart any serious consideration of technological or economic solutions for the alleged problem. Each time such economic or technological actions are seriously contemplated, somebody takes another look at the so-called “climate science” and finds a striking lack of actual science. Then it takes 5-8 years to explain the fraud away, and to raise alarm to new heights.
After considering and discarding other theories as insufficient to explain all the facts, only one conclusion remains: the Climate Alarmism Governance is waging a war on the United States.
The CAG leads a tight coalition of mostly foreign based NGOs, certain United Nations agencies and politicians, and a few individuals possessed by ideas of world domination (euphemistically described as “world governance” or “global civil society”) and aided by domestic collaborators. Here, this coalition will be called Climatist International, or Climintern, to underscore its analogy with the Communist International (Comintern) organization that existed from 1919 until 1956. Climintern also seems to be a partial successor to the Soviet-controlled espionage, influence, and propaganda network that collapsed in 1988-91, many of whose individual members and sympathizers fled to environmentalism. The climate alarmism network rose around the same time.
The word war is not used metaphorically here. It is not a Cold War, not a “trade war,” and not a war of ideas. And it is not a war in some remote location. The theater of this war comprises at least the entire US. It may look inconspicuous, but only because it is 4thGeneration Warfare, as defined by Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997). Col. Boyd’s theories are usually invoked in the context of asymmetrical conflicts in remote parts of the world, but are by no means limited to such conflicts.
I. Colonel Boyd’s Theory & 4th Generation Warfare
Colonel Boyd’s insight is that there are three levels of warfare: moral, mental, and physical:
· Moral Warfare: the destruction of the enemy’s will to win, disruption of alliances (or potential allies) and induction of internal fragmentation. Ideally resulting in the “dissolution of the moral bonds that permit an organic whole to exist.” (i.e., breaking down the mutual trust and common outlook mentioned in the paragraph above.)
· Mental Warfare: the distortion of the enemy’s perception of reality through disinformation, ambiguous posturing, and/or severing of the communication/information infrastructure.
· Physical Warfare: the abilities of physical resources such as weapons, people, and logistical assets.
Thus, destroying things and killing people are not the essence of warfare, but only its lowest, physical level. This observation applies to wars in general and is not limited to 4thgeneration warfare. Colonel Boyd advises that a successful strategy should
“Penetrate [the] adversary’s moral-mental-physical being to dissolve his moral fiber, disorient his mental images, disrupt his operations, and overload his system, as well as subvert, shatter, seize or otherwise subdue those moral-mental-physical bastions, connections, or activities that he depends upon …” (Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd.)
A military strategy is subordinated to a Grand Strategy, which was conceptualized by Colonel Boyd for 4th generation warfare as
“the art of connecting yourself to as many other independent power centers as possible, while at the same time isolating your enemies from as many other power centers as possible. A Fourth Generation conflict will usually have many independent power centers, not only at the grand strategic level but down all the way to the tactical level. The game of connection and isolation will therefore be central to tactics and operational art as well as to strategy and grand strategy.” (Lind, Thiele, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook)
II. On the Edge of Defeat
The events of the last fifteen years, considered in the light of these ideas, suggest that the CAG and Climintern have been waging a textbook 4th generation war against America!
Unfortunately, their war went extremely successfully on the moral and mental levels. On the moral level, it polarized America to an extent not seen in the last 150 years. Climate alarmism confused many smart and influential persons, pushing them to the extreme left and convincing them that Republicans and conservatives are ignorant and evil. On the mental level, Climintern severely undermined the American scientific enterprise and other intellectual infrastructure, and damaged universities and other academic institutions, most of them beyond repair. Other factors contributed more heavily to the downfall of academia.
Considering Col. Boyd’s wisdom, we cannot avoid thinking that the CAG was exceptionally successful in its Grand Strategy as well. It has isolated America from other centers of power, including Western Europe and Latin America. It also isolated America from its own academia, the media-entertainment industry, and even the government (as of 1/1/2017). Even worse, it created internal political divisions showing some attributes of a religious conflict.
But a hostile activity can be properly called a war only when something is done on the physical level: when large-scale violence or damage to physical objects is employed, attempted, or threatened by the enemy. Well, CAG agents in the EPA and some other federal agencies have been damaging the national energy infrastructure by regulations, orders, and threats for many years. For example, the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed eleven men happened when the crew performed an unnecessary procedure, demanded by the EPA. Federal sabotage of the attempts to stop the oil leakage and to clean it up is a separate subject. Fortunately, the fracking revolution and off-shore drilling, happening despite the active resistance of the Obama administration, have offset some of the worst effects of its energy policies. But severe damage to the energy infrastructure can take an enormous toll in human lives, especially when the enemy action caused “dissolution of the moral bonds”.
Industrial systems are usually designed with multiple layers of safety measures and procedures. Enforcing such multi-layer safety is one of the main reasons for regulations and regulators. If a hostile governance penetrates or acquires influence over a regulatory authority, it might remove some safety measures or order dangerous procedures under a suitable pretext, such as protection of the environment. The accidents would not start to happen immediately, because some safety measures would remain. Rather, disasters would happen in the future, and would be usually attributed to failures of the remaining safety measures. Climintern has publicly announced its goal to shut down fossil fuel production and utilization, and words like “penetration” and “influence” severely understate its control over the EPA.
Moreover, the CAG certainly encourages its units to act like they are fighting a war. Its warlike thinking is reflected in the warlike terminology used by its units. They perform mobilization; they demand wartime limits on freedoms; they blockade and disrupt; and they fight battles in an endless war against the enemy, which seems to be us (**).
III. The CAG and Climintern
The existence of the CAG as the center of climate alarmism needs some explanation. Of course, CAG leaders do not conduct their affairs from a secret office or bunker, but the Internet allows them to collaborate almost as if they were in the same office. The majority of individuals who occasionally support climate alarmism are not controlled, but they do believe media propaganda, follow their friends, or trust institutions that used to be trustworthy.
Nevertheless, most alarmist organizations are under the central control. Ordinary members and even some leaders of these organizations might not know that, but this situation is not unusual. For example, front groups of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) were created and operated in exactly the same way. A typical member of a front group did not know he was joining a CPUSA front. Even if the member found out, he did not know that the CPUSA was fully controlled by the Soviet regime, headed by Stalin and his henchmen. And US Communists and fellow travelers did not want to hear about mass murders and other crimes committed by the Soviet regime against its people. In accordance with the Marxist dogma, they considered such information forgery, funded by the bourgeoisie.
Climintern is hundreds of times bigger than Comintern or the CPUSA ever were. Climintern controls annual budgets of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars – compared with the tens of millions that were at the disposal of the CPUSA. Climintern also has a more complex structure, with many command levels and multiple communication channels. Further, some groups within Climintern serve as communication channels in addition to their operational functions, such as propaganda or mobilization. The Guardian’s article Climate change: we must look to international agencies to save the world is an example of such dual functionality. It both weakens resistance to the CAG among ordinary readers and signals to low-level front groups that the party line openly pushes national submission to the international agencies.
To be effective, a Climintern group does not need to know that it is a part of a centrally controlled structure. It only needs to know who gives its instructions, or through what channels it receives those instructions. The Climintern groups and their employees and agents must obey the instructions, or risk loss of their jobs and/or funding. I need not repeat here the well-known cases, such as the expulsion of whole chapters from Sierra Club. The CAG also controls large parts of the federal government (as of 1/1/2017), state governments, many European governments, most research funding, and enormous amounts of public money. The Internet allows continuous and efficient communication and coordination between the CAG and its forces worldwide. Just thirty years ago, global or even regional scale plots were almost impossible because of the lack of efficient communication and coordination. Today, that distance is not an obstacle.
Of course, the CAG itself is not as cohesive as the Soviet regime under Stalin. But the leaders of big transnational NGOs, UN officials, European Green parties, and hell-knows-who-else maintain a unified command, probably aided by huge amounts of money coming their way. And they are adept at issuing instructions in the form of “commander’s intent,” allowing leaders of subordinated outfits broad discretion on how to execute the instructions to achieve their intended goals.
The legacy of two of America’s most powerful defeated enemies – Communism and Nazism – are evident in the CAG. Nazism became a powerful influence in the UN organization in the 1970’s, as evident from the appointment of Kurt Waldheim, an unindicted Nazi war criminal, as the UN Secretary-General from 1972 to 1981. Apparently, this ideology made its way into the UN through certain third-world governments, sometimes in the disguise of anti-colonialism. America had almost no colonies, exerted pressure on European countries to let go of their colonies, and provided aid to many newly independent countries, but still became an object of hatred. Hatred has a logic of its own. America was also perceived by the aspiring “global governors” (including characters as diverse as Maurice Strong and George Soros) as the main obstacle to their tyrannical ambitions, and for good reasons. Finally, the anti-humanist ideology of the “deep ecology” recently moved from the fringes into the mainstream of climate alarmism. Evil attracts evil.
Climintern’s factions have different ultimate goals. The only thing that unites them is their hostility to this nation. Their shared immediate goal is to weaken America and either to subject it to foreign rule or to tear it down entirely. Powerful domestic groups, such as Sierra Club(*), EDF(*), NRDC(*), UCS(*), Center for American Progress (CAP) and, as horrible as it sounds, the Democratic National Committee seem to be affiliated with Climintern.
Transnational environmentalism has been corrupting science through the EPA since the early 1980’s. When Al Gore was Vice President in 1993-2001, the environmentalists started dismantling the American scientific enterprise. George W. Bush did nothing to stop this process. America has been constantly targeted by the Climate Action Network, and the whole UNFCCC process was consciously steered in that direction. For example, this is how the methodology of accounting for emitted gases was established (from a CAN booklet):
Sinks issues began to come up well before Kyoto. … It was the NGO position that we didn’t want land use or gases other than carbon dioxide going into Kyoto because we didn’t think you could estimate them really well. (COP 6, Bonn 2001)
—John Lanchbery
The explanation is not truthful. The relative impact of the land use and gases other than carbon dioxide could be estimated, and certainly better than the impact of carbon dioxide had been estimated. The real reason for this emphasis was that US emissions of infrared-active gases other than carbon dioxide and the net emissions of carbon dioxide (emissions less sinks) are very small, both absolutely and per capita. So the CAG decided to use another accounting methodology, which would show a big US “footprint.” In other words, it designated America as the enemy, and “parameterized” science and economics through the UNFCCC/IPCC to justify this hostility. The booklet also repeatedly mentions CAN’s strategy to isolate the US from its allies and gloats about its successes, like this:
CAN of course played a critical role in working with the EU, South Africa, and other developing countries to craft a strategy on the floor to isolate the US and get them to reverse their position on opposing the Bali Action Plan. John Coequyt was then at Greenpeace USA, and had a friendship with Dave Banks, who was a deputy at the Bush White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. (COP 13, Bali 2007)
—Alden Meyer, UCS
The essay Who unleashed Climatism? has more examples from the early period of climate alarmism. Today these attitudes are obvious. The CAG assault started escalating in 2005 (when CAP founded the International Climate Change Taskforce, together with its British and Australian counterparts), skyrocketed in 2006 (with the release of Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth with outsized participation of Laurie David of the NRDC), and went through the roof in 2007-2008, when innovations in the fracking technology made huge American shale oil reserves economically accessible (in the article Excluding oil, the US trade deficit has never been worse, see the chart Bakken shale: well production & number of wells; notice 10x increase in the oil output per well.) The WWF(*) and OPEC, constantly monitoring oil and gas resources worldwide, should have known about this oil production breakthrough immediately, but most of the American public remained unaware until this election campaign.
2009 brought Climategate 2.0 and the scandalous Copenhagen Conference of Parties (COP15). This prompted even left-leaning scientists to take a closer look at the “UN Physik” and to abandon or even publicly denounce it. COP15 saw an influx of even more radical groups acting under the umbrella names “Climate Justice Action” and “Climate Justice Now!” Even if those groups acted without authorization from the CAG when they were disrupting public order in Copenhagen, the CAG probably accommodated their demands and attitudes later, as shown by the absence of similar disruptions at later COPs.
Thus, in 2010-2011 the CAG became desperate to shut down US shale oil production before its success became widely known, was annoyed by the loss of its scientific entourage, and piqued by its “climate justice” trailer. Probably at some point in this timeframe it crossed the threshold between hostile activity and an undeclared war.
IV. Status of our Allies
This article is not an appeal to nationalism, but the US situation is sharply different from that of Britain, Canada, Australia, and other Western countries. Most of them have surrendered to climate alarmism, at the cost of their freedoms and big economic damage, and were forced to furnish support to CAG. Western Europe seems to be occupied by CAG, but treated relatively well. America faces a total war almost alone. Energy industry is the most visible target, but education, science, political institutions, and even the social fabric itself are under attack by the CAG and Climintern. Commentators say that climate alarmism is used as a wrecking ball against America.
The habit of European politicians to scapegoat America for their own problems has certainly contributed to the overall mess. On the other hand, it is hard to overestimate the unique role played by Al Gore in climate alarmism since 1988. When I stress that climate alarmism is a foreign enemy, aided by domestic collaborators, I mean foreign to America. Nevertheless, readers from other countries would be justified in seeing climatism as a foreign threat to them. This is because the CAG operates in a virtual extraterritorial space – UN agencies with diplomatic immunities, small countries that are either too weak to stand up to the pack of environmental NGOs (like Netherlands), or countries like Switzerland that customarily provide neutral ground for international activities. Also, the CAG is territorially dispersed most of the time, although it can gather forces in almost any place on the globe.
This observation leads to a philosophical detour. The forces of chaos and totalitarianism (commonly known as the Left) can collaborate across state boundaries much easier than the “good guys.” We respect the national sovereignty of each country, just as we respect individual rights and state rights. This respect is an inherent obstacle faced by the “good guys” in the transboundary political cooperation. But chaos is chaos everywhere; it knows no national borders. The adherents of the global governance and compatible totalitarian systems violate national sovereignties on purpose. They easily collaborate on the global scale. The modern mass media allows Climintern and similar powers to instantly mobilize supporters and innocent bystanders across the globe and throw them against any country, political party, or even individuals standing in their path. Their unprecedented interference against Donald Trump and the Republican candidates to Congress in the 2016 elections is a recent example.
V. Conclusions
I want to contribute to greater understanding of the climate alarmism threat. I do not suggest bombing, shooting, or taking any kind of military action. But the enemy is real, determined, and sophisticated, and some of its accomplices have very little to lose. Scientific errors and the desire to help poor countries played a role in attracting good people to this bad cause, nothing more. The enemy is motivated by its lust for power, greed, and hatred. The election results provide us a fighting chance, but do not ensure a victory.
(*) The author is a plaintiff in a civil RICO lawsuit against this organization.
(**) A set of Google searches on the main Greenpeace website, limited to a military term in conjunction with the words climate or warming (example: war site:greenpeace.org climate OR warming) garnered these results on 1/1/2017:
Revolution: 13,100 results
Fight: 6,450
Strategy: 4,470
Blockade: 4,200
War: 3,700
Battle: 2,640
Combat: 1,510
Mobilization: 1,310
Action: 34,500 (the most generic one)
“Denial” is a separate subject:
Denial: 4,580
Deniers: 2,910
Denier: 2,220
Ref.: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/05/is-climate-alarmism-governance-at-war-with-the-usa/
