Ben Pile has produced an impressive 32 page report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, “the UK Climate Assembly: Manufacturing Mandates.” Ben’s main finding is that the supposedly “democratic” format of a consultation with 104 randomly chosen electors, informed by a panel of experts, is about as democratic as a circle jerk organised jointly by Ayn Rand and Dave Spart, with John Selwyn Gummer as Master of Ceremonies and Roger Harrabin as chief mopper up.
Actually Ben doesn’t quite put it like that (the GWPF has bishops on its board of trustees after all.) He analyses in some detail the structure of the Assembly, and the contentious way that its findings are presented. After six weekends of work, consisting of tens of thousands of man-hours of cogitation, the results detailed in the main body of the 500 page report read like a glorified opinion survey based on a hundred (or sometimes thirty) respondents, preselected to be overwhelmingly in favour of the narrow range of answers provided to a limited number of questions. These questions could be summarised as: “How can we, politicians, civil servants, academics and experts, persuade you, the ignorant masses, to accept a world with less meat, travel, and fun, without you turning nasty and voting us out? A world for which the necessary means of transport, energy production and resource allocation haven’t yet been invented?”
For me, the best part of Ben’s report was the beginning, in which he analyses in great detail the network of organisations which financed the operation, and which provided the “Expert Leads,” “Informants,” and “Academic Panellists” who were employed to run the show and brainwash the participants. They were almost all from the same narrow range of green NGOs and activist groupings, often financed by the same billionaire-funded foundations that financed the Assembly process itself. Having hacked through some of this rank undergrowth myself, I can only admire Ben for the calm way he analyses the workings of this putrid swamp of Green Blobbery.
Take the Green Alliance, which, according to their former “consultant” and Climate Assembly “Expert Lead” Professor Rebecca Willis, had “recently been successful in winning funding for a further package of work with MPs, including the establishment of a Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change.” Four of the nineteen members of the “Advisory Panel” were members of the Green Alliance (one a staff member) plus two of the four “Expert Leads” (Jim Watson and Rebecca Willis.)
Among other funding, the Green Alliance received £450,000 from The Children’s Investment Fund, which also gave 7.2 million dollars to the European Climate Fund, which partly financed the Climate Assembly to “progressively strengthen and grow the climate movement to deliver an increase in global ambition in 2020.” Little did the dead billionaires who thought they were financing help for AIDs orphans in Africa imagine that their hard-earned millions would go towards paying for tea and buns for a government indoctrination programme in a Birmingham Conference Centre.
My first thought on reading Ben’s report was: how to get the information out there? Paul Homewood has already done his bit here re-posted by Roger Tallbloke And that’s it. The only parliamentarians who might be interested are already on the board of the GWPF, which still refuses to send me notifications of its publications, despite a zillion requests. And I couldn’t find Ben’s report on the multiple scroll down menus at its site. This report will remain unread outside our tiny world, unless and until someone can make its existence newsworthy. If Lord Deben (formerly known as Gummer) were to find a dead horse in his bed with a rolled up copy of Ben’s oeuvre up his backside, that would be news. (The horse’s backside I mean of course. I’m not suggesting physical violence on the sainted head of the CCC.)
Ben doesn’t get into the content of the ten minute brainwashing sessions by the employees of green zombie organisations whose salaries are paid by the interest on the corpses of dead philanthropists, some of it hived off from funds intended to save the lives of sick babies in Africa. I listened to a few hours of this content, before the Assembly’s site started publishing transcripts. You can watch the ten minute presentations, or read the transcripts, here if you like, though I don’t recommend it.
The only one that interests me is the first by climate scientist Joanna Haigh. As I noted at the time,
I expected a slick PR job presented by cocky professionals, followed by a stage managed Q&A session with the usual banal or incoherent questions, filtered to eliminate anything off message. I was wrong on all counts. The presentations were abysmal, the experts pathetic[…]They really are worse than we thought.
It is astonishing that six weekends of deliberation on a policy that will cost trillions and entirely change our way of life should be based on ten minutes of “science,” delivered by a distracted looking lady who sounds as if she’d have difficulty finding the words to open a church fête. You can see her or read the transcript here
If I were a half-sentient member of the Assembly, someone with a geography GCSE, say, I’d feel insulted by this sub-primary school presentation. And if I were a dead American billionaire I’d want my money back.
via Climate Scepticism
February 12, 2021 at 05:29PM
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