Opinion
Let’s stop pretending that the environmental movement gives a rat’s arse about the environment, any more. Especially not the Greens.
As happens to all activist groups, sooner or later, the sole compass becomes money. It happened to the Civil Rights movement — even by the 1970s, black groups such as the Black Panthers were openly criminal syndicates, dedicated to amassing wealth for the bosses. Later groups were more savvy, using lawfare to, as one historian put it, “rob banks legally”. In more recent years, the leaders of the BLM movement poured millions into their private bank accounts and purchased multiple mansions.
The environmental movement was no different. By the 1980s, green groups were more dedicated to fundraising than meaningful environmental activism.
But the big money these days is in climate change. Really big money.
Now, you might think climate activism and environmentalism are two sides of the same coin.
Wrong.
The harsh truth is that climate activism is almost invariably diametrically opposed to caring for the environment. Consider, for example, the endless hectares of native forest cleared to plant wind turbines, or the catastrophic wildlife carnage wreaked by the whirling machines of death. A mining company that killed a single wedge-tail eagle in Tasmania would see environmental activists chained six-deep to the gates: wind farms kill dozens of the endangered raptors and nothing happens.
The Left’s climate change hysteria and its campaign to end fossil fuels is interfering with a commonsense green agenda. Worse than that, the climate agenda is in some ways making the condition of the environment worse.
It’s so blatant that even the wokest of mainstream media are finally noticing.
The New York Times recently reported […] “A significant shift in donor contributions to nonprofits fighting climate change in recent years has left some of the nation’s biggest environmental organizations facing critical shortfalls in programs on toxic chemicals, radioactive contamination and wildlife protection.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council, “the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the Environmental Working Group, which have been at the forefront of efforts to clean up waste water, regulate pesticides and adopt tougher standards for atomic power plants, are facing similar financial problems,” said Times reporter Ralph Vartabedian.
Whether or not you agree with them, those policies all have tangible results, real outcomes. Now, they have no hope of attracting funding.
Instead, billions — trillions — are pouring into the vain pursuit of sky demons.
This is all being driven by a mad pursuit of billions of green dollars for stopping global warming. That is, they are chasing and spending money on a cause — changing the planet’s temperature — that they can have almost no impact on.
How much money are we talking about? In 2022, environment groups spent and raised $8 billion on climate change activities. That doesn’t fully include the tens of billions of dollars that central governments are spending on climate issues.
Try trillions: global spending on “climate change” initiatives is already north of a trillion dollars. Climate change activists are demanding more, ever more: at least $9 trillion (more than a third of total US GDP) per year.
But surely, spending all that on the environment is a good thing? If only it were being spent on the environment.
All of this money has funded scores of ritzy climate change conferences around the globe, as well as virtue-signaling protests, propaganda campaigns in schools, and a war against oil, gas and coal, cars, stoves and air conditioners.
And the environment is not just a secondary consideration, it’s being actively harmed.
Yet, the climate agenda is often pushing policies that destroy the planet rather than save it. In poor countries, the war against fossil fuels has meant that villages are burning wood, or even feces. Instead of spending money on ensuring the world’s poor have safe drinking water, we are spending billions of dollars pushing windmills and solar power.
These “green energies” use 10 times more land than a coal or gas plant. The landscape of America is being paved over and industrialized by our pursuit of zero-carbon policies. How is that a pro-environment policy?
The same policies plunge poor people into poverty and make even the global middle class poorer which is terrible for the environment: environmentalism is a rich person’s luxury. Poor people can’t afford to keep the air clean or preserve wildlife.
Worst of all, none of it is making a jot of difference to the global climate, either.
The bigger question environmentalists should be asking is: What has the half-trillion dollars that have been spent on climate change bought? No measurable results.
Takimag
For the insane amounts spent for no result on “climate change”, we could have ended global hunger and illiteracy.
But that’s not going to happen, because the global elite have cottoned on to the fact that “climate change” is the ultimate scam. Trillions are being robbed from the global economy and the only people benefitting are the Learjet class, winging from one climate change knees-up in exotic locales to another.