Ah, Aly, I think I remember you from MLMB? Or maybe Lifeboat.
In any case, without animosity or hounding, please allow me to note that you failed to answer my key question, or maybe you did in your own way.
But I’ll repeat it: How will YOU benefit if the climate change narrative takes over COMPLETELY the public discourse, wins completely the debate? What benefits do you see for yourself and your family and friends and society?
And your post has inspired another question:
What’s your evidence currently that big oil and mining and others; what you call a specific ‘corporate agenda’ are denying climate change? I’ve frankly not seen that. What I see is a state/corporate consensus about the climate change narrative. Do you have any public statements from oil companies? Or mining companies? To support your assertion?
Sorry. I thought I had sort of answered your question. Too oblique… I’ll try again.
If by climate change narrative, you mean the green new deal/Bill Gates/WEF narrative, then I won’t benefit. It sounds like a nightmare.
If there’s a chance to build on something like Jem’s vision of radical local democratic organisation then there’s hope. This involves a widespread rejection of the false “opposing” narratives I mentioned above, and the hard work of building something new from the ground up.
If Roger Hallam is right and a revolution is brewing then all bets are off. But that also includes the elites losing the power over us… could literally lead to guillotines in the public square. Not a future I’m keen to be part of.
There have been a few studies done over the last decade or so, based on private but leaked docs from the big oil companies, showing that they spent billions on think tanks like the heartland institute and others building a narrative that they knew was false. Initially the narrative was that there wasn’t a connection between human activities and climate change, then the narrative was that the science wasn’t “settled” and they paid a handful of scientists to be public “contrarians”, then the narrative was that change is inevitable and humans will just adapt, and now it’s if we pay them enough billions they’ll build green energy.
In each case they are fighting tooth and nail to keep business as usual (and massive profits) the most likely outcome for as long as possible.
Naomi Oreskes wrote a very meticulously researched book about this called Merchants of doubt.
Here’s an article in the ecologist magazine talking about it
And another from a months long study
Here’s an article showing that Exxon had an excellent grasp of the science behind climate change in the 1970s and made some of the most accurate predictions of the future so far
Here’s a lawsuit brought in California against a bunch of fusil fuel companies alleging they knowingly lied and misled the public about climate change, while they privately acknowledged the truth of it
HI @Admin. I’ve still go go through your Jem Bendell posts so apologies if this wastes your time. But I wondered why there should be a need to reject people that might agree with your/Bendell’s advocated actions, but aren’t as on board with the idea that man made climate change is a (slow) emergency. Plenty of people will be on the mmcc (mmc2!? ) fence. Actually after covid, that seems to me the most sensible place to be. Few people will get to the bottom of climate change science, and many will smell a rat that they have to cede society, power and (it will just so happen ) wealth - normal life. Constructive moves to curtail corporate power and promote local solutions that address overlapping concerns seem a sensible idea to me. This may be because the biggest threat seems to be those who wish to take advantage of the crisis to turn the world upside down (and no doubt collect all the money that falls out of the pockets )
As an analogy, think how tricky it would be (and is becoming for some) leading lights campaigning on health/covid/vaccine risks if they had to keep stopping to reject (=fight) the no-virusers at every turn. They should not be doing this IMO; both will just lose support, if indeed they don’t grind to a complete halt. Meanwhile the ‘enemy’ chortles…
The psychologist Harvard Professor DanT Gilbert pointed out decades ago that the first ideas that people are exposed to will be the ideas that stick with them and that it is exceedingly difficult to change people’s views of those ideas.
The idea of AGW, as shown by James Corbett in his Oil videos, came out of the 70’s push by oil, ex-oil and banking families - settling into UNEP via the Club of Rome then the IPCC and WEF - not for some philanthropic aim to bring the globe into balance, equality and truth, but to take more control over societies that the 60’s had started to break up.
Getting people to believe that global warming was something to fear and was actually mainly OUR fault were brilliant corporate memes and because they were first out of the gate with massive propaganda they have stuck with people and it is going to be difficult to turn these minds around. No amount of scientific analysis from sources independent of Government, Business and their propaganda outlets will easily change things.
Facts no longer impact, only emotions can do that - hence fear induced policies as we have seen not just under AGW but also, post 9/11, terrorism and recently under COVID and anti-Russian/ pro-Ukrainian policies.
People acting through fear will commit all sorts of horrors and follow every new totalitarian who promises freedom from the sources of their fears. As has already been pointed out we used to kill witches to solve our weather problems - if the MSM and MSAM perpetuate and expand the fear it won’t be long before carbon users will literally be branded in public spectacles!
So the answer is within ourselves to be actively positive learning to use the word “NO” in a non-threatening but encouraging way. Or is that being actively negative ?
I would like to start with this video. This video is 44 years old and was part of the first weather warning of my life.
The next to follow was acid rain. I collected keys and scrap metal for Blue Peter. We were told we wouldn’t be able to go outside at the turn of the century because of the acid…
Revolution. Marx said the only revolution in Britain would be in gardening. I suspect this still stands (just. I don’t like gardening). We’re going to see civil war in America for sure, and who knows what on the continent. But here? I’ll be genuinely surprised. Just think about all those people who deeply believe, they’ll work to stop it. If anything does send the UK over the edge it’ll be either 15 minute cities or ID.
On this note, unlike so many things actually needed, the UN, BRICS and SCO have all singing from the same hymn sheet. They all signed up to digital cash, ID and agenda 2030.
It’s not a nice thing to plan for, but if people are getting quick haircuts at the local square, you need to protect your nearest and dearest. Too late at that point, plan now.
If for a moment we ignore climate, what are we left with?
Seems to me to be a war between two opposing energy providers. Recently quit serial shagger from BP said that it was like having a cash point when speaking about recent profit.
Financial world has always been shark/blood in the water.
What if everything we are seeing is simply a battle. We know the first casualty of war is the truth, on both sides.
Lastly, what about the sides themselves? Judge by actions. Which side seeks control and domination? What do both sides stand to gain from winning this war?
Yes, this is what I also now believe. Making common cause with people wherever we can feels like the right idea. And in the end it doesn’t matter if we agree on a lot of things or not.
The complication is that those who want to actively deny that climate change is occurring are implicitly choosing one of the two narratives. They will oppose the climate agenda (mainly tech bro/Democrat/Labour), but they will do that by supporting the big oil (and mostly Republican/Tory) narrative instead.
How do you expect someone to get on board with actively contributing to local democratic institutions designed to handle times of hardship, loss and shortages when they don’t believe that any of it is real? And that they just want to go back to the status quo ante, and drive as much as they want, fly as much as they want and consume as much as they want? [Edit - is realise this sounds accusatory, but that’s not what I’m going for. This isn’t rhetorical… how do we expect someone to do something they just don’t believe in?]
Surely it’s necessary to realise the state we’re in before one can be part of a movement to build something else?
Maybe I’m wrong here… I’m interested in your thoughts. Perhaps there is a large ground of people who will be ready to reject both corporate narratives?
Yes, I remember that we were predicted an ice age. The truth, as I understand it, is based on various earth and earth-sun dynamics, we should be slowly moving into an ice age round about now. Instead we’re going the other way because of the way we have artificially changed our climate. Perhaps that’s not the worst outcome of climate change!
FWIW I think the Scary Headline of the Spielman article is actually correct and holds true. We had a window to halt the upward trend (somewhere around the year 2000 sounds reasonable to me). We didn’t do that, and now whole nations will be at risk of disappearing… they weren’t gonna disappear by the year 2000, that’s when we should have changed paths…probably. the year 2000 at least agrees with what Exxon’s scientists were saying in the 80s before the company starting a misinformation campaign around the subject.
On the snow article, that’s a bit misleading. Yes, winter storms are more violent, there’s more water in the air because there’s more heating in the atmosphere, so we get massive snow storms. It’s not a clear measure. Compare instead with summer arctic ice extent, or Greenland glaciar melt for a less muddied proxy for warming, and the picture is very clear.
I tend to agree with you on revolutions in Blighty. But… people are waking up. COVID woke a lot of people up. I think we’re in a highly unpredictable social situation. And the US seems to be in deep trouble for sure.
A good question. I think the covid analogy provides the answer. Thanks to novirusers I think we have a parallel situation. I don’t know of any novirusers who think the vaccine is anything but a scam - they have a harsher view of the covid vaccines (and obviously other vaccines too) than the McCulloughs and Malones. I mean they should, logically, see the vaccine (and the politics behind it) as the main threat.
Similarly the (far bigger) group of people who were not initially hostile but have been swayed by developments can see the way the covid ‘threat’ (maybe to be neutral I need double quotes: ’ 'threat ’ ') is being harnessed as the thing that needs to be resisted.
Actually here, with clear common goals to fight for, there should be an imperfect harmony between the novirusers and the main body of narrative opposition.
But there isn’t, because they have been fighting each other.
I posted about this and the need for unity of purpose in a discussion with @Everyman
The trouble is once bad blood gets up it takes over and that’s what happened.
In the corresponding narrative of the extreme measures that we are told must be rolled out to combat man made climate change (mc squared ), do we have the same dynamic? Well there have been tensions here due to opposite interpretations of the science. Virus. No virus! But there is significant agreement about the dystopian nature of the increasingly touted ‘solution’.
I think it is a similar dynamic, and so it is vital to be using the common ground to oppose the dire alternative proposed, and also making fundamental improvements like … well, over to Jeb Bendell.
With the newfound unity (which sounds like a luxury, maybe it’s just a dream) a much more coherent message could be put about.
Disagreements that are of a specialist nature can be haggled over later, when or if the threat of dystopia recedes.
Without resolving the science, I bet the internationally trusted group of 5f regulars could produce a better solution than world leaders (especially if everyone had to do as we say and give us all their money as well though that would probably corrupt us all).
So I would say yes to your final question…there must, at least potentially, be a large number of people who will want to reject jumping in with one big corporate interest or the other.
It’s a good point you made above about there being two competing corporate narratives. That’s different from the covid vaccine and attendant plans, which seem centrally driven. I think the split (though formidable) adversaries wishing to capitalize on ‘mc squared’ increase the potential for building robust public resistance with good positive, narrative-independent solutions.
Cheers
The point about old cars strikes me as a very good one. By some measures my 900cc Peugeot is a clunker. About 16 years old I think, and I’m now having really obscure things replaced, take a bow “downstream O2 sensor”. I was convinced the garage was ragging me until I looked it up. The original battery lasted until about a year ago. Measured by mileage it’s only just getting to 75000. I intend to try and keep it going for a while yet.
Re the more general issues, I do feel that ML have veered a long way out of scope in recent years, reminding me of that good old policy The War On Some Drugs. Expanding on the point made above, quoting The Ethical Skeptic:
Nelsonian knowledge involves a keen prowess in knowing what to not-know, where to not-look and how not-to-look at it.
Both sides of the climate argument are woefully guilty of this, which I guess is what happens when complex issues, no matter how cut-and-dried they seem, is distilled into if { then } { else} loops. Hence one side are deniers, liars essentially, and the others use terms like crisis, collapse, and emergency to justify emergency measures. c.f. Giorgio Agamben and Simon Elmer’s argument in The Road To Fascism.
On a slightly different note I looked up the area I’m moving to and see it is just 21m above sea level. I felt a little nervous. Until I looked up where I’m moving from to see that it’s 10m above sea level.
I’m starting to think this way too. Bendell and his rejection of the authoritarian response to COVID made me think that another way might be possible. I agree with you that there are interesting parallels, and maybe a way forward.
I also think that climate caused devastation is barrelling towards us regardless of philosophy, so coming up with workable responses will be necessary whether you believe in (mc)^2 or not.
Actually, scratch that. For many communities (Pakistan, Pacific Islands, Libya, South Africa etc etc etc) it’s already arrived.
As local yokel said above, the time for planning is now. Or 10 years ago… Cheerful rejection of elitist narratives, and sober, compassionate, from-the-ground-up rebuilding in place is our best policy, I think.
Hey Aly, please read again my request for evidence. I’m not talking about in past years. I’m aware of the reports to which you linked. Please read my sentence above. I’m not talking about the past. ‘Currently’ means ‘now’ of course. And ‘are denying’ means ‘now’ also.
Do you have any evidence that NOW, CURRENTLY, that what you call ‘Big Oil, Mining and others’ are denying human caused climate change? If so, please post the links. Thanks!
I don’t think that they are directly trying to deny climate change these days. I think they are more interested in greenwashing and money making spin.
Oil companies and their supporters outsource the climate denying through direct and clandestine payments to disinformation think tanks like the heartland institute and the global warming foundation who do the dirty work more directly.
If you look up fossil fuel funding of climate denial (or scepticism) you’ll find plenty of evidence
Hi @Everyman , I had a quick look through the audit report and IRS return and the "about us " page of the Heartland Institute website - they made a loss in 2022 despite funding of around $4m ( only 1% of which came from corporate sources i.e. $40,000, they have 95,000 individual subscribers and they say this:
“Over the years, no corporate donor has contributed more than 5% of Heartland’s total receipts.”)
I wonder how much funding is given to support the Climate collapse myth by Governments, International organisations like the IPCC, pro-carbon trading investment houses where the annual market is in excess of $900 Billion, and corporations with a conflict of interest?
I was surprised at how much public information was available about the HI compared to that of “establishment organisations” in the world.
Aly, it seems to me this puts your argument into an ‘impossible to falsify’ category, which if so, would certainly limit, or should limit, its power to convince those with whom you disagree.
I’ll explain my reasoning. If the oil companies had an interest in ‘denying’ climate change in the past, would not that interest be even stronger now, when their control and ownership of energy is being challenged worldwide, and thus their profits are at risk even more? But, as you say, they are NOT denying climate change now. Instead they are SECRETLY denying climate change, via various other organizations. Thus, your argument that the oil companies are STILL resisting the climate change narrative cannot be falsified. If I say ‘they are WITH the climate change narrative, NOW’ you can say, ‘oh no, they are still against the climate change narrative, but they are doing it SECRETLY’.
Indeed, look at the assumptions implicit in your argument. The oil companies, whose ownership is NOT SEPARATE from the capitalists who own the media, who control governments, who fund the World Economic Forum, who have massive influence if not control of the United Nations, are SECRETLY fighting THEMSELVES. Why would they do that? Isn’t there a much more rational way to frame a representation of the situation? Namely, that the economic and political establishment, including the owners of the oil companies, are promoting the climate change narrative for typical reasons of power and profit. This rational framing explains why the word ‘DENIAL’ is omnipresent, it explains why zero or almost zero amount of dissent is allowed to be heard in the state/corporate media, it explains why scientists are not allowed, via lack of funding or career threats or unspoken nudges, to publish challenges to the climate change narrative.
Meanwhile, climate change narrative ‘deniers’ (just look how that word! nobody is calling you a ‘Billionaire Denier’ when you deny that Billionaires, collectively, are promoting the climate change narrative), are becoming, at the working and middle class level, on a wide spectrum on the left and the right, MORE skeptical of the narrative! Meanwhile Media Lens are siding with Tony Blair and the World Economic Forum! They said the other day on Twitter I think, well it was something along the lines of ‘depressing how many of the comments concerning our recent alert were climate change deniers’. That is, the PEOPLE are becoming more skeptical DESPITE the fact that the Oil Companies are, as you say, no longer ‘directly trying to deny climate change’, and the Climate Change Narrative, at the elite level, is overwhelmingly dominant. So, what, exactly, is causing the PEOPLE to be more and more skeptical of the elite driven climate change narrative? We know that the structure of power did not change in the last 30 years. We know that the PEOPLE did not and do not drive this narrative. The PEOPLE in fact, partially thanks to ‘alt left’ groups like Media Lens now aligned with Big Capital, are DEMONIZED as ‘Deniers’ if they resist, in various ways, this narrative. The rational response, in my opinion of course, to this current reality is that 1) the narrative is false and 2) the narrative is being used to exploit and potentially enslave the PEOPLE;
cheers Aly for the exchange, this is my last post in this thread.
Everyman
Hi folks just a postcript to the original post comparing MediaLens to Judith Curry - Medialens has just come out with a new article in which they now point out the non-climate change aspects of the floods in Libya which I had raised. The memory hole that they rightly point towards in this later article is the same memory hole into which they had themselves thrown the history of Libya’s water infrastructure in order to bolster the climate catastrophe meme.
No mea culpa is present, afaics.
" Very little of the above vital history and context to the recent catastrophic flooding in Libya is included in current ‘mainstream’ news reporting. At best, there is token mention. At worst, there is deeply deceitful and cynical rewriting of history.
A report on the Sky News website went about as far as is permissible in detailing the reality:
> ‘Libyans are worn down by years and years of poor governance many of which date back to 2011 and the NATO-backed ousting of the country’s autocratic dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, during the period which became known as the Arab Spring. > > > > ‘Gaddafi was killed and the country dived into instability with rival armed militias vying for power and territory.’
An article for the BBC News Africa section gave an even briefer hint of the awful truth:
> ‘Libya has been beset by chaos since forces backed by the West’s NATO military alliance overthrew long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011.’
This was the only mention in the article of Western responsibility for the disaster. The shameful propaganda censorship was highlighted when the article was posted by the BBC Africa Twitter/X account. So many readers pointed out the glaring omissions that a Twitter/X warning of sorts appeared under the BBC’s tweet:
> ‘Readers added context they thought people might want to know.’
Then:
> ‘Due to NATO intervention in Libya, several problems such as the lack of a unified government, the re-emergence of slave markets and collapse of welfare services have made the country unable to cope with natural disasters.’
If such ‘context’ – actually, vital missing information – were to regularly appear under BBC tweets because of reader intervention, it would be a considerable public service; and a major embarrassment for the self-declared ‘world’s leading public service broadcaster’.
A major reason for the appalling death toll in the Libyan city of Derna was that two dams had collapsed, sending 30 million cubic metres of water into the city in ‘tsunami-like waves’. These dams were built in the 1970s to protect the local population. A Turkish firm had been contracted in 2007 to maintain the dams. This work stopped after NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign. The Turkish firm left the country, their machinery was stolen and all work on the dams ended. This was mentioned briefly in a recent Guardian article, but NATO’s culpability was downplayed and it certainly did not generate the huge headlines across the ‘MSM’ that it warranted.
Further crucial context was also blatantly flushed down the media’s memory hole: NATO had deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure in 2011. Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed reported in 2015:
> ‘The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself.’
Ros Atkins, who has acquired a huge profile as an expert ‘explainer’, with the moniker ‘BBC News Analysis Editor’, narrated a video for the BBC News website ‘on the floods in Libya – and the years of crisis there too.’ Once again, NATO’s appalling role in the 2011 destruction of the country was glossed over. The BBC’s ‘explanation’ explained virtually nothing."
this is according to Wikipedia only because of the death rate which of course could be totally explained by the infrastructure decay and damage from 2011 onwards. the actual words from wikipedia ( which I hate to use! ):
“The resultant flooding and heavy rain caused the deaths of at least 11,300 people in the country, making it, by a very wide margin, the deadliest Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone on record, prompting a state of emergency to be declared by Libyan authorities.”
Wattsupwiththat article and alternative comments as well as Judith Curry Etcetera article all point to non AGW causes:
I agree that control is an all too obvious aim. It becomes internalised too. I’m house hunting at the moment and am having to cross candidate properties off my list due to the Greta Within. One is a very smart terraced house in a former colliery village but it has oil fired central heating. Sure, this could be replaced, at a cost, but my visceral reaction was to imagine the day when the tanker lorry no longer calls to fill the tank. And that probably won’t be many years from now.
) fence. Actually after covid, that seems to me the most sensible place to be. Few people will get to the bottom of climate change science, and many will smell a rat that they have to cede society, power and (it will just so happen 
) wealth - normal life. Constructive moves to curtail corporate power and promote local solutions that address overlapping concerns seem a sensible idea to me. This may be because the biggest threat seems to be those who wish to take advantage of the crisis to turn the world upside down (and no doubt collect all the money that falls out of the pockets 
