As the restrictions and obligations of biosecurity have mostly, but not entirely, been lifted since March 2022—while still being suspended over our necks like the axe of the fasces—their replacement by their equally fundamentalist environmental equivalents has shown the arbitrariness of the crises on which the Global Biosecurity State is being imposed—and their shared end. Last year’s COP27, the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2022, is a demonstration and model of how the forms of global governance that have assumed so much power over our lives on the justification of responding to numerous manufactured ‘crises’ will operate outside of any democratic representation or accountability. Held from 6 to 18 November 2022 in Egypt, COP27 was the twenty-seventh such conference held annually since the first UN climate agreement in 1992.
This led to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015 that committed participating nations to unquestionable orthodoxies. These included what it called the ‘scientific consensus’:
- that global warming is occurring, and
- that man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are driving it.
The effect of this political agreement is that anyone, including climatologists, meteorologists or geologists, who asserts or presents evidence to the contrary is categorised and branded as a ‘climate-change denier’—exactly as those who question the equally authoritarian and unquestionable orthodoxies of the coronavirus ‘crisis’ are branded as ‘Covid deniers’. Among numerous voices excluded from this ‘consensus’ are members of the Global Climate Intelligence Group, whose World Climate Declaration: There is no climate emergency, published in October 2022, bears the signatures of 1,410 scientists and energy industry professionals from 54 countries.
Immense sums
Parties to this fundamentalist orthodoxy, and to the economic obligations and policies to which it commits them, include—by order of the size of their economy—the USA, China, Japan, Germany, India, the UK, France, Brazil, Italy, Canada and 182 other countries, which is to say, almost the whole world. To address what it melodramatically calls the ‘existential threat’ of climate change, the UK Government has committed to spending £11.6 billion of British taxpayers’ money on international climate finance, with funding for what it calls ‘climate adaptation’ tripling from £500 million in 2019 to £1.5 billion in 2025. £150 million of that funding will go to ‘protecting’ rainforests, including in the Amazon and the Congo Basin, the sites of some of the world’s largest reserves of the copper and cobalt required for electric batteries; £65 million to the Nature, People and Climate Investment Fund in Egypt, with a focus on hydrogen and wind power; and a further £2 billion to the UK-Kenya Strategic Partnership for ‘clean and green’ investment in geothermal, solar energy and hydroelectric power projects.
All this public financing will go to private companies selected by the international technocracies formed to do so in accord with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), a Miss World list of humanitarian objectives ranging from abolishing world hunger and poverty to peace, justice and gender equality that was adopted by the United Nations in 2015 under the rubric of Agenda 2030. In reality and practice, however, Sustainable Development Goals allocate the flow of global capital, investment and preferential treatment to governments and corporations according to their compliance with the Environmental, Social and corporate Governance (ESG) criteria.
Despite their UN branding, these targets are formulated and imposed by immensely wealthy international corporate asset managers, the most powerful of which, BlackRock, the Vanguard Group and State Street Global Advisor, between them hold 20 per cent of shares and with it something like government authority over the 500 largest companies on the New York Stock Exchange. Far from saving the planet from exploitation by predatory corporations, the Sustainable Development Goals are designed to increase the monopoly of wealthy Western economies and international companies able to meet their criteria over poorer countries, and in doing so create the financial framework for purchasing their UN-assigned quota of emissions in carbon credits.
On the same justification, developing countries will be loaded with debt by financial organisations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in order to fulfil these goals, and those unable to meet repayments through increased taxation and spending cuts to their already impoverished populations will be compelled to hand over their land and natural resources to their creditors.
Stakeholder capitalism
Indeed, both SDG and ESG criteria are predicated on monetising the natural world, which has recently been estimated by the New York Stock Exchange at $4 quadrillion ($4,000,000,000,000,000). Monetised nature is the basis of a new form of corporation called a Natural Asset Company, the purpose of which is to maximise what it calls ‘ecological performance’ and the production of ‘ecosystem services’, over the management of which these corporations will, of course, have legal rights and authority. Behind their ‘green’ credentials, therefore, these programmes, like those implemented on the justification of the coronavirus ‘crisis’, are instruments of stakeholder capitalism.
By the end of 2022, the total value of contracts awarded to companies by the UK Government in response to the coronavirus ‘crisis’ was £47.3 billion. This included £22.8 billion on the utterly useless ‘Test and Trace’ programme; £14.7 billion on largely unusable or undelivered personal protection equipment; £3.8 billion on medicines and the almost entirely unused ‘Nightingale’ hospitals; £5 billion on ‘other’ supplies and services; and £1 billion on the totally useless and increasingly dangerous ‘vaccines’. This vast expenditure of public money on the justification of combatting a manufactured threat to public health is a microcosm of how the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, on the justification of combatting global warming, will allocate the national wealth of the countries party to its obligations to the international companies able to meet the criteria they themselves have imposed.
In this respect, the trillions of dollars to which the workers of the West have been placed in debt by their governments on the justification of combatting a ‘pandemic’ declared by the World Health Organisation—an agency of the UN funded by Western governments and private companies and subject to lobbying from both—is an example and model of how the equally manufactured environmental ‘crisis’ is designed to impoverish their populations and enrich the architects of both this crisis and the power grab it is enabling.
All this vast expenditure, which is loading still more debt onto the future of our children, is being implemented at a time when the UK public is facing £60 billion in tax rises and spending cuts; when the price cap on annual energy costs for a typical household has been set at £2,500, 96 per cent higher than the previous year, and will increase to £3,000 from April this year; when Britain has experienced a 16.8 per cent rise in food prices over the past year, the highest rate since at least 1977; and when 22 per cent of the population, 14.5 million people, are already living in poverty.
Fundamentalists
Creating public compliance for this transfer of billions of pounds from the national taxpayer to international corporations without mandate from the electorate or oversight of how it is spent, by whom or on what, has been achieved by a vast international campaign of propaganda. One of the forms this has taken is the protests by corporate-funded environmental fundamentalist groups like Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, which our government, municipal authorities and police forces have granted the freedom to shut down British roads for hours, and whose promotion by the antics of a handful of ‘activists’ receives millions of pounds’ worth of media coverage denied to the millions of UK citizens who marched in protest against illegal lockdown and ‘vaccine’ mandates.
I am not claiming that these activists are hired actors or not sincere in their infantile beliefs. The best salesman is someone who believes in their product, and there is no need to hire crocodile tears when a generation of lachrymose kids and apocalyptic ‘greens’ will shed theirs for free. Indeed, Just Stop Oil’s imperious declaration on its website that ‘If you are not in resistance you are appeasing evil’ is typical of the religious rhetoric of these environmental fundamentalists, and as authoritarian as Black Lives Matter’s motto that ‘silence is violence’, or Extinction Rebellion’s demand for ‘zero carbon’. Only a demographic as politically naïve as the Western middle classes could believe that the globalists, international bankers and corporate CEOs implementing Agenda 2030 will ‘save the planet’; but their absolutist rhetoric makes it clear that they are willing to impoverish the rest of the world to realise their fundamentalist religious beliefs.
Of course, we’ve seen this before, and I don’t mean the suicide bombers and iconoclasts of Islamic fundamentalist groups. There’s a parallel between the fanciful ‘solutions’ proposed to avert the imminent prospect of environmental disaster and the belief in the effectiveness of wearing medical masks designed to be used within a sterilised operating theatre, or standing two metres apart when outside, or placing acetate screens between tables at indoor venues, or washing our hands in antibacterial gel at the entrance and exit to every building, and in all the other stage props in the theatre of biosecurity invented to ‘combat’ the virus.
Last April, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that annual greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 43 per cent by 2030 and reach ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050. This will supposedly be achieved not only by enforced restrictions on our energy and food consumption but also through our embrace of highly inefficient technologies like wind turbines, solar panels and electric batteries, in the illusory belief that, over the next three decades, these supposedly renewable sources of energy, which currently provide just 2 per cent of global energy, can replace coal, petroleum and natural gas, which provide 82 per cent.
The problem is, unlike the silicon technologies that have transformed computer power exponentially over the past decades, the energy required to move people, drive machines, produce heat or grow food is determined by properties of nature whose boundaries are set by the laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, and thermodynamics. Even the vast resources of propaganda disposed of by the World Economic Forum cannot overcome the reality that it takes the energy equivalent of one hundred barrels of oil to fabricate the batteries to store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil.
In reality, the energy produced by these new technologies is a new commodity, the promotion of which suppresses the fact that producing millions of electric vehicles to replace the existing ones taxed and fined out of use—or erecting hundreds of thousands of wind turbines with a twenty-year lifespan, or demolishing millions of homes to make way for so-called ‘passive housing’, or mining the lithium, cobalt and copper for the vast increase in the number of batteries required to harness these energy sources—is far more destructive to our environment and the people who live in it, but far more lucrative to the companies and governments with access to the technology and natural resources of other countries.
Wilful blindness
The refusal to see the environmental, social, economic and even political costs of the total cycle of extraction, construction, transportation, demolition and disposal within which these new technologies operate ‘sustainably’, and to stare instead with blinkered eyes at the carbon cost of their operational performance alone, is part of the willing blindness with which the chimera of ‘net zero’ has been conjured into being. The truth is, these are new markets requiring new relations of production, new rights of ownership, new regulations of distribution and new controls of consumption enforced by an authoritarian reduction not only of our standard of living, but also of our rights and freedoms, and with them the sovereignty of governments over their national wealth, assets and resources.
It’s unclear what the environmental fundamentalists hope to achieve with their demands, which if realised will condemn hundreds of millions in the global south to starvation and billions more to increased poverty; but their naivety about the ends to which their beliefs are being put is the legacy of this generation. Born into austerity and identity politics, raised by iPhones and social media, in debt £30,000 for a degree nobody wants, graduated to masks, lockdown and gene therapy, they’re so alienated from themselves and the world they experience through social media they don’t know what sex they are, yet they think they can ‘save the planet’.
They’re the new compliant. The recent images of hysterical, weeping children, chained to bridges or glued to a painting, accusing an imaginary father figure of stealing their future through the screens of smartphones, the footage from which is then sent around the world by international media companies promoting Agenda 2030, is the new model of citizenship in the Global Biosecurity State.
Like all arguments that use the threat of a ‘crisis’ to justify coercive action by the forces of the state, the effect of environmental fundamentalism is to circumvent critical thinking, silence questions and pathologise disagreement as ‘denial’. Indeed, the intended ideological reach of environmental fundamentalism over the British public is written out by chapter and verse in the report published by the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee in October 2022, In our hands: behaviour change for climate and environmental goals, which I recommend to anyone who doubts the extent to which this fundamentalist ideology has taken over our politics and civil liberties.
Manufactured crises
And like the equally manufactured health, energy, food and geopolitical ‘crises’ with which we are threatened today, its purpose is to dismantle our institutions of democracy, erase our human rights, remove our freedoms, automate our jobs and bankrupt our businesses, leaving us impoverished and defenceless against the predations of capital and the authority of the state.
But these organisations also serve another function, of which the religious acolytes, only too ready to offer themselves for arrest, appear to be equally ignorant. Just as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion were cited as justification for the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, so the vandalism by Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain, whose activists have apparently unimpeded access to the city with the highest level of security in Europe, are cited by the Government as justification for the Public Order Bill that, when passed, will remove even more of our freedoms.
This is why environmentalist activists can shut down Oxford Circus, Westminster Bridge or Trafalgar Square, spray paint across the Houses of Parliament, shatter the windows of JP Morgan’s City offices, empty milk bottles across the floor of Harrods, or glue themselves to priceless works of art in the National Gallery, and the police refuse to arrest them; when a few months before, UK citizens were carried off by the same police for holding a sheet of paper saying ‘Not my King’, and a few months before that, some individuals were violently assaulted for not wearing a mask or for leaving their homes without permission.
The Metropolitan Police Service is one of the largest, best equipped and well-funded police forces in the world, with 43,000 personnel and an annual budget of £3.8 billion. If it didn’t want Just Stop Oil activists blocking roads in London, they wouldn’t be able to do so. The UK also has the highest density of CCTV cameras in Europe, with one for every eighteen people in London. If the security of Goldman Sachs, the Royal Academy and Westminster Palace was so easy to circumvent, it wouldn’t be these innocents who made their way inside, but organisations with a far greater reason to resent the British state. They can because their protests are corporate-funded advertisements for Agenda 2030. They are there by invitation.
In stark contrast to which, the millions of UK citizens who, in the spring and summer of 2021, protested without trespass or vandalism against the illegal lockdowns, ‘vaccine’ mandates and ‘vaccine’ passports on which the ‘zero-Covid’/‘zero-carbon’ demands are founded, received a very different welcome from the Metropolitan Police Service, were universally censored by the media, were ignored by those they had elected to represent them in Parliament, and were threatened by the Government with increased powers of arrest, fines and criminal sanctions.
Despite their radical rhetoric, therefore, and whether they know it or not, Just Stop Oil are the paid promoters of the UN’s Agenda 2030 and its goal to financialise the natural world. This is why their website, their professionally-printed banners and their media-covered protests, combine the slick look of consumer advertising with the language of revolution. Like Insulate Britain, Animal Rebellion, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, The People’s Assembly, Momentum and all the other ‘grassroots’ movements astroturfing for their political and corporate backers, Just Stop Oil has appropriated street protest for the political agenda of globalists.
Between 2015 and 2019, I watched the UK Labour Party turn council residents protesting against the demolition of their housing estates into voters for the Party whose councils were demolishing them, and then blame Labour’s neoliberal housing policies on Tory austerity. This is a similar lie but with far greater resources and on a global scale. Indeed, this nexus of environmental fundamentalism, biosecurity restrictions, woke ideology, corporate takeover of national governments and managed economic decline is what the governments of Western nations, only a few months into the ‘pandemic’, informed us was to be ‘The New Normal’. What they didn’t tell us is to what end.
Simon Elmer, whom UK Column has interviewed, is the author of two new volumes of articles on the UK biosecurity state, Virtue and Terror and The New Normal, which are available in hardback, paperback and as an ebook. This article is an extract from the Introduction to Volume 1. Please click on these links for the contents page, introduction and purchase options. On 11 March, to mark the third anniversary since the declaration of the ‘pandemic’, a book launch will be held at the Star & Garter, 62 Poland Street, W1F 7NX, upstairs in the William Blake room from 6 to 8 pm. Entry is free, with book signings, a reading and Q&A.
