climate catastrophism as big business

green is all about the greenbacks

you all know gato’s first law:

as soon as one allows politicians to determine that which is bought and sold, the first thing bought and sold will always be politicians.

increasingly, this goes double for journalism. this trend is no longer haphazard nor piecemeal. it’s a unified, organized, well funded edifice of crony corporatist marketing, manipulation, and grift being funded by investment experts who know an attractive value proposition when they see one.

behind the dupes and power chasers of “watermelon green” hiding red on the inside lies a vast group of funding sources willing to indulge these would be world savers so long as they all stay onside and push the wares sold by the companies they funded.

“why innovate when you can mandate?” runs the greentech investing mantra now popular from silicon valley to london and berlin to bejing.

why indeed…

this has coalesced into entire agencies and networks of journalistic jingo stepping into dying dinosaur newsrooms with one simple ask to trigger a showering of largess. i’ll let the earth journalism network speak in its own words so that none may claim straw man or that i overstate their goals:

truth is not the goal. crisis is.

file “attribution science” away in your mind. we’ll come back to that in part 2.

it has all become funny business. and business is good.

A massive global grooming programme aimed at mostly mainstream media involving climate catastrophism and Net Zero promotion is detailed in a recently published report from the green billionaire-funded Internews’s Earth Journalism Network (EJN). The work is a shocking insight into the corruption of independent, investigative journalism. At one point the report observes “a concerning trend among journalists in some countries still seeking to ‘balance’ their climate change reporting”. The report shows clearly that the green billionaires are calling most of the shots in promoting stories of Net Zero-inspired climate collapse. It is noted that they may fund journalists “to cover stories in a particular subject area, determined by funder interests and goals”.

Over the last 20 years the tax-efficient billionaire foundations have stepped into the funding gaps left by declining circulation and advertising sales across mainstream media. It is noted by the EJN that journalists “overwhelmingly agreed” that support from external funding organisations was “essential” to enabling their climate and environmental reporting. Any journalist can apply to be a member of the EJN and the “primary benefit” is said to be access to grant funding for stories and “training opportunities”. The operation claims over 25,000 members in 200 countries.

The list of EJN funders is a long one and includes many well-known supporters of climate fear-mongering work. Included is the European Climate Foundation, heavily supported by Michael Bloomberg and Extinction Rebellion paymaster Sir Christopher Hohn. Other supporters include Tides, Gulbenkian, Oak, Packard, Climate Justice Resilience, MacArthur and Rockefeller. Helping out with taxpayer money are political and government organisations including the United Nations and the British Foreign Office.

this is a near perfect system to grab and co-opt failing journalists. can’t make ends meet? come get a grant! there’s plenty! just toe the line, sing from our hymnal, make every story a climate story, and “bob’s your uncle!”

source: orwell 2024

the best data gets ignored in favor of pushing “perception of crisis.” the divergence of the last 10 years is fascinating. but when NOAA itself ignores its more accurate reference network to instead push one it knows to be false whose steep temperature rises are driven by poor siting and urban heat islands and is increasing modeled as opposed to even being based in data, well, that sort of speaks for itself on agenda, doesn’t it?

this is not the sort of thing you want investigative journos poking around if you want to keep the narrative spinning.

and so as a budding greengrifter, you’d best get a handle on that.

so you find the weak spots with high ROI and you push. hard.

climate reporter theology school has emerged as a sort of opportunistic infection currently ravaging a sick and depleted media caught in a death spiral of losing readers and viewers due to selling out and losing credibility leading, in turn, to more selling out, more lost credibility, and even greater losses of audience reach. media is dying and this makes it easy prey for anyone willing to fund these jingo-journos and keep them from having to get real jobs or do real research.

so thoroughly have they been bought and paid for lock, stock, and keyboard that the AP newswire folks should have to wear nascar style sponsorship jerseys. pipers are paid and tunes are called. it’s described as “philanthropy funded news” but the reality is that it’s flat out agitprop to drive demand and mandate for portfolio companies. splash a little advertising revenue around to get media manager attention and you’ve really got quite a model. certain felines of questionable goodness opined upon this earlier.

and this trend is spreading inexorably like some sort of invasive slime mold and the desperate denizens of failing mastheads are clutching at it like life preservers in a shipwreck.

there are literal schools for it: come and get indoctrinated. learn to push our agenda and get grants and sinecures. it’s a pervasive trend and as marketing dollars go, it’s cheap as dirt. this is not even a cult, it’s just a grift preying on the desperate and the devoted.

you gather hundreds, bestow them with false gravitas, let them cross link and validate one another, then publish the “ward letter” to parliament pushing aggressive green policy that just happens to require large purchases of the things the companies you are invested in just happen to sell.

the whole point is to break the free market. consumer sovereignty driven competition is difficult and uncertain. margins from mandate and oligopoly are far higher. big firms and big investment pools do not want to guess. they want to bet on sure things. this is why they always cozy up to fascists, totalitarians, and socialists alike. mandate my wealth and i’ll rise and applaud for whatever nonsense you like.

and green is a perfect storm because it touches everyhting.

this is the worst sort of crony corporatism pretending to be beneficent social activism and the mantra is as simple as it is damaging:

“any candidate as long as they are green.”

this is a helluva business model. you make billions investing in shoddy and pointless greentech that has little purpose and less ability to compete unaided in the marketplace by conjuring false consensus in academia, media, and politics by flooding them with money.

people need a new everyhting. new car, new dishwasher, new heat pump, new solar panel, new foods, new clothing, new windows and washing machines. the ROI on buying the academia/journalism industrial complex and the politicos who lean on them for justification is staggering. you drop $20 million in and get mandates to buy 100’s billions worth of products. and the rule by rube true believers you elevate to positions of power literally don’t know any better and are sure the poison they push is panacea. this is how you get absolute incompetents in charge of everything. they were selected for ideological purity and nothing else because that’s what serves the grift. they are chumps too impossibly ignorant to ever be wised up. but the people are cottoning on to this and they are increasingly kicking these wreckers to the curb.

green is getting routed because the thing about terrible policies rooted in physics denial is the damage rapidly becomes too vast to hide.

this is not going to calm the media or its patrons down. the cultists will become more devout as they always do when prophesies fail and those who fund them will keep pushing to get the last of the juice out of their “green mandate as investment thesis” portfolios.

this is the part where is all goes hyper-shrill and despotically manipulative as paid for propaganda masquerades as journalism by passing off weaponized empathy and relentless fear porn as science and the faux credentialism of those seeking to proclaim “consensus” through selection and selective silencing. you can see the intensity and urgency ramping. this will be a desperate rear guard fight.

but the reality is that this is just season 11 of the interminable “10 years to save the world or we all die from <insert bugbear here>!” malthusian watermelon prattle that has pervaded since the 60’s. it’s reaching a crescendo of miscalibrated screeching because it’s losing grip and the one note flutes of collectivism by constant crisis are on the exponential failure curve of upping alarmism and losing plausibility.

and it’s going full woo-woo.

certain malign felines opined on spotting such things:

well, here are some wonderful object lessons:

consider signatory professor lorraine whitmarsh, who is described as the director for U.K. centre for climate change and social transformation. (yowza!)

sounds sceincey, but is it? here’s her profile from the university of bath.

there is zero hard science here. her specialty is theology, culture, and psychology. she focuses on “perceptions and behavior in relation to climate change, energy, and transport.”

without crisis, she’s out of a job. and what a job she has! this woman is the very model of the modern major manipulator. consider the incentives she faces in keeping this career alive and relevant.

this looks like a vast and impressive CV, but it’s basically all the same set of funding, funders, and agenda cross linked to elevate the faithful. it’s woo piled upon woo piled upon woo and each new credential and sinecure enables the next. all one need to is be presentable and strident and the only way to fail is up. it’s an entirely circular reference system of self-attestation by an entirely captured ecosystem.

and it’s falling apart.

these tricks are out in the open now.

and the reputation economy will do the rest.

these people are organized, compromised, and ready to dissemble for dollars, but that very fact is what makes them so easy to spot. this is about as grass roots as the turf in the astrodome and the fugazy frightener fraternity cannot help but discredit itself as the very techniques that were effective the first few times they were applied become saccharine and stupid as they are repeated. subtle this ain’t and mendacious messaging inverts and becomes self-indictment with overuse.

and once you see the game, you notice it everywhere.

and this is why their center can no longer hold.

the impending re-awakening from the golden age of post modern propaganda is going to be quite the thing.

stay tuned. the good part is starting.

(this is part 1 of a 3 part series. stay tuned for the rest of climate crony week here on bad cattitude!)