The establishment is hinting that the kind of draconian restrictions imposed during the pandemic will be redeployed to enforce their climate change agenda. As with Covid-19, a key part of the plan is to generate fear across the population through psychological manipulation and media propaganda.

The desired result is a major reduction in personal mobility, with ordinary people taxed and regulated out of their cars and off flights. Heating costs will also be hiked dramatically as gas boilers are banned and replaced with expensive and less effective heat pumps. Food supplies are another target.

The aim of the ramped-up indoctrination campaign will be to convince the general public to accept this top-down assault on their living standards.

Key elements of the programme are already in place. The BBC long ago effectively banned any proper debate on its airwaves. Don’t expect to see scientists who point out flaws in climate modelling on the UK’s state broadcaster; or economists who question whether the benefits of reducing emissions are worth the costs.

Establishment journalists have also been encouraged to insert climate change into news stories. Almost every time there are floods, reporters tell viewers that such disasters are likely to get worse. The same policy is applied to heat waves, forest fires and hurricanes. Even cold snaps are blamed on global warming as part of the “extreme weather” trope.

Improved communications technology has been a great help to this campaign. Alarming footage of disasters in previously little noticed regions now spreads rapidly around the world, particularly if it fits the establishment’s narrative.

But propaganda by omission is another key element of the strategy. The public is kept in the dark about the debate over the frequency of climate-related natural disasters – and the possibility that even if their frequency were increasing there could be other causes.

The role of government policies is also conveniently neglected. Environmentalist-inspired changes to river management policies, such as reducing dredging, have made flooding more likely in some locations. The “green” agenda and its huge costs have also contributed to cuts in maintenance spending on drains and other vital infrastructure. Green land-use policies promote construction on brownfield sites, which for historical reasons are often on low-lying land near to rivers.

Another long-term factor is urbanisation, which promotes flooding as water runs off rapidly from concrete surfaces into drains rather than being delayed by vegetation and soil. (It also increases temperatures via the urban heat island effect.)  

Policy changes have also been implicated in forest fires. Management methods designed to mitigate the risks, such as thinning and clearing combustible material, have been phased out under pressure from greens. Moreover, arson is a leading cause of wild fires in some regions. This human element is another reason why assessment of long-term trends is problematic. There have been examples of environmentalists engaging in other forms of arson attack, and it is worth bearing in mind the possibility that various kinds of political actors could play a role in future incidents. 

Finally, water shortages have been made more likely by policies to obstruct the construction of new reservoirs, including in regions with growing populations. The subtext is that the resulting shortages would provide a useful rationale to reduce consumption by imposing new regulations and compulsory water meters.     

So, there is substantial evidence that many of the policies imposed by environmentalists actively contribute to the “natural” disasters that are then used by propaganda outlets to promote the idea of a climate crisis. The economic damage caused by green policies also makes societies less resilient. Yet discussion of these crucial factors is typically absent.

There are two main dangers from the one-sided propaganda and indoctrination programme currently being implemented by governments and their media assets. The first is that it will encourage the adoption of harmful policies that impose higher costs than any climate change they aim to prevent. In other words, there is a high risk that the cure will be worse than the disease, with negative effects on low-income groups and poor countries in particular. A sensible strategy would be to implement win-win policies that benefit both the economy and the environment – for example, ending the vast and inefficient state subsidies and privileges given to various polluting activities. However, governments and transnational bodies have been curiously reluctant to adopt this approach.

The second danger is that climate change will be used as a pretext to bring in a far more tyrannical economic and political system, for example by empowering unaccountable transnational institutions that lack the usual constraints. Indeed there are clear parallels with the Covid-19 pandemic, which is being used as a convenient excuse for elites to grab more power and to impose vaccine passports as a stepping stone towards a long-planned global system of digital IDs.   

A free and open debate about climate change is absolutely essential if these alarming outcomes are to be avoided. However, the wider agenda behind the climate change narrative could plausibly explain why elites are so obsessed with eliminating dissent.

Richard Wellings

_{Image: US government}