A Rebuttal of Jonathan Cook’s Climate Alarmism

From New York Times Archives, 1978: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/01/05/archives/international-team-of-specialists-finds-no-end-in-sight-to-30year.html

Jonathan Cook has written a piece titled “Why action on the climate crisis is all hot air”. As the title suggests, it deploys a boiler-plate mainstream Leftist regurgitation of fact-bending climate alarmism. I’m pretty sure that many of my Substack readers are more clued up than I am on the climate debate, so I am by no means promising any light-bulb moments in this piece. But, following a mild scrap I had with Cook in the comments section of his article, I am presenting a more detailed rebuttal here of his arguments. And since Cook thinks I’m full of hot air – that was his carefully considered response to my criticism of his unscientific interpretation of carbon dioxide predictions – I now feel obliged to play the part by huffing and puffing and blowing his climate alarmist nonsense down.

Why do I care about Jonathan Cook feeding more meat to a pack of panting, crisis-addicted mainstream Lefties? His area of expertise is the Israel/Palestine tragedy, and he has unfailingly exposed Israel for the apartheid nightmare that it is. He has also displayed a modicum of courage and independence of thought in dipping his toes, albeit gingerly, into the covid cauldron, questioning some of the more insanely stupid official ‘pandemic’ narratives, something the Pfizer Left has not thanked him for. If anything, my rebuttal is an expression of disbelief at seeing someone argue with such conviction for a position that is not supported by ‘settled science’. I just thought Cook was better than this.

Deconstructing his arguments is, I suppose, a way of asking him whether he has engaged, in good faith, with arguments that oppose the climate catastrophe paradigm. There is certainly no hint in his piece of having considered the existence of other arguments. If he has in fact engaged with those arguments, it is unfathomable to me that he is still able to remain so sure that a carbon-dioxide-laden sky is about to fall on our heads.

The climate science bus is being driven by a nexus of public-private partnership entities including, but not necessarily limited to: Western governments; global capital; the UN and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); the World Economic Forum (WEF), a formal partner organisation of the UN, and; the World Health Organisation (WHO), whose latest proposed international Pandemic Treaty showcases a ‘One Health’ paradigm that will empower it to use climate change and the full spectrum of environmental issues as a lever for dictating how the entire planet responds to its declared health emergencies. So, absolutely nothing to be suspicious of there! Never before in modern history has there been a more comprehensive fusion of state and corporate interests signalling the zenith of fascism. The difference between today’s fascism and its 20^th century iterations is that yesteryear’s governments broadly appeared to be in the driving seat, whereas today they have fully capitulated to the demands of the global corporatocracy.   

Under the banner of saving humanity from imminent climate catastrophe, this fascist nexus is dictating the most sweeping global societal and economic changes since the first industrial revolution. And, whereas those changes evolved over several generations, the climate change agenda is to be implemented within a generation, possibly even less. Why should we trust them? Are we really on the brink of a climate catastrophe? Even if we are, is it man-made? If human activity is not a significant driver of climate change, it stands to reason that the proposed measures aimed at curbing humanity’s alleged contribution to this climate catastrophe will not only be futile but will also likely be disastrous for humanity. In short, what are the risks of hysterically embracing policies that pose massive risks for humanity when the evidence, methods and motives of the parties driving the climate science bus are more than questionable?

I want to take care not to misrepresent Cook’s argument so I will summarise the ‘climate science’ part of it under the following two headings:

The science is settled!

Cook sets the scene with a declaration that the science is settled. Here, he rends his garments over humanity’s “inaction on curbing fossil fuel use” in the face of what Cook regards as kindergarten knowledge – “the debate about the climate crisis should have been settled in the early 1990s.” This lecture is underlined with the hyperbolic “global boiling” pronouncements of the global institutional high priest who heads up the UN. In a futile attempt to perhaps convince himself more than his audience, Cook returns doggedly to the science-is-settled mantra, as if repeating it will eventually make it so. The “scientific consensus and the real-world evidence” is “slapping you in the face”! Why can’t everyone else feel the sting of this slap?

The predictions of the “best minds”

Cook’s righteous fury peaks when he unfurls what he clearly views as the coup de grace – the predictions of the “best minds on climate science”. No evidence of why these geniuses merit such praise is provided. Without an explanation of precisely why we should take it on faith that they are the best minds, one has to assume that Cook deems them to be geniuses because they are the priest class of his religion. At any rate, the predictions of these geniuses were “bang on target”. And what were these predictions that seal the whole climate debate in a holy sepulchre never to be sullied by the questioning minds of mortals like you and me? The threshold of 415ppm would be breached in 2019, and this is the point at which a climate catastrophe Rubicon is crossed – a temperature rise of 0.9C. Ta da! For Cook, everything hinges on these predictions, the accuracy of which he claims “is hard to explain for those arguing that the man-made climate emergency is a hoax.” We will explore in due course another viewpoint that questions whether the accuracy of these predictions have any utility in supporting the hypothesis that carbon levels in the atmosphere are proof of a causal relationship to global warming.

In deconstructing his arguments, I want to make it clear that I am not professing to know more than Cook, or anyone else for that matter, about climate science. Rather, I am trying to demonstrate that his argument fails so miserably to take into account valid competing arguments that it can only be taken seriously by children who believe in fables and the mainstream media. Once you acknowledge that there are competing, good-faith arguments on the table, this must be followed by an assessment of the potential validity of those competing arguments. Finally, we must try to understand how the uncertainty thrown up by competing arguments impinges on the course of action to be taken. This is the essence of risk management. It is how non-experts assess the pronouncements of experts to chart a way forward.

Consensus is the first refuge of the scoundrel, and not without reason – if you can create the illusion of certainty, you can claim there is no need for debate. Once you claim the debate is closed, censorship and ridicule of dissent soon follow. Hence, the settled-science claim is fundamentally anti-intellectual and authoritarian. Its adherents are not interested in the truth. Nor are they simply being lazy. They’re interested in power and control.

The ‘settled science’ of Cook’s ‘best minds’.

Cook knows that the world we live in is as corrupt now as it has ever been at any point in human history, possibly more so given the unparalleled concentration of wealth and power and its corrupting influence on economics and social justice. Needless to say, science is not exempt from that corruption. He’s questioned the irrational approach taken on many aspects of the covid response and he followed up his climate-alarmism piece with this one titled “Once again, the FDA admits it lied to us. And once more, we yawn”. It deals with how the great and the good at the highest levels of the medical establishment censored and suppressed scientific debate in order to serve the interests of Big Pharma in ensuring that no alternative treatments would jeopardise the billions of profit to be made by the covid ‘vaccines’. A textbook case study of the horrific scale of corruption in medical science.

So how is he able to completely suspend any scepticism on climate science, an area infinitely more complicated than ivermectin, with far more margin for gross error and even more motive and opportunity for a corrupt establishment to manipulate evidence and public opinion? By what logic does he, on the one hand, acknowledge “the system’s inherent dysfunction and corruption” but on the other hand, totally trust his cherry-picked version of climate science which propagates “global boiling” hysteria?

So just how unsettled is climate science? Well, in exactly the same sort of way dictators decide prior to their ‘free and fair’ elections what the margin of their landslide victories should be – it’s always above 90% – and then rig the result accordingly, a green activist claimed in 2013 on the basis of a study that 97% of scientists believed that humans cause global warming. The rigging of this ‘consensus’ took the form of a statistical fraud in which it was claimed that 97.1% of the abstracts of 11,944 climate science papers published over a 20-year period (1991 - 2011) endorsed the IPCC’s opinion that human activity was the predominant cause of global warming.

Out of this total of 11,944 papers included in the study, 7,930 or 66.4% took no position on whether humans cause global warming. The 97.1% that supposedly endorsed the IPCC view came from the remaining 4,014 or 33.6% – 3,896 abstracts out of 11,944. But it gets worse. Only 986 of the  remaining 3,896 abstracts (8.2% of the total 11,944 abstracts) actually explicitly endorsed man-made global warming. However, this analysis puts the percentage of abstracts that explicitly endorsed the IPCC view at a staggeringly miniscule 0.3% because of the overwhelming failure to quantify the extent of the human contribution to global warming. In other words, while it is not in dispute that man-made greenhouse emissions cause some global warming, the vast majority of papers are far from conclusive on how much global warming human activity is causing and whether or not it is ‘dangerous’.

What’s more, all of this is based on a spurious percentage of abstracts, not scientists. I don’t know what percentage of climate scientists actually subscribe to the UN’s global-boiling alarmism but I’m quite certain that science doesn’t operate in the same way as voting in elections. It only needs one scientist to prove the consensus wrong, although admittedly it is much harder to argue a position against a genuine 97% of your colleagues. Which is why the climate science industry decided to present a fake dictator’s election consensus.

There are in fact numerous great minds that don’t subscribe to climate alarmism, and frankly I find it hard to believe that Cook is oblivious to these dissenters. So, here is a shortlist of just a few that he might try contacting whenever the BBC colours a map of Greece red in order to convince us that it is spontaneously combusting due to catastrophic man-made global warming:

-          Judith Curry, who opted out of the government-funded climate alarmism complex when she changed her view about catastrophic global warming based on what good scientists do – she changed her mind when the flaws in her own work were pointed out to her.

-          Dr John Clauser, last year’s Nobel Physics laureate who, along with 1600 other scientists and experts, signed a World Climate Declaration stating there is no climate emergency.

-          William Happer (Professor of Physics, Emeritus Princeton University) of the CO2 Coalition and Richard Lindzen (Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who have published a 45-page paper on the disastrous consequences of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules on greenhouse gas emissions.

I could go on, and no doubt Cook could produce what he thinks is a convincing list of scientific declarations that counter the list I’ve produced. And I’m perfectly fine with that, as long as we can agree that it would be entirely irrational to base potentially catastrophic decarbonisation policies on unproven catastrophic climate-change theories.

And while Cook spuriously claims that “scientists knew at least 70 years ago that a warming world would be a major concern”, he conveniently omits to mention that these geniuses were trying to stir up fears in the 1970s over a great global cooling. That’s right – the overwhelming scientific consensus in the 1970s was that the Earth was heading into a period of significant cooling. I am aware of the ‘fact-checking’ controversy over the alleged Time Magazine cover of 1977 that declared or did not declare the coming ice age. I am also aware of the ‘fact-check’ that refutes the claim of a scientific consensus around global cooling. But I find the linked analysis outlining why the 1970s global cooling consensus was not a myth compelling.

The New York Times in 1975 declared that “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” and that “hints that it may have already begun are evident”. Global cooling scaremongering was all the rage. Check out this YouTube clip of a 1978 documentary on The Coming Ice Age narrated by Leonard Nimoy. It worked pretty much the same as it does today. One really bad winter in which some unfortunate people froze to death in their cars and that’s it – we’re all going to the Arctic in a freezer bag. Contrary to Cook’s claim, his “best minds on climate science” have been blowing hot and cold over the last 70 years.

In the 80s, when it became apparent that the ice age cometh not, they turned to the boiling age for solace. And that is now running out of steam as, according to the Satellite Record UAH 6.0, as of 2021 global temperatures are less than 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than in 1986 or 0.6 degrees Celsius warmer measuring from 1979 to January 2023.

Robert Lyman, writing in the Daily Sceptic, has brilliantly summarised the unsettled nature of the debate by posing a number of questions the answers to which, if engaged with in good faith, do not lead to a firm science conclusion. I will highlight just four of these questions because they underline everything I’ve said so far, but also provide a convenient segue into the next part of Cook’s declarations regarding the accuracy of predictions of carbon in the atmosphere. The main question is:

“Do the changes in global temperatures show any strong connection/causation with increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?”

Subsets of that question are:

·         Have the changes in temperatures observed to date preceded or followed the changes in GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations?

·         Historically, when GHG concentrations were higher than today, were temperatures higher or lower?

·         Is there any way clearly to distinguish between the effects of increased GHG concentrations and other global factors including solar trends, ocean cycles, and cloud chemistry?

If one assumes that the Happer-Lindzen paper critiquing the climate-alarmist narrative has been compiled with scientific rigour and in good faith, then there are arguments in that paper that shake the foundations of the alarmist position. They claim that:

·         there is an inverse relationship between CO2 and climate temperatures during much of Earth’s history over the last 600 million years.

·         Temperatures have been higher than today over most of the 600 million years and life flourished (but not in Ice Ages).

·         In a 1990 scientific assessment, the IPCC itself noted that:

“The late tenth to early thirteenth centuries (about AD 950–1250) appear to have been exceptionally warm … This period is known as the Medieval Climatic Optimum….  This period of widespread warmth is notable in that there is no evidence that it was accompanied by an increase of greenhouse gases.” [emphasis added]

This period was followed by a “Little Ice Age” from which we emerged at the end of the 19^th century. Again, unrelated to greenhouse gas concentrations.

“Bang on target” – predictions of carbon dioxide levels of 415ppm

Cook’s coup de grace is the prediction of science’s ‘best’ minds that we would reach a CO2 level of 415ppm in around 2019. This prediction is presented as vindication of the view that CO2 is the dominant contributor to global warming. By now readers will know what I’m going to say: you cannot attach any significance to that prediction if you can’t prove a significant enough correlation between greenhouse gas concentrations and man-made global warming. If the CO2 concentrations are not predictive of significant global warming or its harmful effect, then that prediction has as much weight as a single tiny fart in a giant perfume factory.

When I challenged Cook on this very point in the comments section of his ode to climate alarmism, he simply repeated the assertion that “the scientific consensus has existed for 70 years or more”. But there is no consensus and nor has there ever been. As for the length of the alleged consensus, the scientists reversed en masse in the 70s into a global cooling, only to speed out again in the 80s and 90s into the highway to hell of the UN’s boiling oceans. To me it looks as though they haven’t got a bloody clue. Most of them are probably just following the money.

Cook then went on to re-assert the significance of the 415ppm – “you really have to explain how scientists 40 years ago managed to predict CO2 levels and current temperature rises to the month.”

And so I persisted with this reply:

“None of what you have said is central to the key point - do those predicted CO2 levels mean that we have an imminent man-made climate catastrophe? The answer to THAT determines what is to be done. And the answer is far from clear. This is the issue around which there is NO scientific consensus. You are conflating predictions of CO2 levels with climate catastrophe.”

His reply:

“No, the value of a scientific theory is determined by its ability to predict real-world phenomena. Climate science has proven itself to be extremely capable of doing this. You, on the other hand, are just full of hot air.” [emphasis added]

I was floored by the vapidity of the response, which didn’t even come close to demonstrating an understanding of the question I was asking – why is he so convinced that an ability to accurately predict CO2 levels translates into proof that we are on the brink of a climate catastrophe?

As for the childish put-down, I found that both surprising and satisfying. Surprising because I had assumed, wrongly, that Cook would engage thoughtfully.  Satisfying because it reinforced the emptiness of his reply: if you can’t argue intelligently, it’s entirely appropriate to punctuate the incoherence with verbal flatulence. He appears to have deleted my reply in which I congratulated him for resorting to insults in order to compensate for his inability to craft a coherent response to my point.

Other predictions by Cook’s ‘best minds’

Let’s return to the Happer-Lindzen paper to respond to Cook’s fact-free assertion that “climate science has proven itself to be extremely capable” of “predict[ing] real-world phenomena”. In that paper, Happer and Lindzen cite the work of John Christy, Ph.D., Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama, who applied the scientific method to 102 predictions of temperatures from 1979 to 2016 by models from 32 institutions. He explained he used “the traditional scientific method in which a claim (hypothesis) is made and is tested against independent information to see if the claim can be sustained”. Happer-Lindzen’s summary of Christy’s conclusion was that “101 of the 102 predictions by the models… fail miserably to predict reality”. Dr Christy’s scientific analysis concluded:

“When the ‘scientific method’ is applied to the output from climate models of the IPCC AR5, specifically the bulk atmospheric temperature trends since 1979 (a key variable with a strong and obvious theoretical response to increasing GHGs in this period), . . . the consensus of the models [red line] fails the test to match the real-world observations by a significant margin.  As such, the average of the models is considered to be untruthful in representing the recent decades of climate variation and change, and thus would be inappropriate for use in predicting future changes in the climate or related policy decisions.”

Which illustrates the point I tried to impress on Cook – the accuracy of CO2 predictions does not translate into accurate predictions about increases in global temperature. Wattsupwitthat.com keeps a running score of just how brilliantly “climate science has proven itself to be extremely capable” of “predict[ing] real-world phenomena”. In 1986, the crystal ball geniuses predicted that global temperatures would increase by 3 or 4 degrees sometime between 2010 and 2020. Outcome? As of 2021, according to the Satellite Record UAH 6.0, global temperatures are less than 0.5 degree Celsius warmer than in 1986. Satellite measurements of temperatures avoid most of the corruptions and inaccuracies of surface measurements. As of January 2023, Chris Morrison reported in the Daily Sceptic that “acccording to the satellite record, since 1979, the planet has warmed about 0.6°C with most of the warming occurring before 1998. Since then [1998], the planet has warmed little more than 0.1°C.”

What about sea-levels? In 1989, the ‘best minds’ warned that we had “a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the green-house gas effect” before rising seas were set to “obliterate” nations by the year 2000. Outcome? Sea level rise continues at the same rate it has for the last 200 years. If you want a hearty laugh, just visit the prediction timeline section of the Watts Up With That website.

Notwithstanding these risible predictions, Cook has the brass neck to declare that “much of the public is wrongly persuaded that the climate crisis is still some way off.” [emphasis added]. If Cook were to dismount from his pseudo-scientific high horse, he might realise that the public is not as stupid as he thinks it is. The veiled contempt for the public when the public is in fact way ahead of him, encapsulates the Leftist psychology of patriarchal condescension towards the hoi polloi. It is ultimately why the Left is in many respects more authoritarian than the Right and therefore more dangerous. For the longest time, the likes of Chomsky have tried to persuade their followers that the Republican Party is the greatest threat to humanity. Having listened to Chomsky declare that the unvaccinated should be ostracized from society and having watched only Right-leaning politicians across the West defend human rights against the tyranny of the biosecurity state, I have relegated Chomsky and his ilk to a sewer of hypocrites and liars.

Amazingly, Cook thinks that because “wildfires and floods have become a news staple”, this is incontrovertible evidence of man-made global warming. That, from an independent journalist! If everything Reuters prints is the unassailable truth, why is Cook bothering to ply his trade as an independent journalist? So, how did ‘climate science’ and the mainstream media fare when assessing the cause of the wildfires that spread across Greece this summer? On 26^th July, The Independent presented the issue as a question in the title of the linked article – “Are Greece wildfires caused by climate change?”. But they know that to ask the question is also to answer it. The subtitle acknowledges the view of local authorities who suspect that arson is to blame but that is followed up with the statement that “climate scientists say rising temperatures are to blame.”

Initially posing it as a question also means that if arson subsequently proves to be the cause, they’ve covered themselves by being disingenuously non-committal. But as the article progresses, The Science™ gets more emphatic: “climate science and fire risk specialists say it’s undeniable that rising temperatures and prolonged heatwaves mean the fires in the Mediterranean country have spread faster and burned over larger areas”. As Chris Morrison adeptly points out, climate alarmism “speak[s] to a deep need within the human psyche to take seriously warnings of impending doom. Whatever happens in the near future, come rain or shine, the climate alarmists will be there to remind us we are all going to hell in a handcart.”

Fast forward one month and CNN reported that “Greek authorities have arrested dozens of people on arson-related charges as deadly wildfires – the largest ever recorded in the European Union – rage across the country.

Zoom out for a big picture analysis of extreme weather events and analysis by What’s Up With That shows that, in relation to the US:

“Drought is the key climate factor for wildfires. The United States in recent decades is benefiting from strikingly small amounts of drought…Global warming did not create wildfires. In fact, wildfires have become less frequent and less severe in recent decades. A contributing factor has been less drought in the United States during recent decades. In fact, data displayed by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, NOAA, show no discernible trend for increased drought in the United States in over 125 years.” [emphasis added]

All of which is to say this: you don’t have to uncritically accept all of the above credible dissenting views I’ve summarised. But why would you uncritically accept Cook’s fact-free scaremongering if there are plenty of credible dissenting voices saying something else? Frightening people out of their wits and then imposing greater control in the guise of protection from the overhyped dangers is precisely what the political class does for a living. Accepting this fundamental law of politics and power, I am more inclined to subscribe to Nick Hudson’s (Chairman of PANDA) rule of thumb for diagnosing a scam to concentrate more power in the hands of the ruling class:

“If we can detect: 1) a propagandised global crisis; 2) admitting only global solutions, and; 3) with dissenting voices viciously silenced, then we know, with absolutely certainty, that we are dealing with a scam.”

This street-smart common sense was once the bread and butter of the Left. 

The science is not settled. It’s censored.

Lacking sufficient public support, and with the fake consensus being exposed daily, the tools that the climate alarmists are increasingly turning to are emotional manipulation and censorship. This TCW report exposes how a professional clinical psychologist has chosen to use her powers for evil rather than good by weaponizing negative emotions to garner support for her “Climate Awakening” agenda. The appeals to terror and rage, which, as we all know, are not conducive to critical thinking and analysis, are explicit as she urges people to “share your climate terror, grief, and rage with people who understand”.

And when the censors step in to silence dissent, you can be pretty sure that they have lost the debate. There has never been a time in history when the censors were the good guys, and if climate alarmism had scientific rigour and methodological integrity behind it, it wouldn’t require censorship of dissenters to bolster its position. But that is what’s happening. The corruption and suppression in the world of peer-reviewed climate science is exemplified by an instance in which a group of activist scientists and journalists combined to secure the retraction of a paper that said a climate emergency was not supported by the available data. The data used to draw that conclusion was based on data used by the IPCC. During an adjudication process, three out of four reviewers agreed that publication was appropriate and that an addendum to the paper could be added to incorporate the latest IPCC data that was not available at the time of initial publication. Unsurprisingly, the adjudicator sided with the minority view that called for retraction.

This is not an isolated case. Cancellation of scientists who don’t conform to IPCC orthodoxy is standard operating procedure. It’s what keeps the climate-alarmist industry alive. And it’s set to receive another shot in the arm from the EU’s Digital Services Act that forces all “very large online platforms” to remove all content that meets its Orwellian and arbitrary definition of ‘disinformation’.    

What this shows is that the science is far from settled. The science is censored. I suspect Cook knows that because he knows that most institutions, including and especially those in scientific research fields, are corrupted by their funders. The biggest funders of science are powerful and wealthy vested interests who in essence buy the ‘science’ they need to advance an agenda. So it’s disingenuous of him to present a contested version of climate science as though it were Newton’s law of gravity. And while he purports to understand the dangers of institutional suppression of scientific debate in some spheres, he registers no objection to the silencing of dissent on climate science. There’s a very strange cognitive dissonance at play here that permits him to acknowledge widespread institutional corruption…except in climate science.

This peculiar dissonance invites a psychological analysis which I believe science writer Roger Pielke has captured perfectly:

“For the secular millenarian, extreme events – floods, hurricanes, fires – are more than mere portents, they are evidence of our sins of the past and provide opportunities for redemption in the future, if only we listen, accept and change.”

All of us should share the concerns that Cook has regarding soil degradation, deforestation, air and water pollution, microplastics and the myriad toxins with which we are flooding our own bodies and the environment. They are valid environmental and human health concerns. But environmentalism has morphed into a death cult in which guilt about destroying the natural world has been weaponised to catalyse the destruction of what the climate catastrophists have been brainwashed into thinking is the primary problem – humanity itself. While the likes of Cook wave their puny fists at global capital, they have long given up trying to seriously curtail its destructiveness. Instead they have, consciously or not, put themselves and all of humanity in the crosshairs by kneeling at the altar of decarbonisation.

They’re not sincerely interested in whether there is scientific integrity behind decarbonisation, though they recognise they must invoke The Science™ in the same way soldiers claim to have God on their side before they prepare to do battle. Net Zero is the magical vehicle to deliver the transformative upheaval they yearn for. But in choosing to treat science as a childish consensus game rather than a dispassionate, iterative discourse that embraces uncertainty and welcomes all credible views, they are playing into the hands of Machiavellian forces that are infinitely more wily and powerful than they are.

In the face of all of the abysmal failures of Cook’s “best minds”, how can it possibly be acceptable to endorse policies that are designed to starve humanity by taking farm land out of use or by needlessly culling livestock in the name of reducing cow farts? Forced farm buy-outs being piloted in the Netherlands are part of a hostile takeover of land and nature itself by global capital under the guise of protecting the planet from environmental and climate destruction. It’s positively sick, and it’s fully supported by the mainstream Left.

Cook recognises that Net Zero is a scam, not because the goal in itself is utterly stupid, but because he believes Big Oil simply wants to weasel its way out of it. Yes, China and the BRICS nations are burning more fossil fuel than ever. That’s both understood and welcome, not just by Big Oil but by the West’s financial gatekeepers. Cook claimed that the West’s politicians are burying their heads in the sand in order to pursue economic growth at the expense of his imaginary ‘climate emergency’. He could not be more wrong. Probably for the first time since World War II, the leader of a major Western nation declared that politicians were no longer in the business of promising to improve people’s lives. Macron warned of the “end of abundance” in all facets of life. Here in the UK, London’s mayor is proud to promote a billionaire-backed plan to be implemented within the next 7 years that sets a target of:

“a daily per person allowance of 44g of meat (enough for two small meatballs), a daily limit of 2,500 calories, (less than the ration in the Second World War), one short-haul flight every three years, eight new clothing items a year and private cars available for only one in five people.”

Where does one start in deconstructing the authoritarian fantasies of the diseased minds of these billionaires and their stooges? First, we know these measures won’t apply to the billionaires and their captured politicians because they are the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Second, Cook and his climate emergency zombies may happily spend their evenings wondering if a pair of socks constitutes one item of clothing or two, but I will be telling Khan and his puppeteers to shove their dystopian visions of a rationed world firmly up their rear-ends. Third, the only way they can implement this is by using several force levers, key of which will be spending controls through CBDCs linked to digital ID. Finally, to address Cook’s muddled thinking, this is clearly not indicative of a political elite fixated on economic growth. They are deliberately trying to kill economic growth in the West in order to pave the way for a transition to a New World Order. They know exactly what they are doing and their heads are far clearer than Cook’s.

The shift to a multi-polar world in which the BRICS nations consume more oil as they replace the West as the industrial engine of the world is part of global capital’s strategy for deflating the West’s debt bubble and resetting the decrepit monetary system. Let’s recognise Net Zero for what it is – the instrument by which this reset is to be achieved while keeping global capital in charge of a global monetary system. Big Oil continues to profit in this scenario. Meanwhile the millenarian death cult in the West, cheered on by Cook, wants to shoot itself in the head, neck and chest by begging for Net Zero immiseration. Big Oil is fine with that too. It plays right into the global financial system’s strategy of which Big Oil is an integral part. For global capital and Big Oil, the transition to this multi-polar world is plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. In other words, the puppets are changing but the puppeteer remains the same.

Just Stop Oil, the middle class eco-terrorists who Cook euphemistically and sympathetically refers to as “an increasingly noisy climate protest movement” (here is the link he used) are funded by billionaire philanthropaths and dirty oil money. It’s money well spent for them because the deluded middle class thugs are instrumental in underpinning the psychology of self-flagellation vital to brainwashing people in the West into welcoming the misery that global capital has planned for them under Net Zero and Agenda 2030 programmes. The irony that continues to escape the likes of Cook is that, in falling hook, line and sinker for the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, they have become as far removed from any real empathy with the poor working class as the Right once was.

And no, Just Stop Oil are not simply a “noisy climate protest movement”. These mindless middle class extremists have no qualms about preventing people whose livelihoods depend on road use from putting bread on the table. They would be less inclined to spend their days ruining other people's lives if they themselves had meaningful work to do.

Cook knows Net Zero is a scam but he doesn’t know why. Not only does it have absolutely nothing to do with saving the planet, but it’s solely about saving global capital from the collapse of the financial system while simultaneously giving it unfettered control over all of humanity. The reality, as CJ Hopkins points out, is that “what most people...call ‘the Left’ nowadays is an amalgamation of social forces that are completely aligned with global capitalism.” And Cook, with his latest propaganda piece about “the climate crisis”, is doing his very best to prove Hopkins right. Worst of all, he doesn’t even know it.