(Article republished from ElizabethNickson.Substack.com)
Got a message back!
It read, “Elizabeth, I am sure Robert would fix whatever harm he caused, can you explain?”
No problem, I said.
1. In British Columbia, we had the largest industrial forest in the world
2. It paid for education and universal ‘free’ health care.
3. The environmental left decided to shut it down.
4. The reason for their protest was that the government, as was common practice, had sold cutting permits with long leaseholds. A new socialist government announced it was pulling the permits and taking those forests back.
5. In order not to lose all the invested money, which they had not only paid for upfront and in annual leasing charges, but paid taxes on, some for decades, lessees immediately clear cut their lands. Clear cuts are ugly. (but they are fire breaks)
6. That triggered the protest.
7. RFK Jr came in under RiverKeepers and supercharged the protest. His celebrity and glamour made the protest major international news. I was in London, I heard about it. More kids joined the protest. And then more and more. Until the government caved. Would it have happened without his presence? I do not think so. He gave very young people who had no access to power, nor any hope of it, ever, a very heady hit of significance and their lives took on huge huge meaning. For many it remains the high point of their lives. Because for the province, it was all downhill from there. All promise vanished and a grinding slow growth followed.
8. Over the ensuing ten years, cutting was diminished and heavy regulation covered the rest. By 2002, written regulations piled on top of each other stood seven feet high, taller than a man.
9. Forested communities died.
10. 100,000 families lost their livelihood.
11. Resource jobs have huge multipliers, not only forested towns died, so did regional metropolitan centers. Greens, replete with success, hit other resource industries – mining, ranching - which died. More families bankrupted.
12. They were told to go into tourism.
13. Which pays minimum wage and can only support a family if everyone, even the children, work. And, it’s seasonal.
14. Over time, the unmanaged forests became clogged with overgrowth, little trees like carrots pulled all the water from the forest floor, desiccated the soil and then pulled water from aquifers. The forests became tinder. And increasingly every summer, they explode in fire.
15. The government needed money.
16. Casinos provided it.
17. Asian cartels – you cannot imagine how violent they are - moved in and used the casinos to launder most of the drug money from North America. They bribed immigration, they bribed city government, they threatened anyone who tried to stand in their way.
18. They were so successful, human trafficking and child sex trafficking shot up. We have the second largest port on the west coast of North and South America. Through it streams container loads of drugs and trafficked children and women. At the port, you just stand aside, if you want to live. You think most of the fentanyl comes in through Mexico? Nope. It comes in through us.
19. The cartels do pay taxes. You think Black Rock is bad? These guys kill if they don’t get what they want. They are buying every business they can, to launder money through. The cartels also launder money through real estate in the city. That means housing is insanely expensive and property taxes are sky high. Canadians can’t afford to buy houses or live in the ones they own. A family making a median income has to pay 100% of income to buy a median priced house.
20. Crime is a) a driver of the economy and b) a principal source of government revenue.
21. Green has destroyed the province.
And that, I am afraid, is what celebrities do. It is why they are so hated, and one of the reasons Hollywood is dying. They destroy the lives of ordinary men and women, and then move on to greater heights. Their lives are so privileged, they have absolutely no idea how people make money. And RFKJr, mind-numbingly privileged from birth, is the same. When asked about climate change, he says it’s happening but taxes won’t work. “Regenerative agriculture” he says, vaguely. It is true, regenerative agriculture could capture a lot of carbon, the amount debatable but it has promise. But cutting regulation? He has no, zero, absolutely no idea of how regulation punishes the non-elites. His is a black hole of ignorance and that is common; a majority have zero idea. Zero.
I admire the heck out of his work on vaccines. I admire his work on cleaning rivers and destroying polluters on the east coast. I admire his courage to take up the leadership baton. I admire the many sensible things he says. But then, I remind myself of sitting in a packed auditorium in San Francisco while he shrieked at the crowd for 45 minutes, starting it with parading his glamour coming in on a private plane with his kids, while the hoi polloi in the audience were thrilled at proximity to power, wealth, history and glamor. Then, he sent every resource worker and business straight to hell, and jailed climate skeptics.
Behind me, a guy said to his friend, “Have you seen this performance before?” His friend said “no.”
“You’ve never seen anything like it. You have to sit five rows back when he speaks, otherwise you will get covered in spittle.”
He scares me. That level of passion scares me. The hate for normals he showed scares me. And it is throughout our cultural leadership. This is from the New Yorker in 2019, by the very much-admired literary lion, Jonathan Franzen, who is read by every book group in the world. It is catastrophic nonsense.
“The climate apocalypse is coming. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.”
To be fair, when RFKjr took up vaccines, he left a good gig. The enviro movement pays very very well. And he stuck it out when everyone in the centers of power where he used to walk, turned against him. Again, I admire him. But he had money. He didn’t risk everything. The populists fighting now are risking everything.
Think I’m kidding about cartels owning America? What do you think happened in Arizona during the 2020 and 2022 elections? Those elections and that governor were managed by the cartels. She still is. On the west coast, the CCP, in a symbiotic relationship with the most violent cartels on earth, are infiltrating every government and agency.
In Dubai this past week, at Cop 28, they devised a slave system for the world.
Such are the fruits of the modern environmental movement. Wherever they go, they destroy. In Dubai this past week, at Cop 28, they devised a slave system for the world. After their globalist system is in place, the only people who will make money will be the cartels. It’ll take a couple of decades, but our world will be a slave state run by criminals, just like my gorgeous province that both sets of paternal great grandparents settled in the 1880’s when there were 4,000 people in Vancouver. They built the water systems, clear cut the neighborhoods, built churches, founded schools and the hospital and made a welcoming city replete with one hundred years of peace and prosperity. Now, fathers are knifed in front of their children outside of Starbucks, and people lie on streets dying from fentanyl and native women are so desperate they prostitute themselves to serial killers, organ harvesters and slavers. All that goodness extinguished under violence and greed and, above all, the willful ignorance of the comfortable. Many, many cities are experiencing the same and under COP28 it will get worse.
The cartels will pay for everything: science, health care, education, pensions and they will take a piece of each and determine what is allowed to happen. They will own energy, they will own health, they will own education.
Because our entire culture will have fallen. No one will make money beyond their pittance allowance, that makes it possible to buy cheap consumer goods from their slave factories in Asia and Africa. There will be no independent businesses, there will be no “local” economies. We will be an enslaved earth.
No doubt, the CEOs of multinationals who are engineering this transformation think ‘I’m so smart that I can continue to do business, make money and be virtuous enough to be invited to Steven Spielberg’s summer parties in the Hamptons!’
No, you idiot. You will be replaced by a cartel member who is willing to kill every member of your family until you resign. Or you will be owned by said cartel member. But hey, the cartels are diverse! They come from every race (though mostly Mexican and Asian here). And, like sensible people, they use Wasps like W. or quasi-Wasps like RFKjr, as their unwitting face and administrators. And they have the best lawyers.
In the crudest analysis, that’s what happened in Russia after the fall of communism: cartels took over and now Russian cartels terrorize Europe and the eastern seaboard. In China, same thing. Read retired diplomat Ian Hamilton’s series of novels. The face of the Middle Kingdom may be Mr. Pooh Bear, but its reality is indescribable levels of violence, coercion and theft. No one is free in China, they are all under the boot heel, not of communism but of the cartels.
This is the product of communism and the left. By selling self-hate, faux compassion and the endless fulsome attack on the only free country the world has ever seen, they are destroying us.
This week, Netflix released Leave the World Behind, the first of the fictional films from the Obamas’ studio to a chorus of accusations of predictive programming from the populist right. The more sober pointed out the racism inherent in the film, the immediate hatred the black girl feels for the white family she is forced to live with. “Promise me Daddy, when the SHTF, you won’t trust whitey.’ (I paraphrase)
But here’s the money shot of the film, its raison d’etre, its deepest layer, its hate for humanity, black and white. When Julia Roberts, who plays a terrifying hatchet-faced woman, is asked by the angry black girl:
“Why are you like this? Why are you so angry all the time?”
Roberts replied
“All day, every day, I sell things to people they don’t really need. My whole job is to understand people well enough to learn how to lie to them so I can sell them things they don’t really want. And when you study people like that you see who they really are, how they really treat each other….we fuck each other over all the time without even realising it, we fuck every living thing on this planet over and think it will be fine because we use paper straws and order free range chicken.
“And the sick thing is, I know deep down we know we’re not fooling anyone. I think we know we’re living a lie, an agreed upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring, how awful we really are.”
I’ve spent enough time on the cultural left, the hard left and the communist left, up and down the status scale, to know this is what they think of humanity. They hate us, and a lot. This is a bog-common human trait, which Christianity, when it was the flower of the culture, made sure to battle every Sunday in church. Even if it hurts, you are supposed to love your neighbor. It is still true in the real, not-left world. My lived experience, and I suspect yours, is that in all the nine places I’ve lived, six of which were without family; I have been bolstered by the kindness of strangers, the help of acquaintances and the love of new friends who had no skin in the game, who cared because they were good.
Nonetheless, a massive cohort of the culture, the emotionally-oriented and idealistic young, has been taught to hate. And the principal reason given is that we don’t care about the earth, that it is boiling, that we are losing species in the Sixth Great Extinction, and that no one is willing to give up anything to save the planet or anyone on it.
This is a lie. But a lie which informs all the idiots at Cop 28. They all think like Roberts’ character. That we are stupid and venal and are willfully destroying the earth.
And that gives them permission to lie. They are doing it for the earth. Also the money.
I have spent the last two decades studying and writing about the environmental movement. I wrote dozens, if not hundreds of columns, I wrote a book. I did a green subdivision, I built a green house at the LEED Platinum level, geothermal heating. I covenanted in perpetuity my creeks and ravines in order to preserve habitat for two blue-listed species. I have studied and gone to meetings where I am hated, and listened to the reasoning. I have been stalked, harassed, threatened, stripped of friendships, slandered in the local papers repeatedly, disinvited, and fired. Every time, I read deeper. Am I wrong? Am I wrong? I look for my errors.
Not one person I know, and I live in a green prison camp, reads deeply about climate change. Reading into it is brutal work and you need training in logic, math and reason. But, for every complex analysis of the “science” behind climate change and biodiversity collapse, you will gain one point on your IQ. You will be smarter.
This week I started Judith Curry’s Climate Uncertainty and Risk, Rethinking Our Response. Curry is the former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and a member of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Committee. She has published over a hundred scientific papers and co-edited major works. She has testified in Congress several times.
She started out a fulsome supporter of Climate Change and has moderated her thinking slowly over twenty years. This is what she thinks:
“The IPCC Assessment Reports do not support the concept of imminent global catastrophe associated with global warming.”
Curry points out that the Climate Nazis are ignoring their own baseline conclusions. And Curry claims, they are tuning the models to produce coherence with past and present temperature records. Therefore, they are tuning future models too. Which is dishonest.
Her latest book is a masterwork of analysis and it is a very challenging read. I am a committed experienced reader and in three days I managed one-third of the book. Each chapter is divided into four or five shorter aspects, and is followed by over one hundred citations per chapter.
Curry sets out her baseline, the ground from which she builds her argument:
“100 years ago, the global population was 2 billion. Over the past century, the population has increased to 8 billion, life expectancy has more than doubled, a much smaller percent of the global population is living in poverty, global wealth has increased by a factor of 20, agricultural productivity and yields have increased substantially, and a far smaller fraction of the population die from extreme weather and climate events. Hannah Ritchie’s ourworldindata.org provides fascinating data on global progress.And all this has occurred during a period where the global temperatures have increased by about 1oC. The UN has dropped the extreme emissions scenarios (RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5) from use in policy making, and the UNFCCC COP27 worked from an estimated 2100 warming of 2.5ºC.[1] The 2023 IEA Roadmap to NetZero Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) projects a rise in average global temperature of 2.4ºC by 2100.[2] When plausible scenarios of natural climate variability and values of climate sensitivity on the lower end of the IPCC range are accounted for, the expected warming could be significantly lower
She takes every aspect of an extremely complex subject where there are mostly unknown unknowns, and tries to parse it for sound and unsound. She accepts that since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age, the planet has warmed 1 degree C, and might warm as much as 2 degrees C by 2100, but maybe not even that. That is not what the U.N. is saying. Not Mr. Global Boiling. Not COP28. They have chosen the top range of the UN IPCC reports. The catastrophic range. The range which the IPCC authors themselves say has a 5 percent probability. And this is key: they think we won’t notice.
That is not what the U.N. is saying. Not Mr. Global Boiling. Not COP28. They have chosen the top range of the UN IPCC reports. The catastrophic range. The range which the IPCC authors themselves say has a 5 percent probability. And this is key: they think we won’t notice.
As you may or may not know, with each report, the IPCC sets out a series of possible scenarios, depending on a set of impacts, cloud cover, ocean current, amount of CO2, regional impacts like heat islands, and estimates the future rise in temperature. The authors then give it a probability rating.
But, by 2018, the liklihood of RCP8.5 was not even 5%, but 0%, since carbon emissions were dropping.
That Changed with Biden’s Election. The Catastrophic Scenario RCP8.5 Became Law. And No One Noticed.
Under Biden, the most extreme of the IPCC’s predictions, the off-the-charts estimate that had a maybe 5% chance of occurring, became gospel. Became Global Boiling. Became civilizational death. Become the new method of doing business. It is now factored into everything, into insurance policies, development planning, construction, transportation, everything.
COP28 codifies RCP8.5 into law. Temperatures are expected to rise five degrees centigrade by 2100.
No one was paying attention to this “detail”. On the left it’s all hysteria all the time, sell fear sell fear sell fear, no one is doing enough. The right is evil. Trump is evil. Oil is evil. On the right, they say, it’s bullshit, no one is buying it, fifty-two percent don’t “believe” in climate change anymore. The right doesn’t generally bother to dig deeper. CFACT and Climate Depot and Watts Up With That aggregate the fight masterfully, but nothing moves the needle. Nothing breaks the impasse.
They. Are. Lying. Blatantly. Every policy decision made by every government at COP28 is based on an egregious blatant lie.
Meanwhile:
“It doesn’t matter if fifty-two percent think climate change isn’t dangerous,” says Senator Chris Coons. “This is unstoppable. Even if Trump is elected, this will go forward.’
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed this fall, dictated that all industries conform and tens, if not hundreds of billions are slated to be poured into industry-crippling climate regulations, based on a lie. All individual enterprise will be harnessed and burdened by this lie: building, food, insurance, engineering charges, clothing, energy, schooling, travel, it will all be re-engineered to adapt to a scenario, which the IPCC scientists themselves believe is only 5% likely.
If Trump wins, to create prosperity, to bring us out of the dank hole the not-elite experience, this all has to be unpicked.
Do you see the future yet? Here, I’ll help. As an example, where I live is 100% run by global warming fanatics. If you try to open up housing, get people out of tents and trucks, even 35 new affordable units, all the fanatics turn up and whine and submit thousands of papers of terrible research. No one else shows up. No one.
Our economy is pretty much 75% subsidized by government debt, grants and pensions. Our average age is 70. Our house prices average at $1,000,000. People live in their cars, while 95% of our land is left fallow, unused, the forests and fields largely untended. Our cultural and civic life is contentious and divided. Most people have hived off and leave the fanatics to themselves. Or, they pander. There is no innovation, there is no excitement, there is very little happiness. That is the future warmists want.
OK, here’s the point of all this:
“Anyone, including me, who has built their understanding on what level of warming is likely this century on that RCP8.5 scenario should probably revise that understanding in a less alarmist direction.” (David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth)
Curry: “The extreme emissions scenario RCP8.5 has commonly been referred to as the “business as usual” (BAU) scenario.¹? Referring to RCP8.5 as BAU implies that it is probable in the absence of stringent climate mitigation. Positioning the extreme RCP8.5 scenario as the only clearly defined baseline has made this scenario central to assessments of climate change impacts. RCP8.5 paints a dystopian future that is fossil-fuel intensive and excludes any climate mitigation policies. RCP8.5 drives climate model projections of nearly 5°C of warming by the end of the century, relative to pre-industrial temperatures. Via RCP8.5, this outlook of the future was subsequently adopted for thousands of academic studies that project future climate impacts on people and the environment, to evaluate the costs and benefits of adaptation and mitigation policies, and to estimate the cost effectiveness of policies designed to meet mitigation.
How dare they do this? How dare they?
The 8.5 scenarios can only emerge under a very narrow range of circumstances, comprising a severe course change from recent energy use. Both the RCP8.5 and the SSP5–8.5 scenarios have drawn criticism owing to the assumptions around future coal use, requiring up to 6.5 times more coal use in 2100 than today—an amount larger than some estimates of economically-recoverable coal reserves. A recent elicitation of energy experts gives SSP5–8.5 only a 5 percent chance of occurring among all of the possible no-policy baseline scenarios; the likelihood of SSP5–8.5 becomes much lower when recent and future commitments for policy actions are considered.²? The IEA analysis (Table 7.1) indicates that the worst-case scenarios, RCP8.5/SSP5–8.5, are off the table for the next several decades, and will stay there unless we actively choose to follow them. In many ways, the world has moved beyond the no-policy baseline scenarios through a combination of technological innovation, falling costs of clean energy sources and climate policies already enacted. These changes are unlikely to be reversed, even in the absence of new policies and technologies. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the shift in expectations for future emissions that is represented by the difference in the new IEA scenarios versus RCP8.5.
COP28 is a lie and they know it. They are lying to us. Hundreds of thousands of scientists, policy makers and activists, politicians like John Kerry are blatantly lying to us. They will destroy western civilization in order to prosecute this lie. And they will do it without guilt, while revelling in hate and luxury.
If not stopped, Greens will become the most brutal oppressors and genocidal maniacs in human history.
Read more at: ElizabethNickson.Substack.com
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