Christopher Booker and his
colleague Richard North, both renowned UK journalists, shot into the limelight two
years by their series of brilliant exposé of the drawbacks of the Report of the
UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their chairman, Rajendra
Pachauri, which destroyed almost irrevocably both their credibility in public
eyes. A sideline of this campaign was exposing the widespread usage of WWF’s “grey literature” by the IPCC and
passing this off as “peer reviewed literature”
to give IPCC’s findings a stamp of scientific authority.
Now Booker exposes the WWF again
in his brilliant article in UK’s Telegraph, which is re-posted latter in this
post. Booker had previously exposed WWF as a master carbon profiteer and corrupter of science. But here in this article, he also exposes them as also human
rights violators around the globe. If this comes as a shock to most it is because Booker overlooks
to provide the historical context needed to understand that these
are no aberrations but only a reflection of their true ideological underpinnings. We provide the latter as an introduction to Booker's article.
UK’s Prince Philip, Duke of
Edinburgh and Prince Bernhard of Netherland are the co-founders of the
WFF. There are many commonalities
between the two that drew them into each other’s arms in a common venture but
the two most important are provided below:
- Members
of the Nazi Party.
There had
been many rumours while Britain fought two nasty wars with Adolf Hitler’s Germany;
the British Royal family supported the Nazi Party, even financially. Prince
Philip had recently broken a 60-year public silence about his family’s links
with the Nazis. In a frank interview, he admitted that they found Hitler’s
attempts to restore Germany’s power and prestige ‘attractive’ and admitted they had ‘inhibitions about the Jews’. The revelations came in a book about
German royalty kowtowing to the Nazis, which features photographs never
published in the UK. They include one of Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of
his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brown shirt uniforms.
Prince
Bernhard on the other hand was a member of the Nazi Party and had to resign
from it, in order to hold onto his
title. Prince Bernhard first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his
last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of
the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS.
Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi
Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht's slave labour camp system by building
concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber.
Bernhard's role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS. According to the
April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS
intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the
Nuremberg trials.
- Malthus
Ideology
"Instead
of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits
... we should ...crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the
plague. ... But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging
diseases; and those benevolent, but mistaken men, who have thought they were
doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of
particular disorders. If by these and similar means the annual mortality were
increased from 1 in 36 or 40, to 1 in 18 or 20, we might possibly every one of
us marry at the age of puberty, and yet few be absolutely starved." -Thomas
Malthus, The Essay on Population, 5th edition, 1817.
“A cancer
is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an
uncontrolled multiplication of people…. We must shift our efforts from the
treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will
demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” –Paul Ehrlich, The
Population Bomb
“In
searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution,
the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit
the bill…. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap of
mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human
intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they
can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” –Club of Rome, The
First Global Revolution, 1991
“In the event I am reborn, I would like to
return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve
overpopulation.” – Prince Philip, quoted in Deutsche Presse Agentur, August
1988
The
biggest problems are the damn national sectors of these developing countries.
These countries think that they have the right to develop their resources as
they see fit. They want to become powers.´´ --Thomas Lovejoy, vice president, World
Wildlife Fund U.S.A., 1984.
“Malthus
has been vindicated; reality is finally catching up with Malthus. The Third
World is overpopulated, it’s an economic mess, and there’s no way they could
get out of it with this fast-growing population. Our philosophy is: back to the
village.” –Dr. Arne Schiotz, World Wildlife Fund Director of Conservation, 1984
“If we
look at things causally, the bigger problem in the world is population. We must
set a ceiling to human numbers. All development aid should be made dependent on
the existence of strong family planning programs.” –Sir Peter Scott, chairman,
World Wildlife Fund U.K., 1984
The Malthusian philosophy
accordingly pervades their every outlook of life, even agriculture which they consider
their prime enemy. And what is the sin of farming?
“You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than
you are capable of feeding. In other words conservation may involve culling in
order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any
particular habitat. I realize this is a very touchy subject, but the fact
remains that mankind is part of the living world…. Every new acre brought into
cultivation means another acre denied to wild species... Prince Philip, quoted
in Deutsche Presse Agentur, August 1988
The WWF propaganda is nothing
short of a declaration of war against agriculture. If you you think this is an
exaggeration, take a look at WWF pronouncements:
"Agriculture allowed and even encouraged population growth. With reliable food supplies and even surpluses, birth spacing could be reduced to one to two years. The fastest population growth rates presently occur in agricultural areas...
When practised without care, agriculture presents
the greatest threat to species and ecosystems. Indeed, many of WWF's priority
places and species are negatively impacted by agriculture.... Agriculture is
the leading source of pollution in many countries.....
Agriculture is "one of the thirstiest" of
all human activities, consuming nearly 70% of the freshwater which human
societies "appropriate" for their use globally. Sustaining
agriculture requires "free-flowing water" to be "diverted and
wasted by dams for irrigation."
The WWF is virtually the private
plantation of the British royal family, which carries forward the tradition of
rabid genocidalists Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Thomas Malthus. Their
basic belief, repeated ad nauseam for the last 200-plus years, is that man is just another animal, which must be
managed and culled like any other herd of beasts, by (as Bertrand Russell put
it) by methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary.
Climate Justice is accordingly just
a euphemism for population control, particularly those of the weaker sections
of the human species, the poor and developing countries. Climate hysteria and
the solutions peddled including the so called Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) are
a part of this genocidal agenda and have been so pervasive that the policies of
almost all leading environment organizations and NGOs whether Greenpeace;
Oxfam; ChristianAid; ActionAid, CARE etc are reflective of this philosophy and
agenda. This is why despite the Booker’s exposé of WWF as human rights
violators, none of these jokers will disassociate with WFF and happily flaunt
their collaboration with the latter as they do presently. Neither will Henri Tiphagne, Colin Gonsalves, Salil Shetty and their kind, leading lights of our so-called Human Rights brigade in our
country despite common knowledge that WWF applies the same tactics with the
Gujjar nomads in their Nature Conservation Project in UP and with last few
aborigine peoples, belonging to the Negrito race, in the National Park projects
in the Nilgiri Mountains which WWF oversees.
How Climate Change Has Got Worldwide Fund for Nature Bamboozled
What a strange body the WWF
(formerly the World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature) has
become these days. It is the largest, richest and most influential
environmental lobbying organisation in the world. Originally set up in 1961 by
Julian Huxley, Prince Philip, Prince Bernhard and others, for the admirable
purpose of campaigning to save species endangered by human activity, it has
morphed in the last 20 years into something very different, more akin to a
multinational corporation.
The WWF empire now derives a very
hefty chunk of its income from partnerships with governments, or the EU, or
actual multinationals, such as Coca-Cola and Sky, which like to use its iconic
panda logo (originally designed by the naturalist Peter Scott) to give an
“eco-caring” gloss to their commercial activities. The chief reason why it has
so greatly increased its wealth and influence is that it has joined other lobby
groups, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, in pushing to the top of
its agenda that most fashionable and lucrative of environmental causes, the “battle to halt climate change”.
But this has led WWF into some
rather odd little tangles, such as those which have recently emerged over its
activities in Tanzania. Much of its work there is carried out under a UN
climate change policy known as REDD+ (“reducing emissions from deforestation
and forest degradation”), which is part of the UN’s £17?? billion Fast Start
programme. Britain, giving £1.5? billion, is that programme’s second largest
contributor after Japan.
Last November, Prince Charles, as
president of WWF UK, flew to Tanzania to hand out “Living Planet” awards to five “community
leaders” involved in WWF projects around the delta of the Rufiji River,
which holds the world’s largest mangrove forest. Part of their intention has
been to halt further damage to the forest by local farmers, who have been
clearing it to grow rice and coconuts. This is because the mangroves store
unusual amounts of “carbon” (CO2),
viewed as the major contributor to global warming. (Another WWF project in the
delta is to find a way of measuring just how great a threat release of that CO2
might be.)
Shortly before the Prince’s
arrival, it was revealed that thousands of villagers had been evicted from the
forest, their huts in the paddy fields torched and their coconut palms felled.
This was carried out by the Tanzanian government’s Forestry and Beekeeping
Division, with which WWF has been working. But Stephen Makiri, the head of WWF
Tanzania, was quick to insist that WWF had never advocated expelling
communities from the delta, and that “the evictions were carried out by
government agencies”.
At this point, however, two
American professors intervened. They had just published a study of the delta in
an environmental journal, entitled “The REDD menace: resurgent protectionism in
mangrove forests”. It was highly critical of the so-called “fortress conservation” policy advocated by WWF under REDD+,
claiming that it was seriously damaging the traditional life of those local
communities which had been sustainably farming and fishing in the area for
centuries.
Although this provoked a vehement
riposte from Mr Makiri, who claimed in turn that the paper had seriously
damaged the reputation of his staff who had been working on the WWF REDD
project, a new furore had already erupted over claims that some of those staff
had been falsely claiming expenses on a massive scale, amounting to more than
£1?million.
In December, WWF responded by
commissioning the international auditors Ernst & Young to investigate. In
February, it was announced that Makiri had resigned as head of WWF Tanzania.
The local office of Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID)
leapt in to say that, while it “eagerly awaited” Ernst & Young’s report, it
wished to emphasise that, although it has a general funding programme with WWF
in the area, it had not been responsible for funding any of its projects
directly. In March, a statement from WWF US, which raises half a billion
dollars a year, confirmed that “so far 13
employees have left the organisation, along with two managers who had oversight
responsibility”.
When I recently asked DfID what
had happened to the report it was “eagerly
awaiting” in February, I was told to ask WWF. They told me they had
commissioned “a series of reports” on “four projects in Tanzania and the
behaviour of a number of staff members there”, not all of which “have yet been
completed”. But a summary of their findings will be published “in due course”.
It is hardly surprising that WWF is so anxious to defend its good name, since so much of its income (£55?million a year in Britain alone) depends not just on the five million members it claims worldwide but on the support it gets from governments. Nowhere is this web of top-level influence more striking than in the role WWF now plays in the workings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the body whose reports, supposedly based only on “gold standard” science, have been the chief
driver behind worldwide concern over global warming for 20 years.
When a series of scandals blew up
two years ago over the more alarmist claims made by the IPCC in its 2007
assessment report, the two which attracted most headlines were shown to have
been based, not on peer-reviewed science, but on campaigning material put out
by WWF. One of these, a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers might all have
melted within 30 years, was sourced from a WWF paper based only on a magazine
interview with an obscure Indian scientist (who was subsequently employed by
the research institute run by the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri). The
other, a claim that drought caused by global warming could lead to the
destruction of 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, was revealed – by my
colleague Dr Richard North and this column – to have originated in a WWF
propaganda leaflet based on research that had not been concerned with climate
change at all, but with the damage being done to the forest by logging and
fires.
Exhaustive analysis, led by the
Canadian author Donna Laframboise, then revealed that nearly a third of the
18,531 sources cited by the report had no more scientific provenance than press
clippings, student theses and claims by activist groups – among which none was
more prominent than WWF. But worse was to come. In her recent book on the IPCC,
The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert,
Laframboise shows how, from 2004 on, WWF deliberately set out to recruit
contributors to the IPCC’s next report to its Climate Witness Scientific
Advisory Panel.
The result was that WWF “climate witnesses” contributed to two
thirds of the 2007 report’s 44 chapters, including every one of the 20 chapters
in the section on the impacts of climate change. A third of all the chapters in
the report had WWF witnesses as co-ordinating lead authors, ultimately
responsible for their contents. As Laframboise summed up, her analysis
confirmed that, far from the report being the work of dispassionate scientists,
“the IPCC has been infiltrated… wholly and entirely compromised”.
Many of these WWF panel members
are now at work on the IPCC’s new report, due out next year. WWF has been so
successful in getting its allies into key official positions that, in 2007, the
chief executive of WWF UK, Robert Napier, was able to slip seamlessly into a
new job as chairman of Britain’s Met Office. This is another body which,
through its Hadley Centre on climate change, has been a central player in
promoting alarm over global warming ever since 1990, when the centre was set up
by Sir John Houghton, one of the IPCC’s founding fathers.
WWF has had only one real setback
in its ascent to such influence. In March 2010, I reported here on its part in
a hugely ambitious scheme, backed by $250?million from the World Bank under an
earlier version of REDD, to turn the CO2 locked in the Amazon rainforest into
“carbon credits” worth an estimated $60?billion. The idea was that these would
be saleable on the world carbon market, to enable firms in the developed world
to stay in business by buying the right to continue emitting CO2. WWF and
others were granted selling rights by the Brazilian government over an area of
forest twice the size of Switzerland. But, following the twin failures of the
UN’s 2009 Copenhagen World Climate Conference, and the bid to give the US a
compulsory “cap and trade” scheme, the project came to nothing.
Just how far WWF has travelled
from the noble purposes for which it was set up was perfectly symbolised by the
way it chose as its chief marketing tool the slogan “Adopt a polar bear”. If
this organisation still had concern for endangered species closest to its
heart, it would know that the idea that polar bears are dying out due to global
warming is no more than sentimental propaganda. But then that is the main
business that WWF now seems to be in – very much at the expense of the rest of
us and, of course, those communities in the Rufiji delta.
Note:
This is the official statement of WWF acknowledging the fraud by their staff of
their Tanzanian Office could be read here.
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