Small acts, Big
Impact' is an animation video produced by SEEDS, a Christian Aid partner
in India as part of an educational programme that is targeted to reach 10,000
schools all over the country. Click the arrow of video to watch.
If each school is
assumed to have student strength of 1,000, then this programme could easily
reach a whooping 10 million school children. This is apart from their teachers,
parents and siblings. That's how large this programme is designed to reach. The
storyline is simple enough. A camel in the desert is shown shivering while an
equally bewildered yak on top of a mountain demands to know why the snow has
melted. Both phenomena are blamed on humans and the remedy is to embrace solar
and wind energy!
The Morphing of
Christianity to the Religion of Climate Change
All Creation Mourning (2007),
a climate policy document of Christian Aid admits that Climate Change is
neither mentioned in the Bible nor has it been an integral part of contemporary
systematic theology. Consequently, Christian Aid needed to evolve an approach
to climate change that is rooted in the ‘wider theology’ and ‘ethics of development’ to
frame climate change as their policy.
Interesting as
this video reflects the offspring of such a marriage. The climate change theme
is kept largely secular but cleverly laced with Christian religious nuances - 'planting seeds, harvest, mission, save the
world, let's make God happy'. Christian Aid as their name suggests,
is supposedly one of the most influential development arms of the Protestant
Church in both Britain and Europe. So the use of Christian nuances may
not be startling from this sense.
But don't get
fooled. At the core is nature worship and not Christ. The late Michael
Crichton, internationally renowned science fiction writer, was of the opinion
that certain social structures remain the same irrespective if society changes;
religion being one of them. Not known very well was Crichton as an
anthropologist by academic training. Providing insight to the climate change
ideology in his book, State of Fear,
he opined: 'It's a holistic
ideology; shot through with religious sentiment...it is in fact a perfect 21st
century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.'
In the UK, all
religions are experiencing a downswing in terms of active membership and
practice. Though the 2001 Census, found 71% of the
population had categorized themselves as Christians (with around 16% atheists),
a research by another UK Christian charity, Tearfund revealed that between 1979
and 2005, half of all Christians stopped going to church. Attendance of Sunday
church services plunged well below 10% - a trend that aligns tightly with the
continued secularization of British society that nevertheless is in line with
other countries in mainland Europe.
Among the earlier
strategies used by the Church to stem this membership drift was the
popularization of Liberation Theology that was strongly moulded by a
Marxist-Trotskyist philosophy. This somewhat worked for some time but
after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, they
found that they needed a new adhesive. They found one through the re-invention
of environmentalism as Climate Change, based on a theology that addressed a
secular issue with Christian religious trappings.
Seen within this
context, religious nuances in the video then become a mere tool deliberately
employed by Christian Aid to stem the drift away by sizeable sections of their
original core constituency. The wrap up line of the video is designed to create
the impression with whatever Christian Aid exhorts children to do in the name
of Climate Change ’God will be
happy'. But God in this case becomes a proxy for Nature at the sub-conscious
level. The effect is created by skillfully blurring the distinction between the
two - God and Nature (God's Creation). The video's basic plot blame humans for
climate changes (sin) and in order to save the Planet they needed to act. The
concept of sin is further equated to carbon indulgence. However Christian
Aid disguises all this in a complex web of theological rhetoric:
“If climate change crisis is to be addressed,
the concept of structural sin urgently needs to be highlighted. In relational
terms, while individual seeks to heal……the relationship between society as a
whole and the natural world must be urgently addressed.”
This edifice of
the borrowed ‘wider theology’ is no different from those followed by typical
environmental groups such as Greenpeace whose founding meeting incidentally
also took place at the basement of an Unitarian Church in Vancouver.
Jonah Goldberg in a paper called this the birth of Church of Green
and further elaborated its significance:
'Environmentalism's most renewable resources
are fear, guilt and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful
creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic
past. Salvation comes from shedding our sins, rejecting our addictions (to oil,
consumerism, etc.) and demonstrating an all-encompassing love of Mother Earth.
Quoth Al Gore: "The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral
and spiritual challenge to all of humanity'
Michael Crichton
commented in a similar vein:
'There's an initial
Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from
grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of
knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us
all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which
is now called sustainability.
Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as
organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people
with the right beliefs, imbibe. Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the
coming doomsday--these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly
conservative beliefs.'
The chapter on Sin: The Breakdown of Relationships in
Christian Aid’s Climate Change policy document, All Creation Mourning,
takes to quoting from the Al Gore book, 'Inconvenient Truth' clearly
indicating that its climate change policy has less to do with the Bible but
with Goreism - the wider theology from which Christian Aid seek inspiration
from! Though the Bible propounds that while 'Christ came into this world to give life abundantly', this
leading development arm of Protestant Church in Britain has chosen to preach
the Gospel of Global Doom! From a Christian institution that is expected to
reflect hope to all humanity, Christian Aid morphed into an entity peddling
hopelessness as illustrated by the title of its policy document: All Creation Moaning - quoting
the Bible out of context. What a fall! It led one Christian theologian to
observe:
"It has always been a temptation for the
Christian Church to slavishly copy the latest trends of the day. While there is
a place to present an unchanging message in new forms and expressions, it becomes
a tragedy when it comes at the expense of truth and good doctrine."
However, a
significant bulk of Christian Aid's funding, even today still comes from a
small minority of Church going Christians, many of who are aware that Climate
Change is not even mentioned in the Bible. Christian Aid's climate change
policy documents acknowledge that these sections view environmentalism, leave
alone, climate change, with a certain degree of suspicion.
These are the
types that reason, if Earth and its climate system is the product of a Creator,
the Perfect Designer, a minuscule change in atmospheric chemistry should not
lead to catastrophic climate changes. They even mock the thought that mankind
can induce significant parametric changes to the Earth; dismissing it as
ridiculous as ole (Viking) King Canute attempts to control the tide. With
all advances in knowledge and technology today, these sections feel that man
remain totally helpless in trying to either trigger or stop a Tsunami,
earthquake, snow storm or a cyclone.
The more Bible
read among these sections remember the commandment in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 - 'Test all things, hold fast what is good'
a clear call for Christians to display skepticism as a way of life. Such
a world view inherently put them at odds with Christian Aid's Climate Change
policy which the recent sceptic surge could amplify only further. To these
sections, the deliberate insertion of Christian religious nuances in Christian
Aid’s videos then becomes an instrument to camouflage the true character of
their climate policies.
Climate alarmism
as part of a larger Imperialistic Strategy
A typical Greenpeace climate hysteria routine could be watched by clicking the arrow of
the video. Greenpeace relies heavily on shock and awe effect. The video starts
off very innocently, with a mother turning the tap on of a bath tub in which
her child is placed. However, when she walks off, only then it hits us
that this is designed as a metaphor for a serious topic. The only background
sound is of running water and wailing cries of the baby as the camera trains
its focus on the rapidly rising water in the tub. The implicit
message conveyed is that if climate change is not tackled, we put to risk the
next generation to the dangers of sea rise!
This kind of
emotional pitch is also widely used in NGO funding advertisements. World Vision
for example have in the past used advertisements with such punchlines: 'Before, you turn this page, 1000 children
will die in Africa'.
The undertone of
the Christian Aid video, 'Small acts, Big Impact', though alarmist is certainly
not of a degree that matches those of the Greenpeace variety. But this kind of
mild alarmism can still be very fraudulent. When you have facts you will
certainly tend to use them to further a cause you passionately believe in. But
when you are short on truth, this is when the tendency creeps in to resort to
climate evangelism - a danger which Indian Minister of Environment, Jairam
Ramesh, recently warns about.
'He who refuses to do
arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense" John McCarthy
Take for example
the issue of glaciers melting. Children are merely told glaciers are melting
but what is suppressed is the time-scale. If children can do simple arithmetic,
surely they are capable of working out the likely doomsday, if given the
variables like the average thickness of the glacier and the current melt rate
assumed constant over time. But this is what the video doesn’t do - encouraging
child participation. Instead we see Christian Aid faking an image of
encouraging listening to children by claiming that ‘pupils will be asked to think of ways that the impact of climate change
can be reduced’. The transcripts of the video however tell-tales a
very different story of Christian Aid - one that literally brainwashes impressionable
children by spelling out solar and wind energy as solutions to the problem.
'How to think' is the anti-thesis
of advocating 'What to think'.
If Christian Aid wants to educate children on climate change, they need to
present both sides of an argument, given the fact that children are in the
impressionable age. Giving one side of the argument as Christian Aid does to
children amounts to forced indoctrination. This indoctrination is not even of
the Christianity kind but the new religion peddled by Al Gore and the IPCC. Janet Albrechtsen Blog
commented on the dangers of this:
'There are plenty reasons for concern on this score. Adults have
barely engaged in a grown-up conversation over the causes of global warming.
Debate over the what, how, why, and when on global warming has been drowned out
by hysteria.
Global warming has been cleverly framed as the big moral issue of our
time to quarantine it from debate. ..This is an old trick, but a good one.
Given that stultifying atmosphere among adults, it is a stretch to imagine that
classroom talk will be different.'
By itself, there
is nothing significantly objectionable to peddling solar and wind energy. In
many ways, no one really disputes these options are beneficial to mankind. Peak
oil concerns further make it imperative for any community or nation to
transition out to greater dependence on other energy sources. But the only
problem with this line of logic is that the peak oil scenario is still very
distantly away whereas the Christian Aid video wants us to ACT NOW to bring
about such a transition. This is in a setting where 60% of Indians either do
not have access or cannot afford electricity, even if provided otherwise.
Making available affordable abundant energy then becomes the only solution to eradicate
poverty, given that it is energy that is the main driver of all development.
ACTING NOW brushes
aside the inconvenient truth that renewable energy does not presently come
cheap and its adoption will have a far reaching effect of reducing the affordability
of energy to the masses and instead may accentuate these vulnerabilities even
further. Increased cost of energy has the same effect. It immediately increases
the price of each and every commodity, including food, bringing it out of reach
of more people in the country. Higher cost of production will also curb
our exports, throwing a spanner in the way of our economic growth. Cheap energy
has been absolutely central to the massive improvements in health and
well-being which have so enormously lengthened and improved the quality of life
for millions across the world during the last century. So when does it become
the responsibility of the Western Christian Church to condition developing
countries to launch a propaganda campaign to give up the fossil fuel route to
alleviate our poverty?
This is the real
agenda of Christian Aid's so called climate change awareness programme among
children – degrowth our economy under the contraction and convergence (C&C)
doctrine of the global climate ideology. The first step, ‘contraction’, would
mean adopting a ‘safe’ target CO2 concentration level and then setting global
annual emission levels which should take the atmosphere progressively towards
that target. The convergence part entails even developing countries to cut down
their carbon emissions, even if they played no part historically in the
accumulation of these gases.
Instead of pumping
money into R&D to make renewable energy sources more technologically
reliable and cost competitive, this climate change ethos is based on a deep
cynicism; a belief that the only motivating force for their promotion is the
profit motive i.e. individual greed. As later seen in this paper, relying on
the market to resolve the environmental crisis is nothing less than collective
suicide. Support to such climate treaty is a classical example of a NGO,
facilitating the enrolment of the poor into development agendas that do not
basically benefit them by using climate hysteria as a tool.
In India's case, it is cheap coal that nature has bestowed us in abundance -
the country possessing the fourth largest reserve of coal in the world. And it
is this resource abundance that we need to judiciously capitalize on to offer
affordable energy to our masses. Realizing this, beneath their justice facade, lies
Christian Aid’s neo-imperialistic agenda. as it shows itself in their document: Capturing India’s Carbon: The UK’s role in
delivering low-carbon technology to India (2009).
This is apparently
a scooping study on the potential demand size and the strategies needed
to capture our carbon sequestration market by the UK by dumping this
experimental and very expensive technology on India - in the process, raising
our per unit cost of energy. Surely for an organization that advocates ‘Justice to Poverty’, we should have
expected that such an appreciation of the dangers of increasing energy costs
come intuitively. We now know better of wolves in sheep clothing don't we? What
else can we expect of any organization whose CEO, Daleep Murkerjee has been
conferred the honour of Order of the British Empire? Apparently, he earned it -
building export demand for UK products in developing countries in the name of
Justice!
Does the non-use
of the world’s resources get us off any hooks, whether environmental, economic,
or theological? Of course, one day energy will have to come from sources other
than fossil fuels. Is it then the responsibility of the Western Church to tell
us in developing countries to stop using fossil fuel? Why should they pretend
that when that day comes to change to non-fossil alternatives, it guarantees us
freedom from the shocks of dramatic and often unpredictable climate change? This
amounts to preaching basically untruths. Even if all the carbon dioxide is
eliminated from our atmosphere, earthquakes, Tsunami, heat and cold waves,
cyclones and hurricanes, droughts and floods are all integral part of
God’s created climate of our world. There is simply no return to a mythical
God-given climate stability and security since they were none to begin with
once Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden!
Global Warming:
Only Thing Man-made is the Claim Itself!
Christian Aid's climate
policy favouring immediate adoption of renewable energy can even be all
justified, if the science behind it was solid.
But is it?
As in the case of
many other NGOs, Christian Aid's Climate Change Policy operates around three
basic assumptions: natural conditions are optimal, climate is fragile, and
human influences wreck the climate. Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of
Bio-geography, at the University of London commented cheekily: 'What we have fundamentally forgotten is
simple primary school science. Climate always changes. It is always…warming or
cooling, it’s never stable. And if it were stable, it would actually be
interesting scientifically because it would be the first time for four and a
half billion years'
A Christian
theologian similarly commented: "After all, we believe that this is God’s world. Now we are told that
before humans interfered with ‘natural climates’, the climate was stable and
guaranteed a stable God-given environment in which we could all live with
security, and with a future for our children and grandchildren. The planet, we
are told, having been a secure and stable home for all these generations, has
now become threatened, if not doomed - and it is all our fault."
Going back to the
video, Christian Aid intentionally links the usage of "Freezing in the Desert and Snow melting in the mountain"
with "Battle against climate change" and "affected by global
warming". In fact, in doing so, Christian Aid is not alone in the NGO
world. Others like Greenpeace etc do exactly the same. Steven Guilbeault of
Greenpeace is quoted as claiming 'Global
warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter; that's what
we're dealing with.'
It is easy to
connect up all the dots to grasp that that these alarmist NGOs uses the term
Climate Change simply as a surrogate of Global Warming. But then the term
climate change is also an oxymoron. If we go down the route of cutting carbon
emissions to less than 20% of current levels, we should be clear on some
fundamental truths about God’s created world.
"Given the world's climate history is several
billions of years, there is not now, and never has been, a ‘stable
environment’. Climate has changed, often far more dramatically than it is
changing now, in very short periods of time - and quite unrelated to any human
activity".
These changes are
very little understood, and we have no means of knowing where we are in the
cycle of changing climates. The UN-Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC)'s computer model for instance did not predict the lack of warming after
1998. In the past two million years there have been 60 ice ages, and in the
last 120,000 years since the development of modern man, there were 20 sudden
global warming. If we flashback to the last century we come across a number of
identifiable periods of temperature variability over that reconfirms earth's
natural variability.
·
Cooling in the 20s
·
Warming in 30s to
40s
·
Cooling from 50s
to 70s
·
Warming in 80s and
90s
Christian Aid
further claims floods, cyclones and droughts are caused by climate change
and further warns of desertification, more severe rainfall and flooding,
stronger cyclones and glacier melt. And so any disaster is now promptly blamed
by warmist NGOs on being man-made the way it was once blamed on Satan. See full list, including irregular periods in
women, kidney stones, volcanic eruptions, lousy wine, insomnia, bad tempers,
vampire moths and bubonic plagues. Nothing is too far-fetched to be clubbed as
signs of global warming.
The Bible,
particularly the Old Testament can also be looked at as a history book of the
nation of Israel. The over 2,000 years of history recorded by the Bible is
punctuated with regular mentions of extreme weather events at different time
points. If Christian Aid attributes the cause of droughts and floods to climate
changes, how do they reconcile their alarmism to those that biblically occurred
thousands of years ago and the fact that the human race has survived it
all?
Take Joseph's actions
as adviser to Pharaoh in Egypt as an example. Carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere was then not at alarming levels as it is today. Even then Joseph did
not dissipate his energy by creating alarmism for fighting off the looming
threat of drought. He accepted it as part and parcel of God given climate.
Instead he chose to maximize agricultural yields and storage of grains during
the seven good weather years to offset the following seven years of drought. As
for global warming, even the IPCC do not deny that temperature, during the
Roman Period – the era in which Jesus lived - and the Medieval Warm Period was
high as or even higher than present times.
Besides, recent
media disclosures about IPCC predictions of the vanishing of Himalayan glaciers
and other natural disasters have established that these alarms peddled by
Christian Aid holds no scientific validity and/or are mere speculation made by
‘grey literature’ published by NGOs like World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and
Greenpeace, using personnel, unqualified to even scientifically comment on
these subjects.
The latest setback
for the IPCC being its current lead author, Robert Watson, chief scientist at
Defra, UK environmental ministry contradicting the claim that global warming
could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020.
Even the IPCC has defended its errors saying that even scientists are human.
Even Toyota has recalled its defective vehicles. But NGOs including Christian
Aid have yet to comment on these developments. Embarrassment? Perhaps.
Having shrilled warmist hysteria for so long, they are perhaps awaiting a face
saver to climb off the global warming bandwagon.
The tragedy is
that even if Christian Aid was depending on 'wider theology' to gain an
insight to anthropological climate change, rather than Goreism, they should
have just looked at other ancient religious texts that would have indicated how
absurd the concept of man-made climate change is. The Bhagavad Gita is one such
example 'All actions take place in
time by the interweaving of the forces of Nature; but the man lost in selfish
delusion thinks that he himself is the actor.'
One day, energy
will have to come from sources other than fossil fuels. This made another
Christian theologian to comment: "But to pretend that when that day comes, whatever other benefits it may
bring with it, to assume it will free mankind from the shocks of dramatic and
often unpredictable climate change, is preaching fundamental untruths. The
non-use of the world’s resources does not get us off any hooks, whether
environmental, economic, or theological. The Tsunamis, cyclones and hurricane,
heat and cold waves, floods and droughts will still be an integral part of
God’s created world, even if free from carbon."
Climate of
Money: Follow the Trail
It was the 80s & 90s warming period that provided the context and the
opportunity for the climate alarmists to argue that earth once again faced the
prospect of a serious climatic calamity. Climate Change became the equivalent
of blockbuster production of the environmental movement that not only became a
cult by itself but mostly consumed the environmental movement itself. This cult
succeeded in creating a series of financial incentives, large enough to stoke
the fire of rent seeking impulses of even charities like Christian Aid.
Manmade climate
change proved a dream bonanza for all NGOs, including those of the Christian
persuasion as it enabled them to whip up raw emotions of fear and guilt to
liberally line their money bags which they can't if climate change is
attributed to earth's natural variability. Make no mistake, their man-made
climate change religious belief aside; climate change is a high stakes, big
business. The more successful NGOs are at persuading the public that there's a
climatic crisis, the more likely they rake in the moolah.
But the recent
global economic meltdown hit the NGO sector hard – their growth trajectory in
terms of revenues are trending to be flat or even declining, due to fall offs
mainly from individuals and corporates. To make up the shortfall, NGOs are driven
more and more to the open arms of governmental donors. The most available
governmental funds are for ‘climate
change’ and this could be why more NGOs are seen to be upping their ante in
Climate advocacy in the last two years.
Billions of
dollars that governments dole out to NGOs mostly account for their outward
passion for climate change. According to the latest annual report of Christian
Aid, almost 30% of its funds come from institutional donors viz. bi-lateral and
multi-lateral governmental agencies and corporates. Christian Aid for
instance is a beneficiary of the UN Global Environment Facility (GEF). Due to
poor transparency standards practiced, it was not possible to ascertain just
how much Christian Aid actually receives from GEF annually. However, this is
what one skeptic website had to comment on GEF influence on NGOs in
general:
'In its June, 1998 report, the Global
Environment Facility (GEF) listed $748,142,000 in global warming projects,
$767,019,000 in biodiversity projects, and $63,672,000 in "multiple focal
areas" projects. A detailed analysis of the projects revealed that these
same NGOs were named repeatedly as executing agency or collaborating agency, on
42 projects totaling $792,705,000 in value.
The NGOs named in these projects include: The Nature Conservancy (TNC);
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN); Greenpeace;
World Resources Institute (WRI); and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). It is
little wonder that they attend every climate change meeting en masse to urge
the delegates to continue the global warming welfare program.'
Global Warming
theory has meanwhile suffered a series of setbacks in the last few months:
Climategate (UK); Climategate (US); (Himalayan) Glaciergate; Copenhagen
Meltdown; Big Chill and exposure of leading proponents of the theory as carbon
profiteers. We can add to this list of goofs - Amazongate and sinking of 50% of
Netherlands. Why then are NGOs, Christian Aid included, not prompted to
jettison their Climate policy? It’s perhaps because they are still salivating
at the proposal for a Global Climate Fund that could provide them mind-boggling
income. According to a Christian Aid report (September 1999), industrialized
nations should be owing over 600 billion dollars to the developing nations for
the associated costs of climate changes. At current prices, the amount will be
close to a whooping one trillion dollars. NGOs are still eying to grab a huge
chunk of this cake.
Should Christian
Ad be Indulging in Child Abuse in India?
As an introduction
to their video, Christian Aid says: 'This campaign is focusing on children because we feel they are the best
way of carrying the message on climate change to their families and their
communities.'
There we have it.
Christian Aid is targeting children for religio-political indoctrination. This
is not certainly science, even if climate change education maybe a good
thing. It is reminiscent of the Child Crusades of 1212 AD - one of the
most shameful chapters of Christian history, where children were whipped up
into a wild frenzy to be organized as an army to fight Muslim invaders even
after their adults had failed four times. The most despicable part was that
many were less than 12 years old, with no real understanding of either religion
or politics. Most of these child crusaders lost their lives, drowned at sea,
were maimed for life or sold off as slaves.
In an article
against abuse of children, the Financial Post cautioned: "The notion that we should listen to the
children is fondly cultivated by organizations such as the UN because children
are naive and can be easily manipulated. They make wonderful mouthpieces for
noble-sounding but dangerous collectivist ideas'.
If children are so
matured to be taken seriously then why do the likes of child rights
organizations like Save the Children, UNICEF, Plan International etc replace
their entire adult staff and board with children? The fact they don’t, tells
its own story.
Children can be
easily tutored to say what precisely aid agencies like Christian Aid want the
world to hear. Every parent, teacher and adult knows this as a reality. Despite
this charities and environmentalists blatantly abuses children for furthering
their political agendas by making them parrot speeches written by adults in
various UN and other public fora. By all means, the likes of Christian Aid are
free to reach out to children by creating a healthy atmosphere for debate on
climate change as opposed to indoctrination.
The dangers of the
latter are the risk of brainwashing an entire generation to demand policy
responses of a kind, little realizing that these may not be actually of their
own long term interests. Unless educational programmes encourage recognition of
uncertainties, challenging assumptions and asking questions in the quest for
knowledge, such attempts remain down and right indoctrination - a form of
blatant child abuse.
The other
dimension of child abuse by Christian Aid in India is the gross distortion of
science. Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth readily illustrates this
danger. The film was to be shown in 3,500 schools in and UK and Ireland but was
taken to court, where the judge ruled that it could be only exhibited with
guidance notes to prevent political indoctrination. The judge found nine major
scientific errors 'in the context of alarmism and exaggeration' in order to
support Mr. Gore's thesis on global warming. He further ruled that global
warming was not a science but a religion. In the absence of regulations, NGOs
like Christian Aid and Greenpeace have a field day in countries like India,
spreading junk science to children, whose parents and school authorities may
not have fully woken up to the consequences, as of yet. Once they do, they
would be hell to pay as these NGOs and environmentalists can be drowned in
legal suits
Preaching Justice But Advocating Global Policies of
Injustice
In another climate
change document, Christian Aid
affirms 'Carbon markets must play a
role in tackling climate change because prices are a major influence of
behavior of individuals, companies and other polluters.'
Christian Aid
however offers this policy support with certain caveats – that carbon markets
will reach its potential only if regulated and if politicians establish it on
the right terms and even admitting that it is working imperfectly at
present. Nevertheless, Christian Aid remains one of the few NGOs to still
support carbon offsetting. Most NGOs however treat carbon trading as
fundamentally evil and actively campaigns against them, even though they
otherwise are actively involved in the Climate Change issue.
The term carbon
trading relates to commercial approaches to promoting ‘environmental
responsibility’. Under carbon trading programmes, companies that release
greenhouse gases can either agree to reduce their emissions or buy the right to
keep on polluting under the Kyoto Protocol. The concept is thought by many as
borrowing a chapter from the system of indulgences pioneered by the Catholic
Church during the Middle Dark Ages to raise funds for itself. The church
pardoners sold these indulgences to sinners to avoid time during Purgatory
after death wherein the soul needed to expiate their sins via some sort of
punishment or task that is an external manifestation of their repentance. As
the book, Carbon Neutral Myth highlights:
'The idea was that the clergy were doing more
of such actions than their meagre sins demanded, so they effectively had a
surplus of good deeds. Under the logic of the emerging market, these could be
sold as indulgences to sinners who had money, but not necessarily the time or
inclination to repent for themselves.'
The UN Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM) is one mechanism through which industrialized
countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment are permitted to invest in
ventures that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to
more expensive emission reductions in their own countries through which they
earn carbon credits. CDMs are worth about 20% of all emissions trades, which amounted
to $126 billion in 2008.
The rationale for
the carbon trading scheme was however to catalyze a rapid transitioning away
from polluting fossil fuel, over-production and over-consumption. In reality,
all it facilitates is placing a value on carbon, a so-called pollutant;
treating this intangible as a commodity that can be traded like crude or sugar.
But there is one big difference - the ‘trade’ does not actually reduce any
emissions. It simply allows companies to just buy cheap ‘carbon credits’, instead
of lowering their own toxic emission levels.
Research shows
that despite the scheme, there is a continued expansion of fresh
operational emission capacities in industrialized nations such as coal-fired
power stations, when the real intention was to reduce carbon emissions. This is
why despite the Kyoto Protocol, carbon emissions kept on rising with CDM ending
up as a tool for developed nations to outsource their responsibility for
cutting emissions to the developing world. Nevertheless, it satisfied the guilt
complex of global warmists where any imaginary carbon credit is as good as a
real one. Perhaps, it’s this placebo effect is one of the reasons why the likes
of Christian Aid continue to repose faith in carbon trading as a mechanism that
serves the objectives of climate justice!
But is this
justified?
Actually no one
can trade in physical carbon. Only rights to emit carbon can be traded. Being
an intangible commodity, all these need to be verified before credits could be
assigned. Here comes in the role of auditors. DNV, a Norwegian firm was
the largest CDM auditor on the European Carbon Exchange until a year ago when
they were suspended for professional malpractice. By that time, DNV approved
almost half of all CDM credits of the market. So another firm called SGS was
appointed as a replacement. Months later, they too were suspended as they could
not either prove their staff had vetted all the projects or held the competency
to vet projects! The scheme is thus a fraud. According to a media report:
'The European Union’s flagship cap-and-trade
carbon credit trading system is plagued by massive fraud and is effectively
under the control of organized crime, according to a December 9 statement
issued by European police. Europol, an EU-wide criminal intelligence agency
similar to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, says bogus trading at the
EU’s Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) has exceeded €5 billion (U.S. $7 billion)
over the past 18 months alone. Europol says that in some EU countries, up to 90
percent of the entire market volume is fraudulent.'
NGOs accordingly
only delude themselves that carbon trading; supposedly facilitating fund
transfer from the West to the Third World is actually helping poor people.
These billions often end up with the financial intermediaries in different
financial capitals of the world and corrupt bureaucrats as it was exposed in
China. The main beneficiaries of carbon trading are the lobby of financial
firms like Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, JP Morgan
Chase & Co. None of these financial operators have disclosed how much they
earned from trading carbon permits. This revenue must be colossal for them to
expend huge money to advocate that climate change can’t be solved without a
profit-driven market.
Enron, the most
high profile corrupt firm was the seventh largest corporation in the world when
it collapsed. To improve their success, Enron appointed former US Environmental
Protection Agency regulator John Palmisano to become the company's lead
lobbyist. In an internal memo, Palmisano wrote on the subject of Kyoto Protocol
which Enron lobbied so hard to incorporate its business interests:
'If implemented this agreement will do more to
promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative
outside of restructuring of the energy and natural-gas industries in Europe and
the United States. The potential to add incremental gas sales and additional
demand for renewable technology is enormous. The rules governing transfers of
emission rights are exactly what I have been lobbying for and it seems like we
won. The clean development fund will be a mechanism for funding renewable
projects. Again we won.... The endorsement of emissions trading was another
victory for us.
Enron now has excellent credentials with many ‘green’ interests including
Greenpeace, WWF [World Wildlife Fund], NRDC [Natural Resources Defense
Council], German Watch, the U.S. Climate Action Network, the European Climate Action
Network, Ozone Action, WRI [World Resources Institute] and Worldwatch. This
position should be increasingly cultivated and capitalized on (monetized)
.'
Friends of the
Earth (FoE) further warned carbon trading could trigger a financial collapse
like the sub-prime loans crisis. FoE also claimed that most trades are done not
by polluting industries, but by speculative traders, packaging carbon credits
into complex financial products similar to those which triggered the sub-prime
mortgage crash. The Palmisano Memo meanwhile exposed the intricate
corporate-NGO/environmentalist nexus, which Christian Aid plays no overt part
but still through its Climate Policy unwittingly supports.
Christian Aid
finds itself in a similar situation with the other UN mechanism - Reducing
Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD).
The latter allows two types of forestry offsets: reforestation of previously
forested areas and afforestation where trees are planted in areas where forests
have not existed for over 50 years. Here under REDD developed countries pay
developing ones to reduce emissions caused by deforestation and forest
degradation.
NGOs were however left red faced when their climate hysteria led to a global
bio-fuel boom, as financial firms like Goldman Sachs spiked the price of crude
to nearly 150 dollars per barrel in 2008. This led to sizeable agricultural
land all over the world being diverted for bio-fuel production. The result was
creation of global food inflation that first spiked in 2008, which then
momentarily retreated only to resume its steep climb once again. This in turn
has created a situation that is leading to food riots, food scarcity,
escalating prices of food items and starvation.
The World Health
Organization (WHO) estimates that 1 out of 7 global citizens today face
prospects of starvation. Despite this Barack Obama wants the US to produce 36
billion gallons of ethanol and other biofuels per year by 2022. Green groups
have argued that US subsidies for producers of corn-based ethanol coupled with
targets for biofuel production have contributed to rising food prices and
deforestation as land previously used to grow corn for food is instead used to
supply ethanol producers.
Further, since this
production is not meant for human consumption, the tendency is to opt for
practices that degrades soil fertility and depletes ground water. Seed that
grows corn for biofuels doesn't have to meet the same standards as corn for
human consumption. Artificially genetically engineered corn not fit for humans
or even animal feed is claimed to be no problem, but cross-pollination occurs
despite the assurances of the bioengineering seed companies.
Within this
scenario, Christian Aid often cautions the world of the growing starvation
globally brought about by insensitive policies, including those of
bio-fuels. Its document entitled Fighting food shortages Hungry for
change is one such example. Nevertheless, it is
irrelevant whether Christian Aid raises these issues. What is more important is
whether their climate change policies in any way promote these same outcomes
they highlight as problems through their advocacy programmes. Because of
such policy disconnects, Christian Aid ends up with the public image of simply
shedding crocodile tears while taking up causes of food insecurity and
mass starvation deaths.
Carbon Trade Watch in a report exposed how oppressive and exploitative REDD
could be in developing countries. Tree planting is considered a ‘carbon sink’ under Kyoto Protocol. Fast
growing monoculture is promoted that poses a threat to bio-diversity, ground
water depletion and food security. Land is leased and communities paid a song
to care for trees. People end up dispossessed from their lands or forest,
unable to earn a livelihood. Forest community well before the project commences
are displaced from their land and shelters. These companies make a
killing through carbon credits as well as through sale of forestry
products. Kyoto Protocol thus saw the unleashing of a new form of
colonialism, which many NGOs term as Carbon Colonialism. A recent report from
Greenpeace focused on what it regards as a carbon trading failure in the Noel
Kempff forestry project in Bolivia. The result is that the Bolivian government
is now fervently anti-trading, insisting that rich nations should take
responsibility for all their own emissions themselves.
NGOs like
Christian Aid may not be directly indulging in these forms of excesses
associated with carbon offsetting. But they deliberately pay only lip service
to its opposition as issues flowing from its consequences leads to increased
funding of their more traditional advocacy issues. Carbon offsetting has for
example already stimulated large scale diversion of agricultural land to the
production of bio-fuels/ethanol or through increase of fallow lands needed
to create carbon sinks. Unsustainable loss of food producing land then becomes
a focal advocacy issue for a NGO like Christian Aid.
Meanwhile the issue of
diminishing agriculture acreage is spun by Genetic Modified (GM) seed
companies as a case of diminishing agricultural productivity that warrants GM
technological interventions. The IPCC Assessment reports concurs with
their view. This gives an impetus for GM seed companies to expand their market.
Greenpeace then spearheads the resistance against GM seeds. Likewise climate
alarmism is also giving governments round the world, including India, the
fig-leaf cover for embracing nuclear energy. Here again we find that the same
set of NGOs like Greenpeace having an anti-nuclear agenda being ensured yet
another avenue to raise more funds. The relevance of NGOs dependent on issues,
cynical as it sounds, where none exist, NGOs seems to take to creating issues.
With the
exceptions of environmentalists like FoE, most NGOs do not categorically link
their clamour for a new climate treaty conditional to the lock stock and barrel
rejection of carbon trading. The tragic irony is that the so-called Global Left
take to justifying this evil scheme, while it is the so-called Global
Capitalist Right that have taken carbon trading face on. That a Christian
institution can support this evil is tantamount to crucifying Christ all over
again. And this is the stigma that Christian Aid has to live with even if it
retracts its support to carbon trading.
For Thirty Pieces
of Silver
Having been in the
NGO sector for more than three decades in a multiple of roles, it is easy
to see that some development interventions, well intentioned as they are, end
up failures in relation to their original aims . Worse. They could have created
new and even worse sets of problems for local communities. Climate Change is
only an extreme embodiment of this danger and perhaps most significant, due its
global character of impact. The pervasiveness of climate treaties is such
that it could infringe the lives and livelihoods of almost everyone in this
planet. Get it wrong, it could turn the world topsy-turvy, and prove more
damaging than any climate flips we have yet seen in earth's long climate
history, stretching billions of years.
Renowned NGO
critic, Arturo Escobar argued that development policies after the World War II
became mere mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive as their colonial
counterparts. Escobar accused NGOs of being caught up in their own
self-perpetuation and in public relations efforts designed to create an illusion
of effectiveness.
It was for the
exchange of a mere thirty pieces of silver, Judas Iscariot betrayed his Master,
sending Him to die at the cross. Today, as NGOs including those of the
Christian persuasion are increasingly being dependent on governmental and
corporate funding, they have not really stopped back to take stock, what price
they really pay for these largesse.
The issue of
Global Warming has run its course, exposed as one of the most atrocious
scientific and economic scam of our life time. In the months and years ahead,
we are likely to see some of its leading proponents and scientists ending up as
subjects of various investigations and perhaps also sent to jail. The seed for
the disbanding or re-structuring of the UN-IPCC has already been sowed. Either
ways, the theory of man made Global Warming, as we know it, is toast.
Amidst all these
likely developments, NGOs are now left high and dry, having to painfully
re-examine their own roles in this scam. It is obvious that their public
credibility takes a beating. The public cannot be blamed as they have taken NGO
climate hysteria at face value. Having been let down by NGOs, we can’t blame
them if they not take other NGO advocacy claims as seriously as before. This is
the price to be paid for indiscretion of this magnitude.
Climate Change
will certainly go down as one of the darkest chapters of NGO history, when they
went amok, exchanging their ideals for thirty pieces of silver. Where
have they gone wrong? Is it their board or their top management that let them
down? Or is that their staff who is now longer the committed but thoroughbred
professionals where the cause no longer matters but only their career paths? It
opens the question : Who do NGOs really represent? They are increasingly being
accused of representing no one except themselves!
