THE documentary Climate the Movie is the most needed and the most important contribution to the debate about the so-called climate crisis since the ‘alarmism era’ began in the late 1970s. Our climate science (sceptic) expert Paul Homewood reviewed it here. The film is a fact-packed near one and half hours of careful argument and evidence covering every aspect of the science and the politics of this internationally accepted and supported hoax. For ease of readers’ reference, we decided to publish the transcript in sections over this week.
We began on Tuesday with the film’s preamble, the sections on the scientific history of the earth and the ‘history’ of CO2 , followed on Wednesday by the natural climate change and extreme weather sections. The third part yesterday dealt with the consensus, its funding and climate bandwagon and politics of climate sections. The final section today looks at climate (alarmism) policy versus freedom, people and poverty.
You can watch the full film here. The transcript follows: the sections in bold type are the commentary.
CLIMATE VERSUS FREEDOM
Environmentalists like to pose as anti-establishment, but their demands are well received and piously echoed by King Charles and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC, the UN, the EU, by heads of government, the World Bank and World Economic Forum. In fact by the entire state-funded ruling establishment.
ROY SPENCER: Global warming is like the perfect problem that the government can get involved in. To grow the influence of government.
WILL HAPPER: It’s a wonderful way to increase government power. If there’s an existential threat out there that’s worldwide, well you need a powerful worldwide government to cope with it.
CLAIRE FOX: If you are a climate activist you are actually facilitating a huge validation of the government running our lives.
AUSTIN WILLIAMS: Many environmentalists, most environmentalists, all environmentalists who consider themselves to be radical progressives alternatives are in fact simply reinforcing the mantras and the mainstream arguments of the entire establishment.
CLAIRE FOX: The demands on the government mean that the government suddenly gains the authority to interfere into every nook and cranny of our lives and how we live.
MATTHEW WILEICKI: Everything has a climate narrative attached to it. How much you consume, where you spend your money, how much you travel, who you interact with, what types of food you eat, whether you eat meat. Everything has some kind of aspect to it that can be controlled with a climate lens.
ROSS McKITRICK: Suppose 20 years ago, somebody hatched the idea that ‘I’d really like to ban cheap energy, I’d really like to control everyone’s appliance purchases, I’d really like to tell everyone where they can go, basically I’d really like dictatorial control over everything.’ Well it’s not gonna fly. Everyone would think you’re a nut and ignore you. But fast forward 20 years and that’s what’s happening.
The publicly funded establishment in the West is so large and powerful, it is able to enforce and impose the official consensus on climate through its control of schools, universities, government and much of the media. State broadcasters like the BBC exclude climate sceptics, broadcasting regulatory bodies forbid private stations from disseminating sceptical views, threatening them with having their broadcasting licences revoked.
BENNY PEISER: What normally happens in an emergency is that all normal forms of openness and democracy have to be suppressed. Because how else to deal with an emergency, so we are facing a situation not unlike lockdown when basically all normal forms of behaviour, normal forms of social communication, normal forms of democracy are essentially ruled out. Activists are even calling for any scepticism to be criminalised.
in certain jobs and professions it’s now dangerous to express dissent on climate.
BENNY PEISER: . . . people who are more sceptical will think twice before voicing their concerns because they might risk their career, they might risk their business, they might risk being sacked.
PATRICK MOORE: If you’re a professional of any kind in science or law or medicine and if you belong to a professional association or are in a university, you can be fired for saying what you believe.
BENNY PEISER: The consequence is a censorious authoritarian regime that has to control every move, every word, everything you want to do because everything you do is a potential risk to the survival of mankind.
CLIMATE VERSUS THE PEOPLE
Climate protesters condemn capitalism. But at their anti-capitalist rallies it is hard to spot anyone who looks like a worker – like a docker, or crane-driver, or steel-worker, or a beautician or a trucker. The workers, it appears, are totally absent from these rallies, and for very good reason. Today’s climate alarmists complain not that capitalism isn’t producing enough, but that it’s producing too much.
CLAIRE FOX: The modern capitalist system has led to prosperity, more and more people have more and more things. The modern anti-capitalism of the present time is a critique of capitalism is that it gives us too much.
STEPHEN DAVIES: They think the problem with capitalism now is actually that it gives out too many rewards, en masse, to ordinary workers. What they want instead, and this is often very explicit actually, is a much more austere, simple lifestyle, in which the mass consumption, the consumption choices of the great bulk of the population are controlled or even prohibited.
BENNY PEISER: You have to consume less, you have to holiday less, you have to drive less and to eat less and so on.
It seems that what upsets many environmentalists is not the failure but rather the success of capitalism, in producing an abundance of affordable goods for the masses.
CLAIRE FOX: Ordinary working people for once we have arrived at a point in history, in the Western world at least, where mass manufacturing has allowed them cheap clothes, cheap food, cheap furniture, therefore you get a clash when affluent environmentalists express their disdain for mass consumption. People going on those big huge cruise ships, it’s like thousands. ‘What are they doing? Oh my God! Ruining Venice, ruining all our beautiful places, we own them, don’t we? What are they going there for?’
STEPHEN DAVIES: What you have here is a classic example of class hypocrisy – and self-interest masquerading as public-spirited concern. You could take these sort of green socialists much more seriously if they lived off grid, they cut their own consumption down to the minimum, never flew, instead what you get is constant talk about how human consumption is despite their values. But the people making up this talk show absolutely no signs of reducing their own.
What environmentalists call ‘de-growth’ is being achieved by the trashing of our conventional energy and transport systems, and the forced introduction of expensive and unreliable alternatives. Already this is having the desired effect on industrial manufacturing, which is straining under the burden of punitive green taxes and regulation, and higher energy prices.
TOM NELSON: The people behind the climate alarm couldn’t give a damn about manufacturing. They have nothing to do with it, they don’t know people who work in manufacturing, whose jobs and lives depend on it. They’re not excited by industry or industrial progress. They explicitly want to shut it down.
CLIMATE VERSUS POVERTY
Kisii, Kenya, East Africa. According to many leading environmentalists, the world’s poorest people should not aspire to the lifestyle of people in the First World. The planet will not cope. Grace Nyakenanda is one of the many Africans who do not have electricity or gas to cook with or heat their homes. The resulting indoor smoke from burning wood and dried dung is the deadliest form of pollution in the world, for millions the cause of lung disease, blindness and early death.
KENYAN WOMAN: If I continue like this, I’ll go blind. And my children are still young. Who is going to feed them? I worry about it. But what can I do?
It’s not just cheap, reliable electricity that Africa needs. Agricultural productivity here is incredibly low. Increasing it takes fossil fuels, to make fertiliser and drive tractors and other farm machinery. Jusper Machogu is a farmer.
JUSPER MACHOGU: Each and every African wants to get along, and increasing improving agriculture is one of the easiest ways to do that. Agriculture is closely tied to fossil fuels, fossil fuels which the Western nations say we should not have access to.
Around a third of the food produced in Africa rots before it ever reaches the mouths of consumers. To prevent this tragic waste, Africa needs plastic packaging, refrigerated lorries and good roads. All are opposed by Western environmentalists, all come with industrial development. All rely on affordable fossil fuel energy. Diarrhoea from drinking dirty water still kills hundreds of thousands of African children. But clean water requires large industrial water purification plants and a modern water supply network. And this will come only with cheap energy.
JUSPER MACHOGU: I think it’s pretty obvious that the West has what it has because of fossil fuels When people say Africa doesn’t need fossil fuels, I wonder. I don’t think they want what’s best for us. They don’t want us to develop. That means we continue being starving, we continue being poor. Most people don’t know what climate change is. They don’t care. They just want food on their table. They want to beat poverty. They want to beat hunger. They need money to better their lives. They want to flourish. That’s just it.
AUSTIN WILLIAMS: When they use the words ‘sustainable development’, they’re talking about no development, exactly, the point is that to develop sustainably means not to use too much energy, not to use too much carbon, you know, net zero, the idea that you shouldn’t use too many resources, the fact that you shouldn’t produce enough consumer goods because consumption is bad, so ultimately the idea of development is out the window.
BENNY PEISER: The Greens think the Africans should never use their resources the way the Europeans, or the Americans, or the Canadians, or the Australians have used theirs. They are also in favour of punitive taxes border taxes on any African country that wants to export their goods to Europe if they do use their resources. So that sums up the ethical ruthlessness and depravity of the green agenda.
But climate alarmists have a problem. Many countries in Africa and across Asia are simply ignoring the environmentalist demands of Western governments and international agencies. Communist China is estimated to be building an average of two new coal power plants a week. China now uses more coal than the rest of the world combined.
BENNY PEISER: Which is one of the reasons that this whole climate agenda is falling apart . . . because the rest of the world is not cutting emissions, is not moving towards renewables.
In the West too, for many people, climate alarmism is wearing thin.
TOM NELSON: Ordinary people are not stupid. They’ve seen one ridiculous claim after another fail. Over and over. What this does is leave people with a profound and justified cynicism about what the scientific establishment says. And about what the government says.
To fix the climate problem we’re told we must give up our cars, pay more for fuel, heating, clothes, food, fly less, limit where we go. It’s hardly surprising that this attack on mass travel, mass tourism, mass consumption, holds little appeal to the masses.
CLAIRE FOX: Ordinary people starting to realise it’s going to cost them a lot of money to simply live the lives they were leading and as soon as that started to happen, I could see people in the United Kingdom, who had previously been indifferent to environmentalism, suddenly think how dare they do that, how dare they try and take away what we consider not to be luxuries but necessities?
AUSTIN WILLIAMS: The whole policy of sustainability is about restraint – it’s about restrictions, about doing less and that obviously for most people is an anathema to their everyday needs.
When climate protesters climbed on to an underground train in London’s East End, they were not cheered on by working commuters. They were hurled abuse, pelted, angrily dragged off the train and received rough treatment on the platform.
STEPHEN DAVIES: If you were to go into a pub frequented mainly by what the Americans call blue collar workers, you will find that being sceptical about climate change policy is not going to get you thrown out. Quite the contrary, someone will probably buy you a drink. They can tell that behind all the talk about climate emergency, climate crisis, what there actually is, is an animus and hostility towards them, their lifestyle, their beliefs and a desire to change it by force if necessary.
Punitive and restrictive policies carried out both in the name of Climate change and Covid, have sparked protests in Britain, Canada and other Western countries. Anti-establishment politicians and movements are gaining support.
CLAIRE FOX: What they underestimated was the fury with ordinary people who say you can’t do this! And you suddenly get this new movement.
Many working people are not merely sceptical but positively angry about the climate alarm and all that flows from it. There is a suspicion, or perhaps realisation, that climate change is an invented scare, driven by self-interest and snobbery, cynically promoted by a parasitic, publicly-funded establishment, hungry for ever more money and power.
An assault on the freedom and prosperity of the rest of us.
