A message to the environmental movement

Your movement has been hijacked
Corbett Report
Nov. 25, 2009

Transcript: This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com and I come here today with a message for you.

You the environmentalists, you the activists, you the campaigners.

You who have watched with growing concern the ways in which the world around us has been ravaged in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

You who are concerned with the state of the planet that we are leaving for our children and our grandchildren and those generations yet unborn.

This is not a message of divisiveness, but cooperation.

This is a message of hope and empowerment, but it requires us to look at a hard and uncomfortable truth:

Your movement has been usurped by the very same financial interests you thought you were fighting against.

You have suspected as much for years.

You watched at first with hope and excitement as your movement, your cause, your message began to spread, as it was taken up by the media and given attention, as conferences were organized and as the ideas you had struggled so long and hard to be heard were talked about nationally. Then internationally.

You watched with growing unease as the message was simplified. First it became a slogan. Then it became a brand. Soon it was nothing more than a label and it became attached to products. The ideas you had once fought for were now being sold back to you. For profit.

You watched with growing unease as the message became parroted, not argued, worn like a fashion rather than something that came from the conviction of understanding.

You disagreed when the slogans--and then the science--were dumbed down. When carbon dioxide became the focus and CO2 was taken up as a political cause. Soon it was the only cause.

You knew that Al Gore was not a scientist, that his evidence was factually incorrect, that the movement was being taken over by a cause that was not your own, one that relied on beliefs you did not share to propose a solution you did not want. It began to reach a breaking point when you saw that the solutions being proposed were not solutions at all, when they began to propose new taxes and new markets that would only serve to line their own pockets.

You knew something was wrong when you saw them argue for a cap-and-trade scheme proposed by Ken Lay, when you saw Goldman Sachs position itself to ride the carbon trading bubble, when the whole thrust of the movement became ways to make money or spend money or raise money from this panic.

Your movement had been hijacked.

The realization came the first time you read The Club of Rome's 1991 book, The First Global Revolution, which says:

"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."

And when you looked at the Club of Rome's elite member roster. And when you learnt about eugenics and the Rockefeller ties to the Kaiser Willhelm Institute and the practice of crypto-eugenics and the rise of overpopulation fearmongering and the call by elitist after elitist after elitist to cull the world population.

Still, you wanted to believe that there was some basis of truth, something real and valuable in the single-minded obsession of this hijacked environmental movement with manmade global warming.

Now, in November 2009, the last traces of doubt have been removed.

Last week, an insider leaked internal documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University and exposed the lies, manipulation and fraud behind the studies that supposedly show 0.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the last 130 years. And the hockey stick graph that supposedly shows unprecedented warming in our times. And the alarmist warning of impending climate disaster.

We now know that these scientists wrote programming notes in the source code of their own climate models admitting that results were being manually adjusted.

We now know that values were being adjusted to conform to scientists' wishes, not reality.

We now know that the peer review process itself was being perverted to exclude those scientists whose work criticized their findings.

We now know that these scientists privately expressed doubts about the science that they publicly claimed to be settled.

We now know, in short, that they were lying.

It is unknown as yet what the fallout will be from all of this, but it is evident that the fallout will be substantial.

With this crisis, however, comes an opportunity. An opportunity to recapture the movement that the financiers have stolen from the people.

Together, we can demand a full and independent investigation into all of the researchers whose work was implicated in the CRU affair.

We can demand a full re-evaluation of all those studies whose conclusions have been thrown into question by these revelations, and all of the public policy that has been based on those studies.

We can establish new standards of transparency for scientists whose work is taxpayer funded and/or whose work effects public policy, so that everyone has full and equal access to the data used to calculate results and all of the source code used in all of the programs used to model that data.

In other words, we can reaffirm that no cause is worth supporting that requires deception for its propagation.

Even more importantly, we can take back the environmental movement.

We can begin to concentrate on the serious questions that need to be asked about the genetic engineering technology whereby hybrid organisms and new, never-before-seen proteins that are being released into the biosphere in a giant, uncontrolled experiment that threatens the very genome of life on this planet.

We can look into the environmental causes of the explosion in cancer and the staggering drops in fertility over the last 50 years, including the BPA in our plastics and the anti-androgens in the water.

We can examine regulatory agencies that are controlled by the very corporations they are supposedly watching over.

We can begin focusing on depleted uranium and the dumping of toxic waste into the rivers and all of the issues that we once knew were part of the mandate of the real environmental movement.

Or we can, as some have, descend into petty partisan politics. We can decide that lies are OK if they support 'our' side. We can defend the reprehensible actions of the CRU researchers and rally around the green flag that has long since been captured by the enemy.

It is a simple decision to make, but one that we must make quickly, before the argument can be spun away and environmentalism can go back to business as usual.

We are at a crossroads of history. And make no mistake, history will be the final judge of our actions. So I leave you today with a simple question: Which side of history do you want to be on?

For The Corbett Report, this is James Corbett in western Japan.