There’s nothing democratic about this climate assembly
By Paul Homewood
Ben Pile uncovers the dirty secrets behind the Climate Assembly:
The first two meetings of Climate Assembly UK, dubbed a ‘citizens’ assembly’ on climate change, have taken place in Birmingham over the course of a couple of weekends in January and February.
The climate assembly has brought together 110 randomly selected members of the public to discuss a range of climate issues and policies with a range of experts, including David Attenborough. The task of the assembly, which will meet over two more weekends this spring, is to decide on a set of recommendations for how the government can best meet its pledge to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The reason for establishing the climate assembly is clear enough. It is an attempt to exorcise the democratic deficit that haunts political environmentalism. And it seeks to do this by involving a tiny, but supposedly representative, sample of citizens in the policymaking process. But can it really achieve its aim, given it excludes approximately 45million other members of the electorate from its decision-making?
In short, no. Watching the proceedings of the first assembly, it became clear very quickly that the process is rigged in favour of the environmentalist agenda. Expert after expert, each echoing the same message, made his or her presentation to the assembly. This was followed by a rapid question-and-answer session in which the assembled were told what’s what by said experts. It didn’t look much like a democratic debate. It looked like instruction.
These shortcomings should not be a surprise, however, given the climate assembly’s origins. Initially advocated by Extinction Rebellion, the climate assembly was eventually set up last year by six House of Commons select committees, in partnership with several third-sector organisations. None of these organisations has a democratic mandate. But they do all have a commitment to promoting the green agenda.
Take, for instance, the participation of Involve, the Sortition Foundation, and mySociety. These three organisations claim to want to encourage democratic engagement, and to reformulate the democratic process. All noble aims. But their role in the climate assembly is less to encourage democratic engagement than to limit and set the parameters of debate. Hence, the climate assembly will not hear from anyone remotely critical of climate science, environmental ideology or emissions-reduction policies.
Dig deeper and you discover that the majority of the assembly’s funding comes from the the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (EFF) (which also funds Involve and mySociety), and the European Climate Foundation (ECF). These are not neutral organisations. Both the EFF and the ECF are explicitly committed to promoting an environmentalist agenda. As the ECF puts it on its website: ‘[We call for] the transformation of our systems and markets and the creation of a Net Zero society.’
The ECF is also the major funding partner of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), which provides communication support for the assembly. Indeed, the ECF is one of the largest funders of climate-change campaigns throughout Europe.
The ECF itself is part-funded by the US-based organisation it best resembles: the ClimateWorks Foundation. According to its website, the ClimateWorks Foundation acts as a ‘strategist to a wide range of foundations, helping them evaluate the global landscape of greenhouse-gas-reductions opportunities, develop philanthropic strategies, and coordinate and evaluate their investments’. Or, in other words, it acts as an environmentalist coordinator, distributing millions upon millions of dollars to numerous climate campaigns, using the funds of a few foundations.
Full story here.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Attenborough a climate expert ? Ha Ha.
No, you are right, Attenborough is not a climate expert. He is media expert.
I know that because three female journalists on the BBC said he was right about the BBC under threat from the Government for not being fit for purpose. They also said/implied that only journalists could be trusted to look out for the best interests of the citizens. They are of course totally unbiased perfectly qualified for the job, and objective in their reporting.
One was a refugee from Uganda who has not stopped bad-mouthing the UK since she gained asylum decades ago. The other was French with a good grasp of English which presumably means in the eyes of the BBC, she is ideally qualified to speak about Britain.
There used to be, not so long ago, a wide spread belief in witches. What made it lethal was government and legal support of that belief. Trial procedures and precedents were firmly established and practiced by the Courts of law. The maximum penalty was death. It comes as no surprise that Germany headed the list of executions and the last case was in Scotland (?)
Now that we are living in a more rational and enlightened age we can look back, recognising that supreme folly.
But not with any complacency because we are quick to find other follies for the foolish and ignorant to support. We have passed through the Nazi belief in racial superiority and now find ourselves in a much less lethal world of anti-carbon – climate change or whatever label you want to attached to the most recent folly. It finds support from some educated or famous people who no doubt will enrich themselves further mostly at the expense of ordinary people who as usual are the victims of the folly-laden intelligentsia.
I’ve no doubt that this latest folly will run its course and eventually be consigned to historical archives.
Yes, and accusations of witchcraft were often made after hailstorms and other episodes of bad weather had destroyed crops. Once the the trial and execution were over, the witches assets were seized and distributed amongst the authorities.
It’s funny how now we are faced with the accusation that our evil ‘carbon pollution’ is causing a ‘climate emergency’ and so whilst not being put to death, we should at least have our assets raided through extra taxation for daring to use fossil fuels.
I despair.
We are losing the propaganda battle. The green loonies are well organised, well funded and occupy the high ground in the MSM. Paul does a fine job, presenting facts and figures, loads of graphs and charts, showing the degree of half truths and downright lies that the greens are promulgating.
The problem we have is that the average person confronted with Attenborough, BBC, Guardian, Gove and now Boris stating that we have to be carbon zero by 2050 is not even going to glance at a graph, let alone attempt to understand what it shows.
The GWPF is producing press releases on a daily basis, but you never see them in the MSM, we do not have a leader like Thunberg or Attenborough. In short we are not getting anywhere in convincing the man in the street, that there is no climate emergency.
Time to try a new strategy, the big unknown is how much is it all going to cost, and what are the consequences for the car industry and heavy industry. Gove was asked 8 times what the costs are, and avoided answering. If we can convince the man in the street that the cost of all this and the job losses are astronomic, then we might have a better chance of getting them on our side!
We are losing the propaganda battle because to put it bluntly, people do not give a damn about this or their futures. They do NOTHING to fix their lives and whine and cry for Daddy Government to fix it. We are entering a dark age of superstition and fantasy (the popularity of Harry Potter, organics and homeopathy shows that). There is no cure for this other than nature. When it gets bad enough, and nature dictates that will happen, then enlightenment follows in whomever survives. Humans are broken and do this over and over again. You can’t stop this unless you had humans with enough guts to shut off the lights tomorrow and let all hell break loose. They all died by 1950, so there’s nothing to do but wait for the darkness to pass. We cannot win at this point. People DID NOT CARE AND DID NOTHING for DECADES. Sorry, but I fully believe most people believe this tripe and simply do not care or they would have acted. The evidence is on my side—most people send their kids to be indoctrinated by schools, pay to have them indoctrinated by colleges. If they teach this crap to their kids, they simply cannot care enough to stop it and probably believe it.
It’s going to cost hundreds of billions. Put like that, ignoring the magnitude of the numbers, it seems like we should do that. But what this hides is that those hundreds of billions represents hundreds of billions of resources which will add to the climate issues (as seen by Greta).
As far as I can tell, nobody has quantified how much, if at all, we will gain by this damage to the planet.
For Gove, a very successful Oxford undergrad., to have breen deceived, and/or the Green scams almost passes belief, so what could be in this false, corrupt effort for him?
Salvation and eternal life.
He could be one of those who is well educated and appears an intellectual but it actually quite thick. During the Brexit campaign in his role as justice minister Gove, live on television said that he backed repealing the European Communities Act to leave the EU at once where this would be illegal under international treaty law.
Intelligence has no connection with common sense.
The fact that M/S Haigh told lies to the assembly is surely equivalent to perjury. Experts are rightly questioned and tested in legal process but apparently not in a “democratic” court. Her real lie is to cover up the fact that China has declared in its INDC that it is not intending to reduce actual carbon but reduce carbon / GNP, a totally different and normal thing from what the UK is doing to itself through the idiotic CCA. She ought to be in jail, or at least given proper press coverage!
Sadly, I agree with GeoffB that the “believers” have the upper hand and control the debate.
So, the eugenicist, Boaty McBoatface, is an expert. In what, precisely?
Deception!!
Following Chas Moore’s interesting summary in the DT two days ago I wrote to the Editor saying that CM had understated the absurdity of the Citizen’s Assembly “to decide what it thinks about climate change” when actually it is charged to cogitate how best to reach zero carbon by 2050. In other words the central issue is pre-determined and this is all a travesty of democracy. Needless to say my letter was not published. The MSM is complicit despite publishing CM’s squeal of complaint.
A lose lose situation in the UK, in horrendous debt, releasing nrgligible CO2, with vast waste, industrial depression and dislocated lifestyles in prospect-all for zilch return, except to the troughers like Ld Deben, a fraudster who should first be booted out of public life then charged., found guilty, then jailed.
See to it, Boris, you know it makes sense!
It’s always worth keeping tabs on what this lot are up to:
https://leftfootforward.org/2020/02/diversify-or-die-extinction-rebellion-launch-shift-in-strategy/
Even LFF think it a tall order:
The aim to ensure 50% of people see climate change as their top priority is extremely ambitious. A pre-General Election YouGov poll showed just 27% of voters cited the environment as one of three top issues – behind Brexit and health, putting it on a par with crime and the economy. Last year did see a surge in concern over climate change following XR’s dramatic rise.
Of course, the Labour Party would dearly love to command a 50% vote.
IDAU: This is tempting: We won’t wait for our demands to be met, we will begin to enact them…
If they want to enact them in a FF-free power environment, I’d be happy for them to move to an island – Lundy? – so that they could experience and live such a life-style. They can be the experiment which, if it succeeds, can show the rest of us the way: They could even call themselves ‘Experiment Reference’ – XR for short. Kinda snappy.
Since subscribing to Paul’s website and that of the GWPF I have attempted to understand for myself the mass brainwashing we as a nation are experiencing. Looking back we seem to have a war that sets us back and then we attempt to rise up again and get on. Same with Brexit wouldn’t it be nice if we could do just that now and ‘get on’. But no we must continue to be at war this time with eco extremists who seem to be able to pull many strings. Why is our government joining in what to me seems something totally unnecessary. What is their angle? I have collected 25 Policy documents in my iBooks and I have yards and yards of notes from Paul’s ‘Climate Change – the facts’ to turning off the heat in churches and issuing battery operated seat cushions instead. In between I have collected lots of reasoned comments and arguments and I defy anyone to read through this little lot and not at least scratch their head and wonder what the heck is really going on.
Along the way taking sensible care of our local environment, which we would all be for, gets muddled up with drastic action to mitigate against ACC. If anyone like me, a ‘boomer’ and a reader of the DailyTelegraph, tries to speak out we are dismissed as right wing and therefore our voices are cancelled. We now seem to have arrived at the latest slogan ‘leave fossil fuels in the ground’.
One of those posting comments on this site suggested a list of those organisations who will benefit from keeping this rolling along – I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to produce such a list but I am sure there must be someone who could. Maybe then it may start to become clear as to why this appears to be an unstoppable juggernaut.
As has been noted before and often, we live in a post democratic age, one where, the PTB have stitched up the system, therefore there can be, there is no redress, unless.
The meejah not least ‘our’ lot in the UK have learned their lessons, after the dopenhagen effort to unleash OWG on the world through the auspices of the UN climate agenda 21 – it crashed and burned.
A fire sparked, caused by a tiny brigade of realists and a few very brave correspondents JD for one and of course not to forget, the release of the ‘climategate emails’ which undressed the charlatans and archpriests of green, Bared just what a concocted mix of bent stats and disappearing the LIA……….it all was.
Still undeterred, undaunted by the dopenhagen fraud exposé. Along came ‘Obama’s legacy’ the Paris farce and since then, (lessons learned) all dissenting voices have been silenced. With, the unrelenting propaganda, incredibly was ramped up and the Temperature data sets were fixed – again (x 4!) , NOAA, GISS, HADcrut all part of the conspiracy and with able meejah help.
We realists go up against the corporate blob, the billionaires club*[1] and Governments with all their insidious tools, even the law and unconscionably used, piling up the lies into mountains of climastrophist dung.
I don’t know how to topple it but I also know that, only one side is telling the truth and that in the fullness of time this mass deception will implode under the weight of its own distortions, inconsistencies, exaggerations and bare faced lies.
Alas, in order to cause the downfall of the great green hoax and the mountebanks of the climate scammers, what will it take?
‘Events dear boy’ and events likely to be some form of financial cataclysm. Indeed, a virulent spread of a very infectious disease going on pandemic may be the cause of the domino to effect and this godawful end. I do not and in anyway ache for this impending ‘Armageddon’! But know also that, collapse is nigh inevitable.,,,hubris stage, it passed long ago, the western world teetered and now gone off the cliff edge into the vortex of insanity.
What historians will record, if there be any left to write it, that mankind indeed caused it but that, CO₂ just a trace gas and innocent of all charges laid against it.
*[1]think the likes of the ‘Sierra Club’ or Bilderberger gruppen, Davos too.
This has been a long time in the making:
“Global Warming – The Social Construction Of A Quasi-Reality”
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/science-papers/reprint/social-construction
The XR mob have called for a citizens assembley since their inception.
If this assembley were asked the question ‘Are you or have you ever been associated with XR?” …. I would guess at 90% in the affirmative.
indeed. It should be called the Activists Assembly. What we need is a Realists one.
Unfortunately, little money is there to support realism on climate change.
Don’t know why..
https://www.corbettreport.com/just-dont-call-it-global-warming-propagandawatch/
add agency comes up with new scary names
its a emergency panic