COP26: Greening Finance?

von Thierry Meyssan*

(01.12.2021) COP26 in Glasgow is an entertaining show, designed to divert the public’s attention from what is going on. The IPCC, the COP’s committee of climate experts, does not predict the apocalypse to deaf governments, but provides them with a discourse to justify their political ambitions. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who are resolutely hostile to the financial projects of the COPs, have refused to attend, while the big bankers are talking about 100 billion dollars of investment.

"UN Climate Change Conferences" are always accompanied by apocalyptic rhetoric, but never result in quantifiable and verifiable commitments. They only result in promises signed with great fanfare, but always couched in the conditional.

The conference currently taking place in Glasgow, UK, from October 31 to November 12 2021, is no exception. It began with a spectacular video of a dinosaur announcing the possible extinction of the human species at the UN General Assembly and continued with a keynote speech by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on what James Bond would do about the climate challenge. The drama continued on the streets with a demonstration led by Greta Thunberg to declare all the world’s governments illegitimate and to denounce the "failure" of the conference which has only just begun.

The political leaders who have called for saving humanity from an imminent end are the same ones who are investing billions of dollars in nuclear weapons capable of wiping human life off the planet.¹

The least we can say is that this conference is quality entertainment for the world’s spectators, not a diplomatic meeting to reduce greenhouse gas production. So what is the reality behind this circus and why are all the UN member states taking part?

"Global Warming"

To answer these questions, we first need to get rid of some erroneous beliefs about ’global warming’.

We wrongly ’believe’ that ’global warming’ threatens the survival of our species. The climate has always changed, not in a linear way, but in cycles. The Earth was warmer seven centuries ago than it is today. Here in France, the glaciers in the Alps were smaller than they are today and there were wild camels in Provence. Some of our coasts were further out to sea than they are today, but others were further back, etc.

We have seen that the warming of the climate in Europe corresponds to the industrial revolution. This is why we ’believe’ that the climate changes we are witnessing have been accelerated by the industrial production of greenhouse gases over the last two centuries. This is possible, but concomitance is not causality. There are other hypotheses, including that of the Yougoslavian geophysicist Milutin Milanković based on variations in the Earth’s orbit (eccentricity, obliquity and precession of the equinoxes).

Margaret Thatcher’s creation of the IPCC

Let’s turn to the UN conferences. In 1988, Canadian and British Prime Ministers Brian Mulroney and Margaret Thatcher convinced their partners (the United States, France, Germany and Italy) to fund an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation. Shortly afterwards, Mrs Thatcher claimed that greenhouse gases, the ozone hole and acid rain required intergovernmental responses.² This rhetoric masked political objectives. It was, as her advisers would confirm, to put an end to the coal miners’ unions and to promote a new industrial revolution, based on North Sea oil and nuclear power.³

The IPCC is not a learned academy of climate scientists at all, but as its name suggests an ’intergovernmental group’. It does not discuss climate science, but climate policy. The vast majority of its members are not scientists, but diplomats. The climate experts who sit on the panel are not there as scientists, but as experts in their government delegation, i.e. as civil servants. All their public interventions are controlled by their government. It is therefore preposterous to speak of a "scientific" consensus when referring to the political consensus that prevails in this assembly. This is not to understand the functioning of intergovernmental institutions.

Contrary to what Greta Thunberg thinks, the IPCC does not predict the apocalypse to deaf governments. It faithfully obeys them and, together with climate scientists, develops a rhetoric to justify policy changes that normal people would otherwise refuse.

The work of the IPCC is the basis for an annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The 26th edition is being held in Glasgow (COP26). In its first report, in 1990, the IPCC considered an unambiguous increase in the greenhouse effect "within the next few decades or more" as "unlikely". But what was true in 1990 has become heretical in 2021.

The first conferences were devoted to informing and raising public awareness of climate change. It was clear to everyone that some regions would become uninhabitable and that some populations would have to move. It was only over time that people began to say that the changes would become so great that they could threaten the survival of the entire human race. This change in discourse was not due to a sudden scientific discovery that challenged a one-day truth, but to the changing needs of governments.

Consumer society is on the brink: you can’t sell people what they already have. If industries collapse, jobs disappear and governments are toppled. There is only one way to avoid this: for example, in the late 1990s, most Western companies were computerised. It became impossible to sell computers. So the hoax of the century was propagated: the "Y2K bug".

All computers were going to crash on January 1, 2000 at 00:00. Everyone bought computers and software. Of course, no plane crashed, no lift stopped, no computer broke down. But Silicon Valley was saved and people were now going to invest in consumer computers. Today the solution is the "energy transition". For example: you can’t sell several cars to the same consumer, but you can exchange your petrol car for an electric one. Of course, electricity is usually made with oil and requires batteries that cannot be recycled. In the end, with the energy transition, the planet will be more polluted than before. But this is not something to think about.

The climate exchange, the only advance of the COP

During President Bill Clinton’s term, the US took control of the IPCC so that it pushed for the Kyoto Protocol (COP3) but never signed it. The Vice President, Al Gore, was in charge of US energy policy. He approved the war in Kosovo in order to build a trans-Balkan pipeline. But while the Protocol was originally intended to limit emissions of five greenhouse gases and three chlorofluorocarbons, he pushed for the creation of CO₂ emission rights for industries and forgot about the other gases. After leaving the White House, he founded the Chicago Climate Exchange with bankers from Goldman Sachs and funding from Blackrock. As the US never signed the Kyoto Protocol, it did not work well. So he opened branches on the other four continents, which grew rapidly. Today, he receives a fee for each trade in CO₂ emission rights. To develop his business, he became a climate activist and produced the film “An Inconvenient Truth”. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, although this work is more about advertising his stock exchange than science.⁴

For the record, the statutes of the Climate Exchange were drafted by a young, unknown lawyer, Barack Obama. Soon afterwards he entered politics in Chicago and was suddenly elected President of the United States four years later. Once in the White House, Barack Obama would develop a plan to use climate hysteria to reform the global financial system. This is the plan that was adopted by COP21 in Paris and should be implemented by COP26 in Glasgow.

The next COP achievement: greening finance

This one is being organised by the UK with the help of Italy. Four Brits are in charge: two former ministers, Alok Sharma (Economy, Industry and Industrial Strategy) and Anne-Marie Trevelyan (International Development), a former governor of the UK and Canadian banks, Mark Carney, and a lobbyist, Nigel Topping. None of these people know anything about climate science. All of them, however, have plans to reform the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank).

It is because they are opposed to this financial project and not at all to the fight against air pollution that the Russian and Chinese presidents, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, are not participating in this conference.

The COP26 website states that it is about "Mobilising finance. To meet our targets, developed countries must deliver on their promise to mobilise at least $100 billion in climate finance. The international financial institutions must play their part and we must work to unlock the trillions in private and public sector finance needed to ensure global net zero."

What is expected to be signed off at the end of the conference is the creation of a body comprising:

the Asian Development Bank
the African Development Bank
the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
the Caribbean Development Bank
the European Investment Bank
the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
the Inter-American Development and Investment Bank
the Islamic Development Bank
the World Bank
and 450 major companies
to mobilise this money.

It is important to understand that it is no longer possible to indebt poor countries (and therefore to keep them on a leash) because the World Bank and especially the IMF are no longer credible. All governments now know that grants and loans from international institutions come with drastic conditions that make their countries vulnerable; that when the time comes to pay back, they will no longer own anything.

With COP26, the bankers will be able to lend money to save humanity and, in the process, become the owners of the countries whose leaders have trusted them.⁵

Source: https://www.voltairenet.org/article214630.html, 9 November 2021

(Translation Roger Lagassé)

1    «Ils défendent le climat tout en préparant la fin du monde», par Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto (Italie), Réseau Voltaire, 2 novembre 2021.

2     Speech to the Royal Society, Margaret Thatcher, September 27, 1988.

3     «Le prétexte climatique», seconde partie: «1982-1996: L’écologie de marché», par Thierry Meyssan, Оdnako (Russie), Réseau Voltaire, 22 avril 2010.]

4     “1997-2010: Financial Ecology”, by Thierry Meyssan, Оdnako (Russia), Voltaire Network, December 7, 2015.

5     «Les nouvelles armes financières de l’Occident», par Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto (Italie), Réseau Voltaire, 9 novembre 2021.