Today I argue that an influential element of the “degrowth” campaign is both watermelon-flavored and also adjacent to the institutionalization of a much deeper and more serious challenge to science and democratic governance. That challenge involves the blossoming of myriad non-state actors funded by large foundations who are implementing a framework of “planetary boundaries” into the decision making of businesses, governments and multilateral institutions.
This is not a conspiracy — it is simply a group of powerful and well-funded groups organizing to advance their shared special interests. They are doing so out in plain sight. This is the normal stuff of politics. However, the complexity of the organizational arrangements, their work outside of governmental oversight and the incredible pervasiveness of their work can make them hard to see, much less to hold accountable. For whatever reasons, journalists and academics have spent essentially no time documenting the rise of these organizations, their goals or their influence. Today’s sunshine is just a start of the attention I’ll be paying to them.
In this new world of independent publishing, consider subscribing to one or two of your best reads to support them (particularly those who don’t already have large audiences already). Roger is a good place to start, but there are dozens of others that we link to frequently.
One of the people I think does an outstanding job of pulling threads and making connections is Polly St. George http://www.amazingpolly.net
Totally agree. I’ve followed her work and find she is absolutely incredible as a sleuth. No one connects the dots better!
I think when you understand that we are the carbon the elite want to reduce,everything comes into perspective.
In the now accelerating collapse of western civilization, the role of NGOs has been critical to the culturally significant replacement of Christianity with a more enervated zealousness in “environmental causes”. The left subsumed the greens decades ago while abandoning the the worn out “class struggle” to increase relevancy. NGOs represented vast pools of industrial legacy wealth and a thin veneer of state independence which could mask the planned activism. They also represent a pool of activists that migrate between NGOs and cabinet levels of government and corporate boardrooms. The “coming together” of private wealth, and circular state funding of climate-based “research” now permeating all disciplines has enabled the industrial scale hypothesis reinforcement of CAGW that passes for “science”, the same scientific sin as most research in “conservation biology” (that one need not follow the scientific method beyond hypothesis and instead after reinforcement as opposed to testing, one jumps to mitigating “policies”). The result is a highly politicized “science” that Lysenko could only dream of. This hasn’t happened suddenly (50 years ago one could determine how someone voted by their opinion of nuclear power) but it is now at the geometric rate of change. The pathological frenzy of complete societal domination, the stuff of every sociopath’s life-long ambition is nearing achievement and to get to the finish line all opposing speech must be silenced and penalized. We’ve returned to the inquisition. The Jacobins and Bolsheviks can hardly wait to do their thing.
There is also a large selection of NGOs that receive government funding which really should remove the NG part of NGO.
We’ll said!