Green Is the New Red
“The goal of socialism is communism.” – Vladimir Lenin
We do not buy into the theory that the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its Dr. Evil look-alike leader, Klaus Schwab, are the brains behind a nefarious scheme by the world’s elite to execute a global depopulation agenda. A far more likely explanation is that Schwab created an “access” grift that succeeded beyond his wildest imagination. Having correctly identified the Malthusian instincts of the rich and politically powerful, Schwab built for them a private club that validates those predispositions, justifies them in a veneer of intellectual rigor, and paints them into a future of digital utopia. In exchange, the WEF collects untold millions in membership fees, and what Klaus does with that money is conveniently obscured by the secrecy of the Swiss regulatory and banking systems.
Having evolved into a lightning rod of intrigue, Schwab has fed the perception that he is an omnipotent player on the international stage. Each one-on-one meeting with a head of state only serves to further solidify that personal brand. Aside from hosting its annual hob-knob festival in Davos, Switzerland, the WEF regularly publishes white papers tailor-made to stoke controversy and keep Schwab in the news. We turn to the Wall Street Journal for the latest example of Schwab poking his blade of influence at the masses (emphasis added throughout):
“If the World Economic Forum (WEF) has its way, the number of cars around the world will be reduced by 75% by 2050. How ironic that the denizens of Davos who spend much of their lives being chauffeured back and forth from international conferences hate cars.
The goal is buried in a briefing paper released last month called ‘The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility.’ It points out that more than two-thirds of the world’s population will be urban by 2050. If we are to meet their needs and achieve the climate goals of the Paris Agreement, the report recommends ‘electrification, public transport and shared mobility.’”
Eat bugs and ride bicycles. We get it.
That Schwab isn’t the brains behind a global anti-human agenda doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. The grift of the WEF wouldn’t work without it. As we described in “Malthusian Malarkey,” the modern environmental movement seeped from an ugly history of eugenics and techno-pessimism that actively sought to implement population control in the name of saving planetary resources for those more deserving of them. Our interest in that history stems from a desire to understand how so-called environmentalists—those who profess concern about carbon emissions as an existential threat to the planet—could be steadfastly opposed to nuclear energy:
“As uncomfortable a thought as it is, the history of the funding, propaganda, and influence around the anti-nuclear sentiment was born out of a non-fringe belief that the preferred solution to the population ‘problem’ was not more abundant energy to support such growth, but rather, fewer people to compete for available resources. Proselytizing nuclear waste as a meaningful issue became a convenient, palatable vehicle used to veer the discourse until it took hold generally. Today, this is done either by those who are victims of such propaganda or are knowing architects of it.”
You could be forgiven for assuming that depopulation hippies have been marginalized to the political fringe. This is certainly true in the developing world where, as we have recently documented, leaders have all but abandoned their climate commitments, correctly sniffing out whom the suckers are meant to be at the global resource poker table. However, things have taken an ominous turn in Europe, and Malthusian thinking is being normalized once again. As each energy policy failure is used as proof of the need to double down, leaders have resorted to increasingly totalitarian tactics, careening much of the region toward a system of government with more than a whiff of communist characteristics. Let’s have a look at some recent developments that should give everybody pause.