In any case, Russia is the place where people may talk freely about that idea’s demise, and stay respected members of society and establishment in spite of that. Simply speaking, you go to Russia if you want to hear a spade being at last called a spade.
We are talking about a live discussion of experts in several Russian blogs and media outlets on two documents about the future of the mentioned climate agenda, world over. One is the report of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, another is a publication in America’s Foreign Affairs magazine, called Populist Revolt Against Climate Policy. Both are discussing the same trend, namely, that something like an Anti-Green International is shaping itself among several nations. These people belong to conservative and leftist ideologies, both in a wonderful harmony about climate agenda being a scam against the world. Both right and left agree that, while climate is changing all the time, the idea of a green transition is unable to influence climate, but, instead, is a brazen attempt of the global rich to rob the global poor.
What brings together the right and the left, says Alexander Chachia, the head of the Globalization Studies Center in Moscow, is the idea that the danger of climate change is being consciously exaggerated, while the recommended cure has nothing to do with ecology.
Nothing new here, you may want to say? But the difference with the past is, that anti-green resentment is gaining ground, on its way to becoming a political mainstream, definitely so in Europe and prominently so in the US. And this is what you feel at so many international gatherings where it used to be impossible to say out loud that climate agenda’s an ugly scam. You say it – and you scare off at least a part of your electorate. Not so anymore. What used to be a silent majority, as the American magazine aptly names it, is not so silent anymore.
To add some of my personal observations to the debate, we are witnessing a truly important trend, when the bad folks tried too hard and simply overdid it. Climate agenda was by far not the only case of excessive pressure on public on global scale, when the same tools were been used. Anti-smoking campaign seems to be a warming-up, then came the COVID lockdowns and compulsory vaccination, while the so-called anti-racist agenda and LGBT+ movement were trailing along, all together forming progressive, or woke ideology. Essentially, all the mentioned cases are the same. They all use messages of universal threat and they all impose remedies that have to be obligatory to everyone on Earth, with shame and cancelling from society as an alternative.
But one main ingredient is missing from the above-mentioned formulae, and that element is exactly what crumbles down today. That ingredient was an attempt to control information on global scale. You were not supposed to argue with the mentioned ideas. As a result, initially it was really difficult to discern truth from falsehoods in the original narratives of yet another threat to the whole humanity. Doubters and dissidents have been successfully hushed up or crushed down virtually everywhere.
But the global information monopoly did not happen, and that’s what we see today. There was the case with Elon Musk and his Twitter network, and there is the case, this week, of the arrest of Russian-born Paul Durov, in France, who is the founder of Telegram messenger.
The charges against him are his failure to censor the almost 1 billion people world over, who are using the platform as a space for free communication. Their opinions are about virtually everything, climate agenda included, and they are free. So, when that arrest happened, a huge Russian shout of derision went up to high heaven, something akin to a collective “ha-ha”. They arrested him because they failed to control information, that’s the predominant opinion.
The liberal public has relaxed too much after initial gaining control over information platforms by placing secret service people over there, says Mr. Igor Maltsev, a brilliant writer on all matters, from good wine to European political scene. And that relaxation was the reason why that liberal public has completely lost the battle for Telegram, concludes he.
“Apparently, when ideas clash directly, without an option of banning the wrong opinions, these woke folks look pathetic, like madmen muttering about 67 genders. They have no chance of winning the fair play. And we can see now what these folks do not like about that famous “Kremlin censorship”. They dislike the fact that they do not own it,” Maltsev adds.
Other people are less upbeat, predicting, simply speaking, fragmentation of global information space. Mr. Dmitry Mikhaylin is the general director of “Russian reporters”, an NGO trying to upkeep high standards of media in Russia. The states everywhere, he says, dislike the fact that platforms for exchange of messages and opinions do not moderate that content. Generally speaking, if we lived on a normal planet, the common rules for using common information space would have been accepted by everyone, maybe in the UN.
And, to go back to our climate, there’ll be governments pushing their climate agenda on all the world, but there’ll also be nations not giving a damn about it.
That’s definitely a grim picture of the world to come, but look at the rosy side of it. Some people have been telling you that you have to stop using oil and gas, and coal too, destroy your agriculture and industry, and get your energy from the wind that does not blow.
They tell you that all this is necessary to make climate milder, and if you object, you are murdering people on some other continent. And, what’s worse, you are not supposed to check the state of debate of climatologists, not to mention a check on who pays them and why. You are not supposed to object to that or any other similar universal idea imposed on the whole world by somebody unknown.
Surely it’s somehow reassuring to know that the global information space is going to be fragmented, and you have a small chance of doing your own modest research on that sacred and uncontestable teaching called climate agenda. And it’s especially comforting to learn that you, with your contrarian ideas, have always been in the majority, which stops being silent and ignored.
Dmitry Kosyrev, a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com