Melissa Fleming, UN under-secretary-general for global communications reported last month about how the UN has partnered with Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) to manipulate search results on climate change. “We own the science,” said Fleming, who has no meaningful scientific training.
In a Special Agenda Dialogue titled “Tackling Disinformation” on 20 September, Fleming said that the UN partnered with Google and “we started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we googled climate change, we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. We are becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think the world should know it and the (social media) platforms themselves also do.”
The whole interview, available on YouTube, is quite revealing, but the key quotes about manipulating Google searches appear between 46 and 47 minutes into the video.
Crucially, it seems that anyone with a different interpretation is classified as distributing disinformation. “Never in the field of scientific development has shutting down contestable debate led to better outcomes,” noted one observer with a geology background.
Meanwhile, last year, “YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki – who has no scientific training whatsoever – bragged at a World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos about her efforts to stifle free speech. The powerful company announced it would demonetise all videos sceptical of climate change,” noted Doomberg, which provides in-depth analysis of financial and economic trends.
“The partnership between monopolistic technology companies and governments with totalitarian instincts often leads to the insistence that blatantly wrong policy ideas are ‘good’ despite clear and convincing data that proves precisely the opposite,” Doomberg, which highlights the fundamentals missing from many economic and policy decisions, noted in a recent Twitter thread.
“This same partnership enables governments to pre-emptively silence dissent with little regard for fundamental human rights, all while proclaiming such moves are done in the name of preserving those very same rights. As it turns out, Orwell was an optimist,” said Doomberg.
Doomberg argued “it would be slightly harder to rail against such totalitarian instincts if those expressing them occasionally got a policy decision correct. Instead, we in the West find ourselves rolling from one self-inflicted crisis to another.”
Indeed, Doomberg was an early predictor of the coming supply chain, energy, food, fertiliser, and water crises, and has exposed the insanity of current policies around energy, natural gas, and nuclear power.
However, Doomberg cautioned that their Twitter thread was not about climate change. “We have not written about the topic directly and the odds that we will in the future are low. Our focus has been on critiquing society’s response to climate concerns.”
Doomberg focuses “on the likely consequences to humans if we get the transition wrong, advocating for a bigger role for nuclear power in our collective energy future, and promoting what we believe are smart policies that manage to obvious constraints while enabling humans to flourish.”
The worry now is that soon things Doomberg, and others, have written, will be labelled as misinformation, unsuitable for a platform as influential as Substack, where Doomberg’s analysis is published. “Never mind that our subscribers have proactively chosen to hear our views, routinely critique what we write, and are otherwise free-thinking people,” noted Doomberg.
“Despite our best efforts to express authentically held views in a civil manner and to back those views with data, we suspect it won’t be long. The creeping incrementalism of the surveillance state will mean ever more topics are considered off-limits,” added Doomberg.
Meanwhile, Steven Wilkinson, of Pitchfork Papers, hit the nail on the head when he wrote “I have no time or patience with equivocators and middle-of-the-road faux socialists in business who believe we need saving from ourselves and that only a benign state can provide that taming.”
Wilkinson highlighted the following quotes in his article “What Matters to Me: An Update”:
“The biggest error that unites socialists of various stripes with the men and women running the central banks is the belief that a few designated master planners are better able to determine what the people need than the millions of entrepreneurs, investors and consumers whose individual decisions, when added together, are in fact far superior to those of any governmental planning agency, central bank or other organ of state control,” Rainer Zitelmann ‘The Power of Capitalism’.
“The difference between the great and good societies and the regressing, deteriorating societies is largely in terms of the entrepreneurial opportunity and the number of such people in the society. I think everyone would agree that the most valuable 100 people to bring into a deteriorating society would not be 100 chemists, or politicians, or professors, or engineers but rather 100 entrepreneurs,” Abraham Maslow.
Ultimately, the world needs to shift towards a cleaner, less polluting, and more efficient energy system. Whether doing so will alter the temperature of the planet remains to be seen. But stifling and shutting down debate around climate change and the energy transition will not help humanity advance.
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