GWPF Newsletter: World Bank’s Kim Abruptly Resigns Amid Differences With Trump Over Climate Change

Europe Is Fast-Becoming A Natural Gas Battleground For Russia And The US

In this newsletter:

1) World Bank’s Kim Abruptly Resigns Amid Differences With Trump Over Climate Change
Reuters, 8 January 2019 
 
2) Reminder: GWPF Report Rocks World Bank Meeting As African Nations & U.S. Question Bank’s Green Energy Policy On Poor
The Zimbabwean, 19 October 2017

 
3) Swimming In Cheap Oil: Goldman Cuts Oil Price Forecasts, Citing Us Shale Resilience
Bloomberg, 8 January 2019
 
4) Europe Is Fast-Becoming A Natural Gas Battleground For Russia And The US
CNBC, 8 January 2019 
 
5) Will Jordan Peterson And Dave Rubin Show A Way Through The Internet’s Censorship Minefield?
The Conservative Woman, 8 January 2018 
 
6) And Finally: As The Old Faiths Collapse, The Greens, Social Justice Warriors, And Techno-Futurists Aim To Fill The Void
Joel Kotkin & Alicia Kurimska, The Daily Beast, 23 December 2018

Full details:

1) World Bank’s Kim Abruptly Resigns Amid Differences With Trump Over Climate Change
Reuters, 8 January 2019 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim unexpectedly resigned on Monday, more than three years before his term ends in 2022, amid differences with the Trump administration over climate change and the need for more development resources.

 
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim speaking at the opening of the Climate Action Summit in Washington, D.C., 5 May 2016; World Bank 

Kim, appointed twice by former U.S. President Barack Obama for five-year terms, had pushed financing for green energy projects and largely dropped support for coal power investments, but had avoided public clashes with the Trump administration, which has made reviving the U.S. coal sector a priority.

Just last month, the World Bank announced it would double its investments to fight climate change to around $200 billion over the next five years.

Kim told World Bank employees in an email that he was leaving the world’s largest lender and donor to poor and middle-income countries on Feb. 1 to join a private-sector firm focused on infrastructure investments in the developing world.

“The opportunity to join the private sector was unexpected, but I’ve concluded that this is the path through which I will be able to make the largest impact on major global issues like climate change and the infrastructure deficit in emerging markets,” Kim said.

Kim said details about his new job would be released later. The physician and former Dartmouth College president said he would also rejoin the board of Partners in Health, a health advocacy group he co-founded 30 years ago.

Kristalina Georgieva, who in 2017 became the World Bank’s chief executive officer, will assume the role of interim president when Kim departs, the bank said.

Georgieva, a Bulgarian national, had previously held senior European Union posts after serving 15 years at the World Bank, starting as an environmental economist in 1993.

Two people familiar with Kim’s shock announcement to the World Bank executive board said he was leaving of his own accord and was “not pushed out” by the Trump administration.

President Donald Trump, however, will wield strong influence in choosing Kim’s successor as the United States holds a controlling share of the World Bank’s voting rights.

The bank president has traditionally been an American chosen by the U.S. administration, but some of the multilateral lender’s 189 member countries could mount a new challenge with alternative candidates.

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2) Reminder: GWPF Report Rocks World Bank Meeting As African Nations & U.S. Question Bank’s Green Energy Policy On Poor
The Zimbabwean, 19 October 2017

Tensions came to the fore last week when the World Bank held its annual meeting in Washington. Zimbabwe, Nigeria and India all have doubts about a policy they say does little to lift people out of poverty. Their unlikely ally is Donald Trump.



WASHINGTON DC – More than half-a-century after it was opened by the Queen Mother in 1960, Kariba is still the world’s biggest dam by volume.

Straddling the Zambezi, it stretches back 220 kilometres from the wall, with a catchment area the size of France.

But if Kariba was built today, the World Bank wouldn’t fund it. Same with the Three Gorges Dam in China, oil wells in Saudi or the coal-fired power stations that account for 60 per cent of Africa’s kilowatts.

At the bank’s annual summit last week, hosted by its president Dr Jim Yong Kim, these policies loomed into focus as more than 11,500 delegates, including six from Zimbabwe, converged on Washington.

Where else might you find Donald Trump and Robert Mugabe on the same side, along with India, China, Australia, Ghana, Nigeria and a clutch of others calling for change?

Conventional energy has fallen out of vogue and some say the bank has been hijacked by an army of lobbyists who want to shut down anything not powered by wind or sunshine.

In 2013 the bank adopted an outright ban on funding for coal except where there was no alternative. Thus far, the sole exception has been a power plant in Kosovo.

The World Bank’s mission is to end poverty using aid and loans, mostly for poor nations.  Critics say it is now following such a narrow agenda – with billions tied up in green projects – there’s a danger of losing the plot.
Based on its mammoth contribution to the bank, America is the biggest stakeholder, with more shares than any other country and, as a result, more votes.

Dr Kim spoke optimistically about increased funding, but Donald Trump had a different view.

INEFFECTIVE

Mr Trump, who has suspended his country from both the Paris climate accord and, last week, UNESCO, is a long-time critic of the bank and the billions it spends. He wants projects to be measured and costed like a private company, with the board held accountable when things go wrong. For now, no matter what happens, it’s rare for anyone in to be criticised, let alone fired.

Trump didn’t even bother to voice his verdict. Instead his finance minister, Steve Mnuchin issued a written statement saying there’d be no rise in the US contribution because, “existing capital is not allocated effectively”.

The ledger, he said, needed to be trimmed with less going to rich countries. Trump has criticised loans to China saying the focus should be on the poor.

And, while reviewing that, said Mr Mnuchin, they should cut “the Executive Board budget” of salaries, expenses and pensions for the army of bureaucrats who run the bank.

There was worse to come. Halfway through the summit, a London think-tank published a report in which the bank’s former head of research suggested the entire institution be shut down.

The document, distributed at the meeting, was produced by the Global Warming Policy Foundation with examples of how, in their view, the poor are losing out.

Titled, “The Anti-Development Bank,” the paper was authored by economist Rupert Darwall, one-time advisor to the UK treasury.

But it wasn’t the text that stung so much as some of the quotes. Indian government minister Piyush Goyal, for example, could have been speaking for Zimbabwe or any developing country when he said, ‘The people of India want a certain way of life. They want jobs for their children, schools and colleges, hospitals with uninterrupted power.”

Solar, he complained, only worked when the sun is shining.

“We need a very large amount of baseload power and this can only come from coal.

‘They’re saying to us, we’re sorry but you Indians can only have power for eight hours a day. The rest of the time you must live in darkness’.

More than 300,000,000 Indians are not on the grid, a hot topic at elections.

In Zimbabwe, half the power comes from dams, all built in the Rhodesian era. The rest is from coal, or imported from South Africa where Eskom uses coal for 93 per cent of its output.

For his part, Dr Kim spoke passionately about the falling cost of renewables. Using his numbers, green electricity is cheaper than watts from coal, gas, the turbines of Lake Kariba, even the continent’s only nuclear plant in South Africa.

His rivals cried foul. Reliant on the weather, wind and solar work an average of nine hours a day, they said. Shovel coal or pipe in gas and you can generate, “all day, all night, all year”, so the cost-per-kilowatt is cheaper.

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3) Swimming In Cheap Oil: Goldman Cuts Oil Price Forecasts, Citing Us Shale Resilience
Bloomberg, 8 January 2019

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. cut its oil price forecasts for 2019, citing a re-emerging surplus of oil and resilient U.S. shale production.

Global benchmark Brent crude will average $62.50 a barrel this year, analysts including Damien Courvalin said in a Jan. 6 note, down from a previous estimate of $70. U.S. marker West Texas Intermediate will average $55.50 a barrel, down from a prior forecast of $64.50. With current prices below those levels, Goldman sees them as undervalued at the moment.

A surge in OPEC production in late 2018 means the market started this year better supplied than the last, and pipeline constraints in the U.S. Permian Basin will clear up faster than expected, according to Goldman. Big projects in the works for years in Brazil and Canada will also ramp up output in 2019. Combined, those increases mean fewer high-cost marginal barrels will be needed to meet global demand growth this year, Courvalin said.

“We expect that the oil market will balance at a lower marginal cost in 2019 given higher inventory levels to start the year, the persistent beat in 2018 shale production growth amidst little observed cost inflation, weaker than previously expected demand growth expectations (even at our above consensus forecasts) and increased low-cost production capacity,” Courvalin wrote.

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4) Europe Is Fast-Becoming A Natural Gas Battleground For Russia And The US
CNBC, 8 January 2019 

The competition to supply Europe with natural gas is growing.

Holly Ellyatt



With 28 countries and a combined population of around 512 million people, the European Union is something of a prized market — and political battleground — for the world's largest energy exporters, particularly when it comes to natural gas.

Russia has long been the dominant source and supplier of natural gas to Europe's mass market but the U.S. is looking to challenge Russia by stepping up its imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) — gas which is super-cooled to liquid form — making it easier and safer to store and transport.

Europe certainly appears keen to wean itself off Russian gas, and all the geopolitical implications that reliance entails, while making overtures to the U.S. Last July, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and President Donald Trump agreed to strengthen U.S.-EU strategic cooperation with respect to energy and the EU said it would import more LNG from the U.S. "to diversify and render its energy supply more secure."

Twenty-four percent of U.S. LNG went to the EU in October 2018, a month which saw the largest volume ever of EU-U.S. trade in LNG of almost 0.6 billion cubic meters. In the whole of 2017, only 10 percent of U.S. LNG exports went to the EU. The Commission, the EU's executive arm, expects U.S. gas exports to the region could double by 2022 and has vaunted the construction of LNG terminals across Europe.

"The fact is that U.S. LNG, if priced competitively, can play and increasing role in EU gas supply, enhancing diversification and EU energy security," the EU said in a document detailing the state of EU-U.S. LNG trade in late November.

US vs Russian gas

The U.S. became a net natural gas exporter in 2017 for the first time in almost 60 years, according to the country's Energy Information Administration (EIA). It saw exports of its LNG rise 58 percent through the first half of 2018, compared with the same period in 2017. In fact, while U.S. LNG exports have continued to grow in 2018, U.S. natural gas pipeline import and export volumes have either remained relatively flat or declined from 2017 levels, the EIA noted.

U.S. exporters looking to Europe have a big obstacle in the region, however, and that's Russia.



Russia remains the largest supplier of natural gas to the EU in 2018, according to the Commission's latest data on EU imports of energy products in October. The other main suppliers are Norway and, at a lower level, Algeria and Qatar.

Showing the extent of much of the EU's reliance on Russian gas, the Commission noted that 11 member states (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Finland) imported more than 75 percent of total national imports of natural gas from Russia in 2018, largely due to their proximity to the country.



Gas from Russia is supplied to the continent by state-owned gas company Gazprom via pipelines, giving it an advantage in terms of cheaper transportation costs and established infrastructure and supply. It has a number of major pipelines in operation, or under construction, with European energy and infrastructure companies.

As well as the Nord Stream pipeline and its expanded version, Nord Stream 2, linking Russia to Europe via the Baltic Sea (the expanded pipeline is seen as a way to bypass transit countries like Ukraine), Gazprom and partner companies in Poland, Belarus and Germany oversee the 2,000 kilometer Yamal-Europe pipeline that sends gas from one of its production centers in Torzhok (via Belarus and Poland) to Germany.

The company is also constructing the TurkStream pipeline for gas exports from Russia across the Black Sea to Turkey and south eastern Europe.

Geopolitics

Pipeline projects have prompted criticism in Europe and in the U.S., with Trump accusing Germany (the largest foreign buyer of Russian gas) of being "captive" to Russia. His former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said earlier in 2018 that Nord Stream 2 undermined Europe's energy security.

Despite its reliance on Russia for gas, the EU's relationship with the country is a rocky one. Relations deteriorated when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in early 2014 and supported a pro-Russian uprising in east Ukraine, after which the U.S. and EU placed sanctions on Moscow.

Penalties were placed on Russian oil companies (including Gazprom and its oil arm Neft) in 2014 that sought to hinder these companies exploration and production of energy. The U.S. warned in November it could still seek to thwart the Nord Stream 2 project with further sanctions (essentially fines) on companies involved in the project.

Five EU companies are involved in the construction of Nord Stream 2 and the EU has expressed concern over such sanctions. Given Russia's established and growing infrastructure in Europe, commodity strategists like RBC Capital Markets' Christopher Louney said the geopolitical dimension to the U.S. promotion, and European adoption, of LNG is hard to ignore.



"There is definitely a geopolitical nature to it (the competition for European LNG customers)," Louney told CNBC Monday.

"The geopolitical nature of the U.S. gaining market share in European gas is highlighted by Trump's opposition to Nord Steam 2 (I'd note that there is also some more critical debate happening in Germany itself now)."

While there are other reasons to increase imports from the U.S. right now, including having a diversity of supply source and pricing, "it's hard to argue against geopolitics being at play here as well," he said.

Louney believes there's a long way to go before Russia's natural gas dominance is challenged, however.

"Europe taking U.S. LNG and U.S. LNG challenging Russian pipeline supplies for dominance are two very different things," he noted. "Europe has already taken U.S.-sourced LNG over the past two years with just a couple of export terminals in operation (i.e. U.K., Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal etc.)."

"With more U.S. export facilities coming online, the number of takers and volume taken can both increase, but there is a long way to go to compete (with Russia) for pre-eminence," he said. "That said, Europe's imports will likely grow leaving room for the U.S. to send additional volumes given the growth of exports here in the U.S."

5) Will Jordan Peterson And Dave Rubin Show A Way Through The Internet’s Censorship Minefield?
The Conservative Woman, 8 January 2018 
Kathy Gyngell

JORDAN Peterson and Dave Rubin began their New Year with an announcement. They told their followers they were ditching Patreon (the crowdfunding platform they use to get their followers’ support in the form of pledges and which has financed at least some their output). They have no alternative but to take a stand over Patreon’s censorship they’ve decided, despite not having a viable alternative to turn to.

 

We Are Leaving Patreon: Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson Announcement 

Principled stuff it seems. Internet control versus free speech. That’s the question and the choice they could no longer avoid. The last was, they said, Patreon’s banning of Carl Benjamin, (aka Sargon of Akkad). He’d been ‘de-platformed’ for using offensive slurs on another YouTuber’s channel. Though in fact he was turning the epithets used against racists themselves.

So they are leaving. In a skyped discussion below they explain why they can no longer watch their freedoms ‘erode away’ as tech giants, and the credit card companies working with them, decide what can and what cannot be said.

Although this has been cast as an issue of internet censorship TCW writer Paul T Horgan points out that there’s another perspective:

‘The private sector is under no obligation to be totally impartial. Like any physical establishment, the management reserve the right to refuse admission. The success of both Professor Peterson and Mr Rubin is due in part to the drastic lowering of the barriers to entry into mass media.

‘Forty years ago, both men would have needed to rely upon the discretion of newspaper editors and channel controllers to be able to access the audience they now enjoy. As the News of the World discovered to its cost, the business models of these media platforms do rely on commercial realities, and the liberal Left are adept at morally blackmailing corporate entities with quite modest campaigns using Twitter.

‘The barrier to entry in internet finance is also quite low. Thus it should be possible to create a clone of the services Patreon provides and be able to advise supporters to use that instead. We seem to be in the unusual position of having huge internet corporations that dominate their fields who are able to deny being monopolies because they have competition, even though such competition is relatively tiny to the point that these huge corporations are in effect private-sector public utilities.

‘However, theses quasi-monopolies are able to wield huge editorial power with little accountability.

Historically, Republican administrations have taken on monopolies and broken them up, while more recently the EU simply creates ad-hoc ‘monopoly taxes’ in the form of huge fines and seems to do little else apart from pocketing the cash.

‘The challenge is therefore twofold. First the state should fulfil its duty of public protection by examining whether extremely large internet corporations are operating against the public interest. Second, there is no good reason in a free-market economy for why there is only one Twitter, Google, Amazon, or indeed Patreon.’

And that – launching ‘the establishment of a Patreon-like enterprise that will not be susceptible to arbitrary censorship’ is just what Peterson and Rubin are busy planning right now.

We wish them luck.

6) And Finally: As The Old Faiths Collapse, The Greens, Social Justice Warriors, And Techno-Futurists Aim To Fill The Void
Joel Kotkin & Alicia Kurimska, The Daily Beast, 23 December 2018

They may see themselves as avant-garde, but the greens have perhaps more in common with feudal clerics than they might suspect. Nothing so resembles the bad old days of religion than the green movement’s apocalyptic and authoritarian approach.

The pews are emptying virtually everywhere in the higher-income world. The Catholic Church is divided and enmeshed in scandal, unable to prevent even historically cleric-dominated Ireland from liberalizing abortion. The once vibrant evangelical movement is losing momentum in the developed world while the more established Protestant and Jewish congregations are shrinking, some at a rapid rate.

Yet rather than an end to faith, this fading of religion may presage the radical re-invention of spiritualism. Just as Christianity replaced paganism at the end of the Roman Empire, rising new faiths—built around notions of social justice, the environment, and technology to extend life or even achieve immortality—may supplant the old ones.

The decline of organized religion is clear. In 24 of 42 traditionally Christian countries, many of them in Europe, the Christian population is already shrinking, deaths among Christians already exceed births—a trend that Pew predicts (PDF) will accelerate. Only in Africa, where faith has tended towards fundamentalism, do Christian births seem likely to continue outnumber births. The Jewish population in Europe, meanwhile, is less than half of what it was in 1960.

White Christians now comprise less than half of the American population, with the relative size of white evangelical, mainline Protestant, and Catholic populations all declining rapidly in the latest Public Religion Research Institute poll. Overall, the percentage of Catholics attending church weekly has plunged 50 percent from 1970, to barely 20 percent today; infant baptisms are down by nearly 40 percent since 2000.

The departure from traditional houses of religion has been most pronounced among the young. While 24 percent of Americans overall say they are unaffiliated with a religion, 38 percent of young adults (aged 19 to 29) say so—and they are leaving religious institutions at a rate four times that of their counterparts three decades ago. (In Europe, over 50 percent of Europeans under 30 do not identify with any religion at all.)

As sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell explained in 2010’s sweeping American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, the young and churchless mostly “reject conventional religious affiliation, while not entirely giving up their religious feelings.”

The key here for the future of religion lies in the perhaps ironic fact that many of those who resist affiliation still consider themselves “spiritual”; two-thirds of unaffiliated Americans say that they believe in God or a universal spirit. The Pew poll shows that the share of Americans who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” shot up by half, from 19 percent in 2012 to 27 percent in 2017, while the share of those who call themselves “religious and spiritual” slumped from 59 percent to 48 percent.

Increasingly, the young see religious commitment less a matter of belonging to a particular community, and instead one of pledging oneself, as an individual, to a particular spiritual viewpoint.  Among the “upwardly mobile class,” we have entered, in the words of Wayne Clark Roof, author of the Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, “the church of the solitary individual.”

The Changing Mission of Religion

As that try to manage and mitigate decline, increasingly politicized mainstream sects—the Jesuits, reform Jews and various mainstream Protestant faiths—are shifting away from the strictures, rituals and teachings of religion to embrace the new spirituality of redemption through social justice activism.

Much of this stems from religious education on campuses; a recent survey of tenured faculty at top colleges found 70 liberal religion professors for every one conservative one. Today’s “woke,”progressive churches would have much in common  with the “awakened” who left the pagan world to join the church, notes social theorist Mary Eberstadt.

There are at least two big problems with politicized religion. First, almost all the religious institutions  most committed to this course are also those in the most serious decline; mainstream Protestants have lost five million members in the past decade. They now make up barely 10 percent of the population, one-third their percentage in 1972. The newly politicized churches seem to increasingly put all their “faith” not in  the Gospels, but in joining the strident memes of the anti-Trump resistance even at the cost of their own heritage. Recently, Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia pulled down a memorial of one of its founders, George Washington, because it was seen as potentially offensive to politically correct potential parishioners.

The bigger threat, though, may be long-term demographics, as members of the progressive faiths have fewer children than adherents of evangelical Christianity, orthodox Judaism or fundamentalist Islam, as Eric Kaufmann, professor at Birkbeck College, the University of London, explains in his important book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?  By 2050, for example, Islam may constitute a larger faith community in Britain than the Church of England, the state-sanctioned Christian denomination. One place where the birth rates among the less religious are not declining is in Israel, where even the secular embrace many traditional social beliefs.

In America, secular Jews are fading; the Orthodox already constitute the majority of Jewish children in the New York metropolitan region. Given the reform branch’s increasingly strident politicization, it is likely to alienate many middle-of-the-road and conservative Jews. Much the same dynamic is playing out in Britain, where Orthodox Jews, historically a small sub-group, are projected to outnumber their more moderate counterparts in a few decades.

Europe’s Christian churches also seem on the path to self-destruction. The Roman Catholics seem increasingly weakened, with a pope who has signed away the right to name Bishops in China and whose closest advisers appear to be liberal bishops in Germany—where the church is now losing nearly 170,000 adherents annually. The same pope largely ignores the more traditionalist views of African bishops, who enjoy the fastest growth among congregants and whose flocks could account for 40 percent of all Christians worldwide by 2060.

Secondly, the politicization trend brings back the intolerance and witch-hunting that so characterized medieval religion. Practitioners of the progressive dogma of “intersectionality”, notes atheist philosopher James Lindsay, resemble the old churchmen in anathematizing those who disagree with their dogma. These practitioners, he suggests, “tend to focus on moral purity for the in-group. They tend to demonize the out-group. They especially demonize heretics or blasphemers or anyone who goes too far outside that dogmatic structure of belief and threatens it. Those people are often excommunicated.”

Finally, the new social justice crusaders often find themselves with strange, and even discordant allies. Reform Jewish activists, for example, identify with “resistance” groups like the Women’s March which is led by people who support banning Israeli goods and embrace open anti-Semites like Minister Louis Farrakhan. Catholic activists find themselves allied with politicians like Dianne Feinstein, who openly attack their faith’s basic dogma as disqualifying for federal court appointments.

Sometimes the linkages are ironic, to say the least. Faith in Public Life, a strident “religious” group advocating a progressive anti-Trump line, gets much of its funding from George Soros, perhaps the world’s most well-heeled and active promoter of atheism.

The Green Faith

Other more openly “post-Christian” substitutes for religion find their inspiration elsewhere. Perhaps the largest is the environmental movement, whose rhetoric and preferences echo those of the medieval Christian church. With its own pieties, roster of saints and sinners, the climate movement, notes author Joel Garreau, is becoming “the religion of choice for urban atheists.”

They may see themselves as avant-garde, but the greens have perhaps more in common with feudal clerics than they might suspect. Feudalism developed in an economic environment of extreme scarcity, something also embraced by greens. Rather than celebrate opportunity, the “green” religion emphasizes the dangers of economic growth, a critical element in breaking down the old structures of feudalism.

Like the medieval church, the green movements benefits from enormous support from the wealthiest and most well-established elements in society. No surprise then that what is preached for the masses—for example tough restrictions on driving or energy consumption—rarely apply to or impact the well off and well-connected. Like the aristocrats who bought themselves indulgences, our elites get off by purchasing “carbon offsets” that few middle-class people could afford.

But nothing so resembles the bad old days of religion than the green movement’s apocalyptic and authoritarian approach. For all its unquestioned good in pointing out real environmental issues, greens have often embraced hyperbole—the “population bomb”, predictions of imminent crises of “global cooling,” imminent resource depletion and ever worse pollution—as their primary marketing tactic. Although many of these predictions proved not only exaggerated but often plain wrong, true believers rarely stop and contemplate their misstatements.

Like messianic preachers from the old religions, many climate activists, like medieval clerics, see human greed as the root of evil. They also look to impose penance through such things as not eating meat, something both older Catholics and aging hippies could recall with nostalgia. Perhaps less appealing, climate activists often follow procedures common to the Inquisition, from taking dissenters to court to seeking to banish different ideas even by legal means. They have also managed to ban even the mildly skeptical views from much of the press, including the BBC and The Los Angeles Times.

Many greens have as little use for democracy or impartiality as would the Catholic Church of the 11th century; many see authoritarian regimes, like China, as better suited  to meeting climate change than our querulous democracy. Acting like Torquemada in a business  suit, the former Jesuit-turned-climate crusader Jerry Brown even openly called for the “brainwashing” of the sinful, uncomprehending masses when visiting Rome. Significantly, the green religion is increasingly hostile towards making families. If the medieval mentality attacked sex—15 percent of the population was permanently celibate—the green one focuses on preventing the traditional result from the proverbial role in the hay. Like the millenarians who feared the imminence of the “Final Judgement,” many greens oppose baby-making as a way to mitigate the evil of human existence.

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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.