GWPF Newsletter: WWF’s Secret War

Green NGO Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People

In this newsletter:

1) WWF’s Secret War: One Of The World’s Biggest Green NGO Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People
BuzzFeed News, 4 March 2019 
 
2) An Israeli Company May Have Solved The World’s Water Problems For Good
Jerusalem Post, 4 March 2019 

 
3) U.S. Democrats Raise Alarm Over Proposed White House Climate Scrutiny Panel
The Hill, 1 March 2019
 
4) Lawrence Solomon: Trump’s New Climate Committee Could Welcome The World’s Smartest Sceptics
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, 1 March 2019 
 
5) Senate Democrats Backtrack On Green New Deal, Ask For A Vote To Affirm Climate Change Is Real
The Washington Examiner, 28 February 2019
 
6) Carbon Dioxide: The Newest Form Of Renewable Energy?
James Murphy. The New American, 1 March 2019

7) And Finally: Future Climate Activists In Doubt As Green Women Go On Birth Strike
The Sunday Times, 3 March 2019

Full details:

1) WWF’s Secret War: One Of The World’s Biggest Green NGO Funds Guards Who Have Tortured And Killed People
BuzzFeed News, 4 March 2019 
By Tom Warren and Katie J.M. Baker

The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching. A BuzzFeed News investigation reveals the hidden human cost.



A yearlong BuzzFeed News investigation across six countries — based on more than 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, including confidential memos, internal budgets, and emails discussing weapons purchases — can reveal:
 

• Villagers have been whipped with belts, attacked with machetes, beaten unconscious with bamboo sticks, sexually assaulted, shot, and murdered by WWF-supported anti-poaching units, according to reports and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.

• The charity’s field staff in Asia and Africa have organised anti-poaching missions with notoriously vicious shock troops, and signed off on a proposal to kill trespassers penned by a park director who presided over the killings of dozens of people.

• WWF has provided paramilitary forces with salaries, training, and supplies — including knives, night vision binoculars, riot gear, and batons — and funded raids on villages. In one African country, it embroiled itself in a botched arms deal to buy assault rifles from a brutal army that has paraded the streets with the severed heads of alleged “criminals.”

• The charity has operated like a global spymaster, organizing, financing, and running dangerous and secretive networks of informants motivated by “fear” and “revenge,” including within indigenous communities, to provide park officials with intelligence — all while publicly denying working with informants.

WWF has launched an “independent review” led by human rights specialists into the evidence uncovered by BuzzFeed News. “We see it as our urgent responsibility to get to the bottom of the allegations BuzzFeed has made, and we recognize the importance of such scrutiny,” the charity said in a statement.

“With this in mind, and while many of BuzzFeed’s assertions do not match our understanding of events, we have commissioned an independent review into the matters raised.” The charity declined to answer detailed questions sent by BuzzFeed News.

Full story

See also GWPF coverage of WWF’s history of human rights abuses



2) An Israeli Company May Have Solved The World’s Water Problems For Good
Jerusalem Post, 4 March 2019 

The company’s large-scale generator can produce up to 5,000 liters of clean water every day from the air, requiring no infrastructure other than a standard electricity supply.


A Watergen machine produces clean drinking-quality water from the air . (photo credit: PR)

It might sound like a sophisticated magic trick or even a biblical story, but one Israeli company’s groundbreaking technology can create fresh drinking-quality water from nothing but plain air.

Established in 2009, Rishon Lezion-based Watergen is the ambitious company behind the development, tapping into atmospheric water to produce safe water wherever it is most needed.

The company, chaired by Israeli-Georgian businessman and philanthropist Mikhael Mirilashvili, has set its sights on expanding its renewable and energy-efficient clean water solution to the 2.1 billion people worldwide who lack access to safe water at home – and wherever else it might be needed.

In recent months, the system has been donated to authorities in Brazil, Vietnam and India. It has also assisted rescue and recovery efforts during the 2018 California wildfires and provided clean water to the residents of Texas and Florida in the aftermath of the devastation caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

“Our main target is to save and improve people’s lives all around the world,” Mirilashvili told The Jerusalem Post.

“We also aim to remove plastic from earth, to reduce the global carbon footprint, and of course make our planet cleaner and safer.”

How does the system work? First, Watergen’s built-in blower draws air from the atmosphere into the system’s atmospheric water generator. There, an internal filter cleanses the air by removing dust and dirt. Once clean, the air is directed through the GENius heat exchange and cooling process, and condensed into water.

The water is then filtered again to remove impurities and add minerals, resulting in fresh drinking-quality water. Once produced, the water is continuously circulated in a built-in reservoir to preserve its freshness.

The company’s large-scale generator can produce up to 5,000 liters of clean water every day, requiring no infrastructure other than a standard electricity supply.
Its medium-scale generator can produce up to 900 liters of clean water every day. The “Genny,” a plug-in home or office generator, can produce up to 27 liters per day.

Full story

3) U.S. Democrats Raise Alarm Over Proposed White House Climate Scrutiny Panel
The Hill, 1 March 2019

A group of liberal lawmakers in both the House and Senate are raising concerns over a new climate council being organized at the White House that includes members who question the science behind global warming [alarmism].

In two letters sent to the president this week, the incredulous lawmakers urged Trump to reconsider the council — which is being likened to a similar attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to craft a “red team, blue team” approach to delegitimize climate science — saying it would fly in the face of scientific evidence.

The letter from four House lawmakers Thursday asked Trump to provide more information about the Presidential Climate Security Committee, which is reportedly being organized through the White House’s National Security Council (NSC) and headed by a well-known climate skeptic, former Princeton professor William Happer. The panel will look into climate change’s potential effects on national security, according to reports.

“Given the previous statements you’ve made that fly in the face of explicit scientific evidence and the findings of your own [Department of Defense] and Director of National Intelligence, we have serious concerns about any effort to construct a secret committee to question the basic scientific fact of climate change,” the lawmakers wrote.

Details they desired as listed in the letter included the names and backgrounds of all staffers and members who will be involved with the committee and a commitment to maintain notes from committee meetings and provide regular updates to the House committees on the status of the working group. […]

The White House has remained tight-lipped on the status of the panel, which must ultimately be created through a presidential executive order.

Another letter to Trump, drafted by senators Wednesday called the proposed panel “dangerous” and “misguided.” […]

They said the underlying basis for the proposed committee was at “direct odds” with the findings of various government institutions. They pointed to studies by the Government Accountability Office that said worsening storm systems could affect national food security, the intelligence community’s 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment that warned climate change could fuel resource competition and economic distress, as well as a 2018 statement by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, who said global warming could cause “great devastation.”

Full post

4) Lawrence Solomon: Trump’s New Climate Committee Could Welcome The World’s Smartest Sceptics
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, 1 March 2019 

The idea of exposing the public to both sides of the global warming debate is back in the form of a President’s Committee on Climate Security, but like climate science itself, this committee’s future is not yet settled.

For decades, the world has heard from the so-called “97 per cent” of scientists said to believe that the planet faces an existential threat from global warming. Soon, through the Presidential Committee on Climate Security that the White House is today contemplating, we may be hearing from “the deniers” said to populate the other three per cent — i.e., the scientific misfits and incompetents that the press has castigated for putting the planet in peril by questioning climate change.

Some misfits, some incompetents. The head of the committee would be William Happer, currently a senior director at the National Security Council who oversaw a US$3-billion research budget in the first Bush administration as Director of Energy Research in the Department of Energy. In Happer’s academic career as a professor at Columbia and Princeton universities, he published some 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and became a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Happer is also past president of the CO2 Coalition, a non-profit that he co-founded following research by him and others that found CO2 to be a boon for the environment. As put by the CO2 Coalition’s website: “the recent increase in CO2 levels has had a measurable, positive effect on plant life. Future CO2 increases will boost farm productivity, improve drought resistance, bolster food security and help create a greener, lusher planet.”

Other “deniers” reportedly being considered for the commission include Richard S. Lindzen, emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of both the American Meteorological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a recipient of the Jule Charney award for “highly significant research” in the atmospheric sciences from the American Meteorological Society. Lindzen’s pioneering research in atmospheric dynamics debunked the notion of disastrous climate change.

Also under consideration is Judith Curry, past chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who argues that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the chief fount of climate dogma — should be disbanded.

And John Christy, notable for discounting a large role for humans in climate change and for co-developing a record of earth’s temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, for which he received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal.

Other skeptics of the prevailing climate orthodoxy who would be qualified to round out the commission include Michael Griffin, the former head of NASA, Princeton’s Freeman Dyson, arguably America’s most famous scientist, and Edward Wegman, a past chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences.

Statistics are important because many claims in the global warming debate — such as the IPCC’s infamous “hockey stick” that purported to show unprecedented increases in temperatures in the 20th century — are based on statistical models. It was Wegman’s testimony before a congressional committee that established the statistical incompetence of the hockey stick’s authors. Their model was so flawed that it would produce a hockey-stick shape regardless of the data used as inputs — keying in baseball stats would produce a hockey-stick shape.

Full post

5) Senate Democrats Backtrack On Green New Deal, Ask For A Vote To Affirm Climate Change Is Real
The Washington Examiner, 28 February 2019

Senate Democrats have introduced a joint resolution stating the belief that climate change is real and that it is a genuine threat to life on Earth.

The resolution, which is barely a page long, is a response to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is forcing a vote on a separate bit of legislation introduced earlier this month by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass.

In other words, Senate Democrats are chickening out on a proposal they once eagerly backed. And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is now left struggling to find a good way to counter-troll Senate Republicans. Schumer surely didn’t want this situation. And his solution, perhaps the best available, makes his party look a lot worse than I think he realizes.

One problem with their fallback resolution, which carries the names of all 47 Democratic senators, is that it suggests they’re disingenuous about addressing climate change. After all, they just rolled out the Green New Deal. Now they’re asking for a vote to affirm that climate change is real. Don’t they have it backward? Perhaps it would have been wiser to establish a consensus before proposing a groundbreaking multitrillion-dollar overhaul of the U.S. economy. Or was their embrace of Cortez’ Green New Deal never really about getting anything substantive accomplished? Was it always more about playing to their base’s fevered fantasies than it was about combating climate change?

The joint resolution, which was announced Thursday by Schumer, asks that the Senate vote to affirm three core beliefs. These beliefs are:

– Climate change is real.

– Human activity during the last century is the dominant cause of the climate crisis

– The United States Congress should take immediate action to address the challenge of climate change.

Senate Democrats aren’t exactly taking a bold stand. They’ve gone from backing the wildly ambitious Green New Deal to asking for a vote to agree that climate change is real, and all because they didn’t anticipate McConnell would call up Markey’s resolution. Worse than getting outplayed with their own legislation, though, Democrats also look like they’re making it up as they go, and that’s a hell of a thing to be doing if you really believe the world will end unless we do something drastic within the next 12 years.

Full post

6) Carbon Dioxide: The Newest Form Of Renewable Energy?
James Murphy. The New American, 1 March 2019

Move over wind farms. Step aside acres of solar panels. There’s a new renewable energy source coming down the pike, and it has the potential to put the others out of business. And, ironically, it’s the climate alarmists’ biggest demon. It’s carbon dioxide.

A schematic illustration showing how liquid metal is used as a catalyst for converting carbon dioxide into solid coal. Credit: RMIT University

Carbon sequestration, as the process is called, removes CO₂ from the atmosphere and turns it into a solid form, namely coal, in order to be able to store it safely back in the ground where it came from.

A research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, has discovered a new method of taking carbon dioxide in its gas form and converting it into solid coal. The discovery has the potential to completely change the way people regard the carbon dioxide that humans release into the atmosphere. The paper detailing how the feat was accomplished was published on February 26 in Nature Communications.

“While we can’t literally turn back time, turning carbon dioxide back into coal and burying it back in the ground is a bit like rewinding the emissions clock,” said Dr. Torben Daeneke, a research scientist at RMIT University.

Methods of carbon sequestration already exist, but those methods are technically and economically challenging. Major oil companies and energy concerns such as Shell are currently spending a fortune on projects aimed at removing atmospheric CO₂ from the air, but those processes involve turning CO₂ into a liquid form and injecting it back into rock formations.

The process is so expensive that even major companies can’t afford it without government subsidies.

While this is not the first time that scientists have been able to turn CO₂ into coal, previous methods required extremely high temperatures and were not viable outside a laboratory setting. The new method can be accomplished at room temperature.

“To date, CO₂ has only been converted into a solid at extremely high temperatures, making it industrially unviable,” Daeneke said.

But the researchers found a way around the extreme temperature problem. “By using liquid metals as a catalyst, we’ve shown it’s possible to turn the gas back into carbon at room temperature, in a process that’s efficient and scaleable,” Daeneke said.

The liquid metal catalyst was developed by the researchers with specific surface properties, making it extremely efficient at conducting electricity, while chemically activating the surface.

According to the press release: “The carbon dioxide is dissolved in a beaker with an electrolyte liquid and a small amount of the liquid metal, which is then charged with an electric current. The CO₂ slowly converts into solid flakes of carbon, which are naturally detached from the liquid metal surface, allowing the continuous production of carbonaceous solid.”

And, yes, the process has the potential to yield a future energy source. The carbon produced may be able to be used as an electrode.

Full post
 
7) And Finally: Future Climate Activists In Doubt As Green Women Go On Birth Strike
The Sunday Times, 3 March 2019

For one group of women, global warming has just got personal. They have made a pact not to have children because of the “climate catastrophe” facing the planet.

About 60 women — and a few men — have joined up to form BirthStrike, a group that has imposed a voluntary ban on making babies until the planet “no longer faces global extinction”.

“I do have a partner and would like to have children with him. We’re really in love, and it feels like the right thing to do,” said Blythe Pepino, 33.

“But last year I read the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] and realised how wrong it would be to bring a child into a world on the brink of catastrophe. Now we are looking for [others] who feel the same way to join us.”

Full story

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.