The Great Reset, a Green Veneer for Fake Climate and Environmental Action
The Great Reset sounds like an ad for a magical button that can reset everything back to normal, similar to the owner of an old car who wants maximum profit so he resets the mileage to 0, repaints the car, and installs a few bells and whistles to better fool a naïve potential buyer. In reality, the engine is about to fall and the breaks don’t work.
Joking aside, the World Economic Forum recently met on June 3rd, 2020 to announce their new plan for the Great Reset that will start on January 2021. This is a serious business and the most serious part is that it is all about business and its main priority, profits.
The Great Reset was announced by the founder and Executive Director of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Klaus Schwab. In his speech, he appealed for a change in the way business is done with a new climate and nature-saving plan that builds upon the sustainable goals of the U.N.’s Agenda 2030. The Forum concluded that the top five risks for businesses are related to climate and the environment and this prompted them to make this topic their priority. Their main programs include the World Wild Fund’s (WWF) New Deal for Nature (NDN), the WEF Nature Action Agenda (NAA), and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) chaired by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff. Karl Schwab expressed their willingness to deal with these risks:
The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions… Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.
The nature and climate part of the Great Reset includes the NAA and the New Deal for Nature. They both advocate what Marco Lambertini, Director General of the World Wild Fund International said:
“We are losing nature at a catastrophic and dangerous level, putting people, businesses, and our economy at risk. This cannot continue. In 2020, governments and businesses must commit to halt and reverse the loss of nature.”
The NDN, the NAA, and the 4th Industrial Revolution had been planned for years and were widely discussed during the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos on January 21th, 2020. One day later the WHO declared COVID 19 COV-2 an emergency of international concern. On March 11, 2020, the WEF announced a partnership with the WHO to establish the COVID Action Platform for Business. The next day the WHO declared COVID 19 a pandemic. This is what Prince Charles had to say on June 3, after the world institutional reactions to the pandemic have played out and created plenty of economic and psychological collateral damage:
“We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this [COVID-19] crisis. Its unprecedented shock waves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change.”
These “shock waves” seem very convenient for the implementation of top-down directives like the NDN, the NAA, and the 4th Industrial Revolution. Director-General of the WHO Tedros Ghebreyesus said on Aug 23rd, 2020: “the COVID-19 pandemic has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change”. Dr. Tedros’ joined the WEF chorus for the implementation of the above directives claiming that the reduced activity during the lockdowns had rid our skies of pollution, proving how easy it is to implement solutions for our climate change problem.
Unfortunately, our climate disaster is much more complicated than pollution in cities; the fact that our skies looked cleaner was deceptive, the concentrations of greenhouse gases continued their ascent unperturbed by our reduced activity. Dr. Tedros and other WEF participant’s assertions put in evidence the lack of a real desire to tackle the climate problem, preferring a strategy of promoting a green facade that promises a lot, but only offers a small band-aid as solution.
The simultaneous announcement of nature-saving programs with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, makes quite evident that the lockdowns prescribed for this pandemic were the training camps for the implementation of the 4IR; people were forced to stay at home, restrict travel, rely even more on their technological devices, and resort to virtual meetings for most of their social, health and educational needs. Prince Charles correctly lauded the success of the training of most of the world with access to advanced technology.
Karl Schwab and Thierry Malleret head of the Great Barometer recently published an e-book called: COVID-19 and The Great Reset where they explain the true nature of their top-down policy that concentrates on dramatically increased automation within the 4IR framework:
“Indeed, automation technologies are particularly well suited to a world in which human beings can’t get too close to each other or are willing to reduce their interactions. Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus (COVID-19 or another) will thus speed the relentless march of automation, particularly in the fields most susceptible to automation.”
The above quote shows that though the Great Reset insists that their priority is dealing with the environmental and climate calamity, it is just a façade for their real aim, the implementation of a big leap in automation in which the importance of human interaction will be greatly diminished. Acceptance for these top-down directives would not have been possible without the fear that the relentless reporting about the pandemic created.
Let’s remember who is Klaus Schwab, he is the founder and head of the World Economic Forum, where the elite world corporations, institutions, and politicians meet to discuss the agenda for the world. Their top concern is for business and profits, which has blinded them into thinking that a brave new world of increased technology is a good idea at a time of a climate catastrophe. Conveniently, Lambertini, Schwab, and Benioff et al. see our climate and environmental calamity as a risk for the economical prospects of businesses, but not as a whole scale disaster for the whole species, including themselves, the super-rich. Even though they have finally agreed that fossil fuels are the culprit, their speeded-up automation projects don’t seem to have any real calculations about how to get the energy and resources required for this increased tech growth, and how the cumulative emissions will play out within our current dire climate situation.
Climate disaster
Precisely this summer of 2020 the feedback mechanisms of the Earth are confirming a very alarming scenario for the near term survival of our species. The Arctic and Antarctic are the canaries in the mine; what happens there affects everything else. The temperatures in the Arctic have been increasing steadily since the 1960s, causing a series of feedback mechanisms that reduce the ice each year reflecting less sunlight into space, which in turn has produced a sharp rise in temperatures. This vicious circle is arriving to an extreme this summer with the Arctic experiencing unprecedented high temperatures, ice shrinking and thinning, so much that most of the Arctic ice we have left is just a sludge with not much solid ice. The climate computer models that most world institutions use had predicted a linear progression in ice shrinking but this linearity was lost since the 1990s when the temperature’s rise and the ice melting and thinning entered an exponential curve that spells bad tidings for our climate stability.
In a continuation of feedback mechanisms, the melting of the ice and permafrost is also allowing the escape of methane trapped underneath, which in conjunction with the widespread fires in Siberia, are compounding the emissions and the already dire vicious circle in the Arctic. The water in the shallow East Siberian Arctic Sea is getting dangerously warmer making it easier for the methane hydrates in the sediment to dissolve, increasing the possibilities of sudden huge bursts of methane into the atmosphere. This year, the Arctic Ocean’s temperatures have passed a dire threshold going above the limit that keeps the methane hydrates stable. The limit is calculated at more than 1°C or 2°F above the 20th-century average; in 2020 this limit has been crossed about 10 times already. This means that a sudden burst of a great quantity of methane hydrates could be quite imminent. Adding to this menacing scenario, the increase in water temperature in both poles is reducing the microorganism’s capacity to absorb methane and increasing the disappearance of icebergs and glaciers.
The above vicious circle has disturbed most atmospheric and oceanic currents which had been politely keeping the stability of our climate until recently. A methane hydrate burst could increase greenhouse gas concentrations very dramatically, raising the Earth’s temperature well beyond the expectations of the Paris Agreements. We have lost our benign climate conducive to the thriving of humans; more technology won’t bring it back, it will only make the problem worse.
The Great Reset’s Promises
After reading the above it is evident that the climate and environmental problem that we have is a very threatening problem to our species. Schwab et al.’s admission of a climate and ecological disaster doesn’t even begin to deal with the problem. The excessive use of energy and raw materials that we have needed for our current tech progress is what caused the disturbance of the Earth’s systems that threatens our survival; how can a program that proposes the 4IR while claiming sustainability and respect for nature be taken seriously as a viable option? The Great Reset solutions promise a bright future based on wishful thinking that requires the magical ability to arbitrarily bypass the universal laws of thermodynamics, physics, and chemistry. For them, everything is possible; all we have to do is to use more technology to solve every problem.
The Great Reset’s proposal for fixing the climate and environmental problems includes a commitment to a zero net loss of nature beginning in 2020, to be net positive by 2030, and a full recovery by 2050. They also emphasize an increase in conservancy areas and a stop to fauna and flora extinctions. Celebrities linked to the WEF like nature documentarian David Attenborough and primatologist Jane Goodall joined the chorus by claiming without any proof, that viruses like COVID 19 will be more prevalent if we destroy more nature. The most illogical part of their proposals is that the nature-saving promises are supposed to be accomplished while the 4th Industrial Revolution is going full steam ahead, supposedly powered by clean renewable energy.
Energy
The cognitive dissonance between their pie in the sky proposals and the reality is astounding. For people who advocate science and technology as their guide, it is strange how they choose to ignore the fact that as recently as 2019 fossil fuels provided 84% of our total global energy consumption, up by 4% from 2017. The total global energy consumed includes electricity (only 18% of all our energy needs), and the bulk of it is spent on mining, manufacturing, infrastructure building, industrialized food production, war, and transportation. This means that renewable energy provided only 16% of our total global energy consumption in 2019. It is important here to notice that electricity isn’t the same as total energy and that even the total percentage of renewable energy that provided electricity has barely reached 30%, mostly by hydro-power.
Pollution
The pie in the sky of increasing automation, substituting all fossil fuels for renewable energy while preserving nature and reducing emissions and environmental damage is physically unfeasible; it manages to convince people because it is based on repeated media misinformation and the false idea that renewable energy is clean. Once again, the Great Reset conveniently chooses to ignore the polluting toxicity and emissions caused by mining the components, manufacturing the parts, transporting and finally recycling them. One wind turbine requires 1600 lbs of toxic and radioactive rare earths for the magnet and tons of toxic plastics like polyvinyl chlorides or PCBs for its blades. None of this is recyclable and even if it were, the cost would be especially prohibiting for business-minded people from the WEF. Solar panels, batteries for electric cars, and energy storage all suffer the same toxic fate.
Trees and Conservancy Areas
The Great Reset’s other climate solution involves intensive tree planting, another empty promise claiming that trees currently absorb 60% of excess CO2. They neglect to admit that the absorption of CO2 by trees happens mostly in large, diverse, and intact forests full of old trees. These forests are decreasing every day to provide for our energy and raw materials needs, and the requirements of the 4IR will ensure that this will continue at an increased rate. The cutting of old forests like the Amazon reduces dramatically their ability to absorb CO2 and turns them instead into emitters.
While corporations claim their allegiance to conservancy areas and tree planting. prominently lauding their effort on their websites, the reality is that our energy needs and 4IR growth will require more nature loss. Manufacturing industries and renewable energy like biodiesel imply the destruction of natural forests that are quickly cut to be replaced by endless monocultures of palm oil, soy, and corn. In turn, these crops herald the arrival of big agribusiness and chemical corporations who are linked to the Great Reset, like Monsanto-Bayer with their toxic fertilizers, weed killers, and pesticides.
The Great Reset’s promise to stop fauna and flora extinction by creating conservancy areas is also a ploy for the concentration of land and water in a few corporate hands. According to local activists in many areas of the world, the WWF et al. rate their success in conservancy by how many people are displaced from their natural environments. They have reduced the problem of fauna extinction to the problem of poaching, without noticing that the people who have lived in these environments are the ones who have maintained them in good condition for millennia.
How many people have been displaced by conservancy groups touting the need to protect the tigers and orangutans, only to see that the animals continue to dwindle because the areas are instead given to corporations to mine or transform for profit? The Great Reset doesn’t seem to understand that the continuous displacement of people based on fake conservancy issues will increase the number of poor people, many of whom will inevitably become refugees in other areas and ultimately migrate to the privileged Global North?
Agriculture
The Great Reset envisions a future of a very productive industrial agriculture in which authoritarian directives will only allow the planting of crops that their experts consider healthy for humanity. Their proposed increase in agricultural productivity will also imply corresponding increments in fertilizer and pesticide use. Their business minds conveniently ignore that nitrogen-based fertilizers have disturbed the nitrogen cycle on earth, creating emissions of nitric oxide. This powerful greenhouse gas not only compounds our climate problem but also contributes to the destruction of the ozone layer. The pesticides and fertilizers also create dead zones in the ocean and threaten the survival of pollinators. Their proposals admit that there is no prosperity without pollinators, which loss they attribute entirely to habitat loss, while conveniently ignoring the main culprits, the toxic pesticides produced by corporations like Monsanto-Bayer.
Raw Materials
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will imply accelerated automation which will require a drastic increase in the extraction of raw materials. The Earth has already been gutted for its resources and as these become more difficult and expensive to obtain, the ocean is the next frontier. The 4IR informs us that they are very concerned about the current extractive practices and they aim to transform them from nature-negative to nature positive. Unfortunately, their only concern is for the legalistic and business side of the equation, nothing for the nature-saving aspect of it. The difference between before and after Great Reset extractive practices is in the adjective used, from negative to positive, but not in the regulation and enforcement to minimize ecological damage.
A Plan for Business
Have the Great Reset proponents calculated the number of forests, rivers, oceans, and air that will be destroyed to provide for their projected increased automation and the energy it requires? In a culture used to prioritizing business and legal calculations, we don’t notice that the business as usual talk about economies and profits are just abstract notions that the real effects of climate change will quickly turn obsolete. The Earth’s systems don’t follow GDP and Dow Jones average numbers, they don’t obey what Klaus Schwab or Marco Lambertini say, they react to the myriad of feedback mechanisms that we have caused by our irreparable damage.
If you look at the partners of the WEF it is the who is who of global corporate power, all lauding the start of a new type of capitalism called stakeholder that would be fairer for all, and that will solve all our environmental and climate problems. All these industrial and energy companies have caused pollution and their actions are very responsible for the situation we are in; the only difference now is their new awareness that a green façade is essential for public relations purposes.
The Great Reset sounds like a magic wand that will solve everything just by accepting the directives of these elites, masters of image control; their websites promise the sun and the moon without any factual proofs or even logic. The reality of their proposals will increase the disturbance of the Earth’s physical systems, global human displacement, refugees, unemployment, hunger, poverty, loss of nature, and subsequent reduction in flora and fauna. None of the solutions they propose are feasible, especially when we remember the climate disaster we are facing and the very adverse situation that this has on our species.
One would imagine that awareness of the threatening climate situation we are in would prompt a global union of people to deal with the climate and environmental challenges that we will increasingly face. Instead, we have top-down directives by the corporate world elites that started with the implementation of lockdowns for the 2020 pandemic and will continue with the Great Reset. By accepting this gradual increase in global authoritarianism, we are admitting that only these elites know what is good for us and our children. The mainstream media is loyal to corporations and their needs, so we shouldn’t expect them to enlighten us about the dangers that lurk under the glossy façade of the Great Reset.
