SOURCE: IAIN DAVIS via UK COLUMN
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset has been sold to the public as an opportunity to build a sustainable, carbon neutral future. The ubiquitous sound bite of build back better, or “build back greener,” as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently rephrased it, suggests that recovery from the economic devastation, following the alleged pandemic, is a chance for the world to “reset.”
Sustainable Development Goal 11 (b) of UN Agenda 2030 states:
By 2020, substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards.. adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters, and develop and implement, in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, holistic disaster risk management at all levels.
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, written in 2015, states:
The recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction phase, which needs to be prepared ahead of a disaster, is a critical opportunity to Build Back Better.
With the 2020 emergence of the alleged global pandemic, human settlements have certainly been implementing plans. Fitting in perfectly with Agenda 2030, our leaders efforts to build back better are focused upon a recovery which appears to have been planned long before anyone had even heard of SARS-CoV-2.
A Vision for the Future
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) published their Vision 2050 document in 2010. Aiming to transform the global economy to meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they said that a pathway would be needed. It would “require fundamental changes in governance structures, economic frameworks, business and human behaviour.” They envisaged two distinct periods of transformation.
The WBCSD is an organisation of 200 CEO’s from some of the world’s largest global corporations. It is the hub for more than 60 national and regional business councils and partner organisations including the United Nations, the EU Commission, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Bank, The World Health Organisation, The World Wildlife Fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation and BlackRock.
They called the decade between 2010 to 2020 the Turbulent Teens. This would be the time to construct the mechanisms that would enable the fundamental changes to be established. Transformation Time would start in 2020, once the fundamental changes had been able to “mature into more consistent knowledge, behaviour and solutions.”
In their conclusion the WBCSD suggested how the process of moving from the Turbulent Teens into the Transformation Time could occur:
Crisis. Opportunity. It is a business cliché, but there is truth in it.
While for many of us 2020 was a disaster, the WBCSD were among the central planners of the new normal global economy for whom the global pandemic could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. It was a remarkable coincidence that the right crisis opportunity arrived precisely on schedule. In 2020 they updated their Vision 2050. Recognising that the time to transform had arrived, they said:
Despite its enormous human and financial cost, the COVID-19 pandemic has created an opportunity to drive and accelerate change at a completely different pace than we may have previously imagined to be possible.
Although they did imagine exactly this possibility. WBSCD partners, the WEF, have also been counting their lucky stars. The Covid-19 alleged global pandemic was an opportunity to make the significant social, economic and political changes they had long been hoping for:
The Covid-19 crisis, and the political, economic and social disruptions it has caused, is fundamentally changing the traditional context for decision-making … As we enter a unique window of opportunity to shape the recovery, this initiative will … inform all those determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons.
In his 2021 letter to CEO’s, Larry Fink, the chairman of BlackRock, also expressed his gratitude for BlackRock’s good fortune as he expanded on the unprecedented opportunity presented by Covid-19:
The pandemic has presented such an existential crisis … that it has driven us to confront the global threat of climate change more forcefully.. Markets started to price climate risk into the value of securities … then the pandemic took hold.. and the reallocation of capital accelerated even faster. I believe that this is the beginning of a long but rapidly accelerating transition – one that will unfold over many years and reshape asset prices of every type … the climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity.
Fink’s comments outline how the Build Back Better Great Reset is intended to work. Some people seem to think that sustainable development has got something to do with environmentalism, saving the planet or some other vague “green agenda.” Unfortunately, they are way off the mark.
Corporate Glue
Sustainable development means stakeholder capitalism as the corporate glue holding together a global network of public private partnerships who are collectively assuming the mantle of global governors. Under their stewardship the international monetary and financial system (IMFS) is being transformed. The stakeholder partner network is busy capitalising a $120 trillion Carbon Bond market as the foundation of the new IMFS.
Environmentalist campaigners like Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion perhaps imagine they are in the vanguard of a global environmentalist battle against climate change and the big polluters who are guilty of causing it. In reality, unwittingly or not, they are image leaders for the big polluters’ public relations department.
The same despised global corporations are key members of a global public private partnership which is using the ruse of climate change to establish the new IMFS. One that will consolidate their global economic power and thus their world wide authority.
Not only did the claimed global pandemic deliver the right crisis at precisely the right time, in another truly remarkable coincidence, it accustomed us to the behaviour changes required to live in our new, sustainable IMFS. Reduced travel, limited access to resources, low employment, austerity, reliance upon state financial support and new forms of currency based upon sustainable, stakeholder metrics, are all part of our planned net zero future.
WEF partners Deutsche Bank are certainly among the global corporations who are aware of this. They published an article in November 2020 in which their senior analyst Eric Heymann outlined what a carbon neutral economy portends:
The impact of the current climate policy on people’s everyday lives is still quite abstract. Climate policy comes in the form of higher taxes and fees on energy. If we really want to achieve climate neutrality, we need to change our behaviour in all these areas of life. A major turnaround in climate policy will certainly produce losers among both households and corporates. In addition, prosperity and employment are likely to suffer considerably. There are no adequate cost-effective technologies yet to allow us to maintain our living standards in a carbon-neutral way. That means that carbon prices will have to rise considerably in order to nudge people to change their behaviour. Another (or perhaps supplementary) option is to tighten regulatory law considerably. To what extent may we be willing to accept some kind of eco-dictatorship (in the form of regulatory law) in order to move towards climate neutrality?
This is congruent with the observations of both the former and current Bank of England Governors. Prior to his departure as governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney warned that companies unable to meet the SDG regulatory standards “will go bankrupt without question.” In other words, lines of credit, without which even multinational corporations cannot hope to function, will be limited only to those who can afford to implement the required changes.
More recently, now as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, the UK government special Advisor to the COP26 conference and a Board Trustee of the WEF, Carney reinforced his message and signalled to his stakeholder partners how the new IMFS would select the corporate winners and losers.
There will be industries, sectors and firms that do very well during this process because they will be part of the solution. But there will also be ones that lag behind and they will be punished.
The winners and losers won’t just apply to corporations. The new stakeholder IMFS does not appear to be based upon mass employment either. Recently the UK government released their Green Jobs Taskforce Report. Promising a glittering future of employment opportunities they cite the International Energy Agency (IEA) report Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector. The IEA State:
The transition to net zero brings substantial new opportunities for employment, with 14 million jobs created by 2030 … In our pathway, around 5 million jobs are lost … meaning structural changes can cause shocks for communities with impacts that persist over time. This requires careful policy attention to address the employment losses. It will be vital to minimise hardships associated with these disruptions … locating new clean energy facilities in heavily affected areas wherever possible, and providing regional aid.