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Editor's Note: We are perfectly aware what the UK Guardian is, and how, as a frequent faux left platform, it often acts as a propaganda tool for US-led global imperialism, not to mention how, in cahoots with much of the rest of the British media, it has viciously betrayed and demonised Julian Assange. Despite this, some of their reports pass the smell test, and this is one which in our view merits consideration. The piece addresses two important disturbing facts about contemporary reality: The possible strengthening of a climate crisis denial movement in Western Europe, a development supported by the US government (overtly and covertly), and amply funded by US corporations and reactionary billionaires resisting any type of infringement upon their habitual policy turfs (as applied to energy and food production, for example). The second is the appearance on the German political scene of the nativist/rejectionist AfD party, one more symptom that when the REAL left is emasculated, the right and many of its phony solutions step in to fill the void. As usual, the blame falls squarely on the liberal establishment, complicit in the virtual banishment of authentic left views from mainstream debates. This longstanding liberal (actually center-rightist) betrayal is being seen again on both sides of the Atlantic—with renewed force—but in the US it has taken truly dangerous and revolting dimensions, as the Democrats move in lockstep with Russophobic narratives pushed by the CIA and the FBI, while also seeking to ban and criminalise leftist views in the name of cleansing the public debate of "fake news." Their hypocrisy is truly monumental. No wonder that many strains of the ever present right are taking advantage of the opportunities created by the Democrats' destabilization of the left. —PG

Rightwing populists to launch attack on climate science in vote drive before EU elections

Greta Thunberg, symbol of a nascent global youth resistance to "business as usual," and now at the center of an invidious political firestorm.

Kate Connolly in Berlin, The Guardian

[dropcap]G[/dropcap]ermany’s rightwing populists are embracing climate change denial as the latest topic with which to boost their electoral support, teaming up with scientists who claim hysteria is driving the global warming debate and ridiculing the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as “mentally challenged” and a fraud.

The Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) is expected to launch its biggest attack yet on mainstream climate science at a symposium in parliament on Tuesday supported by a prominent climate change denial body linked by researchers to prominent conservative groups in the US.

The AfD’s focus on climate change has increased since it entered the Bundestag in autumn 2017. It has added a sceptical voice to the rising number of parliamentary debates on the topic and concentrated its opposition specifically on the scandal over diesel car emissions and plans to phase out brown coal.

But the attention the party paid to the topic has been noticeably ramped up since the emergence last August of Greta, the teenage climate activist who has appeared at climate rallies across Europe, including in Germany.

A joint investigation by Greenpeace Unearthed and the counter-extremism organisation the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has shown a surge in AfD digital communication on climate issues. While climate change barely got a mention on its social media channels when the AfD was first founded in 2013, it mentioned the topic on its channels about 300 times in 2017-18, and that has tripled over the past year to more than 900, with its main focus on Greta.

The Greta Thunberg effect: her visit to London in 2 minutes

Guardian News

Teen activist Greta Thunberg spent the Easter weekend in the UK and joined Extinction Rebellion protesters in London. She also took part in a Guardian Live event and told audiences that the world was facing an 'existential crisis' and movements such as Extinction Rebellion are putting crucial pressure on governments to act. She also took her message to the heart of power in Westminster, and prompted politicians to declare contrition for their failure to act. The recent surge of demands for more ambition – on the streets, from the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, and from David Attenborough – have helped to amplify the message that Greta and others are stressing with their climate strikes. The big test on this will come on 2 May, when the Committee on Climate Change announces the results of a review of the UK’s targets, including when the country should aim to reach net zero emissions

The party, whose members have been seen handing out climate change denial leaflets at school climate strikes, has ratcheted up its anti-Thunberg rhetoric ahead of the EU parliamentary elections this month. Its candidates have made comparisons between the Swedish teenager and a member of a Nazi youth organisation and called for her to seek treatment for what Maximilian Krah, an AfD candidate for the EU elections, called her “psychosis”.

It has also been repeatedly claimed on AfD’s Facebook page that she is the leader of a climate movement cult. Posts on the page make repeated use of terms such as “CO2Kult” (CO2 cult), “Klimawandelpanik” (climate change panic) and “Klimagehirnwäsche” (climate brain washing).

Jakob Guhl, an ISD researcher, said climate change denial had become key to the party’s political platform. “The AfD has been denying human-made climate change on its social media pages since 2016, and while it has not shifted its position it is clear that the party decided to communicate it more frequently.

“The fact that many mainstream politicians from across the political divide in Germany supported a 16-year-old female activist who was virtually unknown until a few months ago, allowed the party to present belief in climate change as irrational, hysteria, panic, cult-like or even as a replacement religion. Attacking Greta, at times in fairly vicious ways, including mocking her for her autism, became a way to portray the AfD’s political opponents as irrational.”

The party’s symposium at the Bundestag is backed by the European Institute of Climate and Energy (EIKE), a group that rejects mainstream scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and has links to prominent conservative groups in the US.

EIKE’s annual climate conference is co-sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a fossil fuel industry-funded US thinktank that has a history of funding projects aimed at weakening public confidence in climate science, the investigation found. EIKE’s president, Holger Thuss, co-founded the European branch of another US climate change denial pressure group, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

CFACT Europe received financial support from its US counterpart, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

Thuss acknowledged to Greenpeace Unearthed that he was “one of Heartland’s many experts”, and did not deny financial links between Heartland and EIKE but was keen to stress he was a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and not the AfD.

He told Greenpeace Unearthed that CFACT Europe had been disbanded, although he did not say when, and denied that EIKE was supporting the AfD’s symposium, despite it promoting it on the homepage of its website as as an opportunity to “set facts against CO2 hysteria and climate activism”.

EIKE’s vice-president, Michael Limburg, who has previously run as a candidate for the AfD, has insisted EIKE was not politically affiliated, but admitted “loose ties” between EIKE, Heartlands and CFACT.

Among the scheduled speakers at the AfD event are the Tirolean glaciologist Gernot Patzelt, the Danish atmospheric physicist Henrik Svensmark, and Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a former Ukip candidate described as a hereditary peer, hobby mathematician and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, who claims models used to measure climate change are flawed.

The former Ukip candidate Christopher Monckton is speaking at the AfD climate denial event. Photograph: Alan Porritt/EPA

Promotional materials for the event cite Greta as someone placed on the frontline of climate activism “by PR professionals seeking to bedevil the plant-nutrient carbon dioxide” and describe the AfD as “the only party in Germany not willing to back the supposed climate consensus”.

The AfD did not respond to requests for comment.

Karsten Smid, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace Germany, told the Guardian: “The AfD is using the Bundestag as a stage for its dissemination of climate lies. They invite fake experts to a so-called symposium on climate change to generate content for mass dissemination via social media channels and stir up hatred and anger on the internet.

“We are experiencing a shift to the right on social media and in society. In a short period of time, the new right has established its own counter-society on climate issues. With troll armies, agitating magazines and the support of climate sceptics like EIKE, it has created its own sphere that is massively underestimated.”

Appendix

Climate change scepticism

US is hotbed of climate change denial, major global survey finds

Exclusive: Out of 23 big countries, only Saudi Arabia and Indonesia had higher proportion of doubters

Trump showing his lethal ignorance by suggesting that temperature changes are insignificant.

By Oliver Milman (in NY) and Fiona Harvey } The Guardian

The US is a hotbed of climate science denial when compared with other countries, with international polling finding a significant number of Americans do not believe human-driven climate change is occurring.

A total of 13% of Americans polled in a 23-country survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project agreed with the statement that the climate is changing “but human activity is not responsible at all”. A further 5% said the climate was not changing.

Only Saudi Arabia (16%) and Indonesia (18%) had a higher proportion of people doubtful of manmade climate change.

Americans were also more likely than any other western country polled to say they did not know whether the climate was changing or people were responsible – a total of 13% said this.

But despite these views, the great majority of US citizens do accept the science of climate change, with nearly four in 10 saying human activity was at least partly responsible, potentially with other factors, and a further third taking the stronger view that human activity is the dominant cause.
—>Read the full story