Biden and his political mates around the world are simply following the bidding of the CCP. That’s one reason why they had to get rid of President Trump! This crazy Net Zero 2050 is their target to ruin the West and make us all slaves to the CCP. Conspiracy theory? NOT!! However, as a Bible believing Christian my hope isn’t in politicians but in the Lord Jesus Christ! Titus 2:13 Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.

‘The Ominous Outlook for 2050

Narrator

There are two different visions out there of what the world ought to look like in 2050. One of them is called Net Zero, which says that within three decades the world must all but eliminate fossil fuel use, and get carbon dioxide emissions down to zero, net of the amount plants and trees absorb. So many politicians, business leaders, bankers and academics around the world are calling for Net Zero that you might think it’s solidly based on science.

John Robson

But it’s not. Many experts dispute the necessity of this 2050 plan and indeed its feasibility. They say the worst case scenario for the impacts of climate change over the coming 30 years won’t be nearly as costly as the impact of getting rid of fossil fuels. They say trying to get to net zero in such a short time could destroy our prosperity and weaken us internationally. And they say we couldn’t get there even if we tried.

Narrator

Despite these objections, and with virtually no public debate, governments throughout the western world are embracing the goal of net zero by 2050 and are preparing to impose the target, regardless of the costs. They’re not interested in the vision of cautious, evidence-based, adaptation to what the future brings.

John Robson

Which funnily enough isn’t even the other vision I want to talk about. You see, there’s yet another, very different idea of what the world should look like in 2050 that you may not have heard of. It’s not exactly a secret, but Western governments and journalists ignore it just as they ignore skepticism about Net Zero.

Narrator

This other vision is called The Hundred Year Marathon. And it’s like a mirror image of Net Zero, because it’s the Chinese Politburo’s elaborate and ambitious scheme to build up their nation’s economy and its global power so that by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s seizure of power, China will be the world’s dominant superpower.

John Robson

Then, starting in 2050, the ideology that guides the Chinese Communist Party will spread around the globe, achieving what they like to call “harmony” though a better name would be “world domination”.

Narrator

You might be tempted to dismiss this warning as paranoia, some kind of warmed-over “Red scare”. But while Chinese leaders are careful not to say much to the rest of the world, they talk openly about this ambition among themselves. The plans are found in high-level speeches and strategy documents, and the implementation is progressing around the world, step-by-step, right in plain sight, including the so-called “Belt and Road Initiative” and the not-so-green investment in coal plants in many Third World nations as well as at home. But most Westerners still know nothing about it and find it hard to believe such a plan could even exist, let alone succeed.

John Robson

Unfortunately, the truth is that these two apparently disconnected visions of 2050 are two sides of the same coin. They both lead us to the same place, with the west hobbled and weak, and China powerful and dominant. And if our governments don’t know it, don’t want to hear about it, the Chinese government certainly does. I’m John Robson and this is a Climate Discussion Nexus Backgrounder on the Ominous Outlook for 2050.

First of all, let me assure you I’m not saying “climate change” is a communist plot. Or a globalist plot. Or a what have you plot. Climate change alarmism isn’t not a plot at all, even if it is mistaken. The whole discussion of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect arose in Europe in the 1800s out of scientific inquiry, and lots of people believe in it sincerely, and it’s appropriate and necessary that we, in free societies, have a lively legitimate debate about its meaning and importance. Including the necessity and practicality of Net Zero.

Narrator

But we also need to have a discussion about the geopolitical implications of the green agenda, and the illegitimate uses to which it can be put. Including the strange coincidence that a global political movement has arisen that uses the threat of climate change to impose an agenda on the Western world that fits neatly with what The Hundred Year Marathon seeks to do. If it is a coincidence.

John Robson

You’ll notice, the endless chatter about “Net Zero” never seems to include China. They’re building hundreds of coal-fired power plants at home and abroad, buying up oil reserves around the world, including here in Canada, and they’re ramping up their economy as fast as humanly possible without regard for the human cost including due to real pollution as well as the “carbon” kind. And they have politely but firmly told the world to go jump in the South China Sea whenever discussion of global climate policy comes up. Except not always politely.

Sure they like to brag about the occasional solar panel they put up, or their internal carbon trading shell game, and last fall President Xi Jinping made noises to the UN about cutting emissions. That kind of talk always wins them praise from credulous western environmentalists. But the reality is, net zero is a western preoccupation and China isn’t part of it.

When I say “China” I don’t mean the geographical entity, of course. Nor do I mean the people who live there.  It’s standard shorthand for a political organization called the Chinese Communist Party or CCP that rules China and its people in a thoroughly undemocratic, brutal manner.

Narrator

The CCP was formed in 1921, and after decades of military insurgency it won control of China in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong. It is an authoritarian communist movement that aspires to be totalitarian and control all aspects of the lives of the Chinese people including their thinking. It now has about 90 million members, but not because it’s popular. Because you pretty much have to be a Party member to have a significant job in Chinese business or government. Until the Party turns on you, that is. And then there’s nowhere to hide, no matter how important, rich or well-connected you seemed to be. There’s no such thing as free speech in China, or separation of powers, or rule of law, or private property, or security of any kind. Westerners by and large have no idea how powerful the CCP is.

John Robson

For instance, China does not have a military the way normal countries do. Instead the so-called “Peoples’ Liberation Army” is the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Imagine the hoo-hah if Donald Trump had proposed having the US Army swear an oath of loyalty to the Republican Party instead of the US Constitution. But that’s what the CCP has done, and it now has the largest military in the world as its private enforcers.

China also does not have an independent court system, of course. Judges in China are CCP officials whose sole loyalty is to the Party if they know what’s good for them. The CCP controls the school system, the media, the universities, the internet, all local municipal governments, and of course the central government in Beijing. Leaders in any of those systems have to swear loyalty to the CCP and its ideology to hold their positions. What’s more, all Chinese companies are effectively branches of the state including under the National Intelligence Law that makes enterprises like, say Huawei, explicitly tentacles of Beijing’s espionage.

Narrator

It’s not accidental and it’s not because of any external threat and there is no intention of reforming it. China made a show of moving towards democracy in the 1990s, just long enough to win a membership in the World Trade Organization in 2001. But what was really going on internally was a purge of reformers in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

John Robson

By the time Xi Jinping took power in 2012 the hardliners had cemented their control. And in 2013 Chairman Xi delivered a confidential speech called Document Number 9, which outlines the seven “false ideologies” that the CCP must repress at all costs: Western-style constitutional democracy, the belief in ‘universal values’, civil society (or individual rights), free market economics, independent journalism, ‘historical nihilism’ (i.e. questioning Maoist doctrine), and anything that undermines the socialist nature of China.

Narrator

In that speech he also referred to “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. According to China expert Michael Pillsbury, this is code for righting the historical wrongs that have prevented China from reaching its destiny of being the dominant nation in the world. They don’t simply want to be successful, to be secure, to be an equal and respected partner in a multipolar world. They believe in the saying attributed to Confucius that “there can only be one sun up in the sky.” There can only be one dominant superpower.

John Robson

According to this chauvinistic, belligerent and frankly rather weird reading of history, China was destined to fill that role until its humiliation by the aggressive west in the 1800s. But by 2049 they will have righted that wrong and completed their rejuvenation. Or died trying. Along with anyone who gets in their way.

Delusions of grandeur, you might say. As we said of the Soviet Union and before that Hitler. Yes, I’m putting on that annoying historian’s mortar-board again and saying we’ve been there, we’ve done that and, you’d think, got the point. Instead while we’ve spent decades praising the CCP’s quest for social justice, building statues of Norman Bethune and praising Pierre Trudeau’s youthful visit to China, and indeed taking pity on China as a poor, weak developing nation to whom believe it or not Canada still sends foreign aid, they’ve become the world’s top producer and user of energy, steel, cement and chemical fertilizer (like Khrushchev’s U.S.S.R. before them with similar ambitions). They own over a trillion dollars’ worth of US government debt, they control over 90 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth minerals which gives them effective control over global electronics production, they took over the mobile phone infrastructure in Africa and are seeking dominance over the new 5G global communications network, and through that Belt-and-Road Initiative they have been acquiring vast amounts of transportation infrastructure around the world.

Narrator

The reach of the CCP is astonishing. They own Pirelli tires, Syngenta chemicals, 40 percent of the Philippines’ national electricity system, and ports in Rotterdam, Antwerp, Greece, Bilbao, Valencia, Panama, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nicaragua and elsewhere. In Canada they own Nexen Inc., one of Canada’s major oil and gas companies. And the Canadian government still hasn’t formally barred Huawei from the 5G network’s key infrastructure, the only one of the “Five Eyes” still determined to see no evil here.

John Robson

And bear in mind, we’re not talking about individual Chinese investors buying assets. These are Chinese state-owned, state dominated enterprises, all under the control of the CCP. No Chinese firm is independent of the Politburo no matter what the share certificates or formal laws say. What Chairman Xi wants, Chairman Xi takes, with the People’s Liberation Army to back him up.

Speaking of which, the CCP has built up the largest army and navy in the world, with a target of making sure it is twice as large as the US military by 2050. That’s right. Not as big. Twice as big. What for, do you suppose? With all those hypersonic carrier-busting cruise missiles, killer satellites and military robots?

Well, it’s not to stop climate change, that’s for sure. Throughout this drive for world domination in the name of communist dictatorship, which following Confucius’ policy of the “rectification of names” is exactly what it should be called, their use of fossil fuels, especially coal and oil, have soared, making them the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases by a very wide margin that grows wider every day.

Narrator

Which brings us back to the climate issue. Because a strange thing about Net Zero is that it was never really discussed anywhere, or voted on. It just one day seemed to become the policy of every government, everywhere. Except China, which is applauding us for it while moving relentlessly the other way.

Net Zero has even recently and rather suddenly been embraced by the global financial system. Groups like the World Bank and major private banks have all announced they won’t lend any more money to big fossil fuel-based energy projects, even in developing countries, including coal-fired power plants. Whereas China will.

And as numerous authors have documented, top leaders in the global finance sphere have been the targets for decades of careful, sophisticated influence campaigns run out of Beijing.

John Robson

Hold on a minute, I know what you’re about to say: this is all conspiracy-mongering, which you told us not to do. Besides surely it’s just a coincidence. But we already know that Russia operates this way, funding European green groups who have all but shut down energy development in the EU, forcing them to be utterly dependent on Russian gas exports. It stands to reason that China would use the same strategy. It’s not a conspiracy, they talk about it among themselves. And these days China’s resources vastly exceed those of Russia which, for all Putin’s thuggish delusions of grandeur, has been described with some justice as “a gas station for China.”

So how does this work? Well, as Toronto-based researcher Patricia Adams has documented, western green groups have been conspicuous in their fondness for the ruthless Chinese government. While everyone else has been growing increasingly alarmed at the proliferation of concentration camps, slave labour factories, crushing free speech including in Hong Kong and all the other hallmarks of totalitarian repression under the CCP, even genocide of the Uighur Muslims, environmental groups are conspicuously glowing about the Chinese leadership. As Adams says:

Narrator

The big exceptions – those who have yet to have their eyes opened to the dangers posed by the CCP – are Western environmentalists and their funders. Rather than becoming cautious about China’s role in the world, these groups lavish it with praise for its environmental efforts

John Robson

So do you think it’s just coincidence that, as Adams notes, some $330 million worth of funding for North American green groups can be traced to one single source, Energy Foundation China, which is managed by Ji Zou, a long-time senior official in the Chinese government?

Narrator

Zou, as a paymaster for the Western environmentalists, decides what projects to fund, enabling him to effectively solicit work desired by his former employers in Beijing from the Western environmental organizations, who give it their imprimatur of legitimacy.

John Robson

Front groups are an old communist trick. They’re an established fact, and Beijing has plenty of them. Including in Canada, as you can find scrupulously documented in Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg’s book Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.

Still, let’s keep the rose-coloured blinders on and say it’s all just a coincidence. It’s still remarkable, and worrisome, how it all happens to work to the CCP’s advantage. Where does the Net Zero doctrine leave developing countries who need to build up their electricity grids? China is now the only place most of them can look to for funding. And it’s a role China has enthusiastically embraced, since the terms they impose on the recipients lock in their control over those governments for decades to come.

So even if the CCP didn’t plan it, they couldn’t have arranged it any better. And nor could the people Lenin famously called “useful idiots” in the free world. Which apparently includes the entire EU leadership, which has decided not to criticize China’s dismal human rights record, intellectual property theft or geopolitical bullying lest it impede the flow of meaningless rhetoric on climate. And these coincidences keep appearing in other places too.

Narrator

Consider BlackRock Inc, the world’s largest financial firm with $6.5 trillion in assets under management. In 2019 its President, Larry Fink, announced a plan to ensure the company’s future growth by aggressively expanding in China. To do this he recruited a team of talented financial executives, headed by Tang Xiaodong, a banker and former Chinese government official, to lead BlackRock’s Chinese operations. And right on schedule, Fink just announced they’re going to use their massive financial clout to force companies they own to commit to net zero by 2050, or face being cut off from financing.

John Robson

Will BlackRock apply this rule to CCP-controlled enterprises, or the entire Chinese economy for that matter? Dream on. Once again, it’s only western companies that will be strangled and tossed in a ditch, after being plundered of their proprietary technology, while BlackRock and the CCP cash in on unrestrained growth in China driven by fossil fuels.

In other countries though, there is a conspicuous connection between governments being overly friendly with China and imposing Net Zero on themselves. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his former Ambassador to China John McCallum have been positively giddy over the regime in Beijing, although McCallum did eventually have to be fired when his handling of a diplomatic row with China caused the Canadian press to wonder aloud where his loyalties lay because he was giving the Chinese advice on how to defeat the Canadian government, in public. Meanwhile Trudeau has, of course, announced that Canada is committing to Net Zero by 2050, notwithstanding the fact that it will wipe out our oil and gas sector and may split our country, while China is allowed to grow theirs without limit or reproach.

Narrator

In the UK, where Net Zero is now gospel, connections between the CCP and the social elite are particularly deep. The 48 Group Club is a Who’s Who of top UK government, banking, university and industry elite who regularly rub shoulders with a select group of high-ranking current and former Chinese officials, ostensibly for the purpose of developing trade relationships and business deals. But as Hamilton and Ohlberg detail in Hidden Hand, the 48 Group Club has really become an organ for the Chinese government to influence British public opinion and politics through their uncritical repetition of CCP propaganda.

In a scathing conclusion, Hamilton and Ohlberg write:

In our judgment, so entrenched are the CCP’s influence networks among British elites that Britain has passed the point of no return, and any attempt to extricate itself from Beijing’s orbit would probably fail.

John Robson

Well, I say try anyway. Especially if it’s all just a coincidence and those nice Chinese government agents are plying westerners with money and flattery, and sometimes other favours as well, out of the stunning benevolence of their hearts. But before accepting that preposterous assertion, or trying to hand me a tin foil hat, ask yourself this question: Suppose the CCP really did hatch the scheme of using its global influence networks to push Net Zero by 2050 on the rest of us as an integral part of its Hundred Year Marathon strategy. How would the outcome look any different from what’s been happening?

If the answer is that it wouldn’t, it’s either a plot or it’s a plan that’s getting a lot of venal, ideological or simply careless support from our side. Remember, Lenin didn’t say that the useful idiots were cynics, but he did say they were fools.

Narrator

Whatever the cause, the world is traveling on two paths towards 2050. And while they seem unrelated, with one all about saving the planet from supposed climate doom and the other a dark totalitarian ambition to rule the world, they converge in a remarkable spot where the West is hobbled economically, politically and militarily by climate alarmism and its misguided schemes to slash energy abundance and squash economic growth, while China’s communist regime secures unchallenged global economic, military and ideological dominance.

John Robson

The two visions are stereoscopic. Even if you close one eye, or the other, you see the same picture. But I want nothing to do it. I say it’s time to open our eyes wide and see what’s in front of us, surprisingly close, big and ominous.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus, I’m John Robson. I was an anti-communist before it was cool, I was an anti-communist while it was cool, I’m still an anti-communist when it’s not cool anymore, and you should be too.’https://climatediscussionnexus.com/videos/the-red-green-menace/