Censor the Internet to Save the Planet

Daniel Greenfield | November 21, 2024

“Governments Should Act Now to Curb Climate Disinformation” demands a letter backed by Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has close ties to the British government, along with over 50 other organizations.

The open letter calling for ending free speech to save the planet from global warming accuses social media, broadcast and publishing companies of being “enablers to planetary destruction” for allowing dissenting views and demands that governments step in and crack down.

The groups call on “governments worldwide to take immediate and decisive action” and urge that “those responsible must be held accountable.” Or free speech will destroy the planet.

Signatories to the censorship call also include the Union of Concerned Scientists, which would like to ban scientific debate, Avaaz, the radical Kairos Fellowship and Reporters Without Borders which started out protecting freedom of information, but now suppresses it.

While green censorship is not a new phenomenon, the open letter includes the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition demands that governments and companies adopt its “universal definition” of climate disinformation and misinformation as encompassing not only those who reject the idea that the world is getting hotter because of human activity, but everyone who dissents from the details of the UN IPCC ‘consensus’ and its policies.

Either you’re 100% in agreement with the green movement or you’re a threat to the planet.

The proposed green censorship policy would ban any alternative interpretations of climate figures which is vital to scientific discourse. It would also outlaw any criticism of green policies.

CAAD links to a site that defines ‘climate delay’ as ‘climate denial’ (and therefore ‘climate disinformation’) and so any global warming proposal that falls short of the radical leftist ‘consensus’ agenda is really a form of misinformation that must be censored to save the planet.

Even proposals “put forward in good faith” that “contain partial truths” are “dangerous!” and must be stopped. Ideas such as “individualism” and “technological optimism” must be suppressed or the planet will be destroyed. Warnings about the pollution levels in China, the loss of jobs or higher fuel prices may not be allowed to “pollute” the discourse any longer..

The new green censorship push isn’t just about silencing broader dissent, but any dissent.

Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg who accept global warming, but disagree about the scope of it and the best remedies, are a target, so are elected officials, writers and activists who disagree with making unilateral cuts while giving China a pass, and those who warn about the impact of green taxes and price hikes on the public. What began as a proposal to censor those who question global warming has become a demand to censor anyone who asks any questions at all.

While some might question the impact of the green censorship push, Google has already bowed to initial demands from the Conscious Advertising Network and began demonetizing videos.

CAN, one of the members of CAAD, claims that it supports “freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and human rights.” CAN is actually a censorship network whose members include the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and Omnicom, one of the four largest ad agencies in the world, along with the Islamist TellMama group and numerous other ad agencies and leftist activist groups.

A follow-up letter by Check My Ads, a CAAD member organization, to Google demanded that it eliminate advertising for FOX News, Town Hall, Epoch Times and others from its ad exchanges. The targets of the green censorship included scientists like Lomborg and Steven Koonin, the former Under Secretary for Science in the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, along with thinkers like Jordan Peterson, journalists like Katie Pavlich and the popular PragerU series.

The materials that the CAAD members described as “climate disinformation” in need of censoring were not just direct challenges to global warming dogma, but even publicly stating the obvious fact that the Texas wildfires were not caused by global warming.

The Texas wildfires were caused by downed power lines. But CAAD would like Google, Amazon and most advertisers to ban anyone who rejects the false claim that they were caused by global warming. CAAD claims that critics of global warming claims are spreading “disinformation”, but the disinformation alliance is the one not only spreading, but mandating disinformation.

The most troubling CAAD member may be the Center for Countering Digital Hate which has close ties to the Labour Party and the extremist Starmer government in the UK..

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was the only world leader to show up to the failed UN COP29 conference in Azerbaijan, where he argued that “there is no national security without climate security”. The implications of tying global warming to national security is that it allows extreme measures of the kind that the Starmer regime already used to violently suppress protests against Islamic terrorists and justifies censorship in the name of national security.

The climate disinformation censorship push defines nearly any dissent as a dangerous threat. It defines its side of the argument as a scientific consensus and claims that any deviation from that consensus will kill billions of people. Survival requires a totalitarian worldwide censorship machine of unprecedented scope to end debate and force everyone to submit to their regime.

Governments have to eliminate opposition or, as the open letter describes it, “take concrete steps to ensure information integrity, paving the way for meaningful climate action.” and “the spread of disinformation continues to undermine and delay our collective ability to act.” Any dissent creates delays on government action and undermines the collective.

The familiar totalitarian rationale used by every dictatorship has now gone ‘green’.

Is green censorship really about the planet? Some of the same organizations involved in green censorship, including the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Conscious Advertising Network have pursued censorship for other leftist causes. Environmentalism is only one of a revolving suite of pretexts for silencing the opposition through corporate and political pressure.

Green censorship is really red. Its purpose is to erase conservatives, moderates and any disagreement from the marketplace of public opinion by declaring that dissent is a crisis. The crisis shifts but its ultimate aim, the end of any challenges to leftist power, never does.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.