According to the UN, the People Have Spoken and They Want Governments to do Even More About Climate Change. Never Heard of the People’s Climate Vote? Hard Cheese

How did you vote in the 2024 global People’s Climate Vote?

The People’s Climate Vote…

You’ve never heard of it?

Well, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the people have spoken. Between September last year and May of this, thousands of people all over the world were selected by dialling mobile phone numbers at random. Those who didn’t hang up were asked a series of questions about their climate views. According to the results, 80% of the global population believe their country should strengthen its commitments to addressing climate change. Seventy-eight per cent of the world believes their countries should provide more protection from extreme weather events. And only 17% believe their countries are addressing climate change “very well”.

One has to admire the UN’s chutzpah in calling a somewhat lame opinion poll not just a “vote” but a “people’s vote”. And it reflects the green blob’s growing desperation to connect the global climate agenda with the world’s eight billion people – a connection which is lacking in nearly every country that has put climate change agreements before its population’s interests. The problem of the democratic deficit has long beset the green blob. The UN and its agencies, national governments, global NGOs, national civil society organisations, news media organisations and academics have all decided that society and the global economy must be radically transformed. But this transformation has rarely been put to the test – the ballot box – to gauge the public’s appetite for either the transformation itself, or for the principles underpinning it.

Various attempts to overcome this problem have been tried. In Britain, the green blob – as represented by Westminster lobbying outfit, The Green Alliance – was fully aware of scant public demand for its policies. The Alliance’s 2018 report ‘Building the political mandate for climate action’ revealed that MPs’ “feel under very little pressure on climate change”, and “voters are not asking their representatives to act”. How then, to secure democratic legitimacy, or, at the least, avoid the appearance of bypassing democracy? The bright idea developed by the Green Alliance and others was the U.K. Climate Assembly, convened by Parliament the following year, and overseen by green blob organisations, such as the Alliance itself.

It’s a problem that the UN is also seemingly aware of, to whatever degree it is capable of awareness. The UNFCCC COP 24 meeting in Poland saw the spectacle of Sir David Attenborough appointed to the “People’s Seat”. From this privileged position, Attenborough addressed the meeting “with climate change stories gathered from around the world, collected via social media”, interspersed with his own trademark fire-and-brimstone ecological rhetoric in pitch-perfect RP. But this stunt involved only the “voices” of the “people” whose “stories” reflected the UNFCCC’s preoccupations. There was no chance of any independent and critical perspective being represented to the assembled elites. More problematically, just five years earlier Attenborough had written that people – whose voices he was seemingly representing – are “a plague on the Earth that need to be controlled by limiting population growth”. “We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia,” he said. “Too many people there.”

But the voice-over artist’s manifestly anti-human sentiments seem not to have bothered the UN apparatchiks. And neither did his disinformation. At 106 people per square kilometre, Ethiopia has close to a third the population density of the U.K. The country’s seemingly interminable problems such as famine are owed in fact to wars and civil conflict, which have beset the country’s development since the 1950s. And at the time of Attenborough’s article, there existed precisely zero programmes about Ethiopian famines or conflicts available on BBC iPlayer, whereas more than a dozen series of films under the heading of ‘nature’ were available. Attenborough’s understanding of Ethiopia and its problems was grotesquely ignorant, and his selection as the “People’s Voice” looked more like gaslighting than a genuine attempt to forge democratic links between the UN and “people”.

You may still be puzzled… What is the difference between an opinion poll and a vote? After all, even a ballot box is an opinion poll of some kind. Well, the most obvious problem is in the numbers. There were just 900 respondents to the People’s Vote in the U.K., and 92.9% of 11,393 attempted phone calls resulted in no survey being completed. That already indicates a very low level of engagement, which, as we might imagine, is due to the unwillingness of non-respondents to have their time wasted by climate activists, whereas willing respondents may already be far more more engaged in the subject. Pollsters typically attempt to resolve this problem by “weighting” the answers according to demographic metrics. But this statistical magic doesn’t turn the views of 900 people into the views of 67 million.

More importantly, polls are not votes because there is no public debate about the issues as there is in the run-up to an election. Such a conversation requires the voter’s engagement. And even non-engagement, registered as the inverse of the turnout, or as spoiled ballot papers, is a significant metric relating to the winning party’s mandate to form a government. True enough, climate change is a non-stop story in the news media. But this hectoring of the public does not either involve debate about the necessity of the climate policy agenda or present the public with any choice about its terms on which to deliberate. Opinion polls do not ask respondents to accept the consequences of their vote in the way that choosing a government and its policy agenda requires – or ought to require, if voters are to be given meaningful votes.

The UN has a very odd idea about what a “vote” is. And it seems to have an equally odd idea about what “people” are. It talks a good game, of course, about wanting “people” to have a “voice”. But it seems interested only if that “voice” says what it wants to hear: the regurgitated words of one of the world’s most notorious misanthropes. Clumsy attempts to close the democratic deficit, and to reconcile baby-hating, neomalthusian anti-humanism, have merely exposed a wider and deeper distance between global political elites and actual people.

The last recourse of such a crisis-ridden agenda’s advocates, then, is a conspiracy theory. In the Guardian, Assistant Secretary General of the UN, Selwin Hart, fretted about a “massive disinformation campaign” against the “global transition to green energy”. “There is this prevailing narrative – and a lot of it is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and their enablers – that climate action is too difficult, it’s too expensive,” Hart told the paper’s Environment Editor, Fiona Harvey. She complained about “the perception of a backlash with the findings of the biggest poll ever conducted on the climate, which found clear majorities of people around the world supporting measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”. And the stat, citing the “people’s climate vote”: “72% of people wanted a ‘quick transition’ away from fossil fuels, including majorities in the countries that produce the most coal, oil and gas.”

And here is where the difference between polls and votes really matter. The UN and the Guardian want to believe that fossil fuel companies stand between the world’s “people” and their bright green future that only the UN and other global agencies can produce for them. But votes have consequences, and people, by and large, do not vote Green. And polls such as the “People’s Climate Vote” do not ask people to express the strength of their desire for Eco-utopia in relation to other concerns.

When asked to list their concerns, respondents to Ipsos’s survey of 29 countries put climate change eighth behind inflation, crime & violence, poverty & social inequality, unemployment, financial/political corruption, health care, and immigration. Just 17% of respondents put “climate change” top of the list. And notably, it is residents of wealthier countries that are more likely to respond in that way. Thirty per cent of respondents in Singapore, which has a GDP per capita of US$82,807, believe it is a top concern, whereas just 8% of neighbouring Malaysians, on $11,993, share that sentiment.

Polls that fail to put responses into such context are meaningless, because, yes, when given a choice with no consequence, they will “vote” for seemingly radical climate policies, as they would for Motherhood and Apple Pie. But when asked to consider the consequences of climate change versus inflation, it is their economic circumstances that concern respondents more. This is how normal politics works – trade-offs and priorities. But it is not how UN bosses and Graun scribblers want “people” to act in their conspiracy-theory-cum-morality-play.

Are people prioritising inflation over climate change because of a conspiracy orchestrated by the fossil fuels industry? I find it hard to believe. Not because of opinion polling data, but because the green blob has found it extremely hard to produce the receipts for this “massive disinformation campaign”. Neither Hart nor Harvey even attempt to give any substance to their claims.

One attempt to give substance to that conspiracy theory is produced by InfluenceMap, which claims to be “an independent think tank producing data-driven analysis on how business and finance are impacting the climate crisis”. InfluenceMap’s research says: “Every year, the world’s five largest publicly owned oil and gas companies spend approximately $200 million on lobbying designed to control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policy.” A fifth of a billion dollars sure sounds like a lot of money. But what does it actually do?

One big problem for InfluenceMap’s claims is that they’re not based on any receipts. It merely estimates sums spent on lobbying and advertising. A second problem is that it finds zero evidence of attempts to “control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policy”. In fact, it counts, for example pro-climate “corporate messaging”, including support for the UNFCCC process (such as the Paris Agreement) in its claim that “the five global oil majors have invested over $1 billion since the Paris Agreement on misleading climate lobbying and branding activities”.

But perhaps a bigger problem is that even were these sums an accurate estimate of cash spent on actual climate change denial, far more cash is spent the other way, on green propaganda. In my analysis of claims arising out of their work, I found InfluenceMap’s eleven grantors spent $1.2 billion per year on funding green campaigning organisations between them. The green blob itself, according to one of the largest green philanthropic grant making bodies in the world, has a total annual operating expenditure of up to $12.8 billion. Just as an opinion poll that fails to put responses into broader political contexts are worthless, attempts to survey corporate lobbying that fail to count green organisations interventions are manifestly ideological bullshit.

In reality, it is that $12.8 billion and the uber-wealthy grantors behind them that are pitched against the world’s eight billion people. Fossil fuels are necessary for everything between meeting the most basic needs of those people and making their lives about more than subsistence. Lopsided opinion polls, public engagement stunts, and respectable conspiracy theories are clumsy attempts at narrative control that seem more about convincing green lobbyists than the world’s population. Merely slapping the word “people” on it does not make something democratic. The UN is going to have to work much harder to convince the world it needs to change to suit the UN’s agenda.