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I have watched the sad sight of sincere high school students led by Greta Thunberg, or other climate activists, demanding of politicians that they change policies and receiving from those so-called “leaders” sorrowful apologies and inspiring promises only to discover, to their surprise, that absolutely nothing has changed after six months, or after a year.

This “tragicomedy” is no accident; it is the result of a systematic strategy for misinforming the public through the media, through universities, and through government pronouncements concerning how policy decisions are made about energy.

We are so completely misinformed about how our environment is being destroyed by multinational interests that many citizens honestly believe that climate change is a hoax precisely because the fairy tales about carbon trading, electric cars, smart grids and the promotion of government corporate cooperation are exactly that: a hoax.

The recent COP 26 (October, 2021) meeting of government heads to discuss climate change in Glasgow reflected perfectly the fantastic farce to which citizens are subjected. This corporate show, funded by multinationals like Unilever, Hitachi and Microsoft that have deep ties to the promotion of petroleum, was not about policy or progress, and most certainly not about a greener planet. It was a show meant to brainwash us into thinking that a gradual, progressive shift in behavior by individuals will solve the environmental crisis.

It suggested that electric automobiles, wind farms, smart cities and smart electric grids, all run by multinational corporations funded by multinational banks would save humanity and that we need only hand over decision-making power to these criminal syndicates known as “public-private partnerships.”

COP 26 was silent about how to reduce the need for energy by creating a healthier culture and moving away from the cult of consumption, growth and trade that corporations have foisted upon us. Most countries are in a bind because their forced to prioritize growth in economic planning even though growth, as defined by the World Bank, is damaging, unsustainable and lacks any scientific, or even rational, basis.

The focus at COP 26 was on dazzling new technologies, all extremely expensive, and all with patents controlled by the few.

The true sources of the environmental crisis were covered up.

The collapse of biodiversity, the death of oceans, the plague of micro-plastics, the destruction of soil by chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the spread of deserts because of foolish “development,” and the destruction of drinkable water, and its replacement by bottled water controlled by those same multinationals, all these topics were taboo.

These trends are altering our climate but they are not related to “climate change” as the corporations defined it for us.

Their green revolution will result in the control of food, water, energy and money by a handful of billionaires and they punish the individual citizen for the destruction of the environment when the culprit is those multinational corporations who waste immense amounts of energy and rig up the economy in such a way that the citizen has no choice but to use fossil fuels.

We are supposed to believe that the best way combat climate change is to purchase a horribly overpriced Tesla, or to take out a massive loan to buy solar panels for our homes. Or, for our government to tax us, or to dilute the value of our money, by funding massive green projects which are run entirely by those multinational corporations.

I recently spoke with a professor who specializes in environmental policy. He told me that there was tremendous opposition to a wind farm being constructed of the coast in the United States from local residents. He made it sound as if these ignorant, rural Trump supporters opposed the wind farm because they had no understanding of the need for a green economy, or of the environmental crisis.

When pressed, however, he confessed that the entire project had been planned by multinational banks and that the local residents gained no jobs from this project and had not been consulted at any level before it was pronounced by the mighty. They had not stake in the wind farm and if they had applied for a loan to build a wind farm for 7 billion dollars, they would have certainly been turned down.

If we could get the sweetheart loans from the government that the multinational corporations receive, we would be happy to switch to solar power tomorrow. If you could get 30-year low interest loans to weatherize your home and install solar panels everywhere, it would be cheaper to pay off that loan than to pay for your gas and electricity—effective immediately. But no, that option is not on the table in the new “green economy” –except if you are a multinational corporation!

For that matter, you cannot generate electricity when riding your exercise bike and sell it to your neighbor. You do not have the basic rights of economic exchange in this “green economy.”

No one at COP 26 mentioned that we did not use fossil fuels much 100 years ago outside of manufacturing, and that individuals were able to use wind power, water power and horse power on a regular basis, to grow their own food, the mill their own wheat, and to travel without using automobiles while living in rationally-planned communities that did not require travel by highway.

No one at COP 26 said that the narcissistic culture that has led us to all live separately, as opposed to living together as extended families, can be reversed, or that we can build houses, or furniture or vehicles that last for hundreds of years—saving enormous amounts of energy.

Frugality and energy self-sufficiency at the local level, not smart cities and high tech automobiles, are the answer to the crisis.

No one at COP 26 suggested that the investment banks linked to fossil fuels, and the politicians and think tank experts who take kickbacks from fossil fuel concerns, should not have been invited in the first place. The reason was simple. The investment banks funded the whole show.

We are heading for an environmental crisis of Biblical proportions. You do not have to be a fundamentalist Christian anymore to believe in the Apocalypse. Hallelujah, I believe!

The true source of the crisis is not the personal decisions of individual citizens, but the creation of, and cultivation of, a sick culture based consumption and waste, on needless production and travel, that has become the norm, the ideal, for the entire world.

Most pollution comes from production sites around the world run by multinationals that are immune from regulation, from factory farms also run by multinationals that poison our soil and water, and from needless shipping of products back and forth across oceans burning coal and petroleum—an evil act considered necessary for “growth.”

All the important decisions in government are made by banks and corporations, and then fed to the heads of nation states via a network of consulting firms, lobbyists and privatized intelligence operatives.

The national leaders who appear on television to entertain us have no more impact on economic and energy policy than the clown has on the acts in the other two rings of the circus.

The inability of citizens to grasp the true nature of the environmental crisis is also a result of the decay of intellectual debate in universities and in journalism. The newspapers, the television news, and the textbooks used in schools, do not promote inquisitive debate, a search for truth, but rather promote false assumptions about science and economics favorable to corporations. Deep thinking about the future of the nation by citizens has vanished and democracy is impossible.

Intellectuals, who could help citizens to understand the climate crisis, are forced by new requirements promoted by universities—under financial pressure from corporations—forced to write articles for obscure academic journals that almost no one will read, and they are barred from participation in the debate on energy policy which is run entirely by paid lobbyists for multinational fossil fuel corporations.

We witness today the flowering of a long process that started out with the scheme of John D. Rockefeller to force complete dependence on petroleum on the citizens of the United States, and of the world, as a means of making a fortune and dominating every aspect of the economy and society, starting with the monopoly of Standard Oil.

The players have changed, the names have changed, but the game remains virtually unchanged.

If you do not control the mass media, you do not exist in the policy debate. That means anyone serious about the environment does not exist because the same global finance institutions, like BlackRock, who control the corporate media, also control fossil fuels.

They will do everything in their power to make sure that this economic parasitism rooted in the control of energy (petroleum, coal, nuclear, solar or wind) is dominated by corporations whose interests and whose administrative structure is hidden from sight and never discussed.

If you eat food, drink water, travel, receive an education, seek treatment at a hospital or are buried in a cemetery, the bankers want to make sure that they get a part of the monetary transaction, that they get their pound of flesh. They want to make sure that fossil fuels, which they control, are part of that process.

We can find cultural and spiritual depth in our lives by reading books and newspapers, writing for ourselves, creating our own art, and otherwise participating in a complex local cultural system. We do not need that much energy. We not even need computers for a healthy and meaningful life. Although the increase in human population has increased demand for energy, that demand could be radically reduced through changes in our culture, starting with the elimination of growth, production, and trade as indicators of the wellbeing of the economy.

The institutional investors that push for the use of petroleum to generate energy, to make plastics, and who promote biotechnology and pharmaceuticals that rely on petroleum want us to be dependent on them and to no longer able to produce what we need locally.

Those institutional investors also push for massive military and intelligence spending, much of which is classified, and much of which is unregulated, and therefore consists of the transfer of funds to offshore accounts.

Why do we need such a large military? We need it, they say to defend the import, and the transport, of petroleum, gas and coal over oceans, through straits, and across continents.

The obvious answer to this security problem is to produce energy at home and to minimize usage through rational city planning, organic local farming, and low cost public transit that reduces to near zero the amount of energy imported. For the cost of those F35 fighter planes the United State collects like bad nickels, we could easily pay to have solar and wind power generators installed across the nation.

But no! The powers that be want to make even more money by defending their inefficient and dangerous sources of energy.

The arguments for growth and consumption as a standard for assessing the health of society, for spending trillions of dollars to defend the transport of fossil fuels, for encouraging city planning that wastes energy are made by experts.

The banks and the fossil fuel interests, which include automobile manufacturers, and companies involved in construction and logistics, have showered billions of dollars on foundations that fund research and journalism, on universities and research institutes that produce authoritative studies, on experts for testimony, and on politicians at the local and national level.

These corporations have created a lineup of public intellectuals who rubber stamp their false assumptions.

If we want to save the Earth from climate collapse, we must first make sure that all citizens know why we have been forced to rely on petroleum, and by whom. They must know which banks and which billionaires are involved, and why. They must comprehend the manner in which those players forced us into an addiction to fossil fuels a hundred years ago, and how they plan to continue this scheme under a new green cover.

We must make manifest the hidden strategies of investment banks and hedge funds, uncover the massive investments by billionaires like Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Bill Gates in industries seeped knee-deep in oil. We make sure that everyone sees not only that there is something deeply wrong, but also that they understand what exactly is the cause of this distortion in the economy.

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This article was originally published on US Provisional Government.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Flickr