The new faces of climate change denial
As the world moves on from COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates, the "freedom movement" is pivoting to climate change conspiracy theories
Climate change denial, at least in its most explicit form - denying the reality of anthropogenic climate change - has all but disappeared from mainstream conservatism. When National MP Maureen Pugh told reporters she was awaiting evidence that humans have contributed to climate change, she was rebuked by the leadership and reneged on the comments within hours.
Denialism has moved to the fringes, where it is thriving, intermixing with the other conspiracy theories that led to 2022’s occupation of parliament grounds. Conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic took three forms. Firstly, that the pandemic was a hoax, perpetuated by sinister elites to advance their own interests. Secondly, the pandemic was real, but being used by those sinister elites to reshape the world. The third form, popular among those most detached from reality, suggested that the virus was real, but was released on purpose, perhaps manufactured in a biolab, in order for the elites to be able to carry out their plans.
Climate change fits the same narrative - it can be a hoax, a convenient reality for a global elite with a pre-existing plan, or for those whose politics have all but completely decoupled from the real world, the effects of climate change could actually be some kind of deliberate weather manipulation.
“Is it about the temperature, is it about a warming planet or is it about something else?” Don Nicholson, the former president of Federated Farmers and now a co-host of ‘Greenwashed’ on Reality Check Radio asked rhetorically in the show's first episode. “And I think something else is where we’re headed.” According to Nicholson, “farmers in New Zealand are suffering a form of political abuse”; the goal is supposedly fewer farmers, making them easier to control.
“We don’t let ourselves be silenced,” co-host Jaspreet Boparai tells the audience. In 2022, Boparai, a dairy farmer, was elected to the Southland District Council with the backing of Voices for Freedom (VFF), the organisation that formed to oppose vaccine mandates and has since expanded to promoting a much broader range of conspiracy theories. (VFF are behind Reality Check Radio.)
Nicholson and Boparai discuss the Public Interest Journalism Fund, which they claim was a way for the government to buy off the media, making independent platforms like theirs necessary to spread truth. “I’ll never forget 2020 where the prime minister got on stage and started to espouse words almost from Klaus Schwab’s playbook,” says Nicholson, adding that it must have sounded so great to “the people who are less educated on the real agendas”.
Schwab is the chairperson of the World Economic Forum. In 2020, at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Schwab and HRH the Prince of Wales (now King Charles III) launched a document titled ‘The Great Reset’ stating that the pandemic offered “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future”.
The plan is huge in scope but light on detail, covering climate change, national security and a number of other economic and political issues. The Davos meetings are attended by influential people, such as world leaders (Chinese president Xi Jinping was an attendee in 2022, as was Indian president Nahendra Modi and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres) as well as chief executives of multinational corporations – people who are not household names but wield significant power in the global economy. All this has fed into populist opposition to the WEF.
In the heyday of the anti-globalisation movement, World Social Forum summits attended by left-wing activists were organised to coincide with the Davos meetings. For example, in 2009 a major anti-capitalist demonstration in Geneva coincided with WEF’s gathering. The protesters blamed the ‘Davos elite’ for the economic crisis that occurred after the global economy went into recession late the previous year.
Great Reset conspiracy theories began to circulate on social media almost immediately after the 2020 launch. They appealed to people across the political spectrum, but what provided an audience among the far-right, in contrast to the WEF’s traditionally far-left opponents, were baseless statements that the Great Reset is the next phase in a strategic plan by global elites to deliberately bring about economic collapse in order to institute a socialist world government, administered for the benefit of powerful capitalists (because no one said conspiracy theories had to make sense).
Reality Check Radio was started by Voices for Freedom, as the anti-vaccine mandate movement that VFF emerged from has waned the group has branched out from COVID-19 related conspiracy theories to spreading a wide range of mis- and disinformation. Greenwashed airs on the online platform every Monday, and has a particular focus on climate change.
Nicholson was the emcee at the 2003 protest against the agricultural emissions research levy (conceptualised as a “fart tax”) where a tractor was driven up parliament steps. Two decades later, the agriculture industry has, for the most part, come around to the fact that they will need to reduce emissions. Executives from the dairy giant Fonterra have been on a roadshow across rural New Zealand to win the support from farmers for reducing emissions relative to each kilogram of milksolids. Fonterra’s large customers- multinational food corporations such as Nestle and Unilever - want to reduce the emissions in their supply chain, and Fonterra’s supply chain is farms.
Around the same time, American scientist Dr Tom Sheahen toured several South Island locales with support from the group Groundswell, who had initially asked Beef + Lamb NZ to fund the visit, but ended up having to do it privately. Sheahen, in contrast to the scientific consensus on climate change, makes the claim that water vapour is responsible for 75% of the greenhouse effect, while CO2 contributes only 25%, and methane and nitrous oxide are “irrelevant”. Sheahen was interviewed on “Greenwashed” during his tour.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require global biogenic methane emissions to reduce by 24-47% from 2010 levels by 2050. Research from the New Zealand Agricultural Gas Greenhouse Research Centre shows that biogenic methane emissions have been the largest contribution to global warming in Aotearoa since 1840.
Although Fonterra’s plan, which aims to increase production while reducing relative emissions, arguably falls short of what is needed for Aotearoa to do our part to keep warming to within 1.5 degrees, and does not address the other environmental impacts of the industry, it shows that climate change denial is now a fringe position in the agricultural sector, as does Beef + Lamb NZ not getting behind Sheahen’s tour. The current leadership of Federated Farmers is backing Fonterra’s emissions reduction plan. Government policy toward the sector, far from conspiracy to destroy it, shows an unwillingness to challenge the country’s largest emitter.
Groundswell is now filling the void for farmers who want to believe that mitigating climate change is unnecessary, and requirements to do so are the result of government overreach or something even more nefarious. When the group organised their 2021 “Howl of a Protest” against the clean car rebate scheme and other issues in 2021, they gained support from Agriculture Action Group (AAG) who, like Voices for Freedom, had emerged from Advance New Zealand. AAG had toured the country promoting misinformation about UN Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030, stemming from a conspiracy theory that originated with the John Birch Society, an American ultraconservative group which believes that the United Nations is part of a plan to bring about global communism.
On the morning of the Howl of a Protest, current Federated Farmers president Andrew Hoggard expressed concern that the agricultural sector would be made out to look like "a bunch of fringe nutters". That was likely the perception of people seeing photographs of signs like "Jacinda Kiwis do not want Communism!" or reading that the organiser of the Hastings protest made a speech where he claimed the country was “being taken down a socialist plug hole”.
Hoggard is no political centrist - he is standing for ACT in the general election, and no forward thinking environmentalist - his social media posts deride plant based and lab grown proteins- but he now represents the moderate wing of rural populism.
In 2022, Stuff’s Charlie Mitchelll wrote that Voices for Freedom and Groundswell can be considered two arms of the same movement.
“They are both insurgent groups, representing a self-styled populist uprising against mainstream institutions they see as colluding to impose restrictions on ordinary people.”
As the so-called ‘freedom movement’ that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic pivots toward a new narrative, we can get an idea of what's to come from VFF, Groundswell, and Reality Check Radio. The disruptions wrought by climate change will in the long term be greater than those we saw at the height of the pandemic. Extreme weather events will displace people, and many of those people will cross borders. A movement that sees climate change as some kind of fiendish plot by globalist elites could easily segue to conspiracy theories like the ‘great replacement’ which posits that there is a plan to replace white populations in Europe, North America and Australasia with people of colour. In fact, Nicholson hints that something like this is occuring in the first episode of Greenwashed.
“If you were in the UK or if you were in Sweden, if you were in Germany and watching the boat people moving across from North Africa sort of unhindered…perhaps like the border between Mexico and the States, what is this all about, why are authorities not trying to stop them before they leave their own country? It just doesn’t make sense. So here’s this borderless world. This arrogance of these people to think they can come into a new country and have the rights of others, and create tensions that perhaps weren’t there before.”
Just as the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it a parallel ‘infodemic’, as we face the challenge of climate change we will also be facing a new wave of disinformation, and that is also a threat.
Part of this article was adapted from ‘Fear New Zealand’s Hostile Underworld of Extremists.’
Image by Alex Gruber