London's Week of 'Climate Action' Was All Talk

Exceptionally dull talk bankrolled by the usual Green Blob billionaires

Even if you’re a Londoner, you probably didn’t notice that June 21st-29th was 'London Climate Action Week' (LCAW). The seventh city-wide festival of its kind aimed

to “harness the unique power of London for global and local climate action” and “mobilise London’s unparalleled ecosystem of climate and non-climate organisations to accelerate global climate action”. Lots of “action”, you see. But rather than “harnessing” or “mobilising” anything, the event consisted of little more than talk among a very small choir that needed no more preaching. Meanwhile the rest of the city carried on, oblivious to the local and global action seemingly unfolding amongst them. This is green politics in a nutshell.

It is something of an irony that an extended political rally that intends to be the point at which 'action' is 'mobilised' drew together the organisations that immobilised the city. The city’s extended Ultra Low Emissions Zone, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and a rash of cycle lanes – none of which were demanded by the city’s population who must suffer them – were sneakily imposed under cover of lockdowns. And they were designed and lobbied for by the constellation of ersatz 'civil society' organisations, which, as I’ve discussed here at length, are funded by a very narrow band of billionaire philanthropists.

One such philanthropic fund is billionaire hedge fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn’s Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is a major “strategic partner” of the event. Each year Hohn, through CIFF, splurges more $200 million on green campaigning organisations, either directly or through opaque pass-through strategic funding organisations such as the European Climate Foundation. In 2023, for example, CIFF made grants of nearly $11 million to the Clean Air Fund (CAF) outfit. CAF in turn makes grants to organisations that campaign for restrictions on private transport, making ‘air pollution’ a proxy battle of the climate wars. And this bottomless supply of cash summons up an army of activists to execute the billionaire’s agenda, with sufficient opacity concealing each transaction – ‘dark money’, as the Guardian would call it, if it applied the term consistently – to give the activists the appearance of a ‘grassroots’ movement.

So perhaps 'harnessing' – as in ‘restraint’ – is the better of the terms. London’s political establishment has indeed been captured and tamed. Following his 2016 election, the Mayor’s Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy, Shirley Rodrigues, came directly from Hohn's CIFF HQ, where she “oversaw a global climate change grants portfolio” handing out cash to political activists. In 2016, Sadiq Khan’s 2016’s rival was Conservative Party candidate Zac Goldsmith. Goldsmith’s brother Ben since the year before the election has been a trustee of CIFF. CIFF, then, didn’t merely back both horses in a two-horse race: it effectively owned them and the racetrack and the betting agents. Philanthropy, my finger. Democracy, my arse.

Three years after that election, “London Climate Action Week was founded in 2019 by E3G in partnership with the Mayor of London”. E3G claims to be “an independent climate change think tank with a global outlook”, and its moniker is an acronym of “Third Generation Environmentalism”. Despite the claim of ‘independence’, and despite listing a number of funders and partners on its website, CIFF and CIFF grantee ECF are very likely the largest grantors (or clients, to be precise) of the private company. E3G’s company’s filings indicate £11 million in income in 2023, but just one of a number of active grants on CIFF’s database names it as the beneficiary of $12.3 million for the years March 2022 to 2024. And the company is manifestly a political outfit, not only indicated by the ‘-ism’ in environmentalism but its clearly stated intention to influence politics.

No harm in that, perhaps. Think tanks and campaigning and lobbying organisations are allowed to exist. But why do its 'philanthropic' grantors have charitable status if they are funding political campaigning organisations? And why is the London Mayor’s office working “in partnership” with such an outfit (and its grantors and their grantees) to achieve clearly-stated political goals that go far beyond what can be described either as 'charitable' or 'saving the planet', and which go far further than any party or candidates’ manifestos? And that interference includes backing both horses, and buying out nearly all of the fake 'civil society' organisations that surround and penetrate deep into political decision-making bodies in the UK, including Parliament, Whitehall and London’s City Hall.

From the constellation of organisations that each exist only by virtue of green billionaires’ cash, Climate Action Week offered a smorgasbord of 700 online and real world 'events' to those eco-freaks who really know how to have a good time. Such punters would number at least 45,000, claimed the organisers – just slightly over 0.5% of London’s 8.9 million population (by official estimates). Not even the 1% – the 0.5% were “harnessed” and “mobilised” towards the events’ four main goals.

The first goal was: “Shaping global climate action including diplomacy on the path to the annual international climate COP.” Such action, indeed: 700 talks about talks. “LCAW has become a pre-eminent forum to discuss and shape the global conversation on the politics and practicalities of climate action,” claims the website. But how? As I discussed in my previous article on these pages, Britain’s 'achievement' at the 2021 COP26 meeting was the convening of the Glasgow Financial Alliance on Net Zero (led by Mark Carney and another green billionaire, Michael Bloomberg), which is now disintegrating. Subsequent COP meetings have descended further into farce than anyone thought possible, with world leaders other than Keir Starmer staying away from the most recent shindig in Baku.

Even if all of London turned up to LCAW events, it wouldn’t move President Trump even a fraction of an inch closer to rejoining the Paris Agreement. Nor would the governments or combined three billion population of Russia, China and India be persuaded by so many eco-Londoners against their current courses of fossil fuel-power economic development. Western environmentalism is no longer the dominant narrative of global politics, with 1.5 billion Africans looking at Europe’s green catastrophe and comparing it to China’s boom. In that country, nearly half the population lived in 'extreme poverty' (less than $2.15 per day) at the turn of the 21st century. Today that figure stands at 0.0% – a historically unprecedented rate of progress that is turning many heads from West to East in search of example to follow.

Goal two was: “Delivering a Net Zero, resilient London and UK by helping drive a just and inclusive climate transition.” Yes, the 0.5% believe that they know better than the 99.5%, and they believe that what they desire is “just”. In fact, they believe that their cause is so just that Khan, on the cash from Hohn and Bloomberg, announced at LCAW and in the Guardian his response to what he called a “vicious backlash” from “well-funded, organised climate deniers”.

Khan and his French colleague, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, wrote that, “As leaders of C40 Cities and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM), we are committing to tackle disinformation not just with facts but with fairer, better policies rooted in people’s everyday realities.” Citing EU and looming UK legislation, the pair said that “the UK’s Online Safety Act could be strengthened by explicitly recognising climate disinformation as a form of harmful content”.

Well-organised, perhaps. But the claim that Khan’s critics are well-funded is laughable, given the scale of LCAW by itself, and not least the nearly $500 million that only two of its benefactors pump into Green Blob front organisations each year. The UK office of C40 cities alone declared £13 million of income in 2023, most of it from Hohn and Bloomberg. I wish that we on the opposing side were "well-funded", but I know of no equivalent funding stream. Khan, then, is simply lying.

Moreover, as one of the critics of his policies, I can report that part of his contribution to enabling the “just transition” is allowing his office to withhold data requested under FOI rules for 18 months, thereby precluding timely criticism (which the FOI act is intended to make possible) of his policies that claim success. The Information Commissioner’s Office ultimately forced the release of the data.

Even more moreover, Khan’s species of lie is given substance by the fact that neither he nor the Blob organisations, nor the censorship lobby that that produce it can provide any evidence of it. Khan cannot say who these “well-funded, well-organised climate deniers” are, who the funders are, what their arguments are, and what the funds were. We, meanwhile, have all the receipts. And by their own estimates, Green Blob billionaires pump more than $12 billion into green organisations each year. The “just transition”, then, doesn’t require democracy and debate. It it is advanced by lies and smears.

Goal three, claims LCAW is: “Aligning the London 'Climate Cluster'." There are “250,000 professionals working on climate” in “public, private and third sector organisations” in London, according to this claim. Yet only a fifth of them can make it to their annual rally? It seems unlikely. And this alignment? To what? Are they not already “aligned” by their “harnessing” and the conditions of their grant funding?

The irony of the Blob’s terms of art does not stop there. Goal four is: “Demonstrating the ‘whole of society’ engagement needed to support delivery of deep decarbonisation and resilience.” The “whole of society” manifestly does not include 99.95% of society. When parts of “society” are not “aligned” or “harnessed”, they are excluded and smeared by the London Mayor’s conspiracy theories. They are not asked if they want Ulez or LTNs or car bans. They are not given choices of candidates that offer anything that departs from the designs for their city produced by CIFF and C40. They are just presented with spreadsheets that explain no more than “shut up!”, and which may not be interrogated.

Have a look at the festival’s events. How about 'A State of Flow: Can Arts And Culture Immerse Water In The Sustainability Agenda' featuring self-identifying “polymath” Dr Jasmine Pradissitto. Or how about 'Climate Migration and the Importance of Climate Education'? Be still, my beating heart! And if that doesn’t float your boat, how could you possibly deny the appeal of 'Energy Efficiency in Commercial Properties: Realising the Potential for Decarbonisation'?

I can’t think of anything duller than such a Blobfest, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why even adherents to such ideology would subject themselves to such boring propaganda. For all the talk of “action”, the biggest irony was, of course, that there was only talk. Yet this ritual perhaps exists not to draw people into discussions about their own future, but to instead draw attention to the fact of well-organised and well-funded networks of green organisations, from which ordinary people and their interests are excluded. It is appealing only to the kinds of spivs and chancers who can recognise opportunity in being “harnessed” and “mobilised” towards particular agendas. Anyone who senses the sheer cant of such a cynical enterprise, who is reluctant to sell out principles for the sake of virtue-signalling trends, is naturally alienated by it.