The elites are struggling to maintain control over the climate change narrative amid pushback from social media
History records that when Johannes Gutenberg used his printing press to produce a copy of the Bible in the 15th century, it was a hinge of history. Printed in Europe using mass-produced metal movable type, Gutenberg’s Bible made information accessible beyond handwritten codices. Hosanna!
But the printing press freaked out the Vatican. Why?
Because it allowed common people to read the Bible without an intermediary, a priest or bishop, censoring the uncomfortable bits. The printing press undermined their absolute authority and left people free to make their own “heretical” conclusions. What they read, in part, sparked the Reformation. And 500 years of war as the Church tried to reinforce its power.
Now, elites controlling the legacy media flow are freaked out because impertinent social media threatens their control over the high religion of climate change. Like the cardinals who tried to stop Gutenberg’s press, the high priests of climate have been outpaced by technology. The formative years of the “crisis” occurred pre-social media sites like Twitter (now X), Facebook, and TikTok. Their fantastical climate modelling and doomsday predictions were made in a sealed world of purchased journalists, cloistered academics, and progressive reporting.
 Photo by Markus Spiske |
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Prince (now King) Charles and Al Gore could make outlandish predictions without fear of contradiction. Coca-Cola’s claim of a polar bear wipeout became gospel. Authors like Michael Crichton or James Delingpole could be safely quarantined away from public opinion by the TV news departments.
Academics who dared to disagree were defunded and ridiculed. The DC court system created a kangaroo court so Michael Mann could sue Mark Steyn for mocking his wonky science. Silence was golden for the priests of climate.
Soon, climate belief achieved religious fervour among the secular progressive left, a default belief system to replace the religions of their youth. Like classic religions, climate worship required a “leap of faith” where converts transcended the rational and embraced the mystical. Armed with this faith, the media proclaimed “hottest summer ever” and “rising ocean levels” wholeheartedly, declaring it would not print any material that might contradict the received wisdom of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Governments complied totally. Hollywood? You need to ask? The people succumbed.
But by the late 1990s, social media raised its insubordinate head, first with cheeky new academic and research sources, later with the modern equivalent of Gutenberg’s press, which allowed common people to access news – without the political and media intermediaries – and come to their own conclusions. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter provided a further counterargument to the hysterics in control of legacy media.
It sparked a Reformation, allying itself with populist movements across the West. When the usual suspects brayed about unprecedented heat in 2024 requiring government regulation, online voices countered, Not So Fast. It turns out that maximum U.S. summertime temps have not increased in 30 years and are cooler than 90 years ago.
Ditto the “loss” of the Great Barrier Reef, which has gone from near-death to suddenly revived and restored. Even when climate cultists at the BBC acknowledged the doomsday stuff was bogus, they warned the progress could be undone by climate change and other threats. (Translation: Someone chasing grant money is nervous).
It’s getting so the public ho-hums even when CNN’s Dana Bash grills presidential candidates about their plans for the “climate crisis.” Polls show climate is down the list of public concerns, far behind the economy. They don’t see it in their own lives, so why worry? Adding to the panic among alarmists was the recent SCOTUS “Chevron decision,” which transfers policymaking back to elected officials and courts and away from vast government bureaucracies. From now on, unelected bureaucrats will not be deciding American scientific policies – a death blow to the Swamp’s power in the U.S.
Try as they might, the Apostles of Apocalypse can no longer count on exclusive ownership of “Science” (Translation: chasing grant money) or the U.S. Supreme Court. So friends of greening in government (see: Justin Trudeau) are now proposing draconian censorship laws to suppress the “greenwashing” insubordination.
In February, NDP (read cultist) MP Charlie Angus tabled a federal private members bill that would ban “misleading fossil fuel advertising,” similar to the restrictions on tobacco advertising implemented in the 1990s. “The B.C. Greens tabled their own anti-greenwashing bill in the B.C. legislature in April. If passed, the law would prevent businesses from making misleading statements about greenhouse gas emissions associated with their practices. Corporations that fail to adhere to the measures could face fines of up to $1 million per day if the false representation continues to be published.”
In short, dispute the entrenched Greenist autocrats in government and media at your peril. Where this censorship battle to suppress independent thought leads is unknown.
But it does explain the mania of elites to stifle anyone not approved by the powerful from having a voice. And how far they will go, having been exposed by the internet, to keep the whip hand over a disbelieving public.
Bruce Dowbiggin is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the eighth best professional hockey book by bookauthority.org. His 2004 book Money Players was voted seventh best.
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