Just before Christmas, as COP25 wound down to a close, a fun little bit of light reading found it’s way into my inbox, courtesy of the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s mailing list. The article, titled “Deciding What to Think of the First Four Years of SDG Implementation,” tells us all a person really needs to know about the slow-motion car crash that some have taken to calling “climate politics”.

So — four years and several billions of dollars later, now appears to be the right time for our Green Overlords to take a step back and assess whether or not anything of value has resulted from these efforts. Thus, after decades of doing seemingly little more than publishing an endless slew of ‘reports’ on how nothing is getting done, it was apparently necessary to commission yet another of these reports for it to be recognized that this is not exactly what most might call a “winning strategy.” Of course, we need not get our hopes up that this particular report will have any more of an effect on the execution of said strategy than any of its predecessors.

Provided the reader is at least somewhat familiar with the type of people we’re dealing with, here, the results — or rather, lack thereof — ought to come as little surprise: “[W]ith a few exceptions,” we are told, “[the] SDGs have very rarely been used to challenge practices, and have not triggered the transformative project they promised.” Say it ain’t so!

Moreover, “It must be acknowledged that the adoption of such an ambitious agreement was possible only because it does not require concessions or a change in behavior from anyone in particular.” Indeed, it is much easier to talk a big game than it is to play it — an important lesson that most of us have internalized before puberty. One has to wonder why those who seem the least familiar with the basic tenets of human nature nevertheless see themselves fit to micromanage all of humanity.

It isn’t all bad news, though — the report notes that the SDGs have been name-dropped by various politicians and diplomats more frequently in 2019 than they had been in previous years. If only we lived in the fictional universe of Beetlejuice, and all you had to do was say “sustainable development” three times fast and then — Poof! — results! We’d have reached the promised utopia decades ago!

In all seriousness, the bulk of the report is seriously unimpressive. As jaded as I’ve become over this last year of closely following the implementation of Agenda 2030, it is difficult to read its contents as anything but the typical, desperate attempt to blame its numerous failures and setbacks on the scarecrow issues of “lacking commitment” and “reduced financial flows.” Perhaps they have yet to realize — or, perhaps, have yet to accept — that it is difficult to retain much of any commitment, financial or otherwise, to a project that is fundamentally impossible to implement.

If no other lessons have been learned these last four years, it’s that there is a limit to how quickly and radically one may attempt to alter a given society without facing considerable consequences for having done so. Emmanuel Macron may be willing to chance massive protests, walk-outs, even rioting directed against the many unfavorable policies he has imposed upon the French people, but even he seems capable of determining which lines are better left uncrossed. UN bureaucrats, of course, none of whom were properly elected to their positions and all of whom remain entirely unaccountable to any authority not under the UN banner, clearly have yet to come to a similar understanding.

As such, it is somewhat poetic that not only did the COP25 proceedings end up being moved from their original location Chile, partially (albeit not entirely) as a result of UN-backed fiscal shenanigans in the region, but as well that the conference ultimately ended in a colossal failure. Not only did the attendees fail to produce any form of agreement on the conference’s biggest issues, such as the Green Climate Fund; it would appear that both worldwide CO2 emissions and coal extraction are — get this — increasing still (if you enjoy watching the climate cartel circling the drain as much as I do, see Francis Menton’s takedown of the situation here)! In either respect, we largely have the Chinese to thank: after a long period of courtship between the People’s Republic and the UNEP, particularly in the field of mass surveillance technology and methods of behavioral control (previously covered here), it seems now that the PRC has lost interest, at least temporarily, in maintaining this long-standing charade of ‘consensus’ — at least, as far as shuttering the nation’s resource industry is concerned.

And why would the Chinese government do such a thing? Clearly, because they seem to think this whole ‘climate crisis’ business — increasingly, a ‘business’ in the literal sense — is to some extent a crock of nonsense. Where would they get such an idea from, I wonder? Maybe from the Indian government, which has similarly made clear its intent to worry about things like infrastructure development and the provision of electricity first, climate mitigation second — “conditional on higher financial support from developed nations,” of course. At any rate, both India and China are joined by a handful of African nations in declaring themselves to be far more concerned with the real and immediate concerns of their own nations than they are with some sinking, sparsely-populated islands in the middle of the Pacific. And fair enough, some might say — after all, China and India are home to the first- and second-largest populations on the planet, and current projections have the African continent set to double its own population by 2050. It therefore seems difficult to really blame any of these actors for not wanting to shoulder the burdens of any more people than they already have to deal with — this, of course, goes directly against the core pillars of globalism, which would greatly prefer to see every single person on the planet equally suffer the consequences incurred by the actions of just a few.

Predictably, much of the moaning emitted from UN HQ thus far has instead had to do with the United States’ dropping out of the Paris Accords; likely, I would imagine, because it is easier from a public-relations perspective to accuse America of calculated sabotage than it is to admit to having been played for fools by China. But no matter which particular country (or sets thereof) we’d like to point our fingers at, all roads of inquiry lead back to the UN. Perhaps the real question to be asked is this — just how much longer can this show go on?

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I first started this blog as something of a ‘companion’ outlet to a book I was (and still am) writing about the development industry, particularly regarding the attempted implementation of Agenda 2030. Naturally, the ‘unholy’ institutional trilogy of said industry — the UN System, the IMF, and the World Bank Group — featured quite heavily throughout, as did the innumerable hair-brained schemes and scams concocted by them in the grand pursuit of an allegedly-better world. Over time, my sights were trained on exactly how these organizations came into being, both materially and intellectually; later still, I became quite concerned with understanding why such a clearly corrupt and self-interested network of bureaucracies ever came to be seen as a legitimate force for ‘good’ in the eyes of the public in the first place, considering all the many reasons said public has been given not to trust them, practically since this whole mess started back in 1945.

And now, I am beginning to realize what a mistake it was to believe that all of this really started as late as 1945. Today, it seems to me that in order to truly understand the many problems that we presently face — as individuals, as societies, and indeed, as a species — it may well be necessary to wind the clock of inquiry back to the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Much like Rome, this self-cannibalizing system of ours was not built in a day; rather, it was slowly constructed over the course of at least a century, maybe even two. “Thankfully” — depending on one’s personal outlook on things — it can all come crashing down much more quickly than that.

Soon after beginning this project, I came to the belief that the UN et al. would never live to see the completion of its driving vision. This was based in the sincere observation that it is literally impossible to attain a number of their stated goals — as just one example, the World Bank’s latest initiative to score a given country’s rate of “learning poverty” based on its proportion of literate ten year-olds goes completely against everything we presently understand about both literacy and our present (in-)ability to test such things in a reliably standardized manner — as well as that it is logistically impossible to carry out a majority of the others. Thus, my main concern was with regards to the lengths to which the UN et al. and its supporters might go in the pursuit of carrying it all out anyway — in other words, I was more worried about the journey toward this utopia than I was about ‘discovering’ we’d been lied to about it on arrival.

My initial research for this project began around October of last year; the actual writing of it began the following January. Thus, around a year after having started all of this, the passage of time and the revelations accompanying it have necessitated that I revise my outlook.

In essence, I no longer believe that the UN will live to see the year 2050, let alone the completion of any projects that they might’ve liked to see done by then. As a matter of fact, I’m not convinced that the UN will live to see the year 2030: if it does still exist in ten years, I find it highly doubtful that the organization will retain anywhere near the same level of authority and influence that it enjoys at present. Indeed, since 2015 the entire UN System has been rattled by a dramatic decrease in perceived legitimacy; should this trend continue over the next five years, that the UN would become essentially defunct (or at least powerless) at some point during the next ten years seems practically inevitable.

By all accounts, such a thing would be a blessing. Yet there still remains the aforementioned problems of figuring out how and why we got ourselves into the position of cheering on the UN’s decline in the first place. I am greatly concerned that, without proper insight into the mistakes we’ve made in the past and present, we run the risk of repeating those same mistakes in the future. The absolute last thing I’d want out of this would be to see the UN shuttered, only to be replaced by an ideological carbon-copy differing only in the level of enthusiasm displayed by its proponents. Put simply, if the UN is going down, I want to make sure that it’s down for good.

Going into the new year — and a new decade — my plan is as follows: I am presently sitting on more than two-hundred pages worth of research and analyses conducted for the purpose of trying to “take down” the UN. Now that I see the UN might very well take down itself (and, accordingly, that my attention may be of better use elsewhere), it would be a shame for all this time and effort to have gone to waste. As such, my goal will be to transform this research into blog and/or video-friendly formats, as I work on re-writing the book through a more ‘philosophical’ lens.

At the same time, I would like to branch out a bit in terms of the topics covered on this blog. Specifically, I would like to focus somewhat less on the material aspects of our situation — the economics, the statistics, the projections — and more so on the immaterial, perhaps even ‘spiritual’ wasteland that presently characterizes Western life, particularly in pop culture and media. Whether we like it or not, in this day and age it is indeed through this medium that a majority of people come to understand the nature of the world around them — thus, the cultural landscape appears, to me, as a wide, open threshold, simply waiting to be crossed. Given that my own educational background and training is, in fact, in culture, ethnography, and semiotics — rather than in green energy or digital finance, which has nevertheless characterized much of my content to date — this is an important discussion that I feel quite capable of meaningfully contributing to. Indeed, I feel as if I have something of a duty to do so.

In closing, I want to thank everyone who has been reading, sharing, and (hopefully) getting some use out of my content to date. It has been your overwhelmingly positive feedback that has given me the drive to keep going with this project, and I am truly, immensely grateful for all your support. This past year has been quite the wild ride, and I very much look forward to seeing where it takes us next.

Best wishes to you and yours in the New Year,

A. E.