A United Nations climate expert is calling for people who question the goal of avoiding a climate catastrophe by rapidly eliminating fossil fuels to face criminal penalties. [emphasis, links added]
The experts who would be targeted for these penalties say these calls for censorship are part of a broader, growing effort to stop people from speaking out against climate activists’ political agenda.
“It seems very desperate. I find it very ironic that we can’t debate what we’re told is settled science. If it’s so convincing, surely you wouldn’t need to jail people because they disagree,” Dr. Matt Wielicki, a geologist and author of the “Irrational Fear” Substack, told Just the News.
Elisa Morgera, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, authored a report, “The imperative of defossilizing our economies,” which was released in June.
The report calls for the banning of all oil production and infrastructure development by 2030.
According to Morgera, fossil fuels, which provide 86% of the energy consumed in 2024 and are the basis for thousands of products people consume every day, cause “significant and pervasive risks and harm to the right to life.”
Criminalizing Opinion By Deeming It “Misinformation”
Morgera argues that nations have an obligation not only to eliminate fossil fuel use and production very quickly, but they also need to “defossilize information systems to protect human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence and from information distortions.”
In order to ensure people have the right information and form the right opinions about energy and climate, Morgera argues that oil companies need to be banned from advertising or lobbying for their industry, and “misinformation” by the fossil fuel industry would need to be criminalized.
Additionally, Morgera demands that any media companies running such ads or anything deemed “misinformation” would also face criminal penalties. Finally, nations need to criminalize “attacks against environmental human rights defenders.”
Exactly what constitutes misinformation or “attacks” on environmentalists is never defined in the report, but based on the recommendations she lists and her rhetoric against fossil fuels, it appears that anyone who questions or criticizes the efficacy or reasoning for the rapid elimination of fossil fuels would be deemed as spreading “misinformation.”
Climate activists have been losing ground with public opinion for some time now. In November, U.S. voters elected a president who promotes fossil fuel development and who calls climate change a “hoax.”
Polls showed voters rated climate change at the bottom of their priorities, and the policies of “The Green New Deal” promised by Kamala Harris did not rate highly enough for her to avoid a crushing defeat.
After Trump won the election, investment firms pulled out of net-zero alliances, and many companies are scaling back their net-zero commitments.
The Trump administration has also taken numerous actions to roll back the Biden-Harris administration’s climate agenda, including ending the EV mandate and reviewing climate regulations.
Protests for the climate once drew large crowds. Despite the second Trump administration’s actions against net-zero emission plans, protests in the U.S. have been preoccupied with other issues.
Just Stop Oil — the group notorious for throwing soup on paintings, blocking roads, disrupting events, and gluing themselves to various antiquities — announced in March it would stop such high-profile protests.
Who Decides What “Settled” Science Is?
Climate activists, however, are ramping up their efforts to force people to stop questioning their agenda.
In April, Tortoise Media, considered a leftwing news site, launched a campaign called “Hot Air,” which blamed the shift in public support for climate policies on the spread of what it calls “misinformation.”
Just as with the other censorship campaigns, “Hot Air” never defines exactly what is “misinformation.” The campaign used AI to identify online content that questioned their political agenda in hopes of pressuring social media companies to remove it.
Among those deemed to be spreading “misinformation” were Wielicki, the geologist quoted earlier, energy expert Robert Bryce, Daniel Turner, who founded Power the Future, and entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Bryce points out in an article on the project that it’s funded by Octopus Energy, and among the financial backers of the firm is a company co-chaired by Al Gore.
The list of climate offenders that “Hot Air” identifies includes anyone with a significant following who has ever questioned if climate change is the crisis activists make it out to be, or if we should rapidly eliminate fossil fuels to address its risk, whatever they might actually be. Wielicki called it “complete garbage.”
“Half of the stuff they identified as misinformation was me posting peer-reviewed articles that basically question the narrative that the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] likes to ignore. Now we’re calling peer-reviewed articles misinformation,” he said.
The International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) also released a study in June purporting to find that “powerful actors” are spreading “inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change.”
As with “Hot Air” and the U.N. report, exactly what constitutes “inaccurate or misleading narratives” in the IPIE study is never defined.
Read rest at Just The News
