by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
There is nothing new about fear-mongering propaganda being disseminated by politicians and corporate media, but they are now joined by “scientists.”
A fair amount of catastrophic climate change propaganda has made its way into the scientific method and perhaps in no venue more clearly than the Planetary Boundaries framework, Dr. Jessica Weinkle writes and explains where it comes from and what is driving the narrative.
Last month we published an article that brought attention to the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (“FAO’s”) roadmap to achieve its “global commitment to transform agrifood systems.” The FAO is an agency of the United Nations.
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To publicise this scheme, in January, FAO chief economist Maximo Torero Cullen said a roadmap is necessary because “we are violating six of the nine planetary boundaries.”
In September, 20 scientists funded by the European Research Council, the German government, the Carlsberg Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation published a paper “establishing” 9 planetary boundaries. They determined that 6 of their 9 boundaries had been “crossed.”
As we read Dr. Weinkle’s article below about what is behind the Planetary Boundaries narrative, we should bear in mind that she also writes for The Breakthrough Institute, whose funders include some of the usual suspects driving the false climate change crisis narrative, such as Profiteer Bill Gates (see ‘About the Author’). Why is this relevant? For one thing, while people may feel free to expose nefarious actors, there is the possibility that this freedom might be limited to those who do not fund them.
How Planetary Boundaries Captured Science, Health, and Finance: The Technological Façade Hiding a Normative Empire
By Dr. Jessica Weinkle, 14 June 2024
From his perch overlooking the global community, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the world is on the “highway to climate hell.” The president of the United States has likewise threatened that denying the impacts of climate change means condemning Americans to “a dangerous future.” Former Secretary of State John Kerry has scorned unnamed demagogues slowing the process of decarbonisation.
Overblown rhetoric from the political class is nothing new. But now, the politicians have a fresh cheering section: a cohort of scientists who have set aside rational deliberation about methodology and findings in favour of empathic allyship with advocate researchers. A leading climate psychologist, for example, has argued that those not afflicted with climate anxiety must be in denial, leaning on faulty “rationalisations against existential terror of annihilation.”
Such arguments suggest that a fair amount of propaganda has made its way into the scientific method – and perhaps in no venue more clearly than the Planetary Boundaries framework.
Advocates have positioned the framework as a functional approach to organising society within the (perceived) limits of Earth’s ecology and human ingenuity. Although wrapped in a façade of technical exercise, the framework is scaffolded by the values and assumptions of the model creators. More than an impartial application of science, it serves as a vehicle for political messaging while maintaining an air of objectivity. By understanding where it came from, we can see the path back to scientific integrity and rational deliberation.
The Planetary Boundaries Enterprise
On the surface, Planetary Boundaries and its various derivatives seem scientific. They appear in notable scientifically-oriented journal outlets like Nature and Science, and they tend to involve lots of complicated calculations and formulas.
The framework posits nine thresholds under which “humanity can operate safely.” These range from climate change to ocean acidification to rates of biodiversity loss. If any of the boundaries (or perhaps some of the boundaries) are transgressed (for some unknown amount of time) the Earth will no longer be safe (at some unknown point in the future).
There is some logic here, but the framework is inherently arbitrary. It conflates regional and global scales, which artificially constrains policy options and presents in technocratic form a moral philosophy for social and economic development. Planetary boundaries embed the ideas of tipping points, tipping elements and tipping cascades, which also suffer from muddle; indeed, there is “no rapidly approaching planetary cliff.”
The idea of Planetary Boundaries first appeared in 2009 in the journal Ecology & Society as a “proof of concept paper.” The paper’s lead author, Johan Rockström, had joint association with the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and the Stockholm Environment Institute (“SEI”) supported by the Swedish government.
The framework follows an “overshoot and collapse” trajectory. This means that a variable of interest – say pollution – increases beyond some limit in a system’s capacity, at which point the whole system collapses. In this way, Planetary Boundaries is a re-statement of neo-Malthusian ideas of physical limits to the growth of humanity. In fact, the author team explicitly situated its framework as a follow-on to the ‘Limits to Growth’ modelling exercise developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s for the Club of Rome, a group of elite entrepreneurs and scientists concerned that population growth would necessarily lead to ecological problems.
Yet framing population as a problem has never gone well for society. The publication of the Limits to Growth report in 1972 and broader efforts by the neo-Malthusian community on both sides of the Atlantic helped fuel fears that population growth would lead to catastrophe and set the stage for various population control measures around the world, including forced sterilisation.
More recently, the Club of Rome – with the Stockholm Resilience Centre and a few others – took up the Planetary Boundaries cause in an explicit campaign, called Earth4All, to transform the global economic system to provide an “equitable future on a finite planet” through wealth redistribution, “stabilising the world’s population,” and degrowth. Meanwhile, another body, the Earth Commission, which Rockström co-directs, has busied itself with developing ever more boundaries humans should not cross.
And it is this morally vexed storyline at the heart of the rallying cry for a safe and just planet that has inspired crowds to march.
Cascades of Capture
Despite the chilling relationship between Planetary Boundaries, neo-Malthusianism, and population control, the concept has been happily taken up by a range of groups working to transform institutions like health, banking and finance towards the Earth’s Commission’s ideals.
These institutions tend to zero in on one of the two forces neo-Malthusians have seen as sources of impending doom: population and economy.
I’ll start with concerns about population growth which underpins the concept of “planetary health.”
The original use of the term “planetary health” is attributed to Friends of the Earth in 1980, who amended the World Health Organisation’s 1946 definition of health so that that “health is a state of complete physical, mental, social and ecological well-being and not merely the absence of disease – that personal health involves planetary health.”
