MADRID — For a global-warming conference, it sure was cold outside. Really cold. One day it even dropped below freezing, which is colder than normal for Madrid at this time of year. But at least it wasn’t snowing like it was at the last United Nations “climate change” summit in Poland, where children made snowmen and pelted grown-ups with snowballs after Al Gore landed. Apparently it was another episode of the infamous “Gore Effect” — a mysterious weather phenomenon where snowfall tends to follow Gore around the globe when he goes to preach about alleged man-made warming.

And it wasn’t just the weather that didn’t cooperate. Not only were no new radical policies adopted, thanks mostly to President Trump standing in the way like a brick wall, but the summit to save the planet and fix the weather had to be moved from one locale to another because of anti-global-warming sentiment. It was a hilarious series of events that did nothing to calm the climate alarmists, who sound more unhinged than ever.

The summit to fix the weather by charging us for our CO2 emissions (a gas each and every one of us exhales) was originally supposed to be held in Brazil, where it’s summer now. Unfortunately for the climate dignitaries looking forward to some exotic fun in the Brazilian sun, Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, aka Tropical Trump, quashed that idea. His foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, taking a cue from Trump, called climate alarmism a “Marxist plot” to undermine the West and build up Communist China.

Not to worry, though, Chilean authorities volunteered their nation to host the UN festivities instead: Global-warming alarmists could still have a climate summit in the summer sun in the Southern Hemisphere. But quite ironically, “green” policies in Chile to “save the climate” caused rising energy and transportation costs, sparking violent protests and riots and turning the capital, Santiago, into a war zone, after the movement was hijacked by communists seeking revolution. Oops! Santiago was out, too.

Nor were these latest backlashes to the effects of radical environmental policies unique. Similarly explosive outrage — sparked by similar “green” policies — erupted in France when the “Yellow Vests” movement brought that nation to a halt not long after the UN “Paris Agreement” was adopted at the UN COP21. The grumpy UN officials and climate dignitaries we talked to did not see the humor or the irony in it all, either at the COP24 in Poland or at the COP25 in Madrid. At least they pretended not to. But the awkwardness stood in the conference like an eight-million pound gorilla in a leotard, giving us plenty of fodder for questions. “How will you impose these policies on the world if even the French people will not submit?” we asked, secretly grinning inside.

Fortunately for the UN and its climate-industry hangers-on and cronies, Chile’s mother country, Spain, stepped in to host the embattled UN summit. Spain has been so engulfed in “greenness” that it already eviscerated its own economy with ridiculous, socialist “green” policies years earlier. Indeed, for every Spanish “green” job subsidized by taxpayers — one of several key “green” policies imposed on that nation — more than 2.2 productive jobs were destroyed, according to a major study by Economics Professor Dr. Gabriel Calzada at Juan Carlos University in Madrid. But at least in Spain, the pain had already become normal, so citizens were not out in the streets marching against alarmism-inspired policies during the summit.

That’s not to say that the Spanish people are necessarily on board the green machine, but they largely seem resigned to their fate. Taxi drivers we spoke to were overwhelmingly cynical about the direction their country has taken, and more than a few did not even believe in the man-made warming theory. One of them asked if child climate-change guru Saint Greta Thunberg of Sweden was going home on a bicycle. We all laughed, this reporter included.

All of the sidesteps and missteps associated with holding the climate summit in Spain provided an appropriate backdrop to the UN’s COP25 Climate Change Conference because the conference itself was devoid of anything resembling pragmatism, executable environmental plans, or logic — instead focusing on feelings (especially fear), fait accompli, false rhetoric, and phony political promises. In fact, the radicalism and “thinking” at this UN confab — as with others that preceded it — would shock everyday Americans. After all, after having attended a number of these over the years, we know from firsthand observation that the media presents a very sanitized view of these conferences, intended to beguile the masses.

The globalists and climate alarmists came there with grandiose ideas about finalizing the “rules” for their “global carbon market.” They also promised to advance “global governance.” And they vowed to find new Western taxpayer loot to add to the Green Climate (Slush) Fund to pay off dictators who help keep their people in poverty in the undeveloped world — all to save the “climate,” naturally. They put on a good show. But as chief climate villain (in the warmist movement’s eyes) Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com told us, the alarmist establishment will have to wait until next year to advance its agenda in any significant way — if they are lucky!

Brainwashed Climate Activists Seek Revolution

As soon as we got off the metro at the UN “Climate” summit in Madrid, revolution was in the air. Literally. Shrieking protesters dressed like hippies and fools and furry animals, including “Queers for the Climate” (yes, really), were calling for “revolution.” Literally. “What do we want? Revolution!” hollered the clueless climate activists shivering outside the conference. “When do we want it? Now!” Passersby, mostly lower-ranking delegates, media, and fellow activists who were not welcome at the “VVIP” (Very, Very Important Person) entrances, grinned or cheered them on.

Throngs outside demanded an end to air travel, cars, “farting cows” (as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ “Green New Deal” plans put it), and everything else that makes modern life possible for climate alarmists. No doubt the seemingly unhinged mob outside, largely composed of groups funded by governments, were supposed to seem radical in order to make the proposals offered inside the conference appear saner to the outside world.

Tax-funded signs were everywhere announcing new talking points to the 25,000 assembled climate alarmists. No longer should it be referred to as “climate change.” The new term is “climate emergency” — all the better to scare us with. Dozens of giant billboards plastered from the metro station to the entrance of the UN COP25 summit bombarded passersby with lies: Antarctic ice is melting (it’s not), Miami is flooding from global warming (it’s not), and much more. All of it was supposed to add to the sense of urgency.

Naturally, once inside, everyone was suddenly using the term “climate emergency,” or “climate crisis,” or “climate catastrophe,” or whatever scary term could be concocted to herald an imminent climate apocalypse. “Journalists” and the government delegates who were at the confab frantically seeking money and power all took their cue: “Climate emergency” it is. Many of those in attendance are old enough to remember dire claims from the global-cooling days, and most should remember the global-warming claims that also turned out to be false (e.g., Al Gore’s warning that the Arctic ice cap would completely disappear as early as 2013). But now, after decades of incorrect climate predictions (see page 35) and failing to get global CO2 taxes, new marketing gimmicks were obviously needed.

Also for the benefit of any mass media that happened to show up were claims of overwhelming support for the UN’s mission. Early on during COP25, climate alarmists decided to hold a climate protest in downtown Madrid. Organizers estimated that about 500,000 people attended the protest. By contrast, police said about 15,000 people attended. And even that might have been too generous. We traveled to the same spot in downtown Madrid the following weekend to check out what the area was like, and the streets were seemingly as packed as during the “climate” march. It seems the organizers chose a super-busy area, on a super-busy day, to host their climate march — because it, like the conference as a whole, was all about appearances.

Listen to the Children! At Least Some of Them

Instead of scientific arguments (the science is supposedly settled), throughout the summit, UN leaders and climate bigwigs declared that humanity must “listen to the children.” Apparently UN officials never read Proverbs 22:15, which explains that “foolishness is bound in the heart of a child.” Or maybe they have, and know that children are easier to fool. Alarmists made clear that “education” was the key to advancing their agenda, too.

As to “listening to the children,” here, at least, UN officials and globalists, for the most part, followed their own advice: “Listen to the children” they did — at least to brainwashed children who spouted the party line. The UN rolled out the red carpet for Swedish climate superstar Greta Thunberg, the world’s newest “saint,” who dutifully scolded the adults for allegedly stealing her future. UN officials celebrated her “courage” for “speaking truth to power,” just as they did on an earlier occasion, when she angrily said at UN headquarters in New York, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

At the climate summit, Greta even got named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year”! Globalists were very pleased: Neither Saint Greta nor her emotion-laden tirades can be questioned without the critic being accused of “attacking a child with Asperger’s syndrome!” You could almost hear warmists saying: “How dare you!”

In fact, the only journalist in the world to ask Saint Greta some real questions — Rebel News reporter Keean Bexte of Canada, who asked where all the money to fund Greta’s adventures was coming from — was locked out of the UN confab, at the behest of the Trudeau regime in Canada. But this did not stop him from getting news immediately outside the confines of the conference itself. In Madrid, Bexte got footage of “climate contraband” in the parked Tesla Greta traveled in with her father and handlers — plastic bottles, plastic silverware, plastic bags, and much more. Children who were shown the video at the summit were horrified to learn that the trash belonged to their idol; some refused to believe it. Of course, they (and others) are not supposed to know the truth, which is why it is not surprising that Bexte and the rest of Rebel’s team were banned from the summit due to having asked a real question at an earlier UN summit.

Along with Greta, there were hundreds of zealous children running all over the compound shrieking and scolding adults for not “doing enough” to save humanity from the changing climate. At a children’s press conference held on the last day of the conference, a Greta-inspired group called “Fridays for the Future” put a half dozen girls and an apparent transgender child on stage to publicly denounce the state of the world. I asked one of the children why no boys were allowed (except perhaps the apparent transgender child identifying as a girl), and she said it was to remedy historical gender oppression. All of the kids sported the “all-seeing eye” symbol on their hands and bibs, supposedly to warn “world leaders” that the children are “watching everything.”

The symbolism reminded me of Al Gore’s ludicrous comments, quoted in the UN’s propaganda book Rescue Mission Planet Earth: A Children’s Edition of Agenda 21, calling for a “worldwide monitoring system staffed by children … designed to rescue the global environment.” Mao and Hitler would have been so jealous.

But the UN bigwigs were not interested in listening to all children and youth. In fact, YouTube star Naomi Seibt of Germany, a girl who describes herself as a “climate realist,” came to Madrid and would have been absolutely delighted to speak to UN dignitaries, the media, the activists — anyone, really — about the scientific realities of climate change and global warming. We at The New American interviewed her, and it was obvious that her grasp of climate science was far stronger than virtually any of the youngsters in the shrieking mob allowed to rampage through the UN summit.

“They are protesting so heavily,” the 19-year-old Naomi explained from a cafe across the street from the COP25. “Why don’t they ever question their ‘scientific facts’? They are so easy to debunk, actually.” CO2, she explained, is a “tiny factor” compared to the sun and the clouds when it comes to climate.

Of course, opinions in opposition to the party line were not allowed to be expressed in COP25, so Naomi — described by one leading alternative-media journalist as the “anti-Greta,” a term she is not comfortable with — was forced to stay outside in the cold while hundreds of young “climate activists” marched around inside the official venue providing cover for the UN’s power-grabs.

Fridays for the Future: Exploiting Naive Children for Revolution

On the other hand, though kids such as Naomi were verboten at the summit, climate-alarmist children could run amok with near impunity. One of Saint Greta’s disciples, a fellow Swedish girl named Vega Manson who was also with the group Fridays for the Future, was outraged that UN leaders briefly revoked badges of some of the more unruly climate-justice children after they swarmed the stage at the plenary hall. However, she then admitted that the UN was actually happy about the spectacle the kids had caused — again likely allowing it to take place for the benefit of any major media present: “The UNFCCC [UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] praised us for this unauthorized action, even though it was breaking so many rules,” said the girl, before calling UN’s decision to revoke their badges for a moment “racist, sexist, and xenophobic.” By contrast, climate realist Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com was expelled merely for bringing in a life-size image of Trump and a paper-shredder, then shredding the Paris Agreement. Lord Monckton was banned for invading the plenary hall dressed as an Arab and ridiculing climate alarmism from an Arab delegation’s spot, something harmless compared with what the children did.

Next the UN featured a Mexican girl who claimed to be from an “indigenous tribe” from some “mountain region” of Mexico, though she now has a (horror!) super-sized carbon footprint in her new home in New York City. Apparently being an “indigenous people” gives one bonus points in the UN’s hierarchy of child props. She demanded, among other things, more climate indoctrination at school: “We demand climate education now!” Why she asked the UN for this was not clear.

Another key demand was that there should be no more energy extraction on indigenous land, saying oil and energy resources should be left in the ground. During the Q&A session, I pointed out that some Canadians had recently told me that oil and the energy sector were the largest employers of indigenous peoples in Canada. Is there a conflict or dichotomy between keeping them poor and unemployed, and “saving” the environment? “Um....” several of them mumbled, glancing at each other nervously. Finally, one of them had an idea: “That’s a question you should ask indigenous peoples!” It was not clear why the self-proclaimed indigenous Mexican girl who demanded no more energy extraction on “indigenous lands” was not qualified to answer the question.

Unfortunately for the girls on stage, their willingness to spout ignorant claims was then called out once again. During the Swedish girl’s speech she had claimed that the previously mentioned “unauthorized action” committed by some of the children had been led by “indigenous peoples.” But during Q&A, a representative of the “indigenous peoples,” wearing face paint and a feathered headdress, stood up and challenged that assertion. “Don’t claim it was by indigenous people when it wasn’t by indigenous people,” he said, sternly. Boy, was that awkward. All the girls (and the transgender kid) on the panel were squirming, trying frantically to think of something to say. Finally the Swedish girl, Vega, sheepishly apologized, and claimed the group had received inaccurate information from some place.

But the egg on their faces did not deter the children from making more absurd claims later — lots of them. Later that same day, Friday the 13th, the “Fridays for the Future” children held a protest that began inside and then headed out to the street. Shrieking children and “youth,” along with plenty of older people, screamed all sorts of Marxist talking points while putting their raised fists in the air — each one painted with an occult-style eye on it. The “young people” chanted, among other things, “This is what a feminist looks like.” Occasionally, one would stand up and rant about the alleged evils of America, CO2, patriarchy, energy companies, markets, colonialism, “white privilege,” and more.

Despite being in a city with more than six million people in the metro area, the protest consisted of only dozens of children screaming in front of a sailboat (ironically made of oil byproducts) that was supposed to signify the danger of sea-level rise. The nearby “electric car” parking lot was empty, a testimony as to just how “sincere” the climate alarmists are about driving electric vehicles. But the adoring “journalists” broadcasting the spectacle to the world made the protest look like an enormous march, carefully choosing camera angles to conceal well-spoken adults just outside the group of protesting children, giving them instructions on what to do. Over and over again, the children shouted “anti-capitalist, anti-capitalist.” Then they began chanting “system change, not climate change.” When I asked them what they meant, every protester either told me to talk to an “authorized spokesperson” or said the goal was to dismantle what remains of the market system.

One French girl who looked to be about 15 or 16 was crying her eyes out. We asked her for an interview, but she did not want to go on camera. When I asked her why she was crying, she responded in French, sobbing, “We’ve worked so hard to make this happen.”

Others were far more aggressive. One foul-mouthed activist with a bullhorn shouted “F*** Trump! F*** capitalism! F*** colonialism! F*** America!” The attacks on America and capitalism were intense. Nobody stopped to mention that American capitalism is what unleashed the ingenuity that made the modern world possible — the air conditioning, the cars, the telephones, Internet, air travel, smartphones, and the abundance that made life so easy for the privileged, bratty-sounding kids screaming in the streets. After the kids’ protest, the streets were littered with mountains of plastic trash.

On the last day of the summit, “CommunismoEsVida” (Communism Is Life) was trending on Twitter in Spain as indoctrinated children on social media ranted against economic freedom.

Adults, Pressure From Above, Almost as Nutty

If someone had looked for an adult to rein in the ludicrous behavior, he would have looked in vain. Adults speaking at the summit sounded similarly unhinged, which is probably one of the reasons why the American media chose to largely ignore the UN summit, lest the sleeping giant that is the American public wakes up.

On display everywhere were hatred of America, Trump, and the Republican Party. On one of the most prominent platforms in the entire UN summit, for instance, radical population-control advocate Stuart Scott, with the group “Scientists Warning,” blasted the United States as “the kleptocratic States of America.”

Speaking of President Trump, he went even further. “This man is a threat to the planet, as is his corporate owned Republican Party, who have been bought by the fossil-fuel industry and other polluting industries,” argued Scott, parroting the same message as the children only with slightly bigger words. “They have together done a huge disservice to humanity and all of life on Earth. They’ve done all this for the sake of money. Make no mistake: Trump has got a particular personality aberration.... The callousness of this man is astonishing and revolting.” Scott also blasted what he called Trump’s “amazing depravity.”

For some reason, Scott then shared some teenage gossip he heard about Trump during his childhood. “I grew up a couple miles away from where Donald Trump grew up,” he said. “And the story in the hood — the neighborhood — was that he got kicked out of a couple schools locally, and so his parents put him in a military academy where they tolerated him as long as his parents paid. And his initials became the acronym for serving detention at the military academy.”

He also claimed that by getting the U.S. government out of the UN Paris agreement, Trump was “not trying to protect the American people, that’s very clear.” Scott also claimed the president had “somehow cheated, lied, hoodwinked the public into becoming president of the United States.” He even accused the GOP of rigging the election through “a lot of gerrymandering the districts to help make that possible.”

Former Secretary of State John Kerry, an uber-wealthy former politician with a super-sized carbon footprint, also spoke from one of the most prominent stages at the UN summit, and declared that he was ashamed to be an American. “I assume the burden unfortunately of a country that is the largest naysayer of all,” he told throngs of adoring officials, journalists, and activists from around the world. “And I’m sorry for that. I regret it enormously. Only the United States of America has a head of government who calls climate change a Chinese hoax.”

To top off his zany remarks, Kerry also took some time to lie, multiple times, about various issues ranging from the dangers of diesel particulate matter to the supposed “science” underpinning the man-made-warming hypothesis. At one point, he claimed solar power, “now absolutely, under any standard by whatever you measure, is cheaper than coal, no question about it.” If that were true, everybody would be using solar power, of course. But facts have never gotten in the way of the UN’s narrative, and COP25 would have been a bad place for that to begin.

“Democracy,” Sans Conservatives or Truth

Despite constant shrieking of “This is what democracy looks like” throughout the two-week summit, there was literally no representation for conservative Americans or Republicans anywhere at the summit. Not a single conservative, pro-America speaker could be found among the 25,000 attendees at COP25, even though in America the number of people who consider themselves conservative is huge. Only a tiny handful of American patriots who reject the man-made global-warming hypothesis were even allowed in the conference, and none were given a platform to speak. Nobody wanted to comment on that.

Yet not only did the UN’s invited speakers denigrate the United States and other countries that don’t bow to the “green” global agenda, powerful activists inside to conference took their shots, too. The Climate Action Network (CAN), for example, repeatedly gave the U.S. government a mock “Fossil of the Day Award” for being the “best at being the worst.” Even Canadian government officials in the audience — supposedly representing one of America’s closest allies — cheered them on.

In the spectacles, trophies were handed out to activists pretending to be Donald Trump, who would stand up and make America look evil, greedy, and ridiculous. Apparently America was the “best at being the worst,” almost every day. There were many supposed reasons for America being the worst country in the world: not handing over enough money to the UN and its kleptocratic member states, not slashing CO2 emissions quickly enough (even as U.S. emissions decline while other nations’ emissions rise), withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, sending delegates to represent U.S. interests despite being in the withdrawal process, and more. Apparently some CO2 emissions — America’s — are worse than others’ emissions, those of China, which emits more CO2 than America and Europe combined and yet is not asked to even consider curbing the growth in those emissions for at least another decade.

A little digging on this Climate Action Network, which includes hundreds of powerful member groups, revealed a great deal. CAN’s largest donor has been the Sea Change Foundation, which according to investigations by the U.S. Congress has been receiving money from the Kremlin via a shadowy shell corporation in Bermuda called “Klein Ltd.” U.S. lawmakers said the Russian government’s goal was to boost its government-controlled energy sector, which produces about 50 percent of its exports, at the expense of the West. We tried to find out what was going on. When we asked the Russians, a guy came out and laughed maniacally. When we asked CAN, they had no comment and said this was not the time or place to talk about it. You can watch the whole video on YouTube. The Rockefeller oil dynasty, meanwhile, has also been among the most significant financiers of the “climate” movement, according to a report by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.

The extremism that was so ubiquitous at the UN climate summit would have shocked Americans to the core — even many liberals and Democrats would have been appalled. And that is almost certainly why the press in the United States, including the liberal establishment media, decided to ignore or downplay it. It will be up to everyday Americans to spread the word. 

Photo credit: AP Images

This article appears in the February 3, 2020, issue of The New American. To download the issue and continue reading this story, or to subscribe, click here.