When Big Change Meets Hard Reality
Part 2: Big Change’s Climate / Energy Transition Campaign Failure
This is Part 2 of the Big Change series. In Part 1, Big Change was defined as an industrial-grade complex of forces and interest groups that thrive on endless transition strategies to push for massive social, economic and political disruptions. Like Big Oil or Big Pharma, it represents an activist monolith seeking to dominate and control human behavior by transforming society through political ideology, unlimited foundation funding and a deep network of interest groups.
Part 2 will examine the first Big Change movement – the climate / energy transition campaign – while Part 3 will assess if their attempt to establish a food system transition will meet the same demise. Part 4 will be a case study on how Michael Bloomberg could create a Big Change infrastructure from scratch for less than two billion dollars.
While no one in the environmental movement wants to admit it, the rhetorical days of climate crises, net-zero and carbon-free solutions have become part of political history. This should not have happened given how hundreds of millions of dollars of dark foundation funding were poured into climate campaigning, paying off the media and driving ESG and corporate social responsibility goals. So what went wrong?
Neo-Marxists and environmentalists used the threat of climate change as the opportunity to refocus their campaign against industry and capitalism. They framed it as an existential crisis, centering on the urgent necessity for an energy transition away from fossil fuels toward renewables. There was “no time to lose” so targets were rushed forward to decarbonize western economies. Transition to renewables, transition to electric vehicles (EVs), transition to a net-zero industries – all of these massive green infrastructure transitions became imperative, with target deadlines set for 2030 (or 2035 at the latest).
It was a moral imperative. Millions of children were marching in the streets, there were theatrical street shows, closures of airports, movies on the climate movement and cultural events. If an academic wanted to publish a paper in a journal like Nature, it had to mention the climate crisis. Companies had to frame their press releases within the new theological dogma. And every news story was reported as a climate story. The narrative was so seamless that no one even asked who was funding this show. This is the perfect example of how Big Change was at work in the background, controlling the campaign, the narrative, the networks…
Fatal Assumptions
Since the impact of severely disrupting western economies would be inevitable, Big Change started to advance to concept of “degrowth” in a post-capitalist world. Rather than exhausting the word “transition”, Big Change referred to this period as “late-stage capitalism”, assuming that the fate of the economic/financial system had already been sealed.
There was one little problem. Nobody asked consumers if they were ready to give up social and economic goods, accept harder times and pay more for lower quality products.
The transition to renewables meant higher energy costs, colder homes and risks to a secure energy supply.
The transition to EVs meant more expensive cars with battery technologies that would be obsolete within a couple years.
With wealth disparity near record levels, western consumers were then told that growth, jobs and progress were not longer part of the plan.
Should anyone have been surprised with the results of the elections of 2024-25 when consumers were asked what they actually thought of all of this?
People don’t want to give up social and economic goods for some idealistic transition. The climate campaigners had been drinking their own Kool-Aid and convinced themselves that saving the planet was a far greater calling than a warm home or affordable personal mobility. Change was inevitable, they argued, and the only question was how fast the transition could be imposed. These activists could afford the sacrifice and did not consider the effects such cutbacks would have on the less affluent. Worse, they believed the studies they had funded that reassured them that the transition would not lead to any short-term decline, and could even deliver benefits.
In the business community, there was a clear set of assumptions that no one could question: that the days of fossil fuels were over, that capitalism had entered its late, final stages, and that deindustrialization was a beneficial part of the degrowth strategy. Asset managers were rating companies according to their commitment to decarbonize, earning ESG points was a core corporate strategy and every event, every decision, had to be climate motivated.
Pure Madness
In hindsight, the demand from Big Change to rapidly decarbonize was pure madness. Government subsidies for offshore wind farms were driving the public purse deeper into debt, farmers converted valuable agricultural land to solar farms and targets for EVs were well ahead of production capacity or recharging infrastructure.
The financial community bought into the transition as a new business opportunity, new products and new investments. In their ESG world, old heavy industries were being challenged, threatened, blacklisted for not falling in line. Davos lost a decade of business leadership defining itself by climate interest groups and an angry Swedish teenager.
If the climate campaigners had just slowed their transition demands to incremental changes (which the industry concept of product stewardship called “continuous improvement”), they would still be leading the movement towards a greener, lower carbon economy over the coming decades. But Big Change is about creating opportunities to push a transition as fast and as binding as possible.
“Compromise” does not exist in the Big Change lexicon.
The Big Money Behind this Big Change Transition
Once climate change was declared a crisis, assumedly by the UN at first but repeated so often that no one (except Bjørn Lomborg) actually questioned the claim, Big Change was able to orchestrate large volumes of government and foundation funding channeled through their networks. With big money comes bigger networks of paid-off lawyers, scientists, journalists, lobbyists, consultants, celebrity influencers and slicker media campaigns. The Firebreak covered the party (even if we weren’t invited to the punchbowl).
Florence Autret’s excellent investigation into the European Climate Foundation showed how foundations pumped hundreds of millions annually into a high-level fiscal sponsor to represent their interests at high levels in the European Union, UN and the World Economic Forum while paying off a network of NGOs. As part of the Big Change movement, they don’t feel they have to declare how much they receive from whom, and how much they regrant to whom (ECF’s 2023 income was €279 million).
Perhaps the most egregious case of Big Change abuse was when a number of US-based foundations funded Canadian and international NGOs to run campaigns to try to “landlock” the Canadian province of Alberta to prevent them from being able to export their fossil fuels. The Firebreak reviewed the Albertan government’s official inquiry into the extent of the extremist campaigning, all orchestrated by foundation fund managers in the United States.
The Agroecology Fund was a sleepy organization supporting peasant farmers on a budget of around $1 million a year until they changed their fiscal sponsor. Our Substack showed how the Global Greengrants Fund repackaged agroecology as a means to mitigate climate change (it doesn’t). They then tapped into their network of tech billionaires and within a couple years increased the funding to around $100 million for advocacy campaigns against conventional agriculture. Although they don’t disclose the amounts (because they only exist as a Global Greengrants Fund project and thus don’t have to), the Agroecology Fund seem to be running a lot of programs with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The Firebreak ran a series of investigations into the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), showing how support from the investment banking community allowed them to build a massive database of industry CO2 emissions (that the investment bankers then used as inside information to package into financial products). When the CDP started to diversify into other environmental disclosure products, the writing was on the wall.
The UN nominally sponsored the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and the Net-Zero Asset Management Initiative to use the power of the financial industry to move the developed world toward a net-zero economy. The Firebreak showed how these bankers were the first to abandon the Big Change ship when they started to see how much they could earn selling AI Data Center investment funds (built on fossil fuels). By the 2025 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, the climate crisis was a distant memory.
Big Change invested a lot into controlling the media and the climate narrative. The Firebreak exposed how foundations, via discreet fiscal sponsors, set up a project called Covering Climate Now, to regrant millions of dollars to “train” journalists to report every news story as a climate story. The money was flowing so freely among reporters, with foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies creating their own investigative reporting arms, that the climate crisis narrative should have been cast in stone.
One of the tragedies from this manipulation of reality was the reappropriation of development aid. To meet UN imposed climate commitments, many government aid agencies simply refocused their funding and redirected their programs toward climate-related issues. There was no new money. If you are running a family planning charity or a community health service in a developing country, you had better shift to planting trees to be able to avail of aid funding. I, myself, was involved in a rural development project that had its German government funding yanked because it did not meet their new climate-driven parameters. Once again, Big Change does not care about the actual consequences of their campaigns so long as they are successful.
Unravelling Big Change
Project Climate failed, with their ambitious agenda rolled back, the net-zero strategy derailed and the return to a fossil-fuel based economy entrenched, likely well past 2035. The activists should have listened, engaged and compromised. But Big Change did not think like that, dismissed opposition and only listened to their own expert advice.
There is a thinly veiled arrogance from activists and academics who suffer from the patriarchal belief than anyone who does not think like them is stupid and that their concerns should simply be ignored. Since the ignorant public adds no value to the discussion, campaigns, cutbacks and hardships should just be imposed on them. If governments, knowing full well of a potential consumer backlash, do not comply with the activist demands, then Big Change pumps even more resources into attacking the regulators.
Giving these activists money and power just amplifies their arrogance (I call it the “Robert Malone Effect”). And if someone like me were to challenge their dogmatic activism with facts or a rational counter-arguments, I would just be ringfenced or branded an “industry shill”. In blissful ignorance, they can carry on with their campaign without the need for reflection or revision.
On the climate campaign, the idealists behind Big Change abruptly met hard reality during the elections of 2024-25. Will other Big Change campaigns suffer the same demise? In Part 3 of this series, Big Change’s food system transition will be evaluated.