STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Recycling Memes: The Biodiversity Promotion
By Staff News & Analysis - October 29, 2010

One in five vertebrates threatened by extinction … Twenty years ago, nearly all the world's nations agreed to significantly reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010. (The United States signed the accord but, like other treaties, the Senate has not ratified it.) Well, it's 2010 and we are nowhere near that goal. While the Convention on Biological Diversity is currently meeting to update its targets for 2020, a new study released by Science says one-fifth of the world's vertebrate species are threatened with extinction. But the good news is things would be a whole lot worse if we had done nothing at all. … Preserving biodiversity may seem like a frivolous goal to some, given the current economic recession, but diverse and stable ecosystems provide many services, including clean drinking water, pollination, pest control, pollution abatement, and so on. "These ecosystem services, as they are called, are estimated to be worth $33 trillion per year, ten times the size of the UK GDP, for example," said Stuart Butchart, an ornithologist with BirdLife International and one of the paper's authors. "Economists have calculated that not stepping up our efforts on biodiversity loss will cost us seven percent of the global GDP by 2050, and that doesn't even include the consequences of resource conflicts, refugees, and political instability that will happen when these systems reach tipping points of collapse." – Science 2010

Dominant Social Theme: The animals are dying! The animals are dying! We must protect biodiversity!

Free-Market Analysis: Well, they are at it again. Usually we try very hard to produce articles that are not being currently reported on within the alternative 'Net media. In this case, we will have to settle for making a statement about an obvious new promotion that is currently being commented on at other websites. Interestingly, the speed with which the alternative 'Net community seems to be picking up these promotions seems to be increasing. (We don't give ourselves any credit for this, we're just sayin'….)

Anyway, this is indeed a new roll out of an old dominant social theme from our point of view. The extinction meme has been around for decades and was one of several initial fear-based promotions that got the "environmental movement" up and running. The idea that splendid animals were dying out (which wasn't necessarily true) was a surefire way to get people concerned about what humanity was doing to Mother Earth. Here's a recent take on the reality of "mass extinction" that we pick up from nofrakkingconsensus, a website that is obviously skeptical about elite promotions. It is entitled Another "IPCC Train Wreck: Species Extinction" and here's an excerpt:

The Thomas paper [a famous paper about mass extinction] "may have greatly overestimated the probability of extinction." Like Oxford biologist Lewis, above, they believe the past sheds important light on the threat climate change may pose in the future: …the fossil record indicates that, in most regions, surprisingly few species went extinct during the [last 2.5 million years] – in North America, for example, only one tree species is known to have gone extinct.

We can see from the above statement that there is a likelihood that UN statistics are being fudged again; another fear-based meme is being created. But as we said at the beginning of this article, we are not at all alone in realizing this. The UK Telegraph has already written about this issue and made some very good points as follows:

And so it begins. With all the shamelessness of a Goldman Sachser trading in his middle-aged wife for a hot, pouting twentysomething called Ivanka, the green movement is ditching "Climate Change". The newer, younger, sexier model's name? Biodiversity. (Mega hat tips to: Hilary Ostrov and Ozboy at Libertygibbet) When I say shameless, I'm talking so amoral it makes the Whore of Babylon look like Mother Theresa; so flagrant it makes Al Gore's, ahem, alleged drunken "Love poodle" assault on the Portland Masseuse look like an especially delicate passage from Andreas Capellanus's The Art of Courtly Love.

What we have learned in our years of studying these dominant and sub dominant social themes is that they are never merely rolled out without a purpose. In this case, the purpose has already been revealed, and the Telegraph article presents it clearly and persuasively:

Consider this summary of the UN's two-week Convention On Biodiversity, launched on Monday: "Delegates from nearly 200 countries are being asked to agree to new 2020 targets after governments largely failed to meet a 2010 target of achieving a significant reduction in biological diversity losses, a goal set at the last biodiversity conference in 2002. And one of the same issues that led to failure the first time around could jeopardize this meeting: money. Developing nations say more funding is needed from developed countries to share the effort in saving nature. Much of the world's remaining biological diversity is in developing nations such as Brazil, Indonesia and in central Africa."

You see what is going on? If global warming doesn't work, the UN, and those behind the UN's various programs, are prepared to attack with a biodiversity meme. But the underlying effort is always the same. The "problem" is global and the solution is "funding." The UN and the power elite behind it is DETERMINED to get some some sort of global tax implemented at UN level. It could be one tenth of one penny per person per year – but something that provides a precedent for more taxation down the road.

After Thoughts

The comforting part of all this, if there is one, is that these promotions are being rolled out faster and faster and rather than building up slowly, they are being hurried, which saps their credibility. Also the truth-telling of the Internet has revealed the mechanism of these promotions and their utility. We think many people are not so trusting anymore. The elite can attempt to market these programs in a variety of ways but as the 21st century unrolls, these efforts are becoming more difficult to mount and in our estimation are become less effective as well.

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