Friday 22 July 2011

Former Greenpeace boss now a big player in the doomsday business

Throughout the history of mankind, doomsday prophecies have fascinated people. In this age of fast communications and world wide audiences clever manipulators - think of Al Gore  - have realized that scaremongering is a huge business opportunity.

One of the newest entrants into the exclusive club of top doomsday entrepreneurs is Australian Paul Gilding, former head of Greenpeace International.

Gilding, whose "merits" include being arrested five times,  now has a private consultancy with several major companies "from BHP Billiton to Dupont" as his customers. (Business contracts are now clearly much more appealing than Greenpeace stunts for this former activist ).

Lucrative book contracts offer another business bonanza for climate change scaremongerers, which is why Gilding has written  a book, "The Great Disruption". The former activist is now busy touting his literary "masterpiece" to warmist mainstream media, most of which willingly agree to spread his message of gloom.

Recently the NYT climate change hypocrite Thomas Friedman did his best to to promote Gilding´s book:

One of those who has been warning me of [a coming crisis] for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment-when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once-’The Great Disruption.’ “

Reuters is the next one to promote the book:

Gilding, author of a new book "The Great Disruption", has a simple message: We have left it too late to avoid serious impact from climate change and ecological damage after trying to drive global economic growth far beyond system and resource capacity.
As a consequence, we risk an environmental crash, triggering a sudden collapse in the global economy, and need to be ready to respond to the ensuing "social and economic hurricane", he says.
"If you thought the financial situation in 2008 was a crisis, and if you thought climate change was a cultural, economic and political challenge, then hold on for the ride," writes Gilding, a former head of Greenpeace International.
"We are about to witness humanity deal with its biggest crisis ever, something that will shake it to the core -- the end of economic growth," added the 52 - year-old Australian, who as an activist was arrested five times during protests.
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He sees a series of ecological, social and economic shocks driven by climate change, including extreme weather, melting polar regions and agricultural output changes boosting prices.
Financial markets will see big drops, while the resulting economic and political crises will be massive in scale and last for decades.
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So what are we supposed to do? Gilding says the stark view that it's too late now to avoid a crisis at first caused him despair -- he recalls breaking down sobbing during a 2007 presentation on the issue to a business audience in New York.

However, after 2007 things have improved for Gilding. No more sobbing and breakdowns for the  hard working business entrepreneur. There is money to make in the doomsday business.

Although the doomsday prophecy is the one that is supposed to sell his book, Gilding obviously has realized that his consultancy business would suffer, unless there is a happy ending:

But despite the turmoil and geopolitical strife he says we could face he is optimistic that humanity will quickly respond once it wakes up to the scale of the threat.

Read the entire article here

PS

Obvious airlines and coal companies are not among Gilding´s customers:

Among a series of measures, he foresees the closure of 1,000 dirty coal power plants within five years and the building of huge wind and solar farms. He suggests half the world's aircraft might have to be stranded to cut emissions.












1 comment:

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