Global radicals and the frightening power of ENGOs – by Peter Foster (National Post – December 4, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

A key tactic is to proliferate groups that masquerade as the multiple voices of ‘civil society’ when in fact they stand for a limited radical point of view

Independent researcher Vivian Krause has dug up a lengthy list of recent grants by the U.S.-based Tides Foundation to hold up oil sands development (See “New U.S. funding for the war on Canadian oil”). She makes the excellent point that many of these “charitable” donations go to environmental NGOs whose standards of objectivity in no way comply with tax exempt status.

My colleague Terence Corcoran also rightly notes how the grants represent “manufactured dissent.” However, some might argue that the amounts involved are relatively trivial – mere tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars –when set against the expenditures of government and industry. When Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver fingered “foreign-funded radicals” a couple of years ago, he was roundly pilloried. Canadians who regarded themselves as environmentally concerned felt they were being unfairly labelled.

Environmental groups were quick to point to all the foreign-funding that went into resource development (as if creating jobs was as culpable as preventing them). Critics might also note that Mr. Oliver’s department is planning a $24-million two-year campaign to promote the oil sands. And aren’t producers spending millions to create a positive image?

Merely looking at ENGO grants ignores both the lopsided nature of “the debate” and the fact that the fight against the oil sands is just one part – albeit a key one – of a multi-billion dollar international movement whose objectives have less to do with environmental protection than a “sustainable” ideology that seeks to curtail human wealth and freedom.

That campaign is centred in, and cultivated by, the United Nations and its international bureaucratic allies. It cynically manipulates idealism for political ends, and has achieved remarkable power over both governments and corporations.

The very fact that ENGOs are funded by some of the greatest capitalist foundations on earth shows how those foundations have been captured by forces that many of their founders would have considered repugnant.

Although modern environmentalism goes back to the 1970s, the growing political influence of the ENGOs might be dated to the UN conference in Rio in 1992, where organizers invited activists in to pressure diplomats. The ongoing UN/ENGO symbiosis was very clear at the recent UN climate conference in Warsaw, where the ENGO presence was everywhere.

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