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"The World Meteorological Organization should immediately retract this flawed study and issue a formal statement publicly correcting the record." ... The facts fly in the face of the reporting. The WMO and its authors chose to misrepresent disaster data as gathered by one of the most reputable agencies in the world, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in their EM-DAT database. ... The CRED system’s counts rose as it received reports from more and more sources over the years. Comparing totals from the 1970s with 21st century data is not only inappropriate, but also a blatant misuse of statistics to bolster a pre-ordained conclusion of increasing destruction.

TOM CHIVERS: "The world’s population has exploded: in 1800, there were about 1 billion humans. In 1950, there were 2.5 billion. Now there are 7.7 billion. In my parents’ lifetime, the number of humans alive has trebled. But amazingly, the amount of material available to each of them has increased even more, and that is in large part because of our use of fossil fuels. In 1800, almost all the energy used globally was in the form of human and animal muscles, for mechanical work, or plant matter, burned for heat and light. Coal, the first widely used fossil fuel, was just starting to be used in steam engines in the UK, but it was negligible overall. By 1900, fossil fuels were the source for half our energy. By 2000, they were the source of 87%. ... 

And as a result, our lives have been transformed. The amount of energy available to the world has increased 1,500-fold. That is only part of the story, though: increased energy efficiency means that the gain in useful energy is more like 3,500 times. And even though the world’s population has gone up many times, “an average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century”.

Laurence D. Fink, the founder and chief executive of the investment giant BlackRock, has become one of the most influential voices in business over the past decade in pushing corporate leaders to think beyond profits, to their social purpose...Within weeks of his telling leaders in 2020 that climate change would become a “defining factor” in how BlackRock assessed their companies, many blue-chip businesses announced plans to become carbon-neutral or carbon-negative. ... 

He suggested that E.S.G. was not a fad but a permanent feature of the corporate world. Business leaders who do not adapt to the new reality, he suggested, risk being overtaken by younger and more innovative rivals in step with the times. “Capital markets have allowed companies and countries to flourish. But access to capital is not a right,” he wrote. “It is a privilege. And the duty to attract that capital in a responsible and sustainable way lies with you.”

"The lockdowns served as a 'test run' for necessary measures to realise their preferred climate-change policies.'

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class: "For the middle and working classes, however, the Great Reset may prove somewhat less promising — if not disastrous. For most people, notes Eric Heymann, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank Research, the rapid 'green' transition will mean 'a noticeable loss of welfare and jobs.' The conscious policy of degrowth as a means of forcibly reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require getting most people out of their cars, and forcing them to travel far less and to live in tiny apartments. Enforcement will be necessarily intrusive as well. Planners in the UK and elsewhere are pushing for family 'carbon budgets.' Add surveillance technology and we end up with something akin to China’s 'social credit' system, in which your right to free movement is subject to government approval. ... 

"The [COVID] emergency allowed governments to grant them unprecedented executive and administrative powers not just in centralised France but even in usually semi-sensible Great Britain and Australia. For some, the lockdowns served as a 'test run' for necessary measures to realise their preferred climate-change policies. In the new schema, the real class enemy is not the excesses of the ultra-rich, or even wasteful spending by government: it’s the consumption patterns of the masses. ... The early-twentieth-century Italian sociologist Robert Michels noted that complex issues — climate, for instance — reinforce what he called the 'iron law of oligarchy': the more dependent on expertise a society becomes, the greater the need for elite-driven solutions that bypass popular input — and the greater the force the elite will apply to attain its goals."