Ron Collins
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

There is a lot of prejudice and bias on both sides of this debate — all of which makes it hard to determine anything that can be confidently seen as balanced.

What makes me skeptical about the growth industry of “climate science”, is that it is quite clearly not any genuine urge to save the planet that drives these people. It is rather the urge to get their projects funded.

Their models and projections and apocalyptic predictions are all entirely hypothetical, and the solutions they pose offer no remote possibility of measuring what their succeeding might look like.

This is the key to the non-profit, grant-driven economy: since the metrics of profit are surgically removed coming in, the motive then becomes one of keeping projects and organizations funded by whatever means are necessary. You can look at any type of non-profit activity involving grant funds to keep them afloat, and their consistent feature is that there is no real way of measuring success. The obvious perverse incentive then becomes, to continue appealing to the funding sources on the basis of success not having been achieved yet. Again, and again, and again. One grant application right after another.

Why? Because people who draw their livelihood from the grant sector and the economy of non-profits, are just consumers like anyone else. They have mortgages to pay, kids’ braces and summer camps to shell out for, they want to take vacations and have evenings out and live in nice homes just like anyone else. The stress they live under is different from in the profit-making sector, which continually threatens to punish those who are not making profits. But similar nonetheless: the worst threat to the livelihood of grant recipients or anyone employed under their funding schemes, is the grants not being renewed or other grants not being available to take their place.

So in other words, panic and hyperbole and apocalyptic warnings in the non-profit sector, are just another day at the office. It is what they manufacture and sell, to their grantors and to those the grantors are themselves funded by. The sense of urgency may or may not have any grounding in hard reality, but that is not what determines its marketability. Political, and pop-culture, trends are. So the more people you can convince that the world is about to burn up unless NPOs get their funds renewed, the more the grants economy is likely to continue being directed toward those issues.

The non-profit economy is essentially a gigantic tax shelter, a function of an insane and punitive taxation system which punishes profitability and rewards throwing away money on hopeless causes that can never show any effectiveness at all. Grantors write grants not to save the world from something, but rather because their accounting departments show them that they need to throw some money away to avoid its being over-taxed instead.

It is simply naive to even take the rhetoric of any non-profit sector cause at face value. The rhetoric is doing precisely what any other form of advertising is meant to do: seduce, delude, distract, obfuscate, hypnotize and convince.

The relative merits of the product or service being pitched have little to do with how advertising works, but rather how its contents make its audiences feel.

The advertising of non-profit non-causes such as climate panic, work precisely the same way. This doesn’t mean there is no merit at all to concerns over how humanity might be affecting climate, but it certainly is no reason to believe that what we are being sold, is anything but a self-sustaining ponzi scheme.

    Ron Collins

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    Facts don’t care about your faction