The Great Russian Energy Scam
Russian 'Dark Money' Funding 'Green' Groups in West
by Giulio Meotti • April 6, 2022 at 5:00 am
"Germany and several other European countries have largely banned fracking. This has transformed European leaders into the equivalent of 16th-century naval explorers, praying for favorable winds and weather as energy prices rise and fall depending on cloud cover and wind conditions." — Wall Street Journal editorial, October 20, 2021.
In the autumn of 2021, COP26, the UN climate conference, was setting up its grotesque spectacle: a kind of ecological Versailles. The rich, powerful and virtuous of the planet gathered in Glasgow to pontificate to the citizenry of Western countries about how much we are harming the planet with our way of life. They arrived in their private jets to complain about the plague of air industry emissions. The British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, said that everyone should eat less meat and fly less. Then came the news that 400 private jets would be flying to the UN climate conference...
While the Germans pontificated about the climate, the Washington Post informed us of their hypocrisy: "Germany portrays itself as a climate leader. But it's still razing villages for coal mines... The yawning black-brown scar in the earth that is Germany's Garzweiler coal mine has already swallowed more than a dozen villages. Centuries-old churches and family homes have been razed and the land they were built on torn away. Farmland has disappeared, graveyards have been emptied." The Lützerath mine alone is twice the size of Manhattan. That is why Germany has been labelled as the most polluting country in Europe.
Thus, the progressive American pundits until October dreamed of an alliance between the West, Russia and China against global warming. Now that the West has isolated Russia, the largest supplier of energy for Europe, no one is talking about that anymore.
Russia, it turns out, has reportedly been promoting, often through "dark money" via Bermuda – which does not require countries to be named -- "green" campaigns against nuclear power to ensure dependence by the West on Russia's fossil fuel.
A German organization, The Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation, which received more than 17 million euros from Gazprom has also been accused of being a Moscow-funded "puppet." -- the Times revealed.
The Foundation for Climate and Environmental Protection was established last month in Mecklenburg-Pomerania by Manuela Schwesig... an ally of former German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, president of Nord Stream II Russian gas pipeline. He is still serving on the boards of state-backed Russian energy companies.
"Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas". -- Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2022
"We discovered that Gazprom financed environmental NGOs who acted as consultants to ministers to various governments, such as Belgium, which then supported the abandonment of nuclear power." -- Dominique Reynié, professor of political science at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, in an interview with CNews.
China (now allied with Russia) is also funding Western environmentalists. - Unherd investigation, December 15, 2021
"With winter fast approaching, Europe finds itself in an energy crisis—and reliant on the tender mercies of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. It's a self-induced disaster years in the making".
That was how an October 2021 editorial in the Wall Street Journal began, before Russia amassed its troops on the Ukrainian border and no analyst or think tank imagined that the unthinkable was around the corner. The editorial continued:
"European leaders have handicapped themselves on energy in the name of pursuing a climate agenda that will have no effect on the climate but is raising energy prices, harming consumers and industry, and is now empowering the bullies in the Kremlin.