ESG first entered the investment and banking mainstream as a survival strategy. In 2009, BlackRock had acquired Barclay’s Global Investors Ltd, making it the largest investment firm in the world with almost $3 trillion in assets under management (AUM), a sum larger than the total revenue of the US federal treasury. Politically speaking, BlackRock’s emergence as an investment superpower could hardly have come at a worse time. Amid the wreckage of the 2008 Financial Crisis and then the ululations of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, public suspicion of big banks and corporations was at an all-time high. Finance, in particular, became a morality play: financial institutions were the greedy villains, while policymakers played the heroic civic advocates reining them in. For BlackRock, the chances of continuing to grow freely in such a hostile policy climate seemed remote.

But BlackRock’s leaders had an epiphany — one that would repeat itself in the C-suites of several of its competitors in the early 2010s. What if big investment houses could rebrand themselves as so unimpeachably virtuous and civic-minded that their virtue outshone even their regulators themselves? Such a strategy would be game-changing. Not only would it afford investment houses a mile-wide road to limitless growth; it could even, if played judiciously, accord the companies themselves quasi-governmental power.

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The ESG principles underpinning that strategy had already been written. The 2004 United Nations report “Who Cares Wins,” which introduced the principles of ESG to a worldwide audience, suggested that investors would make higher long-term profits if they put more emphasis on environmental and social progress. The small print was that the task of defining these impossibly broad categories (“environmental” or “social”) would be left to international institutions. Per those institutions’ priorities, “environmental” would mostly focus on implementing CO2-reduction goals, while “social” would mean anything related to the UN’s stated social goals on issues such as gender parity, racial justice, and poverty reduction. In other words, from the very beginning, the goal of ESG was to harmonise the priorities of political elites with those of business leaders. This approach was nothing new in Europe, where Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF) had long blurred the lines between business and government. But in the US, where the WEF ethos had failed to take root and the shareholder remained king, it was a radical departure.

When the UN invited global financial institutions to sign onto the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2007, the total global assets managed by ESG-minded investing vehicles was around $10 trillion. By 2020, a mere 13 years later, that has grown to more than $30 trillion worldwide and more than $17 trillion in the US. New private equity firms and investment outfits devoted purely to ESG — such as Al Gore’s Generation Investment — were springing up every year, and most large US investment firms began offering ESG-mandated mutual funds, leading Bloomberg in 2021 to project $53 trillion invested in ESG by 2025.

As the ESG agenda took hold, the individual investor increasingly found himself shunted aside. Admittedly, the roots of this shift lay in the early Eighties, when federal proxy voting rules were changed to allow fund managers such as BlackRock to vote on behalf of their clients. The idea was a good one at the time, in that it recognised that few individual investors have the time to attend shareholder meetings or the wherewithal to make their views known to company leadership. But it handed vast power to investment companies — admittedly under the understanding that they would vote on behalf of their clients for one purpose only: the maximisation of profits and shareholder returns. It was, however, only a matter of time before this power was exploited.

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That time came in the 2010s, as investment companies began instead to vote in line with the ESG agenda. Company leaders who opposed this were either quickly made to see its inherent wisdom, overruled, or out of a job.

In 2020, BlackRock voted at 16,200 shareholder meetings on 153,000 company proposals. Frequently, these votes were against company management. According to the company’s own Investment Stewardship Annual Report: “In 2020, we identified 244 companies that were making insufficient progress integrating climate risk into their business models or disclosures. Of these companies, we took voting action against 53, or 22%. We have put the remaining 191 companies ‘on watch’. Those that do not make significant progress risk voting action against management in 2021.”

In the same report, BlackRock boasted of having voted against management more than 1,500 times for “insufficient diversity” in company management. This interventionist approach was hardly limited to BlackRock. At State Street Global Advisors, in 2017 alone, proxies voted against the re-election of board members at 400 companies that it felt had made insufficient effort to appoint female board members.

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But for huge investors such as BlackRock, attending shareholder meetings remained a rather inefficient method of coercing company managers into accepting the Good News of ESG. By 2012, Larry Fink had already discovered a far better method: the royal proclamation.

Fink’s first few letters contained tell-tale signs of the revolution to come, particularly in 2015, when he chastised managers for returning too much money to their investors in dividends and buybacks. Then, in his 2018 letter, he went a step further, advocating that CEOs step away from traditional shareholder capitalism and toward ESG by embracing the idea of “stakeholders”. In his words: “Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.” “Every company,” he wrote, “must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” Allow me to translate: On behalf of millions of shareholders I’ve never met, I declare that they no longer truly own the companies they have invested in. Society does.

As Vivek Ramaswamy convincingly argues in his book Woke, Inc., this feint of widening the pool of “stakeholders” beyond shareholders marginalises the shareholder and elevates the manager. By making companies answerable to everyone, proponents of stakeholder capitalism make them answerable to no one.

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In his 2020 letter, modestly subtitled “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance”, Fink decreed that all American companies must redesign their businesses to align with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, with the implied threat of shareholder activism or even divestment if they failed to do so. To that end, he declared that all portfolio companies would thenceforward need to define climate risk as investment risk in their financial analyses — a measure designed to disadvantage companies engaged in heavy industry or fossil fuel production or use, and likely shunt them into cleaner businesses. Furthermore, since the nearest-term climate risks for many businesses are government climate regulations rather than the actual effects of climate change, this is a thinly-disguised method for coercing companies into complying with international climate agreements.

Second, Fink stipulated that companies must disclose their climate risk to investors using accounting methods created by two organisations which are constituted primarily of representatives from investment companies including BlackRock and international organisations such as the UN, World Bank, and IFC. Fink ordered that these disclosures specifically draw a path to the two-degree global temperature increase stipulated by the Paris Agreement.

A reader sympathetic to Fink’s goals might reasonably ask why such use of the bully pulpit is a problem. After all, if companies don’t do the right thing on their own, why shouldn’t Larry Fink incentivise them to do so? But in making his demands, Fink is speaking with the authority of an elected representative who has polled his investors and found that his proposals have their universal support, when he has not.

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Considering that BlackRock is headquartered in the United States, which within the last decade elected a president who withdrew America from the Paris Agreement, there are probably many BlackRock investors who would either reject ESG principles out of hand or else disagree with Fink’s methods of applying them. For example, while many Americans would agree with Fink that climate change is cause for concern, some would dispute the idea that reaching Net Zero emissions by 2050 is a workable strategy, or even that businesses should focus on climate change at the expense of prioritising other problems such as hunger, poverty or terrorism. Similarly, some individual investors might disagree with State Street’s insistence on gender and diversity quotas for company boards.

Living as we do in a free-market capitalist democracy, there is supposed to be room for disagreement on questions such as these. When companies disagree with one another, the result is that they choose different strategies, allowing the market to choose the best strategy in the long term. But when the CEOs of every company in America answer to Larry Fink first and their actual investors second, that diversity — and therefore, the probability that we ever discover the best strategies — plummets.

There is a further irony in this. Over the past decade, as investment houses such as BlackRock have exerted ever-greater influence over decision-making at their portfolio companies, investors have in fact been signalling for them to take a step back. We can see this in the growing popularity of passive strategies (in which investment companies take a backseat role) compared with active strategies (in which they more frequently buy and sell stocks and actively intervene in the affairs of portfolio companies to improve performance). In 2011, 21% of US AUM were managed passively, compared with 79% managed actively; by 2018, the split had narrowed to 36% to 64%. Parity is projected for 2025. BlackRock’s own active-to-passive balance has followed a similar trajectory. Their portfolio had been primarily actively managed until 2009. But by 2018, $3.9 trillion of their $6 trillion assets were invested passively. Just as BlackRock’s customers were voting with their dollars for the firm to intervene less in company policy, BlackRock’s leaders were declaring it their sacred duty to intervene more.

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Over the years, ESG advocates have parried charges of overreach by responding that investing with ESG criteria is just as lucrative as traditional investing. This has always been a dubious argument: after all, if favouring ESG-friendly companies were a prudent financial strategy, an investor would not need to publicly commit to ESG in order to do it; it would simply be the best financial decision.

The evidence of ESG’s performance has until recently been ambiguous enough to offer ammunition to both sides. But that has begun to change. In 2022, eight of the top ten actively managed US ESG funds (including one of BlackRock’s) performed worse than the S&P 500. This demonstrates two things. First, that ESG funds are not some financial miracle. And second, that the performance of ESG funds is tightly bound to the tech industry, which had a terrible year in 2022. (Unsurprisingly, tech stocks are overrepresented in ESG funds, since it is easier for tech companies to claim low environmental impact than companies that actually make things.)

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Not only is ESG failing to make money, but it is not even achieving its non-financial goals. One sizeable Columbia University and London School of Economics study published in 2021 found that US companies in 147 ESG portfolios had worse compliance records for both labour and environmental rules than US companies in 2,428 non-ESG portfolios. They also found that companies added to ESG portfolios did not subsequently improve compliance with labour or environmental regulations. This study added to a growing body of evidence that ESG investing is not only anti-democratic but ineffective.

Over the past few months, investment companies have begun to take notice. Of particular note was investing giant Vanguard’s December 2022 decision to pull out of a Net Zero 2050 pledge. Last week, Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley told the Financial Times: “We don’t believe that we should dictate company strategy […] It would be hubris to presume that we know the right strategy for the thousands of companies that Vanguard invests with.” The just-announced presidential campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the most articulate spokesmen on ESG’s excesses, will doubtless only amplify demands for corporate independence.

Larry Fink has not yet posted a 2023 letter. Perhaps he is delaying as he contemplates how to respond to the growing anti-ESG tide, a tide he bitterly decried at the January WEF in Davos. I might be unusual among ESG detractors in my belief that Fink should write another CEO letter this year. But it should be a very short one, the writing of which is unlikely to take too much time away from his busy schedule of saving the planet through regular flights to Aspen and Davos. The letter should read, simply:

Dear CEO,

I’m sorry.

Jan Brok, vice chairman of the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) party, understands why Netherlands farmers have spent the past month blockading food distribution centres, roads and ministers’ driveways. They are horrified by a new environmental policy that will mean a likely 30% reduction in livestock.

The Netherlands is a country of four million cattle, 13 million pigs, 104 million chickens, and just over 17 million people. It is Europe’s biggest meat exporter with a total area of just over 41,000 square kilometres, and a fifth of this is water. It is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, with the EU’s highest density of livestock.

But there is a significant cost to this abundance: the local environmental impact. Such intensive agriculture, and livestock farming in particular, creates harmful pollution. Manure and urine mix to produce ammonia, and together with run-off from nitrogen-rich fertiliser on fields ends up in lakes and streams, where it can promote excessive algae that smothers other life. Manure here is not a vital fertiliser but a problem waste product.

For decades, this success in trade and agriculture has been accompanied by high emissions of harmful nitrogen compounds, including nitrogen oxides emitted by industry and transport. Levels were dropping, and in 2015, the Dutch introduced a ‘trading scheme’ known as the Programmatische Aanpak Stikstof (PAS) to try to reduce the pollution.

But a Council of State court ruling in 2019 — on a case brought by two local environmental organisations against various farms — ruled that this offsetting scheme was invalid. Permission could not be granted for polluting projects or farm expansion in exchange for promised nitrogen-related reductions in the future: the reductions needed to come first.

The government panicked: national shutdowns were put in place, building projects were put on hold and traffic speeds reduced to 100 kph in the daytime on major roads; it was also obvious that farming was a problem — something needed to be done about all ammonia, nitrogen oxide and nitrous oxide emissions.

Then, in January, the conservative-liberal-Christian coalition pledged to halve nitrogen production by 2030, with a €25 billion budget to back it up. That money was the loud part. The quiet part included the possibility of expropriation, of the government forcibly purchasing farmland. Plans drawn up by civil servants include slashing livestock numbers by 30%. More than €500 million is being brought forward for regional government to buy out farmers this year and next.

Leading the charge among the coalition partners are the Democrats 66 (D66) party. They insisted on “real action for the climate” in their last manifesto. Tjeerd de Groot, the D66 nature and farming spokesman, pointed out that the Netherlands is Europe’s biggest nitrogen emitter, followed by Belgium and Germany. He told a current affairs programme last week: “It is absolutely essential — but also painful — that the plans go through.”

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In June, the government published two documents. One: a map showing the areas that need to reduce emissions by between 12% and 95%. The second was a statement that aimed to help farmers — which De Groot admits failed spectacularly. Farmers saw ruin, not a pair of documents. They looked at the percentage reduction figures next to their farms, and began interpreting how many cattle they would need to cull. It was an enormous blow. Many of them had made huge, expensive investments in new equipment to reduce the environmental impact of their herds.

Hence the massive uprising. A huge rally in the central village of Stroe was followed by wildcat protests; ministers were challenged at their homes; police vehicles were attacked; roads and food deliveries were blocked. Supermarkets lost “tens of millions” according to food retailers group CBL. In one incident, a police officer shot at a 16-year-old farmer’s son, apparently misreading his intent to leave a rally. Last weekend, farmers replaced road signs, declaring a free state of boerenlanden (farmer land) in some villages.

“The [farming] sector is dumbfounded,” says Brok. His party has seen a huge increase in the polls and been signing up 300 members a day. “It has been pushed into a corner by a [Mark] Rutte government that has lost public support in all kinds of ways. Everything that is happening is about frustration, legal battles, people digging in their heels, it’s anger.”

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Wytse Sonnema, a spokesman for the farmers’ association the LTO says that their own grassroots proposals that would lead to a 40% reduction by 2030, had been completely ignored. “Famers in the Netherlands are deeply concerned and angry about nitrogen policy that was presented by the national government on June 10^th”, he explains. He was angered by the map showing entire regions facing 70% reduction targets. “According to the government these should all add up to a country-level reduction of 50% in 2030, which is simply unfeasible, and will have disastrous effects on not just agriculture, but on the economic, social and cultural viability of rural Netherlands.”

While some see the farmers as denying a reality that has been approaching for the past 30 years, their protests have drawn on wider mistrust in politics. (The uprising comes after the previous government stepped down last year, after a childcare benefits scandal involving ethnic profiling by the tax office  — they eventually returned to power and formed exactly the same coalition.) Across the country, people have been hanging Dutch flags upside down along roads and bridges in an expression of support for the farmers.

Jeroen van Maanen, an organic farmer with 130 cows, who helped organise the Stroe protest, said nitrogen has become more than a gas. It has overtaken every other agricultural problem. European law demands that farmers protect vulnerable natural areas, by improving ground water quality and soil quality, and through careful land management. “If you block all other solutions, there’s only one left: a reduction in farmed animals”, he says. “That’s their primary goal and they are using nitrogen as a reason to achieve it.

“Everyone in the world is born an omnivore, whether we like it or not. It’s a populist agenda… that’s purely about less livestock, fewer animals, more vegetable alternatives. I think it’s crazy. Plant-based food needs fertiliser, and where do you get it if you don’t have manure?”

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One group of organic farmers has proposed its own 10-point plan for change, which has so far been ignored by government. There are also indications that some young farmers are open to downscaling — but as vulnerable freelance businesses, they need the cash and security to do it. Who is going to pay more, or take less profit along the supply chain, to make this happen? “I speak to many farmers who want to change: the question is how”, says Natasja Oerlemans, head of the food team at WWF Netherlands, stressing that they are not farmer bashing. “The how is not very clear in current government communication but I think there are multiple opportunities for farmers to transition.

“The fact that our food system in the Netherlands is broken is not new. The current situation is detrimental for biodiversity but also for farmers — many don’t have a successor, every day five farmers stop, and about half of their income is dependent on European income support subsidies.

“Our farmers still think we are feeding the world. But the whole process of intensification and scale enlargement has made farmers  very low income, producing for a bulk market, exporting 70%, but with limited volume compared to Ukraine or the US. It’s not working for them, for the environment and for us as people, our air quality or water quality.”

Johan Remkes is the latest negotiator appointed by the government to diffuse the crisis. Remkes was an curious choice. He came to the position already an object of suspicion among farmers, because he chaired a commission on nitrogen that recommended drastic cuts. The anger and protests are likely to continue. Last week, a provincial government meeting was evacuated and 150 people sheltered in a cellar after a bomb threat. Police and politicians talk about a “hardening” of protest, threats and intimidation, while farmers talk about being both singled-out and ignored.

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The world is beginning to take notice. Internationally, the farm protests have been cheered on by alternative Right-wing media, desperate to fit them into a larger story. On one side the localist farmers with their traditional occupations. On the other, the globalist ‘world elite’, pushing a green agenda developed by the World Economic forum in Davos.

Yet this is a deeply parochial issue. The wider resonances detected in some English-language reporting of the protests generally miss the point. Although legal rulings from cases brought by green activists have driven the agenda, a broad spectrum of political parties agrees change is needed in industry, transport and building to combat climate change. It’s not Klaus Schwab driving farmers to black roads — it’s a run-of-the-mill collection of Dutch politicians and activists. And it’s not just farmers who are getting edgy. Corporations are also starting to fume, or even move abroad, with the prospect of unclear future greening costs, and the pain of manoeuvring through the elephantine Dutch bureaucracy.

So a local issue — for now. A stone’s throw away in Belgium, Flanders is beginning to limit nitrogen emissions and ordering tens of farmers to stop their work. Like the air and water that flows over borders, environmental issues, and clumsy attempts to solve them, will come for us all.

Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.

What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.

Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.

Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a report for Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.

Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals” — the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.

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Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.

Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.

And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.

Such moves have, unsurprisingly, attracted robust criticism. Professor Jun Arima of Tokyo University, one of Japan’s Cop26 negotiators, told me that allowing China to benefit from cheap, coal-fired energy will only consolidate its industrial domination. Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, pointed out that China’s leaders have repeatedly shown they are not “men of their word”.

Yet those in attendance at the meeting in September have been unified by their reticence. Why?

Last year, in their book Hidden Hand: How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg revealed how China influences Britain and other Western democracies by seducing their elites. Its ‘useful idiots’ often believe they are acting for the common good, but become blind to Xi’s avowed ambition: for China to achieve global supremacy by 2049, the 100^th anniversary of the Maoist revolution.

Nowhere is this more effective than in the climate movement. I asked a specialist researcher fluent in Mandarin to examine open-source material from the Chinese web. The results suggest Western greens have become prime targets. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising: before he was a climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua helped run the Party Discipline Commission, which operates a secret prison network where torture, according to Human Rights Watch, has long been rife.

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I asked Hamilton if China’s wooing of Western environmentalists explains why the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has aroused so little protest? He believes it is likely: “They’ve fallen for what the Party calls ‘discourse control’ — to shape the way the rest of the world thinks and talks about China, presenting the Chinese government in a favourable light. Toadying to the Party leadership is letting them off the hook.”

For Lord Stern, this is nothing new: his environmental record is littered with papers saying CCP leaders are making great progress, and suggesting — prematurely — that their coal use and emissions have already or will soon peak. In 2014, for example, he claimed in a paper for the World Economic Forum that China was “emerging as a global leader in climate policy”. His co-author was He Jiankun, a ‘counsellor’ to China’s top administrative body, the State Council, and the director of the Energy, Environment and Economy Institute at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Three years later, following the the annual WEF jamboree at Davos, Stern said: “The world is looking for a climate champion. In China, it has one.”

Has Stern been naïve and let himself get too close to the CCP? Certainly for the Party, Tsinghua University has a special role: it is Xi Jinping’s alma mater, and home to multiple labs conducting secret research for the People’s Liberation Army. Yet the pair still work together: Stern’s spokesman told me that Tsinghua and the LSE are joint leaders of the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate, which held two international meetings before Cop26 with contributions from Alok Sharma, US climate envoy John Kerry, and — of course — Xie Zhenhua.

This year, for what it’s worth, Stern has called on China to stop building new coal-fired plants. But he still spoke at this year’s CCICED, while his spokesman told me that China remained “keen to learn from the UK’s example of world-leading action on climate change” and said the rate of increase in its emissions had slowed enormously. While this may be true, China’s emissions continued to rise even through the pandemic, and now exceed the total produced by rest of the developed world.

On paper, at least, you might argue there’s no harm in that. After all, the CCICED’s “mission” is to build “a more beautiful China and a green and bountiful world”. Who could possibly object?

Hardly anyone, I suspect, until they learnt that, the CCICED’s Chinese members include not only top Party bosses but officials who work with China’s United Front Work Department, one of the CCP’s main instruments for exerting influence abroad. Among them is Li Xiaolin, a top party cadre and the daughter of China’s late president Li Xiannan. Until recently, she was the chair of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries — which, as Hamilton and Ohlberg show in their book, is one of China’s most important foreign influence organisations.

What does this mean in practice? According to Patricia Adams, director of the Toronto-based environmental think tank Probe International, in 2017 a new Chinese law forced foreign NGOs there to submit to “close supervision” by the Ministry of Public Security, responsible for crushing dissent and controlling China’s secret police. Any organisation deemed to have “harmed the national interest” risks having its assets seized, its staff jailed, and being permanently banned.

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Adams knows this fully well: in 2014, when the new law was being discussed, two Chinese academics she was working with were arrested and later jailed, and Probe International named as co-conspirators. Their crime? “Picking quarrels and provoking troubles” for speaking out on issues such as the rule of law. After that, Adams tells me, “it was no longer safe for us to work in China”. As for the Western environmentalists who still do, she adds: “They hope they can influence China’s leadership. But they are also aware that for them, to publicly criticise China’s policy would be suicide.”

Take, for example, the aforementioned CIFF, whose Chief Executive attended the CCICED gathering in September. Along with the WWF and ClientEarth, it has a branch in China which is subject to CCP control. There, the CIFF employs one Wang Yi as its “independent adviser on climate projects”. As chance would have it, he also happens to be a high-ranking member of China’s puppet parliament, the National People’s Congress.

To what extent that compromises his impartiality is anyone’s guess. But it is striking that the CIFF — a registered UK charity — gives away millions of pounds to projects in China. These include an £18 million grant to “help contribute to peaking China’s emissions”, £14 million to give China “evidence-based recommendations” for renewable energy, and, most astonishingly of all, £8 million to assist China “in global climate governance”.

This might not matter quite so much were Sir Christopher and the CIFF not prominent funders of green causes in Britain and Europe. He has personally given £50,000 to Extinction Rebellion, with a further £150,000 from the CIFF. When these payments emerged in 2019, Hohn said: “I recently gave them £50,000 because humanity is aggressively destroying the world with climate change and there is an urgent need for us all to wake up to this fact.”

But not, apparently, to China’s role in it. When I asked an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson why they never said anything about China, she told me: “It would be divisive to put pressure on one particular nation. It would be hypocritical.”

Yet the CIFF’s China connection extends well beyond Extinction Rebellion: it is also the biggest funder of the European Climate Foundation, based in Brussels but with an office in London, to which the CIFF donated £29 million last year. Strikingly, the ECF’s deputy chair is a familiar figure: the CIFF’s Kate Hampton.

Like the CIFF, the ECF website provides few details of the groups it funds. But its UK ‘grantees’ include ClientEarth and the Conservative Environment Network, an alliance of more than 100 Tory MPs and peers set up by environment minister Zac Goldsmith and his plutocrat brother Ben.

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Its ‘global ambassador’, meanwhile, is the Prime Minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, a self-declared “Sinophile” who said last year that China “will come over to our side”, and it was vital “not to raise the temperature” by criticising them. He added he had recently enjoyed “a wonderful, wonderful meeting with the Chinese ambassador”, at which, after discussing global warming, they had sung the Flanders and Swann song ‘Mud, Glorious Mud’ together, inspired by mud’s supposed ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

And yet for all the pledges made in recent years by China and Western environmentalists, the evidence suggests that any future action will be strictly on China’s terms. For many years, Chinese leaders avoided trying to promote the Communist system in the West, but since Xi took power in 2012, this has changed. China, says Clive Hamilton, now touts the ‘China model’ as superior to the West’s.

Anyone doubting this had only attend yet another Beijing meeting, held in June at a Chinese government office by the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Centre, part of China’s environment ministry. The meeting’s attendees included staff from the CCICED, and discussed “the building of ecological civilisation and the community of common destiny”. One leading participant was Chen Xiangyang, the Director of China’s Total State Security Outlook Research Centre — an arm of the Ministry of State Security, which has helped to direct a regime of surveillance against Chinese citizens.

Meanwhile, Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.

None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.

An ECF spokesperson told me: “Climate change impacts every country and so we work with every country, and of course that includes China.” A CIFF spokesperson added: “China is the world’s largest emitter and its transition to a net zero economy is therefore of utmost importance to the entire world. CIFF’s work in China aims to accelerate this transition.”

ClientEarth said: “As a result of our work delivering legal training, the legal system in China is now used to hold Chinese government bodies to account… We are focused on reducing pollution and bringing down emissions both in China and from its overseas investments.” And a WWF campaigns chief added: “All countries need to contribute towards reducing emissions to net zero by 2050. By promising to stop building coal plants abroad, China had ‘given an important signal’.

Ultimately, however, the meaning of that “signal” remains unclear. Is it a sign that President Xi is seriously committed to saving the planet? Or is it a sign that he understands how to fool an influential group of Western environmentalists, with the intention of making that planet his own?

Only days later, another of these creatures from Arthurian legend wandered into the post-industrial landscape of suburban Liverpool. Having failed to capture it, police shot it.

Their actions were couched in the language of safety, procedure and reason. “There was no option to let the deer wander as it could be a danger to motorists and members of the public,” said a Merseyside Police spokesperson. “As a result a decision was made in the early evening to euthanise the deer.”

All very reasonable and understandable, from the perspective of a body of public servants whose task is acting as the “thin blue line” that maintains our rational public order. The general public, though, was outraged. Responses were clearly powered by a sense that a crime had been committed at some symbolic level. A creature of legend had been destroyed by “health and safety”. Liverpool-based writer Nina Antonia called it “a very bad omen”.

In folklore, the white hart often appears to signal the presence of the uncanny. And the death of this white hart lent a note of deep weirdness to an already-brittle mood at this year’s party conference season, which kicked off the same day. The combined effect was of a political class determinedly bickering over trivia while dangling over a howling pit of monsters.

First, we witnessed the hijacking of Keir Starmer’s sublimely bland 14,000-word effort to reboot the Labour Party by a bitter religious dispute. Forget the future of public services, is it blasphemous to say only women have cervices? This argument, at heart a metaphysical one concerning the true relation between material and spiritual planes, almost entirely drowned out the usual business of shouting about neoliberalism and insulting the Tories.

For the party of government, meanwhile, it has been less metaphysics, more apocalypse. A conference crowd less than half the size of 2019’s applauded the launch of this or that paper, to widespread indifference save among politics junkies. Meanwhile, outside, the country devolved into fist fights and knife threats at petrol stations, and British farmers faced the prospect of a million-pig sacrifice to the god of self-correcting labour markets.

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The Remainer class lurched out of their sarcophagi to say they told us so, and that leaving the single market was an irrational thing to do. This is of course true, but rather misses the point that a core question in the Brexit debate was whether or not, from a holistic perspective, the “rational” policy is always the right one. And sometimes “rational” and “right” are as incommensurable as police safety procedures and a beast out of legend. Do we want higher wages or cheaper goods? Are pig culls and lorry driver shortages an acceptable short-term price of correction or evidence of terminal decline?

Further back, the “rational” arguments for offshoring industry had political tradeoffs, as did the “rational” arguments that took us into the EU. Those social classes who didn’t win out used Brexit to make their protest known at the concatenating political effects of our supposedly technocratic, post-political regime.

Today, though, as the technocratic mode of politics limps on, it seems an ever feebler vehicle for stark political choices made against a backdrop of increasingly existential dread. And whether thanks to the pandemic, climate change or the global fracturing of supply chains that once seemed seamless, such decisions are now everywhere: cancer victims or flattening the curve? Young people’s need for affordable homes and a fair tax burden, or social care funding and the preferences of Green Belt Tory voters? And no one wants to think about the prospects for the welfare state if (or when) growth stalls permanently, or if birth rates continue to crater.

And if climate catastrophe looks grim, so does climate mitigation. It was rising fuel prices which triggered France’s “gilets jaunes” riots in 2018; they’re still ongoing. And the global tilt toward “clean power” has prompted what Bloomberg predicts will be the first of many energy crises, plunging many UK families unexpectedly into fuel poverty.

To compound the mood of apocalypse, an offshoot of the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, sought to raise awareness of such thorny questions by glueing themselves to the M25. As a result, an elderly woman suffering a stroke was delayed for six hours on the way to hospital, and is now permanently paralysed. In a sense, the group’s fanatical willingness to risk literal paralysis in elderly women, in order to make a point about political paralysis in climate policy, serves as an eloquent metaphor for the ugly reality of climate-policy tradeoffs.

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And we continue to not talk about who will bear the brunt. As George Monbiot pointed out, the only real way to reduce our carbon footprint is less of everything. Who takes the hit? There will never be enough batteries to make electric cars as widely-available as the internal combustion variety. Who goes back to walking? There will never be enough renewable energy for us all to leave the lights on: who has to sit in the dark? No one has yet worked out how to power an aeroplane on electricity; who, then, still gets to fly? Our meat consumption is unsustainable; who makes the swap to bugs?

Greens usually gesture vaguely at “redistributing wealth” while also curbing it. But those with the greatest power to coordinate international climate policy are the world’s 2,000-odd billionaires – who are also the ones sitting on most of that wealth. This rarefied group may be as motivated as the rest of us to avoid climate catastrophe, but if doing so means someone has to take a financial hit, they’re unlikely to volunteer themselves.

Instead, among the rarefied echelons of bodies such as the WEF, papers and videos are published by more technocrats who discuss the pandemic as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bed in permanent changes in the name of climate mitigation. Perhaps the masses can be persuaded to buy and travel less; to own nothing and be happy. Perhaps one more Economist article about eating insects will persuade someone other than Sam Bowman to give these crunchy delicacies a try.

Further down the food chain, despite omens and outbreaks of gender theology, our political class is still grimly reluctant to set down the comfort blankets of data, technocracy and “growth”. Nor are they keen to talk frankly about political choices; even about how on earth “net zero” squares with waving through expansion plans at every major UK airport.

The exasperated result has been a growing minority of Britons abandoning reason altogether as a viable register in which to debate anything, instead forming what Clive Martin recently called “Radical Normal”. This increasingly vocal protest cohort coalesces into placard-waving flash-mobs, with grievances ranging from masks to Pfizer, 5G masts, adrenochrome and the New World Order.

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From a technocratic perspective it’s easy to dismiss such people as crazies. But while people as a whole may be largely uninterested in politics, that’s not the same thing as being stupid. And having lived through all the rational arguments for de-industrialisation, and the “rational” case for EU membership, the public is now seeing the same woefully inadequate “rational” mindset being turned to climate policy. Meanwhile the painful political trade-offs involved both in doing something and in not doing something become increasingly evident.

In a sense, reverting to the language of omens is a perfectly sane thing to do, when the world has become so complicatedly unpredictable that an everyday person might as well read the auguries as try and master it through data.

Eric McLuhan, son of Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhan wrote that “Our New World of chaos and complexity is too volatile, too precarious, too important to be left in the hands of the merely practical administrator.” The uncanny white deer often warns of change and danger — or perhaps now, of a future running too menacingly wild for mere technical management. In seeing this message clearly, the people of Britain have been quicker than their rulers to read the omens.

Put simply, the bugman is slang for a default, normie consumer, who imbibes uncritically the great narratives of today’s power structures: the kind of person who mistakes the basic bitch hedonism that Western society offers in abundance for a source of deep meaning.

Accordingly, the bugman enjoys Netflix and Deliveroo; Marvel franchises and Blue Apron. The bugman probably thought The Last Jedi was pretty cool for its feminist messages. It is an article of faith for him that Beyoncé is a queen who slays. In fact, the bugman’s opinions are so tediously orthodox they can be widely shared on social media without any fear of payback.

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The bugman’s original etymology (and entomology) refers to how he lives in a kind of honeycomb of similarly indistinct humans — a block of flats, say, probably in a major metropolis. But in recent years, the bugman has taken on another origin story. It can now mean ‘he who would gladly eat the bugs’. A global citizen, primed for the coming age of deep ecology proposed by XR and Greta, in which cows are banned, and protein is dispensed from reconstituted insect matter with far lower carbon footprints.

It’s the future in which we no longer own cars but merely rent space in self-driving taxis; the one in which we have to apply for our annual flight credits from the National Carbon Register. In its most extreme version, it’s the world of pod people — where the joyous citizen takes on the awesome planet-saving responsibility of limiting his housing to the necessary few square metres of dormitory space. After all, the bugman is instinctively a globalist, deeply trustful of international institutions, and their high-level plans for his future.

Which brings us neatly to an international institution, and its high-level plan for our future. It takes us into the heart of a conspiracy that isn’t, but a tendency that most certainly is. It is in the spaces between this non-existent conspiracy and the thriving tendency that a new war to control meaning is now raging.

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In June of this year, the World Economic Forum hosted a video seminar called The Great Reset, to promote a book, also called The Great Reset. It was a crushingly tedious time for all concerned. Bookended with the mitherings of Prince Charles, the event mainly involved a panel of worthies — who all had that NGO tan that comes from endlessly staring at discussion documents about third world poverty from a luxurious Alpine apartment — sharing their thoughts on ‘sustainability’, ‘green jobs’ and ‘the global south’.

Their Great Reset, as unveiled in their seminar, proposes a generational shifting of the track-lines of our economic development. It calls for de-carbonising, with the help of massive government stimulus; it wants an internationalist approach that clamps down on tax-dodging companies, paid for by new taxes on the wealthy. Lame, perhaps. But on the face of it, hardly sinister.

The stronger thesis of The Great Reset was best stated by the former Vatican ambassador to the US, Archbishop Carlo Vagano, who in November of this year wrote an open letter to President Trump:

Mr. President, I imagine that you are already aware that in some countries the Great Reset will be activated between the end of this year and the first trimester of 2021. For this purpose, further lockdowns are planned, which will be officially justified by a supposed second and third wave of the pandemic. You are well aware of the means that have been deployed to sow panic and legitimize draconian limitations on individual liberties, artfully provoking a world-wide economic crisis. In the intentions of its architects, this crisis will serve to make the recourse of nations to the Great Reset irreversible, thereby giving the final blow to a world whose existence and very memory they want to completely cancel. 

This is the Great Reset as it now exists within the conspiracy world: the premise that life as we knew it is being flattened so as to be re-forged into the bugman’s paradise — with special emphasis on Covid-19 being essentially fake, or at least wildly overstated.

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Clearly, these two Great Resets — the lame version and the conspiracy version — are very different propositions. Yet there is also a sense in which they talk to each other, feed off each other. Above all, each provides an excellent strawman for the opposing team to attack.

Take the case of Justin Trudeau, who became a viral sensation in Great Reset (lame version) circles in September, when he used his speech to the UN General Assembly to talk about using Covid to pursue more of the politics he already enjoys:

“Building back better means getting support to the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum on reaching the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development”

Agenda 2030, often spoken of in the same breath as the Great Reset, is the UN’s “sustainable development goals”, a long list of platitudes about the environment and inequality of such aching tedium that it makes The Great Reset (lame version) look like The 120 Days Of Sodom.

In the moment, Trudeau was saying no more than what the Trudeaus of this world tend to say. But then, the beauty of the Great Reset is that it has become a framework for connecting the dots between all the world’s Trudeaus and their mandarin class. These are all the people Steve Bannon used to call The Party Of Davos. And in the battle to define what comes after the Jahr Null of Covid, so far, it’s this Davos crowd and these ideas that are winning every skirmish.

For the very online Right, it hasn’t escaped notice that, whether it’s voiced by Biden, Trudeau or Johnson, ‘building back better’ always seems to mean pinning the individual under the state, in service of an open-ended, easily-redefined ‘common good’. Boris Johnson’s great green reset is one of the more curious cases in point: a moment where a leader went over the heads of his working class, northern balance of power, to play to a gallery of internationalists. The Prime Minister has bet our future on untested heat pump technology and expensive electric cars.

Of course, Klaus Schwab’s annual talking shop is hardly the only organisation vying to turn the crisis towards their agenda. The problem, it seems, was that they were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off; the title was just too good, too on-the-nose, to be ignored. The Great Reset was accidental over-sell, but only in the way that lighting striking the highest conductive point is ‘accidental’. By November, when the phrase really took off, societal disquiet was already rumbling, looking for an obvious point-of-contact with reality. Suddenly, a vague unease had a name.

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But at the same time, both sides also refuse to concede that the term has multiple meanings. For the WEF and its allies, any opposition to their policies must therefore come from wackos. This kind of queasy duality is a standard part of the modern playbook. By 2017, the term ‘alt-Right’ had come to mean both ‘card-carrying Neo-Nazi’ and ‘young people slightly to the right of Douglas Carswell who own a modem’. In debate, the distinction was deliberately elided to de-platform and defame. Ever more, the term ‘climate denier’ performs a similar function.

On the other side of the fence, those who deal in the fantasies can deploy their own motte and bailey. They point to the WEF’s actual plan as a safe harbour in reality — a stout Christmas tree of genuine fact, on which they can then hang their madder baubles. As one YouTube commenter beneath the WEF video had it: “When we warned of a reset, we’re [sic] were called conspiracists. Now what idiots?”

Between them lies the real argument, unloved and untackled. The crisis has already put down several waymarkers towards a world few of us signed up for: from the steamrollering of mom-’n’-pops in favour of Amazon, to the truly cashless society, to credit scores based on your Google history to the oft-floated ‘vaccine passport’. The bugman is always figurative: a kind of platonic ideal pointing towards the dangers of a technocratic 2020s. To take it literally is always to miss the point.

The WEF case rests precisely on explaining why we won’t end up in that future. But tackling the unease fuelling The Great Reset’s wide spectrum of critics would also mean addressing the sentiment underlying both strands of opposition: that however buttery the buzzwords, human beings are rightly suspicious of those who make abstruse high-level plans for their ‘welfare’. Especially if they’re designed by pointy-heads from Davos with no skin in the game — whether they come bearing a thought, a plan, a scheme, or an outright conspiracy.