by: Liam Edgar
Bill Gates didn’t become the richest man in the world – pre-Bezos – by being just lucky. He uncannily understood computer technology and its potential before so many others did, developed a product that made these machines more accessible to non-techsters and subsequently pocketed a bundle.
Since amassing his mountain of money, Gates has pumped out billions for the supposed betterment of mankind, through healthcare, education and anti-hunger initiatives primarily in Third World countries.
But Gates is now backing something that seems borderline bizarre – which would have a particular impact on the Sunshine State, if not the rest of our country and the globe.
Here is how Reuters recently described it:
“Harvard University scientists plan to fly a test balloon above Sweden next year to help advance research into dimming sunlight to cool the Earth.”
The project entails “open-air research into spraying tiny, sun-reflecting particles into the stratosphere, to offset global warming,” Reuters continued.
Gates attended Harvard before dropping out to go make bank on computer software.
Reuters did not say what role he had in Harvard’s “Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment,” known by the shorthand SCoPEx. But the London-based Daily Mail reported in August that Gates provides the primary bankroll behind the $3 million project.
Obviously, Gates has the fiscal muscle to shove this idea forward a long way, if it works.
And some folks find that worrisome.
The Harvard project is a dip into the realm of “geoengineering,” which the globalists at the United Nations define as “deliberate intervention in the planetary environment of a nature and scale intended to counteract anthropogenic climate change and its impacts.”
Geoengineering, the UN said in a 2012 paper, “encompasses a wide spectrum of possible actions to counteract (or remedy) global warming and its associated consequences. The commonality of those actions is that they could produce global cooling.”
That does not include some commonly proposed methods to mitigate climate change, such as capturing and storing carbon.
But it can be accomplished through some apparently commonsense, low-tech ways, such as reforestation, or some whacky ones, like Harvard spraying shiny dust in space to blot out the sun.
The UN was so unsettled by geoengineering that it imposed a moratorium on it 10 years ago, because it was concerned about the potential yet unknown impact on less developed parts of the world.
As Niclas Hällström, the leader of WhatNext?, a Swedish environmental organization, told Reuters, “There is no merit in this (Harvard) test except to enable the next step. You can’t test the trigger of a bomb and say, ‘This can’t possibly do any harm.'”
Thus, it’s not far off to say opponents see Harvard’s scientists and their benefactor, Gates, as quasi Bond villains maneuvering us toward, as Reuters put it, the slippery slope of “engineering the climate with an artificial sunshade – something with potentially large and hard-to-predict risks, such as shifts in global rain patterns.”
Yes, but per Reuters, proponents of the Harvard initiative suggest the space-dust experiment might lead to a “shortcut” to relieve the ills the greenies attribute to climate change, such as heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and rising sea levels.
But the real fear of foes is that SCoPEx “could create the impression that continuing use of fossil fuels is possible.”
As Douglas Golden, a columnist for the Western Journal noted, beyond the troubling unknown of what artificially blocking the sun does to mankind, “to environmentalists, the problem is that it doesn’t solve global warming the way they want to do it.” (emphasis original)
Accordingly, those on the political right can rightly be conflicted by this situation.
On one hand, Gates has been so ham-handed with supporting lockdowns, masks and other draconian steps during COVID-19 that we should not let him anywhere near controlling the sun’s rays.
On the other, his sprinkling of reflective pixie dust may beat back the goofiness of the AOC-Bernie Sanders Green New Deal that would march us back to the Stone Age with a cost that not even Gates could afford.
A dilemma indeed.