Your Credit Score Please, Comrade

Recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF) held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Known as a globalist influencing operation, it is funded through membership fees from a cross-section of the elites from the private and public sectors, including CEOs, diplomats, celebrities, media personalities, government officials, religious leaders, and even union representatives from around the world. With attendance this year encompassing 52 heads of state and government and nearly 600 CEOs, the disconnect between the social and political objectives of the attendees and the best interest of the citizens and communities from which these WEF members hail, is widening.

From Sri Lanka to Belgium and from Main Street to Wall Street, the policy proposals and social change the WEF promotes and funds have by now been repeatedly rejected, legally challenged, and roundly criticized by the people these policies are purportedly intended to help. WEF policy prescriptions caused the collapse of the government in Sri Lanka last year, the degradation of the farming sector in Belgium, the destruction of the social fabric in New Zealand, the freezing of citizens’ bank accounts in Canada, higher fuel prices in Europe, the neutralization of the US. Energy sector, the funding and promotion of totalitarian policies similar to those in Communist Chinese, the support of border collapse, and perhaps most relevant to Americans, the creation, of the reporting and scoring scheme known as environmental, social and governance (ESG).

Poisonous to every living thing on the planet.

While WEF policy failures abound, and the ESG apparatus is being met with increasing legal and market challenges, the construct has nevertheless already had a significant negative impact on some industry sectors. ESG was created as a reporting and scoring system used to justify re-orienting the capital markets toward the social and political objectives important to WEF members, and their philosophical eco-system of non-profits, NGOs and financial sector partners. Though in defiance of the "sole interest" principle and fiduciary obligations codified in U.S. law to protect investors, the outsized influence of the financial sector, which has fully embraced ESG, has delivered a particularly strong blow to the U.S. oil and gas industry.

Because of the importance of capital in the scaling and management of many businesses, creating capital pressure through the ESG scheme has been one way ESG progenitors believe they can affect the growth of certain industries. Energy companies have had to look harder to find capital to finance oil and gas assets. This attempt to impede capital has led to supply constraints and higher energy prices globally. According to WEF literature, industries including agriculture, steel and concrete will likewise begin to be attacked which will drive prices across the economy even higher.

This year’s WEF theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World," was an ironic choice since the policies promoted by its members seem to reflect cooperation intended to create a fragmented world. The podium and panels overflowed with quips from elites from the United States to the United Nations, all seeking to sound more relevant than the person next to them. Their very attendance revealed their desire to financially enrich themselves, even if at the expense of those in their own countries or of society more broadly. With fear-filled descriptions of the imminent destruction of the planet unless their solutions, however dystopic, be accepted, it was a parade of anti-market misfits and international villains keen to strip you of your personal liberties while entrenching their own privilege and economic benefit. 

Central to their success is the continued fomenting of fear about "climate change." According to their narrative, all problems in society emanate from this chimera. According to their logic, ESG therefore must necessarily be more deeply integrated into all business and society at large, not just corporate boardrooms. "Climate" is the pretense and ESG the mechanism from which to hang all of their liberty-defying policies and society-killing changes.

While initially focusing their ESG scoring scheme on the board rooms of publicly traded companies, WEF members and ESG advocates ultimately intend to also wrest control from private companies and even individuals. With societal control as an important strategic endpoint—think of  the social credit scoring system used in China—the WEF highlights technologies and promotes companies whose sole purpose is in some way to track and surveil members of otherwise free societies. Always couched as an effort to improve one’s life, of course.

In the WEF-inspired world, your privilege will emanate from your social credit score. Use public transportation and your score goes up. Have children, and your carbon emission score goes down. Buy products deemed environmentally acceptable and your score goes up. Use too many fossil-fuel inspired luxuries like computers and private automobiles and your score goes down.  If you have the correct colored check mark on your phone, you will be permitted to access to particular products, services, and experiences. Everyone else is relegated to the existence they are granted by their overseers.

Atop the sinister Magic Mountain, dread Klaus lies scheming.

Some of the mounting evidence: as first reported by True North during last year’s WEF’s annual meeting, an executive with the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba revealed that the company was working on an individual carbon footprint tracker. “We’re developing through technology an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint,” president J. Michael Evans said at the time.

Meanwhile, Mastercard already provides a CO2 emissions-tracking card, developed with technology from the WEF-promoted Swedish company, Doconomy. In May 2019 Doconomy launched its credit card that monitors the carbon footprint of its customers—and cuts off their spending when they hit their carbon max.

Then last fall, the Canadian-based credit union Vancity announced the introduction of Canada’s first-ever carbon tracking Visa card. It is available beginning this year. “The Carbon Counter will help Vancity card holders understand the carbon footprint of their purchases as well as provide advice on what they can do to reduce their emissions footprint.” a statement by Vancity read. In the case of Visa’s credit card technology, developed by Ecolytiq, it too provides “education and behavioral nudging.”

How long before one isn’t even permitted to have a credit card because one’s purchases don’t comport with the values of these arbiters of the acceptable? That day is coming, unless we stop it.