The BBC’s flirtation with radical politics and ideologies continues…whilst still promoting radical Islam as an antidote to supposed Western hegemony the BBC also continues its experiment in promoting extremist left wing politics, having backed Occupy, student riots and recruited Giles Fraser to their ranks, as they put a great deal of time and effort into brand Brand.

It looks like the BBC are trying to create and shape him into a political figurehead for all the Marxist malcontents in Britain spouting all that good stuff about bankers, capitalism and overturning democracy and the social order so often heard on the BBC.

They brought him onto Question Time last night where he got a good drubbing from the audience…but you’d hardly know that from this piece of puffery from the BBC….

Russell Brand: Can an outsider challenge the status quo?

 

Rather disingenuously, and as the last line in the article, the BBC only admits to this:

Many in the audience seemed dissatisfied with the response but it seems unlikely the flamboyant firebrand will ever put that claim to the test.

Try a different perspective:

Russell Brand Was Terrified on Last Night’s Question Time

Brand left the studio having lost much of the audience, sunken into his chair, almost reclusive compared to his usually extrovert eccentricities.

What happened? Put simply, Russell Brand was frit. Worse than that, he looked terrified. After Brand strayed from his notes – which at times he clung onto for dear life – and accused Farage of attacking the disabled, the microphone came to a gentleman in the audience wielding a walking stick.

He demolished Brand’s ill-judged smear and called his bluff: if he is the saviour of the masses, why doesn’t he have the nerve to stand for parliament? Brand stuttered. This was the question he feared most.

“Because I’m afraid I would become one of them,” he whispered, barely convincing himself. Howls of derision from the room. They all knew the truth, audience, panel and Brand together.

For all his bravado, this is a man scared of having to face the scrutiny of the people at the ballot box, scared that his hackneyed, teenage ideology will be resoundingly, humiliatingly rejected by the people he claims to represent.

 

 

The BBC is having a ball with the Senate committee’s report on interrogation……all too often forgetting to tell us that it is a partisan report produced by the Democratic party…

A scathing Senate report two days earlier said “brutal” methods like waterboarding were ineffective.

While he [John Brennan] was speaking, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who heads the committee that produced the report, was rejecting his arguments on Twitter.

 

 

…..and it was an investigation that did not bother to interview anyone from the CIA itself.

Who did the BBC get in to comment?  James Rubin, a Clinton era democratic politician, a well known Islamist, Moazzam Begg, who was asked for ‘his thoughts’ on the report, and other democrats.  Haven’t heard a single ‘off message’ voice supporting the CIA on the BBC….I’m sure there are one or two somewhere.

The BBC are playing fast and loose with facts…here failing to mention why Bush said terrorists shouldn’t be considered parties to the Geneva Convention…

September 2001: After the 9/11 attacks, President George Bush authorises the capture, detention and interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects.

February 2002: President Bush signs an executive order which says the Geneva Conventions – which prohibit mutilation, cruel treatment and torture – do not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.

 

The reason the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to terrorists is  because it says it doesn’t….

Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949.

A combatant, even one in a militia, can be considered a prisoner of war and be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention but only if some conditions are met…the combatants…

….having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

…. that of carrying arms openly;

…..that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

….And in particular that they treat nationals of the Occupying Power who may have fallen into their hands, according to the provisions of the present Convention.

 

None of those apply to terrorists or the Taliban.

However…..The BBC’s Jon Sopel bucks the trend and sounds a sceptical note about the Senate committee report..not something you would have got from Mark Mardell:

A whiff of hypocrisy about CIA report?

The really big picture is legacy. In 50 years’ time when the history books are written and children are sitting at their desks in Duluth, Des Moines or Detroit, and turning to the chapter marked “9/11”, what are they going to read? Here are two versions.

On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack from al-Qaeda terrorists, claiming the lives of 3,000 people when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania – a war on terror was declared, and those responsible were hunted down and detained, and there were no further attacks on US soil.

Or:

On 11 September 2001, the United States came under attack from al-Qaeda terrorists, claiming the lives of 3,000 people when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania – a war on terror was declared, but the torture tactics used to hunt down and detain those responsible brought condemnation and America lost its moral authority in the world.

Remember Winston Churchill’s adage that “history is written by the victors”? This is a battle between Bush-era officials and the Obama administration over which narrative of these events should prevail.

A battle between most Democrats, who think that there are NO circumstances EVER when coercive interrogation techniques can be condoned; and most Republicans who say America was under attack, there was intelligence that there could be a second and third wave of attacks and we did whatever we could to prevent that.

But is there just a small whiff of hypocrisy here? What if it had been a Democrat in the White House when America came under attack on that dreadful September day. Would the response have been that different?

I’m sure there were sadists, oddballs and bad people out there. But weren’t the overwhelming majority of CIA operatives at that time just driven by one thing – a patriotic duty to keep America safe, by whatever means?

And this is where it gets uncomfortable. Of course I can sit here at my keyboard and pronounce that torture can never be justified. It is an absolute. I do totally believe that. But what if a child of mine had been kidnapped, and the police arrest the kidnapper, but say to me, “Well we’ve got the guy who took your kid, but despite us asking him really politely where he’s being kept, he’s not telling us… However there are these things called enhanced interrogation techniques – we could give them a go.” Would I say no? I’m really not sure.

 

Now that’s just something that you would never expect from the BBC….an entirely nuanced piece that suggests, in the circumstances, use of harsh interrogation methods might be justified.

Then again there’s the more usual fare we expect from the BBC in the shape of Frank Gardner’s highly partisan and wilfully blind interpretation of what is effective interrogation techniques….

Why interrogators prefer the soft approach

“At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ticking time bomb,” says the report.

In other words, all that mistreatment, all those hours of waterboarding, of dragging people hooded and shackled, up and down corridors, depriving them of sleep for days on end and subjecting them to white noise, did not actually yield any real information that stopped a terrorist attack.

Here quoting expert British interrogators…..telling us torture doesn’t work…and of course they never use it do they?…because it doesn’t work, does it!….and no hint of gloating and professional rivalry from the Brits…remember these were the ‘experts’ at counter-insurgency warfare…who got their arses kicked whilst the Yanks steamrollered through and wiped out Al Qaeda in Iraq.

So was there a better way for the US government to acquire this information without risking breaking international law and committing a moral outrage?

Yes there was. Talk to almost any trained British army interrogator and they will tell you that in the long run it is the “logical friendly approach” that yields the best results.

An experienced British army interrogator, who questioned high-value Iraqi POWs, says when a detainee is seized, often as a result of a violent struggle or firefight, there is the inevitable shock of capture and the fear of what is going to happen to them.

Often they imagine the worst – remember the Royal Navy sailor who broke down in tears when he and his crew were captured in the Gulf by an Iranian patrol boat and briefly held in 2007.

 

That sailor was not a high value prisoner…just a ‘callow youth’ way out of his depth.  Most of the prisoners, like him, that would react to the soft approach and the slightest pressure are the humblest of recruits probably just there for the money and would know little information of any value.

Curious Gardner doesn’t quote ‘Andy Mcnab’ who tells us that everyone cracks in the end under intense interrogation…just a question of when and trying to hold out long enough to make any information you do have out of date and useless.

Gardner quotes this….

“They are hungry for affection,” says the former interrogator about prisoners he questioned. “Eventually, they will be willing to co-operate in exchange for safety and comfort.”

 

Gardner thinks such a statement means the interrogator is saying harsh interrogation doesn’t work….but he isn’t really saying that…..the subtext to that comment is that the prisoners are made to feel ‘unsafe and uncomfortable’...and only cooperate when to do so would bring such suffering to an end…in other words…..don’t be nice to them.  Gardner reads into things what he wants to see…enhanced interrogation, or torture, doesn’t work when the subtle words of the interrogator suggests it does.

Perhaps the BBC should retrain its journalists so that they don’t have the wool pulled over their eyes…what does he expect the ‘expert’ interrogator to say…‘Yes we torture prisoners’?

Low level, non ideological recruits may well be more susceptible to less rigorous approaches, but then they know very little of value…… the hardcore  jihadists are far more radical and determined…and not likely to compromise themselves for a cup of coffee, a cigarette and few kind words….or indeed the suggestion that their cause is hopeless.

The only thing that would work to any degree at all is those good old ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, locking them up out of troubles way or removing them permanently from the battlefield once and for all.

They have confidence that with much of Western media on their side and numerous human rigths organisations and pan handling lawyers advocating on their behalf not much will happen to them…..which is why the CIA used techniques that were intended to break that confidence and make them think that they were beyond help, no Seventh Cavalry coming to the rescue…..to break their defiance and mental resilience.

And as a contrast to Gardner’s one sided view there’s this from the Mail:

Did torture stop UK terror attack? Al-Qaeda terrorist captured in London after CIA spies interrogated Guantanamo Bay detainee

Al Qaeda’s top British terrorist was captured after CIA spies tortured former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg, it was claimed today.

Crucial information provided by Mr Begg while he was being held helped identify ‘dirty bomber’ Dhiren Barot who was plotting terror attacks on London, according to the long-awaited publication of a report into CIA torture programmes in the wake of 9/11.

The report claims that drawings by Mr Begg – who claims to have been beaten and deprived of sleep in Guantanamo Bay – helped lead British security services to Barot, who had gone to ground in London.

Begg, a confirmed Islamist extremist who admitted to training in terrorist camps, naturally denies he grassed on his fellow Islamists….

Mr Begg has also reacted furiously to the claim. In a letter to The Independent last night, lawyers for Mr Begg rejected any suggestion that he ‘volunteered or co-operated in the provision of information to any intelligence service’.

They added: ‘Insofar as he was tortured and under extreme and unlawful continuing duress for three-and-a-half years in Bagram and Guantanamo he, as every other individual subject to such treatment, cannot be regarded in any proper sense of the words to have ‘given or provided information’ voluntarily.’

‘……cannot be regarded in any proper sense of the words to have ‘given or provided information’ voluntarily.’

Yep….that’s the point….he was made to talk…not that he did of course!

This is a pretty decent exposure of BBC bias! Give it a read. It concerns the Shrien Dewani case.

Here you go, a new Open Thread for you to complete. The BBC has been quite hysterical in recent days, wallowing in the Senate Democrat attack on the CIA, trying to suggest that Miliband’s woeful speech on the economy could represent a leap forward for the glorious leader in waiting…..and the rest. The floor is yours.

I hadn’t been able to check the background to the BBC’s hyperbolic reports on the NHS this morning…every news bulletin I heard announced that the NHS had practically been privatised….

A third of NHS contracts awarded to private firms – report

The only clue (other than a lot of past experience) that the BBC might be misleading us was hearing Nick Clegg on PMQs responding to Labour’s claim, as above from the BBC, that 1/3 of NHS contracts had gone to private companies.

Clegg told us that a mere 6% of NHS spending had gone to private companies…a figure not dissimilar to Labour’s 5%.

The BBC’s web report confirms this…

The government says the data is misleading.

It’s unclear how much the contracts were worth because the CCGS would not disclose this information citing commercial sensitivities.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Official NHS accounts show that use of the private sector amounts to only six pence in every pound the NHS spends, slowing the rate of increase to just one penny since May 2010.

 

Which makes you wonder how the ‘hyperbolic’ and highly political headline was chosen.  The ‘privatisation’ of the NHS is one of Labour’s favourite narratives and one they aim to use to buttress their supposed position as ‘defenders of the NHS’….which makes the choice of headline by the BBC hugely suspect as it is so highly political.

I guess ‘6% of NHS spending has gone to private companies’ is just too lacking in drama and fails to paint a picture of Tory rampant capitalism destroying a national treasure….as so eloquently and ridiculously stated by Labour…

“These figures show what is at stake at the coming election. David Cameron’s Government is stealthily hiving off NHS services without the permission of the public.”

 

 

The BBC’s Director of BBC News and Current Affairs, James Harding, has launched a counter-blast to Conservative complaints of BBC bias. Harding’s response shows how quickly new recruits to the BBC absorb the dominant cultural and political orthodoxy of the organisation and so rapidly adopt the unquestioning obedience to the hand that feeds them.

Rather than admit what was a clear-cut case of bias and intemperate language by a BBC reporter Harding sets out to trivialise and sidestep the seriousness of the complaint.

He makes his case in the Telegraph starting off with this….

 Apparently the “Tories are at war with the BBC”. Rows between the BBC and the Government of the day are nothing new. They go back decades to the very birth of the BBC. And few would argue that a cozy relationship between the BBC and government – or indeed any news organisation – would be a good thing. Scrutiny and accountability can sometimes be a bumpy ride.

Immediately you can see he has no intention of genuinely dealing with the complaint instead dismissing it as ‘nothing new’, merely part of an age old game played by politicians….then trying to imply that taking the complaint seriously would be bowing to political pressure compromising BBC independence and integrity.

He goes on to say…

The economy is one of the key issues at the heart of the election. The BBC has played a leading role in covering the financial crisis and the return to economic growth. We have made huge efforts to give balanced coverage and reflect all sides of the argument from the fall in unemployment and the rise in private sector jobs, to the challenges caused by persistently downward pressure on wages and the resulting lower-than-expected tax receipts.

The economy is indeed one of, if not the most important, issues in the coming election which is why the BBC has a duty to report impartially with all the facts…something it has patently failed to do.

He tells us the BBC has played a leading role in reporting the economy in a balanced manner…is that true? No.

The BBC, as reported so often on this site, pushed Labour’s Plan B relentlessly, it pushed ‘Keynesian’ economics, it pushed the Occupy movement, it recruited Occupy acolytes like Giles Fraser. The BBC consistently reported we had a double dip recession, its journalists still do, despite the fact we had no double dip….the BBC reported with an all too evident eagerness that we were heading for a triple dip recession…the fallacy of that is all too obvious.

As for reporting the ‘the challenges caused by the persistent downward pressure on wages’ they certainly did report on that subject…but no-where near the truth….you will be hard pressed now to get a BBC journalist to link immigration to low wages and the subsequent fall in tax revenue and the increase in welfare payments.

The BBC repeatedly told us there was a puzzle as to why employment was increasing when productivity wasn’t increasing…but that fails to understand that wages are a part of productivity…..if wages fall and output stays the same then productivity, per pound not per worker, has gone up.

The BBC never bothered to knock on a factory door and ask why they were employing more people preferring instead to spin a tale of an economic mystery that apparently gave a lie to the face value facts of an improving economy. Let’s face it no employer would employ someone unless they had a reason to…they aren’t charities…and yet the BBC persistently insisted they were doing so, flying in the face of economic wisdom.

Harding defends the BBC by saying….

 In fact, it is not the BBC that pointed out that reductions in public spending proposed by the Chancellor on Wednesday amounted to a return to state spending on citizens last seen in the 1930s.

Indeed he is right…except the OBR referred to 1938 specifically not the ‘1930’s’ and definitely not the Depression era early 1930’s that the BBC decided to use as its comparison claiming this was the OBR’s reference…a blatant attempt to encourage a view that the Tories were going to lead us into an era where poverty and misery would be ‘stalking the land’, to coin a phrase.

He tells us that…

Through the course of the past week, we reported the run up to the Autumn statement as the Government made a series of announcements: a £2bn commitment to the NHS on Sunday, a package of infrastructure investments on Monday, a flood defences plan on Tuesday and the Autumn Statement on Wednesday.

Trouble is the plans were pretty much dismissed by the BBC as electioneering hype by the Tories and that once the election was over would be quietly shelved.

Here we get to the heart of the matter….

Just after 6am on Thursday morning, Norman Smith, the BBC’s Assistant Political Editor, was pointing out that while many headlines were around the changes to Stamp Duty – the big new news of the Autumn Statement – the issue that would dominate in the months ahead was the OBR’s prediction that Britain could face a return to 1930s public spending per capita. And if some people thought his reference to George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier was a tad strong, his editorial judgment was exactly right: spending cuts to reduce the deficit will be a central argument of the election. It’s clear it will be an issue irrespective of whichever party wins.

Note Harding makes no mention of Smith’s toxic reference to the economic outlook as ‘utterly terrible’ and dismisses his other comparison of the economy to an era of slump and depression, starvation, joblessness and misery.

He then helpfully and unintentionally spells out why the BBC’s biased reporting should not go unchallenged saying ‘spending cuts to reduce the deficit will be a central argument of the election.’…unwittingly admitting that by reporting in a biased manner Smith is misreporting one of the most important issues of the election.

And yet the BBC’s head of news’ trite, self-serving response to complaints of bias is to say ‘Well, look how clever my journalist is, he’s spotted that the deficit might play an important role in the election. He may well have spun a tale of doom and gloom that favours the Labour narrative but any Tory complaints are just the usual unfair criticisms we expect from politicians.’

This is a typical BBC response to criticism, brush it under the carpet, dismiss it paradoxically as other people’s bias and not the BBC’s, and to proclaim the BBC’s integrity and genius.

One day the Tories will have the guts to disembowel the BBC and bring it to heel. Until they do every election will be a battle not just against other parties’ political machines but also against the BBC’s hugely powerful and influential propaganda machine.

Remember this recent headline from the BBC?

‘Colossal’ spending cuts to come, warns IFS

When Osborne made his Autumn Statement the BBC went into overdrive to undermine any perceived good news. We know of its blatant comparison of the 1930’s depression to what they predict will be the outcome of his policies but they also hyped the IFS’s ‘revelation’ of those ‘colossal spending cuts’ after the election.

But hang on…isn’t that very old news? Haven’t we known for a long time that the majority of the cuts would come after the 2015 election? So why the hype from the BBC?

This was the New Statesman in 2013:

Austerity after 2015: why the worst is yet to come

This was the BBC itself in March 2013, reporting the IFS’ words….which have a familiar ring to them:

Budget 2013: ‘Cuts deferred’ until after elections

Or this from Politics.co.uk in 2012:

Never-ending austerity? More cuts to come after 2015

Nothing new there then…so why make such a song and dance about these cuts now in the run up to the election as if they are something new and terrible to be inflicted upon us completely unuspecting victims?

The IFS itself seems a bit confused as to what caused the slow reduction in the deficit….this is their analysis:

It is important to understand why the deficit hasn’t fallen. It is emphatically not because the government has failed to impose the intended spending cuts. It is because the economy performed so poorly in the first half of the parliament, hitting revenues very hard.

Oh right….poorly performing economy at the beginning of the Parliament…or is it?  Here is the other explanation…from the IFS in the same analysis by Paul Johnson:

The relatively modest fall over this parliament is largely explained by increased spending on social security, especially pensions.

 

So is it a poorly performing economy or welfare spending caused by low wages, caused by immigration, and pension raises that kept the borrowing figures up?

You might look at Robert Peston’s honest appraisal of our economic situation…..note in particular these words which have long since been forgotten… ‘The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix…. What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

 That will take at least a decade.’

A decade…so by 2018…..as per the latest budget statement.

It is a very enlightening and honest look at the problem and consequences of debt, government spending and how it is funded….unfortunately it is an analysis that the BBC has always ignored, presumably as its diagnosis and prescription are a direct challenge to the BBC’s favoured narrative of high government spending on public services, welfare and infrastructure projects regardless of where the money comes from.

Here are Peston’s thoughts from his book ‘How do we fix this mess?’…..

How do we fix this mess? I don’t know. But don’t stop reading now. Perhaps if we have a clearer understanding of what went wrong, we’ll have a better idea of what needs to be done.

We will be right in the middle of the jungle, observing how bankers, regulators, politicians – and, oh yes, most of us – were by turns greedy, gullible lazy and short-sighted, and how we wilfully refused to see how our improving living standards were not being earned in a sustainable way.

We failed to rise to the challenge of globalisation.

We did not work harder and smarter.

Instead we borrowed.

And now as a nation, we have to pay back much of the debt, which inevitably makes us feel poorer, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The clean up will take years. And there is no quick fix.

We have allowed others, our governments and the so-called authorities, to take us from boom to bust.

I confess, during much of the journey, I had little idea we had taken a wrong turning….but as we headed for the swamp I succeeded in spotting the looming disaster and shouted out a warning: I was largely ignored and was even asked to shut up.

I am not going to pretend there is a road to Shangri-La, where we will suddenly find ourselves becoming richer and richer again.

We tried that road in the late 1990’s and early years of this century, and it was the road to ruin.

Boom and bust will be with us forever.

It was our foolish conviction that the smooth road to sunny uplands would go on forever which got us into such trouble.

The Future’s Overdrawn

Whether we own up to it or not, we can’t go on forever living on China’s credit.

What became clear in 2008 is that we will have to find a way of paying much of that debt back.

That will take at least a decade.

And when we repay debt, we’re spending less. Which means economic activity slows down, growth grinds to a halt.

It is reasonable to assume that growth will be as little as 1% in the coming 10 years….which wouldn’t look so bad after a contraction of 6.3% in output during the 2008-09 recession.

Cuts in public spending, including in benefits and tax credits, were almost certainly inevitable and have indeed followed.

Since 2008, the UK’s aggregate debt has been shuffled, not repaid.

The government kept spending to prevent recession turning into an extreme slump while tax revenues were shrinking.

When essential public services start to be financed through borrowing rather than tax, it is immensely difficult to cut the borrowing.

In the past few days, I caught a couple of BBC stories which did little for my blood pressure.

On BBC NI, they ran an item explaining the the “traveller” community was the most discriminated against in Northern Ireland. This was based in feedback from..the travelling community! Honestly, you couldn’t make it up although I suspect the Travellers do.

I then heard another story elsewhere on the BBC network explaining that the Arts Council was DEMANDING that those who it sponsors (with taxpayers money) MUST ensure more racial “diversity” or else funding will be cut. This was portrayed as a “good thing” with no contrary opinion expressed. It appears quality comes second to diversity and the pursuance of inverted racism.

Watching the BBC is not good for your spirit or your health!

Here we go, an overdue Open Thread! BBC went into food bank frenzy yesterday. I was invited into the BBC NI studio to take part in a discussion on such. My view is that Food Banks are street theatre agitprop sponsored by the left. To my amusement, the BBC in Belfast put on a caller from Cheltenham (!) who gave a tale of woe and explained how Food Banks saved his life. The particularity becomes the generality in the eyes of the BBC, as they do everything possible to help Labour. With an improving economy and falling unemployment the Left need SOMETHING to keep the gospel of despair going so welcome to the great Food Bank meme.

Remember this from 2011 when Richard Black tried to persuade us that it was the dumb, ignorant Anglo-Saxons who were climate deniers while the rest of the world wailed as it burned?

The world wide web, where climate change is most vociferously debated, is predominantly an Anglo-Saxon medium.

For we native English speakers who’ve never needed to become fluent in other tongues but speak the language of climate change daily, this raises an intriguing question: is it possible that we’re getting a distorted view of the “climate debate” globally, simply because we’re missing what’s going on elsewhere?

“The weight of this study would suggest that, out of this wide range of factors, the presence of politicians espousing some variation of climate scepticism, the existence of organised interests that feed sceptical coverage, and partisan media receptive to this message, all play a particularly significant role in explaining the greater prevalence of sceptical voices in the print media of the USA and the UK.”

To those who despair of the success of sceptical lobbying, the message is clear: learn one of the languages of Brazil, China or India.

 

 

WUWT suggests he’s wrong…

Climate Change … Who Cares?

Thanks to the blog of the irrepressible Hilary Ostrov, a long-time WUWT commenter, I found out about a poll gone either horribly wrong or totally predictably depending on your point of view. It’s a global poll done by the United Nations, with over six million responses from all over the planet, and guess what?

The revealed truth is that of the sixteen choices given to people regarding what they think are the important issues in their lives, climate change is dead last. Not only that, but in every sub-category, by age, by sex, by education, by country grouping, it’s right down at the bottom of the list. NOBODY thinks it’s important.

Now, people are always saying how the US is some kind of outlier in this regard, because polls in the US always put climate change down at the bottom, whereas polls in Europe generally rate it somewhat higher. But this is a global poll, with people chiming in from all over the planet. The top fifteen countries, in order of the number of people voting, were Mexico, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Philippines, Thailand, Cameroon, United States, Ghana, Rwanda, Brazil, Jordan, and Morocco … so this appears to be truly representative of the world, which is mostly non-industrialized nations.

So the next time someone tries to claim that climate change is “the most important challenge facing the world” … point them to the website of the study, and gently inform them that the rest of the world doesn’t buy that kind of alarmist hogwash for one minute.