Why did 30,000 elites meet in Glasgow in November of 2021? The equivalent of a small city full of government leaders, environmental activists, business executives and journalists swelled the population of this Scottish city for two weeks for one fundamental reason. But it’s not the reason you think.

This was the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (cop26). Many of these elites heralded it as the world’s last chance to break away from fossil fuels, halt climate change, and make the Earth pure again. Pope Francis recorded a message calling on delegates to provide “effective responses” to the climate crisis and offer “concrete hope” to future generations. Former United States Vice President Al Gore released a video message calling on the world to “say goodbye to coal, oil and gas.” Joe Biden warned that climate change is “ravaging the world” before apologizing for the fact that his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, pulled America out of the Paris Climate Accords. The heir to Britain’s throne, Prince Charles, referred to the conference as “the last-chance saloon” for humanity and declared that “we need a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector with trillions at its disposal.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned, “It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock, and we need to act now.” He pledged to make Britain the “Saudi Arabia of wind power.”

Former U.S. President Barack Obama outdid all these men with a quasi-religious speech, declaring that “this is not just about raw numbers. This is not just about science. This is about politics. It’s about culture. It’s about morality. It’s about the human dynamic. How do we work together to get a big thing done? And it’s about participation and power.” Then, after admitting climate change isn’t about the data, he told young people around the world: “I want you to stay angry. I want you to stay frustrated. Channel that anger, harness that frustration, keep pushing harder and harder for more because that’s what’s required to meet this challenge.”

While European and North American leaders jockeyed to pronounce the most headline-worthy quotes on the peril of the world, the urgency of the time, the evil of carbon dioxide, and the need to shut down their own industries, one nation was conspicuous for its absence. Chinese President Xi Jinping declined to attend. The nation he leads is the world’s greatest polluter, producing more carbon dioxide than the U.S. and Europe combined. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were also absent. They were uninterested in hurting their own nations’ industries and energy supplies.

Yet the cop26 agenda plunged ahead. Why?

Protecting the environment is an important and worthy goal. But for these “environmentalist” elites, it’s not the main goal. It’s a useful weapon. It’s not about controlling the amount of carbon in the air. It’s about controlling your rights. You can see it in their agenda—and you can see it in Bible prophecy.

Self-Harm

One of the main aims of cop26 was to get national leaders to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions within their nations to net zero by 2050. The timing is terrible: The United States, Europe and much of the world already face an energy crisis. But Joe Biden and European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signed a pledge to cut methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Keeping this pledge will require nations to cripple their own oil and gas industries, industries that are particularly crucial to the American economy.

Some analysts now say that Biden may have to choose between saving the Earth from climate change and saving the U.S. economy from an energy crisis. But they fail to understand the real motives of the people behind this movement. The goal of elites controlling the climate change conversation is not to reduce carbon emissions but to create a new world order—and to dismantle the current one. To do this, they must attack American dominance in energy and its economy, empower socialist dictatorships, demonize the free market, and destroy individual liberty. Only then can they replace your freedoms with the dictates of those who “know best”: themselves.

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Joe Biden and those behind him, including his boss Barack Obama, were already trillions of dollars deep into leveraging environmental concerns to fundamentally transform America before they headed off to Scotland. Their “Build Back Better” plan spends $555 billion on new grants and loans to entice or force businesses and consumers to switch to renewable (and less reliable) energy technologies like wind and solar power. And their executive actions suspending leases for oil and gas production drastically reduce U.S. energy production. This helps the United Nations as it tries to force other democracies to switch over to wind and solar power.

The result is that U.S. oil prices have climbed above $85 a barrel for the first time in seven years, causing gasoline prices to soar to nearly $3.40 per gallon nationwide. Meanwhile, the energy crisis in Europe is so bad that factories are shutting down due to the soaring cost of natural gas.

Biden and Obama are forcing Americans to depend on undependable, expensive green technologies that are prone to failure (attested to most recently by rolling blackouts in California and power failures in Texas). Meanwhile, they allow Chinese Communists to run the world’s biggest polluting nation unperturbed and permit Russian oligarchs, Venezuelan Communists, Iranian mullahs and Saudi sheiks to benefit from resulting high prices of oil and gas.

“We’re going to end up with a real shortage of energy,” Blackstone ceo Stephen Schwarzman told cnn. “And when you have a shortage, it’s going to cost more. And it’s probably going to cost a lot more. You’re going to get very unhappy people around the world in the emerging markets in particular, but also in the developed world.” He said that when this happens, “you’ve got real unrest” (Oct. 26, 2021).

This isn’t just about paying more to refuel your sedan every week or so. This is about revolution.

Obama and Biden are already making it harder to fund drilling projects in the U.S. on the pretext of Biden’s agenda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “If you try and raise money to drill holes, it’s almost impossible to get that money,” Schwarzman said, and this is happening on an “extremely widespread basis” (ibid).

Middle-class families—already being squeezed by runaway inflation and supply-chain problems—are not prepared for this energy crisis. This is no accident.

The Hudson Institute’s Walter Russell Mead warned, “President Biden may soon have to choose between his climate policy and his overall national strategy. The problem is not just that the energy shortage and price surges threaten to drive a wedge between green activists and middle- and working-class voters struggling with high energy bills …. The real problem is that the green agenda as currently conceived is an effective machine for undermining the economic and political power of the democratic world and boosting the influence of precisely the authoritarian powers President Biden has [supposedly] made it his mission to oppose. By artificially depressing fossil-fuel production and investment in the democratic world faster than renewables and other fuels can fill the gap, Biden policy promotes a multiyear, multi-trillion-dollar windfall for countries like Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia” (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18, 2021).

Mead correctly deduced that American policymakers would have to give up on carbon reduction targets if they want to avoid impoverishing and weakening everyday Americans and strengthening the regimes of Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. But he has not considered the disturbing possibility that impoverishing Americans and strengthening these regimes is the very point of the “green” agenda!

Slashing America’s carbon footprint will impoverish the middle class while empowering Communists, oligarchs and mullahs. This is not an unfortunate side effect of “building back better.” It is its primary principle. It causes the confusion, weakness, disenchantment, anger and dependency necessary to overthrow America’s constitutional system of government. That is the first goal of the revolution. The next is to install a dictatorial government in which socialist central planners tell us how or if we can work, how many masks to wear, and whether we can leave our houses.

Green Tyranny

Pollution is a problem that humanity must face. Serious environmental issues like acid rain, soil degradation and urban sprawl are indeed “ravaging the world.” Yet have you noticed that the radical environmentalist movement rarely discusses these issues? It is fixated on one thing: the theory of man-made global warming being caused by carbon dioxide emissions. Why not devote more attention, more work, more billions, more headline-chasing quotations to smog, pesticides, plastic pollution or contaminated drinking water?

Encouraging people to take measures to improve their soil, reduce urban sprawl, raise grass-fed cattle in the countryside, and improve the environment in other ways does not advance their agenda, because their agenda is to take power from individuals and give it to government elites. But micromanaging carbon dioxide does advance their agenda.

After old-fashioned communism failed catastrophically in the 20th century, people were still dedicated to the atheistic theory that human beings can create their own utopia by treating everyone like a hive of insects and forcing them to surrender their rights. But they needed a new vehicle since the ideology on its own merits was unattractive to the masses after it helped kill about 100 million people in less than 100 years.

Communists deliberately chose radical environmentalism (as well as race relations) as their means for destroying individual liberty and accountability and advancing socialism.

Burning fossil fuels may have some limited effect on global temperatures, but it’s hard to tell because repeated scientific fraud has clouded the issue. Reasonable people want clean air, water and soil for themselves and others, so Communists and socialists are highly motivated to mix concern for the environment in with their ideology. They use the same approach with race. This strategy also makes socialist activists, journalists and politicians highly motivated to hijack and exaggerate concerns about the environment to literally doomsday-level proportions. When a course of action (such as soil remediation) would help the environment but do nothing for the socialist agenda, they ignore it. When a course of action would hurt the environment (such as giving a pass to the world’s biggest polluter, which happens to already be Communist), they go for it.

This is why, despite no evidence to support their claims, Obama and Biden have fixated on global warming as the greatest threat to humanity in history. The goal is to frighten people into surrendering their freedoms to centralized government. And you will only do that if you are held in the grip of fear. (For more information about the spirit motivating this attack on freedom, please request a free copy of our booklet America Under Attack, by Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry.)

Obama once taught a class at the University of Chicago on Saul Alinsky’s approach to “power analysis.” Alinsky is the author of Rules for Radicals, a playbook for the American socialist movement, which he dedicated to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”

“[Russian novelist Fyodor] Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most,” Alinsky wrote. “They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. … A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives—agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. … Remember: Once you have organized people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move. From there it’s a short and natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution.”

Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

You read that right. The strategy that influenced Obama, the Clintons and others openly states that socialist environmentalism is not about the environment; it’s about socialism. It intentionally pushes people to feel frustrated, defeated, lost and “futureless,” to psychologically condition them to let go of the past. For Americans, “to let go of the past” means to abandon what biblical and constitutional virtues they have left. To “chance the future” means to “build back better” with a repackaged version of an authoritarian socialism that has destroyed millions and degraded billions of lives.

Such a radical change in America is not surprising; it is prophesied in the Bible.

After America

Jesus Christ prophesied to His disciples that the world would come to be dominated by non-Israelite nations. “And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” (Matthew 24:3). He confirmed that the end of human civilization would indeed come and answered their questions by detailing specific events that would occur before and during “the end of the world” (see also Mark 13; Luke 21).

Jesus focused on Jerusalem, the capital of ancient Israel, and said it would “be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” (Luke 21:24).

Who are the Gentiles? This term refers to “the nations,” or peoples, who are not Israelite. Most people think that everyone except Jews are Gentiles. But the Jews are only one of the 12 tribes of Israel. Today, the Jews are found in the State of Israel in the Middle East and scattered across other nations. The descendants of the other tribes also continue to exist. The late Herbert W. Armstrong proved in his book The United States and Britain in Prophecy that these lost tribes include Americans, Britons and northwestern Europeans. Jesus’s prophecy about Jerusalem being trodden down is about a time when authoritarian Gentile dictators will dominate these Israelite nations.

The radical left’s push to offshore carbon-emitting industries and shut down oil rigs is weakening the Israelite nations of the world while empowering Gentile nations like China, Russia and Iran. Even many Germans, who have been great advocates of green energy and greenhouse gas reduction, are realizing that they will need a lot of oil and gas from Russia to build Europe into a superpower. These other nations stand to gain from the radical left’s green agenda, so they support the aim to dismantle America.

“The weaker America is, the more vulnerable it becomes to being controlled,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in “What the Paris Climate Agreement Was Really About.” “That is exactly what the radical left wants. It is using the issue of the environment in order to get it. The Obama administration didn’t want to get climate change under control; it wanted to get America under its control! Proponents of deals like this want to control the world. Where does such thinking come from? That is actually a very satanic mindset—explained in many places in your Bible. Efforts to reverse climate change may look like they spring from good intentions, but there is an evil spirit behind it. It is all tainted by deceit, intimidation, bullying and autocratic tendencies. This is exactly the way a great evil spirit thinks! He wants control and will use any means he can to get it. He is very active in the world today, and the climate change controversy is evidence of this fact” (Trumpet, August 2017; theTrumpet.com/15956).

The solution to the plight of the planet and, more importantly, the human beings on it is not found in cop26, the Obama-Biden regime, or the regimes of other nations. It is not found in the ideology of Communists or, in fact, the ideology of conservatives. It is found in the one source that Communists have rejected and conservatives have mostly ignored: the Holy Bible. That is where you will find accurate prophecies by Jesus Christ and those He inspired that exactly describe current and imminent events. That is where you will find the laws of physical and spiritual cause and effect that even the churches of the world have turned their backs on. And that is where you will find hope.

That hope is in God and His laws. Yes, Bible prophecy shows that He will allow us to destroy our civilizations, the majority of our human race and much of our beautiful planet. Why? So that we will finally see the full effects of our own selfish, deceitful human nature, finally humble ourselves, finally submit to His perfect spiritual law, finally admit that we are incapable of ruling ourselves. Then—and only then—can the returned Jesus Christ establish a new civilization that will restore and beautify Jerusalem, the Earth and the character of the human beings living here.