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Her name is Agnes Walton, and in her environmental fanaticism she makes Greta Thunberg look half-hearted and Al Gore look irresolute. Let’s start with her 2017 video for HBO’s VICE News Tonight, in which she noted that “more than half of all consumer goods” contain palm oil – often labeled on packaging as “vegetable oil” or “vegetable fat” – and, over images of trees being felled and cute animals running for their lives, claimed that the growth of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia was causing “massive deforestation,” “killing the rainforest,” and “driving forest species to the brink of extinction.”
Only one country, Walton said, had “taken on the industry.” That country would be Norway, where, she explained, the entire population boycotted palm oil products; consequently, the substance was removed from all Norwegian food products. (I live in Norway, but somehow I entirely missed this people’s crusade.) Since Norway’s population is so small, alas, this glorious local success “didn’t put a dent in the global market.” The only answer, then, instructed Walton, is for the rest of the world to follow Norway’s example prontissimo – or consider itself responsible for a genocide of both flora and fauna.
Or check out Walton’s video editorial from August of last year. In this one, produced for the New York Times, Walton warned of another existential dilemma: American lawns, which, she solemnly asserted, “are damaging our planet, ruining our health, and wasting our time.” Maintaining them depletes precious water and involves the use of dangerous fertilizers. And why should we want lawns, anyway? Walton flashed an image of the Stars and Stripes, and another of a wholesome-looking traditional white family (mom, dad, two sons) standing behind a white picket fence – thereby linking lawns to those two appalling phenomena, the American dream and middle-class suburban life.
That wasn’t all. Over paintings of nineteenth-century bluebloods cavorting outside their stately homes, Walton charged that American’s “obsession” with lawns “has its roots in the manicured lawns of the European aristocracy” – in other words, suburban U.S. lawns are tainted by Old World imperialism. Bottom line: our planet is in peril, and it’s all the fault of selfish, suburban, stateside caucasians (read: hard-working, law-abiding taxpayers) who’ve allowed their lifestyle choices to be influenced not by virtuous lefties like Walton but by the vile Europeans of yore who colonized the global south. “Local laws need to be more progressive,” Walton insisted, “and get real about the climate emergency.” Translation: cities from Boston to Burbank need to put even severer restrictions on individual liberty – and put even more pressure on the deplorables to obey their betters.
A couple of months later, Walton returned to the Times with another clarion cry in visual form, this one entitled “Brazil’s Presidential Election Will Determine the Planet’s Future.” This time, her contention was that the Workers’ Party candidate for president of Brazil, the corrupt, far-left, pro-Chinese Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, absolutely had to win the upcoming election over the America-friendly, pro-economic development incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, because Lula “wants to save the Amazon” while Bolsonaro “wants to burn it down.” Bottom line: “The most important day for Planet Earth – and your survival – is October 30.”
Who is Agnes Walton? Born and raised in Norway, she’s (surprise!) a daughter of privilege – specifically, the daughter of Stephen J. Walton, a professor of languages who splits his time between Norway and the U.K. and who, in a 2012 profile for the scholarly journal Kjønnsforskning (Gender Research), explained that he and his wife live apart so that he can have sex with men. He contributes a column on feminism to Klassekampen, Norway’s self-described “revolutionary socialist” newspaper, and has written a book deploring the “Americanization” of Norway: “Norwegians have forgotten how to speak German and French….Linguistically, Norwegians are becoming a kind of Americans who happen to be very good at Norwegian.” Oh, one more thing: his son, Agnes’s brother, is an ardent Communist.
So, by all indications, is Agnes, who, having studied French at the University of Oslo, political science in Sweden, and environmental science at Yale, has had a busy transatlantic career, working (just like Dad) as a Klassekampen columnist and as communications manager for a Swedish commission on “food, planet, [and] health” before becoming, as we’ve seen, a “climate researcher” for VICE News in New York and, then, a “senior video journalist” at the Times.
But now she has a new job. As reported by Mats With Gregor in a September 25 article for Journalisten, she’s been hired to be the “climate/environment specialist” at the Norwegian Institute of Journalism, where her task will be to “educate” the nation’s reporters about the environment and the alleged climate crisis. To that end, she’ll be teaching a course in October and November about how to cover climate issues. This is vital, you see, because, as Walton explained, the climate has a profound impact on every kind of news – whether about finance or sports or showbiz – and every last person on earth is, or soon will be, “affected by…the crisis in which we find ourselves.”
Yet in Norway, at least, lamented Walton, journalists tend not to do a great job on climate. Why? Too often, they report on forecasts, predictions, prognoses. And this can be problematic. How so? Because climate forecasts – especially truthful ones – may not be dramatic enough to get news consumers sufficiently worked up about the environment. Something, obviously, must be done. And Walton knows what it is. “Talk more about feelings and less about figures….Don’t get hung up on numbers, prognoses, reports, and graphs.”
So what if the actual statistics show that the number of hurricanes or tornadoes or whatever hasn’t soared in recent years? So what if the doomsday stories about Arctic ice and polar bears are utter nonsense? So what if the talk of sea levels rising so high that they’ll soon drown the Obamas in their Martha’s Vineyard mansion is sheer claptrap? Who cares? Because, as Walton was implicitly admitting, climatism isn’t about science. It’s a faith, a sect, a cult, that replaces God with nature and that views the human race as a blight on the planet.
This being the case, “journalism” isn’t even remotely the right word for what Walton has produced for Vice and the Times and what she plans to teach her students to produce for the Norwegian news media. No, as she makes clear, she’s going to teach them to be even less sober, less responsible, and less skeptical in their coverage of the climate scam than they are already. She’s going to teach them to remove from their articles the slightest shreds of fact that they might be tempted to include. She’s going to teach them to ratchet up their rhetoric to Goebbels levels.
Because the goal isn’t to communicate the truth. It’s to ensure that even more children will grow up into hysterics who truly think that we’re just around the corner from Armageddon and will end up blocking traffic and glueing themselves to paintings in museums. So we owe Agnes Walton a nod of gratitude: in her interview with Journalisten, she gave the whole game away. In 2023, the job of a reporter isn’t to try to figure out the truth behind the climate-catastrophe hyperbole; it’s to persuade governments and businesses to deprive, tax, fine, and oppress the rabble in the name of saving the planet – and to get the rabble to believe that if they don’t knuckle under and sacrifice their freedom, the Earth, within a few years, will be as barren as the moon.
I watched a few YouTube videos, and the Stihl company (Best known for their chainsaws) makes a dandy tool for cutting off the excess palm tree growth, so the farmers can get to the palm oil fruit. Also the trees are planted in orchards, so farmers are not foolishly cutting their own trees.
But what about the endless tracs of forest being mowed down for solar panels and windmills?
Not to mention the despoliation of thousands of acres of rural and desert areas, as well as seacoasts, for the wind “farms” and solar “farms.”
And all of the whales washing up dead on the coasts? At the rate things are going the North Atlantic Right Whale is going to be extinct because of the activities of the wind farms. What ever happened to “Save the Whales”?
But green energy is virtuous.
Said no sensible person, ever. Other than your clever sarcastic remark, that is.
Like those loose nuts weeping for t he Trees use Emotional Poppycock to try and convince us Global Warming/Climate Change is for real and we all must listen to Gore and Thunberg as well as DiCaprio Etc.
So she travels from Norway to NYC in an organic grown vegan rowing boat so that she doesn’t use fossil fuels?
Hypocrisy.
MdP, very funny. My take is, she doesn’t know how to row, swim or do anything useful or productive. Worse than a leech.
Right.At least sime leeches have medical uses that are beneficial. This “ting”? Not so much.
Wow, a grown up Greta Thunberg.
Neither this thing nor Princess Thurnburg have nor will grow up. they may be getting older, but certainly neither wiser nor more useful. What was that comment above about leeches???
The energy that these people are able to muster and continue to use pushing this lie is impressive.
NPR is absolutely nonstop, the ”news”, dozens maybe hundreds of NGO’s, corrupt politicians, teachers unions, and normal useful idiots all singing from the same hymn book 24/7.
Ive never seen anything like it, and lack the words to describe it.
Just plain EVIL.
If only we could harness all of that wheel-spinning energy, we’d have something very useful.
“… the human race as a blight on the planet.” Well she’s actually correct about that.
Seeing dead people and being happy for Gaia makes Malthusians happy.
In other words, the whole climate hysteria isn’t about the truth of the claims. It’s about using these claims, whether true or not, to obtain tyrannical powers for the Left. Gee, who ever wudda thunk that?
Rachel Carson wrote the emotionally laden crap “Silent Spring”
Mosquitoes & malaria flourished as a direct result.
Women like Walton, Thunberg, Carson, and DiCaprio tend to have the overwrought, emotional reaction.
Compulsive liars like Al Gore are more in it for the money by tapping that hysterical emotion. (Mandating his fraud movie be viewed in schools was a nice touch.)
Poor Aggie. If she stays in Norway who cares what crackpot enviro ideas she has. She sounds like the usual privileged, white, garden variety Communist scold who is over-educated but really doesn’t have a lot to do.
Now, where did I put my plastic jar, made with fossil fuels, of palm oil.
Women tend to think less analytically than men and allow their emotions to lead their thinking. Coupled with the normal human desire to have power and significance, we create cults at a much higher rate than the male of the species.
It is no accident Mr. Bawer calls her a “prophetess.” We live in the age when these satanic cults aggressively proselytize and are applauded.
In my house my husband is the more emotional one while I tend to be more analytical. It can be exhausting watching him get emotional over nothing. Lol.
Ditto in my house …. and all the famous cult leaders that immediately come to my mind are/were all men. Hmmmmmm ……
Most of their hysterical supporters are women …take a look at all the old nazi film of hitler where the women were just hysterical ..this is one of the major reasons why women were kept well away from politics ..they were only allowed to vote out of misplaced idealism and a little pity
you’re married to a typical metrosexual twerp ; are you sure he’s not gay ?
Not THIS woman! I have a real brain and I use it. Females like her make me barf.
That generalisation about women’s motives is accurate, but will be vilified (esp by wimps)
Still more than a million people a year dying of mosquito borne diseases?
See,s to be an accurate figure… and many of them in nations where about two dollars equivalent in local money can buy a course of HCQ to cure the viral infections borne by the mosquitp.
Too bad those same folks hadn’t gotten the word that HCQ willalso kill off the Covid. Two friends of mone, one a local the other a Yank ecpat, died of covid in a central American nation that had adoped US medical standards for “treatment” of da WooFlue. Both were told to go home, rest, and come back to hospital when they could no longer breathe. Whereupon they got the black sname slid down their throats and were dead four or five days later, when any kid could have taen the equivalent of about two dollars fifty US, walkedito any farmácia and walked out with a bottle of HCQ and cured them in a few days. Yay for Yank “medicine”.
I do agree about getting rid of poisonous fertilizers and insecticides (limited environmentalism), but
the whole climate crisis is nonsense and is totalitarian cult. To hell with their ideas.
She should be more concerned to save seriously endangered species such as native Norwegians.
Eh, if they’re saved they’ll just go a-viking and raid coastal villages and monasteries. Let ’em go extinct.
I’m all for keeping the planet clean for future generations, but…..I will never be for doing anything to the extreme as this woman wants.
That’s the thing, SCC! There are a lot of people doing their humble best at that, but the ilk like this Norwegian fly-by-nightess are the only ones who get any credit.
I would not hand this thing ten dollars on credit if she had left for deposit an hundred dollars cash.
God speaking to Job, Job 38: 22-30
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
23 which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?
24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,
26 to water a land where no one lives,
an uninhabited desert,
27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?
28 Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
29 From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
30 when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?”
It is gross arrogance to imagine that our activities determine the weather. Only one Person can do that.
America’s founders knew how to deal with oppressive tyrants. For example, British stamp tax collectors were forced to flee the American colonies. Eco-Nazis like this should be regarded with similar contempt.
and the illegal tea tax collectors had their own pot of tea made for them one night… Boston Harbour a teapot Tonight was the rallying cry. And make tea they did.
Bruce,
Thanks for digging up this loony useless hypocrite wench. Never heard of her/it but they are a legion, alas. Could you send her this memo from a lowly digging-in-mud field geologist. “CO2 is a life-sustaining trace gas (0.04% in the air). Short term weather is affected by the sun’s corona – plasma protuberances. Long term climate change is caused by the wobbling of the earth axis – precession & nutation. The double-cone takes 26000 years to go around – geophysics 101. Your support of the bloodiest tyranny in the world – communism – is barbaric (100+ million dead in the Gulag!) So, educate yourself, and grow up, my dear.”
A thousand “Thank you” s Robert of Prague !!! The stellar comment of the week!
Thank you kindly, Lady Eve. You made me chuckle but my head won’t be swelling, I promise.
Ah, the flaw in your excellent arguement is that people like these are NOT interested in the truth. Otherwise, how would they win?
“For industrialised civilisation to collapse…”Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong, at the 1992 UN Earth Summit.
The dimmish shiites told the world what they intend to do, yet they continue to be tolerated in every country they are busing working to bring down in wreck and ruin.
We can send Bidum’s eighty one million to Venezuela, but what will the rest of the world do with the monsters that are tearing at the foundations of civilisation?
I have always said that Communism is a Opium Pipe Dream, A delusional dream of Utopia, but the reality
in the end is Murder, Destruction & Misery for the enslaved people.
I don’t suppose anybody has asked her what makes her think her commie buddy Lula will have any better environmental record than the abysmal environmental record of her commie buddies in China?
These people should not be allowed to use any products made using petroleum. No plastics, no phones, no eye glasses, hair ties, brushes, tooth brushes, cleaners, soft soled shoes, computers, pens, paper and while we’re at it, anything containing leather from cows.
The Dimly Lit have vegan leather, and I have seen plastic shoes sold as vegan, in the ’80s.
If you could bring back a priestess of the Cult of Baal and dress her up in modern clothes………….what would she look like.?
You already saw her in the picture for this article.
I have a neighbor, a woman, who indulges in these same fantasies of her own power. She never mowed her lawn or raked her leaves for the first 10 years she lived next to us, but she bitched mightily about the sound of my backpack blowers. Due to prevailing southwest winds, I cleaned up most of her leaves that blew into our yard. Once I found out she hated my leaf blower I bought the most powerful and loudest one on the market….let the good times roll!
In addition to her laziness, she held convenient beliefs that justified her sloth. My favorite was the time she told me that she doesn’t believe in mono-culture lawns, ie. grass. So, year after year the weeds grew in variety and size until the entire eastern half of her pigsty became an impenetrable mass of invasive species — thorns, mulberry trees, poison ivy, black locust and a thousand other prohibited plants.
Eventually, her tangle of toxic weeds reached her patio, which was constructed by a moron with a Bobcat that belched huge quantities of black diesel exhaust – more pollution in one hour than all of my landscape management tools produced in 50 years, at least. Finally, she saw a reason to deal with the mess she created but it didn’t go well because she is too cheap to hire professionals. She did plant grass, however, the mono-culture hypocrite. Unfortunately for her, the weeds keep coming up from her culture of weed roots and stupidity.
Oh, and by the way, she named herself “Naiad”, after the minor Greek divinities, that were renowned for their ravishing beauty and popularity with the male Greek gods. She doesn’t remotely fit the description of Naiads.All delusion, all of the time.
too bad she doesnt live in the Pacific NorthWet, where imported himalayan blackberries can, once a couple yars established, can commonly put out fifty to an hundred new canes thirty feet or more in length that are half to three quarters of in inch diameter. First year they are sort of tender, next year almost like oak. And that second year any cane that touches the ground will grow new roots and it becomes lather rinse repeat. I had to be away for two summers hearling from a bad injury some years back. When I returned I went to go did out and awaken my trusty old Mercedes diesel sedan, Could not find it. Was pretty certain I had left it THERE. Then when the sun was straight up I was once more looking where I was sure I had left it, and sure enough I saw a few bright reflections from lass and bright trim. There it was, under twelve foot high blackberries. I had to wade in with the loppers close to twetny feet before I could tough the car. Then another day’s hard work to trim back enough to be able to get in and drive it out of its “home”.
Rush limbaugh was right!
He told his listeners years ago the New Communism
was Global Climate Control. Don”t believe me? Gp back
and read this article over again.
Thank you Bruce for stating the facts so eloquently. Just as you stated, this woman is not just a socialist progressive Marxist, she’s a full blown lunatic who has been completely brainwashed into this cult religion of climate theology that is really the danger to our planet. It is the true insurrection on our country, not a few thugs breaking into the capitol building. The goal is to shut down and make us apologize for what made America the greatest country on the planet. and to destroy are way of life in favor of what? What is the insurrections end goal? To be more like other communist countries around the world? Do they truly think they have a better way of life? What have they contributed to the earth? My opinion is not even a 10th of what the U.S. has contributed.
Sometimes I think the only environmental issue we need worry about is the abundance of hot air from the lips of these climate change theologians and the ultimate effects it will have on our ozone layer.
We’ve been exposed to the Democrat’s psychopathy ad nauseam.
Isn’t it time to focus on solutions instead of raging against problems to no avail?
Maybe that’s why the right makes little headway. We focus on problems, not solutions.
I would he happy to move them to the Amazon and live in a Tree just don’t bother the Quetzals
and the best one of all is that all the balsa wood trees have been stripped from the amazons tropical rainforests along with the destruction of the surrounds after a crooked deal with the natives just to provide the timber for wind farm blades . who knew !? where is the outrage . ?!
Here are some pertinent facts re: reheating the earth’s surface by CO2. Have learned interesting facts. Look up on American Thinker this piece: What Our Oceans Say about Global Warming by Guy K. Mitchell, Jr. Great ammo for discussing AGW w/ the woke fanatics, although facts means nothing to them.
I wonder if this strange irrational creature would be willing to use hard numbers and SHOW us how cutting natural forest and replacing it with cultivated tree crops destroys some balance of nature. Tell us the difference in water and mineral uptake from the soil, conversion rate of CO2 gas in the air through photosynthesis converting the CO2 and oxygen into plant material in the form of wood, leaves, and other biomass. She also must calculate the rate of oxygen release from the cultivated tree crops and that of the naturally occurring growth being replaced with the cultivated crop. And, finally, calculate the quantity of carbon based product removed as crop from the land in question and compare that means of producing that needed product to securing/producing a replacement product elsewhere.
She won’t, two reasons: first it does not fit her “narrative”, and second, she KNOWS it will prove her the fool she is, beyond any question.
I would also be VERY interested in learning the source of her income. WHO is paying her to invent and/or repeat this nonesense? WHO is her sugar daddie?
> . . . over images of trees being felled and cute animals running for their lives, claimed that the growth of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia was causing “massive deforestation,” “killing the rainforest,” and “driving forest species to the brink of extinction.”
Bruce writes as if the contentions being quoted are evidently false, and so no contradiction is needed.
But is it so? Have not significant rainforests been destroyed for conversion to palm-oil plantations?
There are some very strange people from the Far North like those of Norway and Sweden. Maybe to little sun?
Climate change is one of the core elements of American Marxism
I always have the same thought when some climate warrior asks, “Why can’t we be more like [insert your favorite eco-friendly country here]. In the case of Norway, we can’t be like them because we’re not them. Different country, different economy, different everything. In fact, Norway has a population comparable to Philadelphia PA–a dramatic difference in size. Compared to the US, one might conclude that Norway should be so easy to regulate and manage that just about any CEO of a major US retail store chain could do it (provided that they weren’t being bombarded daily by theft and vandalism).
Who (Soros) pays her (Soros/Gates) salary and grants (Soros and son, and Gates) her these positions of no genuine peer review, totalitarian (Soros Gates) power?
This article appears to be of the form that because a lot of climate hysteria is just that, that all of the claims must be junk. However, it is possible that some of the claims may not be junk. Destruction due to bio-fuels (PALM OIL) is a major deleterious impact destroying the planet caused by fear of CO2 and should be brought out, It is an example of how the greenies are destroying the world.
Why do we criticize when an environmentalist actually gets it right? Bio-fuels are extremely destructive but permit the pious Europeans to think they are carbon neutral. They do it on the back of destruction of vast tracts of land.
Sure, you may read another article talking about the idiot enviro-weenies, but there is little value to this article, it doesn’t contain anything profound, and negates one of the most important (IMHO) things we are doing to the planet, that is, destroying natural habitat so that idiots can greenwash their existence. Just because you understand that the climate hysteria is stupid and destructive doesn’t mean that this article has any value.
Re climate ‘journalism’ and advocacy, “…the goal isn’t to communicate the truth.” Thanks, Bruce, for communicating the truth about this.
“Agnes’s brother is an ardent Communist.” Guilt by association,, Mr.
Biden. TACKY
Only wanna tell that this is very useful , Thanks for taking your time to write this.