Activist shares how Canadians can fight globalism through local action

Maggie Braun, the founder of Kicking International Council out of Local Environmental Initiatives, told LifeSiteNews that there are ‘small wins happening every day’ against globalism by pro-local Canadians.

A pro-freedom advocate told LifeSiteNews that many Canadians have already successfully stood up to the meddling of the United Nations’ globalist agenda, encouraging all citizens to know their rights under the law to protect their local communities.

During a November 20 discussion at the Rankin Culture and Recreation Centre in Pembroke, Ontario, about the ways in which the United Nations are breaking municipal laws and violating property rights in an effort to achieve their globalist goals, Maggie Braun, the founder of Kicking International Council out of Local Environmental Initiatives (KICLEI), shared just what Canadians have been doing to successfully stand up for their local communities.

“There’s small wins happening every day,” Braun told LifeSiteNews in an interview before the discussion.

“Counselors opening up and communicating with the community and our concerns and just bridging that gap and sharing and exchanging information with them and slowly watching them start to make moves to withdraw from the programs or shut down renewable energy projects that don’t make sense in their area,” she shared as an example of successful pushback.

KICLEI is an organization dedicated to empowering local governments to address the needs in their community, and not to blindly follow the direction of groups like the UN.

The group also works to ensure “every Canadian enjoys the right to privacy, property, and self-determination, while fostering respect for our cultural and regional diversity.”

According to Braun, her goal is to “advocate for local environmental stewardship programs over globally mandated climate action plans” by informing Canadians of their property rights, particularly with respect to the attempted implementation of the UN’s climate policies.

“We’ve discovered that these programs are coming in through an organization called ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability) and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, who have brought certain programs down to the municipal level to drive climate action plans,” Braun explained.

Following this discovery, Braun has been working to bring awareness to the issue and persuade city and town councils to vote against UN recommendations which would undermine their citizens’ sovereignty. She revealed that her first victory was in Thorold, Ontario.

“We did four delegations in a row and by the end of it the staff recommended that they withdraw from the program,” Braun stated. “We just had to show up and do the basic work and it worked.”

“That was our first big win and now we’ve taken those strategies, developed tools that we can bring across the country” to help citizens “push back on the climate action plan.”

Earlier in November, Maggie Hope Braun told LifeSiteNews via email that the meeting will address how global agendas, “particularly UN climate initiatives,” are reshaping municipal priorities and policies across Canada.

Braun voiced concerned over local governments feeling pressured to adopt policies set by international organizations rather than responding to local priorities.

“Programs aligned with UN climate goals often come with strings attached, especially regarding federal funding, which can compel municipalities to follow UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to access resources,” she wrote. “This reliance can dilute local autonomy, making it difficult for municipalities to allocate budgets according to their own needs, as funding is often tied to specific climate-related expenditures—like electric fleets—that may not suit every community’s practical or economic realities.”

She added that these programs often introduce costly mandates, increase taxes, and, in some cases, affect privacy through the use of data-monitoring smart technologies, all of which can strain communities financially and socially.

“Canadians are beginning to feel these pressures, and many are questioning the long-term impacts on their rights, privacy, and economic well-being,” Braun stated.

Braun’s concerns are hardly unfounded as in March, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued an “urgent” call for countries around the world to sign on to their sovereignty-undermining “Pandemic Accord” by May. However, as May came around, countries were still unable to agree on the treaty, with many refusing to sign away their sovereign rights.

As a result, the treaty was not signed into law, but critics have warned that the WHO will likely continues its efforts to coerce countries to sign the document.

Similarly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “pandemic prevention and preparedness” bill is set to become law despite concerns raised by Conservative senators that it gives sweeping powers to government, particularly over agriculture.

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New paper shows clouds are more important than CO2

Published on February 17, 2025

Todayville

From Clintel.org

By Vijay Jayaraj

Underestimating Clouds: A Climate Mistake We Cannot Afford

A new paper by physicists W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer, Radiation Transport in Clouds, suggests that clouds affect atmospheric temperature more than CO2, says Vijay Jayaray of the CO2 Coalition.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been predominantly portrayed as the chief culprit driving global warming. For decades, this misconception has guided international policies, prompted ambitious targets for reducing CO₂ emissions and driven a shift from reliable and affordable energy resources like coal, oil, and natural gas toward problematic wind and solar sources.

However, this theory overlooks important factors that influence Earth’s climate system, including a critical variable in the climate system – the role of clouds, which remains woefully underestimated.

Recent work by physicists W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer challenges this prevailing paradigm: Their new paper, Radiation Transport in Clouds, suggest clouds affect atmospheric temperature more than CO₂ because they have a greater impact on the comparative amounts of solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere and escaping to outer space.

The Overshadowed Influence of Clouds

Clouds simultaneously reflect incoming sunlight back to space (cooling the Earth) and trap outgoing heat (warming the Earth). This dual nature makes clouds both powerful and perplexing players in our climate system. The net effect of clouds on climate is a balance between these opposing influences, thus a central component of the Earth’s energy budget.

A recent study by van Wijngaarden and Happer, titled “Radiation Transport in Clouds,” delves into this complexity. The 2025 paper says the radiation effects of clouds can easily negate or amplify the impact of CO₂. The researchers highlight that clouds have a more pronounced effect on Earth’s radiation budget than greenhouse gases like CO₂.

For instance, their research reveals that a modest decrease in low cloud cover could significantly increase solar heating of the Earth’s surface. In comparison, a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations reduces radiation to space by a mere 1%: “Instantaneously doubling CO₂ concentrations, a 100% increase, only decreases radiation to space by about 1%. To increase solar heating of the Earth by a few percent, low cloud cover only needs to decrease by a few percent.”

This stark contrast highlights the disproportionate influence of cloud dynamics compared to CO₂ fluctuations. Most state-of-art climate models are still in their infancy. We need more accurate measurements of clouds’ properties and their influence on the electromagnetic components of solar radiation if they are to be useful inputs for climate models.

Implications for Energy Policy and Reliability

Current strategies assume a direct and dominant link between CO₂ emissions and global temperatures to justify aggressive “decarbonization” efforts and an increase in the use of solar and wind energy.

However, solar and wind are inherently intermittent, rendering them unreliable and very expensive as components of a power grid. The infrastructure required to support these technologies entails substantial upfront investments, higher operating costs and increasing utility bills for consumers.

Blackouts, energy shortages and price spikes are becoming increasingly common in regions that have prematurely decommissioned fossil fuel plants without adequate backup solutions. This trend disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, exacerbating energy poverty and hindering economic development.

The major justification for using solar and wind has been that they counter global warming by reducing CO₂ emissions from burning fossil fuels. If small variations in cloud cover actually overwhelm the effects of CO₂, then the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is being significantly overestimated. This has profound implications for policy.

Attributing global warming predominantly to CO₂ emissions from the use of fossil fuels is a gross oversimplification. While CO₂ undoubtedly has a warming effect, it is relatively modest and beneficial, mainly moderating the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures. On the other hand, clouds, with their multifaceted interactions and feedbacks, represent a critical and underappreciated component of this puzzle.

The findings of van Wijngaarden and Happer highlight a broader issue within climate science: the tendency to oversimplify complex systems for the sake of political expediency. As the global energy landscape continues to evolve, it is imperative that decisions be based on sound science rather than political dogma.

The time has come to reassess our approach to both climate science and energy policy. The stakes are too high to continue down a path of destructive policies based on erroneous analyses. We must prioritize reliable, affordable energy sources and grid stability over useless reductions in emissions of a harmless gas.

Click here to access the entire Radiation Transport in Clouds paper.

This commentary was first published at BizPac Review on February 10, 2025

Business

Biden announces massive new climate goals in final weeks, despite looming Trump takeover

Published on December 23, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Outgoing President Joe Biden announced a new climate target of reducing American carbon emissions from 61-66% over the next decade, even though President Trump would be able to undo it as soon as next month.

Outgoing President Joe Biden announced December 19 a new climate target of reducing American carbon emissions of more than 60% over the next decade, even though returning President Donald Trump would be able to undo it as soon as next month.

“Today, as the United States continues to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy, President Biden is announcing a new climate target for the United States: a 61-66 percent reduction in 2035 from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions,” the White House announced, the Washington Free Beacon reports. The new target will be formally submitted to the United Nations Climate Change secretariat.

“President Biden’s new 2035 climate goal is both a reflection of what we’ve already accomplished,” Biden climate adviser John Podesta added, “and what we believe the United States can and should achieve in the future.”

The announcement may be little more than a symbolic gesture in the end, however, as Trump is widely expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement upon resuming office in January, in the process voiding related climate obligations.

Trump formally pulled out of the Paris accords in August 2017, the first year of his first term, with then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stating that the administration would be “open to re-engaging in the Paris Agreement if the United States can identify terms that are more favorable to it, its business, its workers, its people, and its taxpayers.”

Such terms were never reached, however, leaving America out until Biden re-committed the nation to the Paris Agreement on the first day of his presidency, obligating U.S. policy to new economic regulations to cut carbon emissions.

In June, the Trump campaign confirmed Trump’s intentions to withdraw from Paris again. At the time, Trump’s team was reportedly mulling a number of non-finalized drafts of executive orders to do so.

Left-wing consternation on the matter is based on certitude in “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or “climate change,” the thesis that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate and that such trends pose a danger to the planet in the form of rising sea levels and weather instability.

Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.