A successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to die an ignominious death at the end of the year, continues primarily as a source of massive bureaucratic make-work. One leading question is how dubious science, shoddy economics and tried-and-failed socialist policies have come to dominate the democratic process in so many countries for so long. The answer appears to be the skill with which a radical minority — centred in and promoted by the UN, and funded by national governments and, even more bizarrely, corporations — has skilfully manipulated the political process at every level. Since the Rio conference in 1992, the radical green movement has mounted a pincer movement to pressure democratic governments both from above, via vast UN agreements on biodiversity and climate, and from below by a deliberately seeded and ever-proliferating group of ENGOs, which were sold as the voice of “civil society.”