By Mecca Fowler
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
In 2019, Mastercard announced its DO Black card which would allow customers to see how their spending habits have an impact on the environment. The move was designed to encourage people to reduce their “carbon footprint” on the planet. It was marketed as “the world’s first credit card with a carbon limit.”
A carbon footprint is defined as the total amount of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) that are generated by our individual actions.
The idea behind the card is that if customers can see how their direct spending impacts the environment, they would be more inclined to self-moderate their purchases. It would even cut off your spending if you exceeded your allotted carbon usage.
The effort was a collaboration with Swedish financial technology company Doconomy and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Sometime between then and now, however, Mastercard moved on from having this function specifically for the Do Black card. Instead, they launched a carbon calculator tool in partnership with the same entities (Doconomy and UNFCCC).
While some may think this helps stave off climate change, I believe this is a scam to put the onus of climate change on everyday citizens. Us citizens feel the need to virtue signal and comply with the asks of financial institutions and to help the Earth, yet large corporations that influence these governments get away with making large profits and polluting the planet simultaneously.
First, the logic of using carbon footprints as a measurement of people’s impact on the environment is built on propaganda. The concept started in the early 2000s after British Petroleum (BP) hired British advertising and marketing company Ogilvy & Mather shortly after it acquired Amoco. Ogilvy & Mather created a campaign called “Beyond Petroleum,” which sought to shift the blame of the responsibility of climate change away from Big Oil and onto the general public.
The same industry that is “greenwashing” efforts to combat climate change, according to climate change activists, wanted individuals to bear the moral responsibility for the climate more than corporations. So, in a sense, the “carbon footprint” movement is a form of gaslighting. Companies do more damage to the planet than individuals do collectively, but they have made our everyday actions and purchases the problem while their actions are protected. John Kenney, a former Ogilvy & Mather employee who helped work on the “Beyond Petroleum,” later likened the campaign to propaganda.
Next, this type of control over people’s finances is a method of socially coercing them into caring about the interests of the global population over their own. It is another tool to usher in the New World Order. Similar to the COVID-19 dogma of “we’re all in this together,” globalist institutions are suggesting people forfeit their individual needs and liberties at the behest of the collective good.
In fact, in September, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published an article suggesting that the collective obedience of global citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that people would be just as compliant to adapt to measurements to control carbon emissions.
“COVID-19 was the test of social responsibility – A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world,” the article says. “There were numerous examples globally of maintaining social distancing, wearing masks, mass vaccinations and acceptance of contact-tracing applications for public health, which demonstrated the core of individual social responsibility.”
The same article goes on to talk about how influencing economic, cognitive, and social behaviors by proxy of a platform called My Carbon can be an inclusive approach to delivering sustainable cities by deploying similar technologies as Mastercard. In the paragraph about the “fourth industrial revolution,” the article says, “through advances in emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and digitization can enable tracking personal carbon emissions, raise awareness and also provide individual advisories on lower carbon and ethical choices for consumption of product and services. The World Economic Forum’s Scale 360 initiative demonstrates the use of fourth industrial revolution technologies across the whole life cycle of products and services.”
Mastercard is just one of many entities seeking to normalize putting caps on individuals’ resource use as a benefit to the overall advancement and longevity of humans on this planet. If these types of interventions become normalized, they will be used as a control mechanism in the technocratic future.
The soft launching of overriding how people are allowed to spend their money based on a societal expectation that is not even built on sound logic is absurd. It’s one of the next steps in the social credit score matrix that will be designed to keep everyone in lockstep with the globalists’ goals.
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