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Iconic British Children's Character Used To Push Net Zero Propaganda

Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
Authored...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Bob the Builder, the stop-motion tradesman who once built houses, has been hauled out of retirement to install solar panels, home batteries and "low carbon heating" for German-owned energy giant E.ON. The catchphrase is the same. The product is Net Zero.

The much loved kids' character is back on screen for the first time in 15 years in a 90-second stop-motion advert for E.ON Next. He no longer spends the day on a construction yard. He enrols at a "Net Zero Training Academy," swaps his yellow hard hat for an E.ON-branded one, and learns to fit the kit the government says Britain needs for a decarbonised electricity system by 2030.

In the film he explains the gap in his CV. "I downed tools for a while. I got into yoga. Took up bird-watching. Then I packed my bags and went to Australia, where I saw some amazing sights." Holding a newspaper headlined "UK needs more green skills for clean energy future," he adds: "When I arrived back home, I saw this in the news and thought: 'Can we fix it?'"

Then comes the sales pitch. "Now I'm helping with the switch to clean power by using my great new skills so people can take control of their energy and save money too." A fellow trainee asks the inevitable question. "So, Bob, can we fix it?" He replies: "Yes we can."

Toby Young flagged the campaign as Net Zero propaganda dressed up as nostalgia.

Reform UK chairman Lee Anderson told The Telegraph the character had been conscripted. "Bob the Builder has been turned into a woke commissar of climate, flogging the same net zero propaganda that's sent energy bills through the roof in the homes he used to build. This country doesn't need another army of Net Zero specialists. It needs builders, plumbers and sparkies who can actually keep the lights on. Send Bob back to his proper trade."

Deputy leader Richard Tice piled on: "Go woke, go broke: Bob the Builder has been missing for years. Did his firm go bust, or has he abandoned Britain by going to China and buying their solar panels?"

Shadow transport minister Greg Smith asked: "Whatever happened to innocent children's TV, telling fun stories rather than cramming in eco-zealotry and political messaging? Hey, Bob, leave our kids alone."

E.ON insists the campaign is about skills. Helen Bradbury, the firm's chief people officer, said: "Bob the Builder has always inspired people to solve problems and build things that matter. Today, those same qualities are needed to help deliver the UK's transition to clean power."

A company spokesman added that "simply combining a home battery and time-of-use tariff can save the average household £255 a year."

Britain already has some of the highest domestic electricity prices in Europe. Net Zero taxes, subsidies and system costs have been estimated at around £22 billion a year. The 2030 clean-power target is the political backdrop. The advert is the soft sell.

This is the same method, applied to a different franchise. Netflix is developing a live-action reboot of Captain Planet, the 1990s cartoon created by Ted Turner that preached environmental panic, multicultural planeteers and population control to children. Leonardo DiCaprio is among the executive producers.

The original treated humanity as the problem requiring global management. The Club of Rome put the strategy in writing in The First Global Revolution: "In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill... The real enemy then is humanity itself."

Adults are not spared from the propaganda. BBC naturalist Chris Packham has lobbied for a cameo on soap EastEnders so a flood can hit the fictional Albert Square and he can march through with a placard. He told Radio Times the role "would give me the capacity to communicate to an audience which I don't talk to in my sphere of work."

He wants the message "integrated into broader output, so properly into news obviously, properly into weather... but also into dramas." He said it was "really scary" that some people still "deny" the "gravity of that crisis."

The emotional payload of this alarmism has been measured. The Times reported the largest study then available of 16- to 25-year-olds: four in ten were so anxious about climate change they hesitated about having children, and 45 percent said it was affecting daily life.

Naomi Oreskes circulated the underlying Lancet Planetary Health survey under the heading that children and young people are "sad, worried, anxious and angry."

RTÉ put teenagers in front of a camera to discuss "climate anxiety" for a programme titled The End of the World With Beanz.

The Financial Times has urged parents to cultivate anxiety in their children in the name of "moral clarity," while skipping scientists who reject the catastrophe script.

Is it any wonder young people are acting like this?

The policy Bob the Builder is now hired to normalise still rests on a tight causal story: CO2 up, temperature up, therefore Net Zero. Research recently published in Nature found atmospheric CO2 and methane broadly stable over three million years of Antarctic ice-core data, while temperatures swung through long cooling and interglacial spikes without a matching greenhouse-gas plot.

One reading of the wider geological record is that no obvious continuous link between CO2 and temperature runs back across hundreds of millions of years.

Establishment voices rushed to save the narrative. Study lead Julia Marks-Peterson said her team was "a bit surprised" and that if the findings hold, "even small changes in greenhouse gas levels could trigger major shifts."

Carrie Lear of Cardiff University said the work does not "rewrite the role of CO2" and that "today's rapid CO2 rise is so alarming." Tim Naish called it "way too early to throw the baby out with the bathwater." The activism did not pause for the ice.

A generation already primed to treat climate as original sin now watches the builder of their childhood recast as a recruitment officer for the 2030 target.

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