Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 02/09/2022
A video of Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer known for misogynistic attitudes, making inaccurate claims about climate change is spreading on social media.
On August 27, 2022, a video was published on Facebook in which Andrew Tate talks about climate change.
In the video, Tate claims that climate change measures are a ruse by “the people who run the world” to establish control over the population and take away individual liberties.
The post has been shared more than 150 times as of the date of writing this analysis. The video, with a similar description, was originally published on August 26, 2022 (available here) and has since been shared on several more Facebook profiles.
The video circulating on social networks in our language is a clip from Tate’s guest appearance on the YouTube channel CEOCAST on June 12, 2022.
In a clip in English, published with a translation into our language, Tate states:
And the people who rule the world use certain plans that they impose. They use them as an excuse to impose hidden things. Do you understand? It’s like the Green New Deal. They come and say: global warming, global warming, global warming. They pretend it’s about the planet, but in reality it’s just about covering up tax hikes, locking you in your house and repossessing your car.
(…)
Anyone with a brain and who wants to go and find out will learn that this green agenda pushed by them has nothing to do with the environment. All this gay stuff they’re pushing has nothing to do with gay people. It’s all about control. The people who run the world want more control. If they care about global warming and sea level rise, then why is every multi-millionaire and billionaire buying a beach house? It is the first place where they buy their villa, and like all of us, we will drown next year. It’s all a lie. They don’t care. But speaking like that, carbon credits, carbon limits, that you can’t drive a car after 20:00 because of the environment, that you can’t eat meat because of the environment, stay at home, eat bugs, be a slave, be a slave, be a slave…
Are Tate’s claims “a mind-blowing truth”?
Contrary to Tate’s claims, global warming and sea level rise is not a “lie”. Climate change is real and caused by the human factor, which is supported by a number of scientific evidence.
Global warming is a term that refers to the long-term warming of the Earth’s surface observed since the pre-industrial period. It is caused by human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, which increases the levels of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. Climate change represents long-term changes in weather patterns on Earth, which are partly caused by the emission of greenhouse gases.
There is ample evidence that climate change is real. Some of these include the apparent increase in temperatures on Earth, changes in bird migration patterns, the movement of certain marine species northward, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the reduction of Arctic sea ice, as well as the rise in average global sea level.
According to a study from 2016, more than 90 percent of climatologists, whose work has been published in scientific publications, are of the opinion that recent global warming is caused by the human factor, and more than 99.99% of scientific studies that have undergone peer review since 2012, agree that the human factor causes the new climate changes.
Despite this, narratives that deny climate change are very popular in the public sphere. As stated in Raskrinkavanje’s analysis from July 22, 2022, oil companies have been financing the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories about climate change for decades (1, 2, 3, 4).
What is the Green New Deal?
The Green New Deal mentioned by Tate is a resolution of the US Congress from 2019, which sets out a plan to combat climate change. Its goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and, at the same time, solve social problems, such as economic inequality and racial injustice.
As a 2019 New York Times article explains, the resolution is non-binding, meaning nothing in it has to become law.
Claims about bans on eating meat and owning cars, as well as forcing people to eat insects, have long appeared in “conspiracy” narratives and have no basis in facts. Raskrinkavanje already wrote about them in the following analyses:
Although it is clear that cars pollute the environment and that reducing meat consumption could be good for the environment, no one is forced to stop driving or eating meat if they do not want to.
It is impossible to know the motives of politicians, officials and other influential figures for supporting measures to combat climate change or whether each of them really cares about the planet. However, this does not mean that climate change is a “lie” and that measures to preserve the environment are a means of control.
Who is Andrew Tate?
Andrew Tate is a former kickboxer who has gained a lot of popularity on social media in recent months. Tate became known to the general public in 2016 when he was kicked out of the British version of the reality show “Big Brother”, after a video of him hitting a woman with a belt appeared. He claimed the video was edited and taken out of context. Tate and his brother Tristan ran a website where, according to their confession, they deceived men by charging them to talk to women via video camera, with the promise that they could meet them if they paid a certain amount of money, which in the end would not happen. In April of this year, the Romanian police searched the house where Andrew Tate lives with his brother and from which they run a site with web cam models, due to a report that the woman who lives there is being held against her will. The search turned into an investigation into human trafficking and rape, which is still ongoing.
Tate himself was accused of abuse while living in the UK, prompting him to move to Romania, according to a Guardian article from August 6, 2022. The article also states that Tate himself said that 40% of the reason he moved to that country was that he could “get away with rape charges more easily”.
Andrew Tate has also launched an online course called “Hustler’s University”, which claims to teach how to get rich for £36 a month. In an article published on Sportskeeda on August 4, 2022, the course is described as a pyramid scheme, and it is stated that the same information taught in it can be found for free on the Internet.
Tate made various misogynistic claims in his speeches and guest appearances. He claimed that women are the property of men, that they belong in the home, that rape victims should “bear their share of responsibility” for what happened to them, and promoted violence against women in partner relationships.
At the end of August this year, Tate’s accounts were removed from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube for violating the terms of use. Social networks reacted after numerous appeals from various groups, mostly concerned parents, who claimed that Tate was promoting a dangerous ideology to its mostly young audience.
We assess the claims that global warming and increased sea levels are a “lie” and that the population is being controlled through the “green agenda”, originally published on August 26, 2022, as fake news and a conspiracy theory. We consider all transmissions of these claims to be fake news and a conspiracy theory.