Better in their words…

Despite President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and UN executives and bureaucrats doubled down this year at the poorly attended WEF gathering in Davos — could world leaders possibly be starting to catch on? — and proclaimed that nothing can stop their radical transformation of the world in the name of “climate change.”

“We are already collaborating at a scale where no one can stop; not one country, not one leader making a decision, because it’s just the right thing to do globally,” announced Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All.

“Anyone who steps back … will create a vacuum that others will fill”, said Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The ostensible goal of the climate change project is to get to “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. To do that, global leaders, led by the WEF and the UN, are apparently planning to radically transform the lives of everyone on the planet except their own.

Their plan, officially launched as the UN “Agenda 21” in 1992, during the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and now renamed “Agenda 2030,” — still under the pretext of saving the planet — sets in motion initiatives aimed at controlling every detail of people’s lives.

This agenda includes “smart cities” (also known as “15-minute cities”) that monitor, track and extract data about citizens’ lives. In addition — already in full swing, with mayors of at least 100 cities — all participants in the so-called C-40“network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis” are working on turning their cities into yet another UN concoction.

The World Economic Forum wrote on its website in 2022:

“As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical….

“[T]he “15-minute city” concept—which implies having all necessary amenities within a short walk, bike ride, or public transit trip from one’s home—has demonstrated stickiness not just as an idea, but as a powerful tool for action – from Paris to Seoul, from Bogotá to Houston.”

As with smart cities, the WEF conveniently used the Covid-19 pandemic, alongside the fictitious “climate crisis,” to legitimize the introduction of 15-minute cities:

“[W]ith COVID-19 and its variants keeping everyone home (or closer to home than usual), the 15-minute city went from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a rallying cry. Meeting all of one’s needs within a walking, biking or transit distance was suddenly a matter of life and death. The pandemic created an urgency around equitable urbanism that sidelined arguments about bike lanes and other ‘amenities’ that have roiled communities for years. “

The man who claims credit for inventing this “15-minute city” confinement plan is French-Colombian Professor Carlos Moreno. In the 1970s, he was a member of the violent Marxist Colombian M-19 guerillas, before making his way to France, where he now works as an advisor to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a socialist, who has pledged to transform Paris into a 15-minute city. Moreno also does not hide that Covid-19 conveniently supplied the perfect excuse to force 15-minute cities on an unsuspecting public, saying in a December 2021 interview:

“Were it not for Covid-19, I think that the conditions for deploying the 15-minute city concept would have been very hard to instigate. But the catastrophe of the pandemic has seen us drastically change how we live – it has forced us to reassess the nature and quality of our urban lifestyles.”

The term “15-minute city” was first coined in 2015, at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris. The purpose: To take away your freedom to move by means of your own choice in order to get to “net zero.”

“Adoptable to new or existing cities, the model is for a decentralised, polycentric city, moving away from car ownership, freeing up urban space and reducing fossil fuel use,” the RIBA Journal noted in its 2021 profile of Moreno. “It promotes diversity, innovation, citizenship and technology for common good.”

In a 2023 interview, Moreno also talked about “fostering the radical transformation of Paris,” adding:

“The global network of C40 cities have embraced this concept as the new backbone for developing urban policy post-pandemic, for promoting decarbonized mobilities – pedestrian and bike capability, local economy… and the new economic models for developing more mixed cities,”

So, people’s cities are being “radically transformed” by a shadowy “global network” of participating cities without residents having any say in what they think about this upheaval. Thirteen US cities apparently already participate in this scheme, including Austin, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC.

The C-40 website declares.

“C40 is a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis.

“Mayors of C40 cities are committed to using an inclusive, science-based and collaborative approach to cut their fair share of emissions in half by 2030, help the world limit global heating to 1.5°C, and build healthy, equitable and resilient communities.”

In 2022, the council of the university city of Oxford, in the UK, decided to split the city into six 15-minute districts. According to the UK website Spiked:

“On the surface, these 15-minute neigbourhoods might sound pleasant and convenient. But there is a coercive edge. The council plans to cut car use and traffic congestion by placing strict rules on car journeys. Under the new proposals, if any of Oxford’s 150,000 residents drives outside of their designated district more than 100 days a year, he or she could be fined £70.”

Furious residents went out to protest the measures — to no avail.

Instead of engaging with them, the local council simply cut out the phrase “15-minute city” from its proposal, while openly admitting that they would continue to do the exact same thing.

“If we want to actually engage with people about what the real problems are and what the solutions are, we don’t need the phrase 15-minute cities anymore,” one member of the council said, adding that the change would make “no noticeable difference to our planning decisions.”

Her statement reflects the undemocratic, self-entitled, authoritarian, ideology-driven agenda of the climate change movement. Popular demand, democratic inclusion and the free market play no role whatsoever. It reminds one of China — which is no coincidence. The idea embedded within the concept of the 15-minute city is not a new one – it has been practiced in Communist China since 1949. Tracking people’s mobility is – and remains – a way for self-appointed “elites” to efficiently control what they seem to regard as the “great unwashed (and incapable of making important decisions) masses.”

“For the communist regime that established itself in Beijing in 1949, mobility was synonymous with disorder,” wrote Jean-Philippe Béja, Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at the National Center for Scientific Research and the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences-Po, in Paris, in 2019.

“Once in power, the Party divided the population into classes to better control it: the members of the ‘exploiting classes’ were subject to many restrictions, while the ‘red’ classes were tasked with monitoring them. But by 1958, State control was widespread and travel was limited for all. Yet, mobility gradually became part of Chinese people’s daily lives: corporate executives would fly to their hometown on weekends; the middle classes would drive to their country homes; private cars replaced bicycles in the villages. However, far from signaling the end of State control, this apparent liberation came with unparalleled surveillance…

“The means of control have greatly evolved: you no longer have to force people to stay in their village or neighborhood to monitor them. Artificial intelligence, facial recognition, phones…

“I was in China three days ago and when you pay for something with cash, everyone looks at you as if you were from the Middle Ages. No one pays with money anymore: over there, they pay with WeChat or Alipay, through their phone, which is very easily to control. To control people, you don’t need to limit mobility anymore. The Party’s goal of controlling people hasn’t changed, it’s been updated.”

China has taken smart “15-minute cities” to the extreme. It is using biometric scanners as checkpoints, meaning that neighborhoods can turn into prisons by only being accessible through facial scans. If your “social credit” score is too low, you may not be able to enter or leave. China, increasingly, has also made entering your own apartment dependent on biometric scans with the digital “City Brain” receiving updates on the movements of its citizens, so that it knows where they are at all times. Similarly, the “City Brain” knows what people buy – cash, as mentioned, is no longer used – when they take public transport and so on. Anonymity and the right to privacy has been completely abolished.

Yet this is something that the WEF is pushing for hard and even seems to think is a delightful idea. In 2020, the WEF published an article in which it praised a new Chinese project named Cloud Valley, to be built in southwestern China’s Chongqing Municipality as a cooperation between the Danish architecture firm BIG, and the Chinese company Terminus. The WEF presented it as an idyllic scenario in the quoted exchange between the WEF architect and his Chinese partner. According to Terminus founder Victor Ai:

“The project named Cloud Valley, plans to use sensors and wifi-connected devices to gather data on everything from weather and pollution to people’s eating habits to automatically meet residents’ needs.”

BIG founding partner Bjarke Ingels said:

“It’s almost coming back to this idea of living in a village where, when you show up, even though it’s the first time you’re there, the bar tender knows your favourite drink.”

“When our environment becomes sensing and sentient … we can really open up that kind of seamlessness because the AI can recognise people coming. So it can open the door, so they don’t have to look for their key cards.”

Chinese state media, praising the project, added that it would “help society achieve carbon neutrality.” China, according to a February 2025 report, continues to build coal plants at warp speed. China’s construction of new coal-power plants in 2024 reached a “10-year high.” However, adding the magic words “carbon neutrality” keeps assuring many Westerners that they are saving the planet. So they keep on buying cheap China’s goods and enriching China’s military — enabling it to replace the United States even faster as the world’s leading superpower and at last to fulfill Chinese President Xi Jinping’s dream of finally ruling the planet.

Robert Williams is based in the United States.