Translating Agenda 2030

Summit of the Future

In a series of essays, I will address the looming United Nations Summit of the Future, to be held in September during the 79th General Assembly, where member states will sign a new Pact of the Future, while also agreeing to two other outcomes documents: the Declaration on Future Generations and the Global Digital Compact.

These documents have been written in support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the “global governance” regime that it aims to establish. Likewise, as an introduction to Agenda 2030 and the series to follow, I am issuing a new and updated version of Chapter 12, “Translating Agenda 2030,” originally published in my book, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda (2023).

(This essay is truncated in your email; the complete essay is only available on Substack.)

Translating Agenda 2030

With its apparent concern for the universal “common good,” leftist ideology provides the best cover for disguising totalitarian ambitions. Leftist totalitarians attempt to exert control over the world for the supposed welfare of the masses, the community, the disadvantaged, the developing world, women, children, the economy, and “the planet.” Rightist totalitarianism, on the other hand, if it even exists, wears its totalitarian ambitions on its sleeve. It openly suggests that it must dominate for its own sake, because of some putative natural superiority. Such avowed supremacism does not represent a viable approach for achieving global hegemony. This explains why rightist totalitarianism is very rare, while leftist totalitarianism has virtually dominated the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (Nazism is a curious case. It was both socialist,¹ while also race supremacist.) Rightist totalitarianism, if it ever exists, offers little opportunity for buy-in from the masses; its aim for domination is made too explicit. Leftist totalitarianism, on the other hand, poses as benign and clearly beneficial, as the de facto no-fault ideology whose moral probity is deemed unassailable. A supposed universal concern for “the common good” not only hides its totalitarian ambitions from the masses but also, perhaps, from the elites themselves.

As we have seen, when not avowedly socialist themselves, elites have allied themselves with communists, socialists, fascists, and other such political ideologues and their camps. Having the same object in view as the elites—a singular world system—these ideologues and camps serve the elite’s totalitarian ambitions. This explains why globalist billionaires like George Soros routinely support leftist causes and groups while plebeian leftists essentially act as their unwitting foot soldiers and dupes.

As for the elites themselves, there is no sure way to know for sure—other than from confessions or Freudian slips—whether they consciously pursue totalitarianism, or whether they believe the egalitarian ideology and rhetoric that they apparently embrace.

It not as if the totalitarian ambition of leftist elites is anything new, however. The roots of its globalist totalitarianism can be traced from the Rhodes Society to the Chatham House to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Bilderberg Group to the Club of Rome to the WEF and the Trilateral Commission. (See Chapter 8.)

Meanwhile, the totalitarian ambitions of the UN have long been descried and criticized. As the CATO Institute’s Doug Bandow wrote in 1985:

[T]he UN has been actively promoting a comprehensive and totalitarian system of global management…The overriding UN ideology is one of international control of natural, financial, and informational resources, as well as the global regulation of economic and even cultural activities²

Bandow goes on to state that “world socialism” is the UN’s philosophy. This is illustrated in hundreds of UN reports and declarations. Consider these statements from the 1976 Vancouver Declaration On Human Settlements regarding land ownership, for example:

Land is an essential element in development of both urban and rural settlements. The use and tenure of land should be subject to public control because of its limited supply through appropriate measures and legislation including agrarian reform policies (emphasis mine).³

Land, because of its unique nature and the crucial role it plays in human settlements, cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private ownership of land is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. Social justice, urban renewal, and development, the provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole…(emphasis mine).

Instead, the pattern of land use should be determined by the long-term interests of the community…

Public control of land use is therefore indispensable to its protection as
an asset.⁴

I will add that the UN has apparently been informed by the Leninist notion that imperialism is late-stage capitalism (a conflation of political plunder and economic activity), and that the developing world is the proletariat exploited by wealthier nations.⁵ This zero-sum thinking—premised on the false notion that the creation of wealth produces poverty for others and depends on it—informs the UN’s many declarations and demands.

We have already seen that the UN’s ideology is an elite-managed socialism. Bandow adds the following: “In addition to providing a forum for the ideology of global management, the UN also helps underwrite the development and spread of redistributionist ideas.” That is, the UN’s pronouncements, while not necessarily binding on member states, support the propensity of states to engage in centralized planning and management. Such planning and management grow the state and add to its powers. The UN thus works to undermine free market principles, thwarting the developing world’s full participation in the free market and likewise cosigning on the developing world’s poverty. This global management ideology does not yield to the self-direction of those it claims to serve but rather issues from an international elite whose power the UN represents and nurtures.

It is with such socialist, statist, and elitist inclinations in mind that we must read “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (hereafter “Agenda 2030”).⁶

While Agenda 2030 does not address climate change exclusively, the document is shot through with climate change catastrophism and an overall environmental alarmism. The belief that the planet is facing a climate emergency and worsening environmental degradation informs the entire agenda. The state of emergency is used as a pretext for exerting centralized control.

The words “sustainable,” “sustainability,” “sustainably,” and “sustainable development” are used over 200 times in the 41-page document, including the word “sustainable” in the title, although the terms are never defined. The meaning of these cognate terms can be gleaned by tracing their historical roots.

Although he didn’t use the term, the concept of “sustainable growth” dates to Thomas Malthus’s (in)famous Essay on Population, first published in 1798.⁷ As discussed in Chapter 9, Malthus argued that human population, when left unchecked, tends to grow exponentially, while the resources that humans depend on for sustenance tend to grow arithmetically. According to Malthus, human beings inevitably encounter natural limits to population growth (and happiness). He didn’t provide an adequate explanation for why human population naturally outstrips that of the species on which it depends for its alimentary needs—except to point to the limits of space and nutriments imposed on other species and the (apparently insatiable) sex drive of human beings. But there is no reason to assume that human population grows exponentially while the population of the species it depends on grows arithmetically. The premise entirely discounts the power of human ingenuity to increase production. (This premise also led Malthus to deny the perfectibility of human beings and society and to inveigh against the “Poor Laws” in England, which provided the poor relief that he argued should be discontinued because it only increased misery by encouraging excess reproduction.)

As previously discussed, Malthusianism was transmuted into Neo-Malthusianism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, evolving into a progressive ideology whose adherents advocated (often coercive) birth control methods and family planning.

The Club of Rome, the Neo-Malthusian association founded in 1968 in Italy, used the term “sustainable” six times in its first major publication, The Limits to Growth (1972)—in connection with panic around population growth, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.⁸ These same associations attached to its frequent use of  the word “sustainable” in The First Global Revolution, published in 1992, which added climate change to the Club of Rome’s list of pressing and interlocking issues facing humanity (“the global problematique”).⁹ Published in the same year, the Club of Rome’s Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future presents an even more dire picture of unfettered economic and population growth than its forebear, The Limits to Growth. It uses the word “sustainable” no less than 128 times.¹⁰

In the 1987 “Brundtland Report,” also called “Our Common Future,” the World Commission on Environmental Development (WCED)—an international group of environmental “experts,” politicians, and civil servants—coined the now ubiquitous  term, “sustainable development.”¹¹ Published at the behest of the General Assembly of the UN, with Maurice Strong as the leading commissioner, the UN report figures “sustainable development” as “intimately linked to the dynamics of population growth.”¹² Population growth, the report argues, is more problematic in developing nations than in developing ones: “A child born in a country where levels of material and energy use are high places a greater burden on the Earth's resources than a child born in a poorer country.”¹³ This belief translates into the insistence that the developed world must reduce its consumption (and population), which connects to the WEF’s economic model of reduced expectations and consumption for the majority in the developed world. The WCED used the term “sustainable development” a total of 197 times to describe the impacts of economic and population growth on traditional communities, “ecosystem conservation,” resource depletion and degradation, “equity,” food security, global warming, pollution, international conflicts, and in consideration of national sovereignty, the last of which is seen as an impediment to sustainable development.

From these Neo-Malthusian documents, we may conclude that terms with the root word “sustainable” point to the belief that the human population and the economy cannot continue to grow safely and “equitably.” These texts represent Neo-Malthusianism because they posit new limits to economic and population growth and new problems deriving from such growth. Further, we can conclude from the uses of terms with the root word “sustainable” that environmentalism, including climate change catastrophism, is inextricably connected with population control “ethics,” or Neo-Malthusianism. 

The UN’s Agenda 2030 draws directly on such Neo-Malthusian roots. The report states: “We reaffirm the outcomes of all major United Nations conferences and summits which have laid a solid foundation for sustainable development,” including “the Programme of Action of the UN’s International Conference on Population and Development.”¹⁴ As discussed in Chapter 9, this Programme of Action builds on five previous international and world conferences on population, including four UN conferences and the League of Nations’ seminal World Population Conference, which involved Malthusian-eugenicist, Margaret Sanger and eugenicist Raymond Pearl. (Pearl was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.) The UN also promotes birth control, including abortion,¹⁵ as well as advocating “gender equality,”¹⁶ which, as we have seen, amounts to the exclusive promotion of careerism and birth control for women, both largely advanced to reduce reproduction. The UN also opposes unlimited, unfettered, and uncontrolled economic growth, which is intimately connected to population growth. The main pretext for problematizing economic growth for the UN is the protection of the environment, especially in connection with climate change. The enviro-Neo-Malthusian preoccupation with unfettered growth, including population growth, is embodied in Agenda 2030. Furthermore, given its collectivist ethos, its penchant for advocating centralized control over the economy, and its climate catastrophism, the solutions are always top-down dictates. To avert disaster, a statist and “stakeholder” elite must steer the economy and manage/reduce world development and control population.

Agenda 2030 includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets. The SDGs are the successors to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)¹⁷ and UN Agenda 21,¹⁸ the latter of which was launched as the result of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro and led by WEF board member Maurice Strong.¹⁹ The 17 SDGs, along with my translations, follow:

Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Translation: Exert centralized government and stakeholder control using central banks, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Word Bank, possibly using central bank digital currencies (CBDCs; see Part IV) to rapidly redistribute wealth.

Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
Translation: Exert centralized governmental and stakeholder control over agriculture with the consolidation of land ownership by the state or preferred owners; reduce/eliminate nitrates in fertilizers; eliminate pesticides in farming; introduce vertical urban farming; introduce new “sustainable” sources of protein (insects and synthetic meats); redistribute wealth to draw down consumption in the developed world.

Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Translation: Redistribute health care with centralized governmental and stakeholder planning and control; promote mandatory vaccinations through the World Health Organization (WHO); possibly use technology to monitor organs and organ systems reporting to central databases (the Internet of Bodies (IoB); see Part IV).

Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Translation: Exert centralized government and intergovernmental control over education; eliminate ideological opposition to UN objectives; promote collectivist ideology (propaganda and reeducation).

Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
Translation: Promote careerism as the path for women as well as governmental and intergovernmental sponsored family planning through birth control (including abortion) to reduce population growth.

Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
Translation: Exert centralized governmental and stakeholder control over water resources; dictate acceptable access to and use of rivers and streams by controlling and/or eliminating unapproved industries that rely on water resources (such as fracking); privatize water with ownership in the approved hands, etc.

Goal 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
Translation: Promote and legislate renewable energy to the exclusion of fossil-fuel-based energy; exercise centralized control of energy production and distribution using government sanctions, subsidies, taxes, and financial pressure on corporations (ESGs); outmode/outlaw gasoline consumption and gas-driven locomotion; monitor and restrict carbon-based energy use with individual carbon footprint tracking (see Part IV); allow/encourage/mandate the purchase of carbon credits from the poor by the wealthy.

Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.
Translation: Exert centralized control of the economy by governments and stakeholders using subsidies and sanctions to curtail/redirect growth in line with climate change catastrophist projections; provide state-based employment for the unemployed.

Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
Translation: Exert centralized governmental and stakeholder control over infrastructure development to eliminate fossil-fuel-powered infrastructure with subsidies for renewables and sanctions and prohibitive taxes on fossil fuels.

Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries.
Translation: Redistribute wealth by central planners within and especially between nation states; transfer wealth from the developed to the developing world to prevent development not in line with climate catastrophism and to fund sustainable development.

Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
Translation: Exert centralized governmental and stakeholder control over urban planning through government-backed architectural projects; limit living space through “smart” architectural designs and zoning laws; limit resource use through “smart” monitoring technologies and smart cities; locate populations within reach of public transportation to reduce/eliminate automobile use; overwrite zoning laws that prevent the building of high-rise housing in the suburbs.

Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
Translation: Exert centralized governmental and stakeholder control over production and consumption to reduce/eliminate the use of fossil fuels and meat consumption and enforce the use of renewable energy in factories and plants through subsidies, sanctions, and taxes; implement and mandate ESGs across all sectors of the economy (the WEF helps here); exert governmental and stakeholder control over farming to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions; introduce new “sustainable” sources of protein (insects and synthetic meats).

Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. (Acknowledging that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change.)
Translation: Climate change catastrophism stemming from IPCC reports must dictate energy policies and all other resource use policies, which must be directed by the UN. All other sources of information must be deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation” and dismissed/condemned as climate change “denialism” or akin to violent extremism.

Goal 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.
Translation: Exert centralized governmental, intergovernmental, and stakeholder control over oceans and other large bodies of water; control access to oceans and bays; limit/outlaw drilling on ocean floors; control fishing rights, etc.

Goal 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
Translation: Exert centralized governmental and stakeholder control over land use; revert farmland to nature conservatories (see the following chapter); induce states and/or approved stakholders (private buyers) to accumulate and control land to prevent unsustainable/unwanted farming and development; reintroduce wild species and reduce the population of farm animals that putatively contribute to global warming. 

Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
Translation: Peacekeeping must come from UN dictates; unapproved wars are “unsustainable,” and states must be controlled by international law stemming from the UN; punish violators and “violent extremists,” including those who resist UN dictates; use international bodies like NATO to pressure nations to abide by UN decrees; law becomes international by virtue of universal governmental adoption of UN policy recommendations. Introduce digital identity and make the allocation of “human rights” hinge on its adoption.

Goal 17:  Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.
Translation: Turn policy recommendations into law; enroll corporate and state partners in the efforts to meet the SDGs (the WEF and its corporate partnerships apply here).

The meaning of Agenda 2030 comes into focus when we understand that consumption patterns in the developed world are considered harmful to the environment and are thought to exacerbate climate change. Redistributing wealth from the developed to the developing world thus reduces production and consumption in the developed world, where most of the damage to the environment is thought to take place. Likewise, equity—the redistribution of wealth—leads to sustainability, and vice versa. Thus, “equity” is not only supposed to help the poor but also is thought to mitigate negative environmental impacts. Further, population control is necessary so that increased production and consumption (growth) do not become sources of additional environmental damage, including exacerbated climate change. “Gender equality” must be understood in these terms. It represents the financial, medical, and sociopolitical encouragement of careerism and “reproductive health” (birth control) for women as a means for reducing population growth. Neo-Malthusian constraints are thus adopted “voluntarily.” (See Chapter 9.)

Thus, Agenda 2030 promotes socialist redistribution, while relying on enviro-Neo-Malthusianism. Underlying this vision is zero-sum thinking. According to this conception, wealth is necessarily represented as a static, fixed sum—not only because resources are regarded as finite but also because growth is considered environmentally unsustainable. Thus, “equity” can only be accomplished through wealth transfers from the developed to the developing world. Wealth transfers likewise amount to bribes to the developing world to inhibit or prevent “unsustainable” development. “Equity” not only averts the supposed looming environmental catastrophe by reducing consumption in the developed world and “unsustainable” development in the developing world but also allows the agenda to appear humanitarian even while leading to economic loss in the developed world and the continued immiseration in the developing world. In short, the transfer of wealth is considered both environmentally essential and economically “fair.” This is what is meant by the Great Reset’s “fairer, greener future.”²⁰

On June 13, 2019, the WEF signed a memorandum of understanding with the UN to form a partnership centered on advancing Agenda 2030.²¹ The WEF published the “United Nations-World Economic Forum Strategic Partnership Framework for the 2030 Agenda” shortly thereafter.²² The WEF promised to help “finance” Agenda 2030. The framework also commits the WEF to helping the UN “meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” including providing assets and expertise for “digital governance” (surveillance, etc.; see Part IV). Agenda 2030 appears to have been tailor-made to accommodate the UN-WEF partnership. It adopts the stakeholder concept introduced by Schwab decades earlier. The word “stakeholders” is used no less than 13 times in the 2030 resolution. The Great Reset, then, may be understood as the WEF’s contribution to achieving the SDGs of Agenda 2030.

1. David Gordon, “Yes, the Nazis Were Socialists,” Mises Institute, October 19, 2020, https://mises.org/wire/yes-nazis-were-socialists.

2. Doug Bandow, “Totalitarian Global Management: The UN’s War on the Liberal International Economic Order,” Cato.org, Cato Institute, October 24, 1985, https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/totalitarian-global-management-uns-war-liberal-international-economic-order.

3. “Report of Habitat: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements,” United Nations, 1976, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N76/967/11/PDF/N7696711.pdf, page 8.

4. Ibid., page 61.

5. V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed September 4, 2022, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/. See publication information at website.

6. “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development | Department of Economic and Social Affairs,” United Nations, accessed October 27, 2021, https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda.

7. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, London: J. Johnson, 1798. 

8. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report of the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York, NY: Universe Books, 1972.

9. Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome, London: Simon & Schuster, 1992. 

10. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future, Post Mills, Vermont: Chelsea Green Pub., 1992. 

11. Gro Harlem Brundtland, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: "Our Common Future,"New York, NY: United Nations, 1987. 

12. Ibid, page 51.

13. Ibid.

14. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” page 8.

15. “USA: UN Experts Denounce Supreme Court Decision to Strike down Roe v. Wade, Urge Action to Mitigate Consequences,” OHCHR, June 24, 2022, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/06/usa-un-experts-denounce-supreme-court-decision-strike-down-roe-v-wade-urge.

16. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” passim.

17. “United Nations Millennium Development Goals,” United Nations, Accessed August 10, 2022, https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml.

18. “Agenda 21: Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform,” United Nations, 1991, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/outcomedocuments/agenda21/.

19. “United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, 3-14 June 1992,” United Nations, Accessed August 10, 2022, https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/rio1992.

20. Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset (Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2020), p. 57.

21. “World Economic Forum and UN Sign Strategic Partnership Framework,” World Economic Forum, Accessed October 27, 2021, https://www.weforum.org/press/2019/06/world-economic-forum-and-un-sign-strategic-partnership-framework/; “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations. United Nations, Accessed October 27, 2021, https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda.

22. “The United Nations-World Economic Forum Strategic Partnership Framework for the 2030 Agenda,” World Economic Forum, https://weforum.ent.box.com/s/rdlgipawkjxi2vdaidw8npbtyach2qbt.