ISO Standards Developer, IFAN President Outs Himself as Climate Denier

Former IFAN President and current ANSI and ISO standards developer Dave Felinksi has outed himself as an unhinged climate denier, because that sort of thing qualified one for sober standards-making these days.

The International Federation of Standards Users (IFAN) has long been a worldwide scam, purporting to carry the views of standards users to ISO, while in fact doing the opposite. It exists purely as a secondary marketing arm for ISO, pushing ISO’s pre-set views down to users and providing no user feedback at all back to Geneva.

Per its marketing materials, IFAN exists in part:

To consolidate standards users’ interests and views on all aspects of standardization and conformity assessment, and to cooperate with international and regional standardizing bodies in order to communicate user views to these organizations

To encourage openness, transparency and awareness in conformity assessment structures, procedures and results

To engage with relevant organizations involved in conformity assessment in order that the views of IFAN members are taken into account

That’s not what it does, though. In the 2000s, Oxebridge was one of only two US corporate members of IFAN, alongside Microsoft. I thought this would be a tremendous opportunity to ensure ISO standards took user viewpoints into consideration when developing standards. I was quickly disabused of that notion when I was simply flooded with copy-and-paste press releases from ISO, and every attempt to provide feedback in the opposite direction was ignored outright. During the years Oxebridge as a member, I don’t think anyone at IFAN ever responded to a single thing I wrote them; they kept taking my money, though.

A few years later, when Felinski was President, I wrote to him appealing for IFAN to strengthen its representation of users over ISO itself, and he ignored me entirely.

I though the was just another shill. It appears it’s much worse, and he’s an outright drooling boltneck.

Over on LinkedIn, IFAN posted a boast about their annual meeting, and now they are (still) so proud to be liaison organization to ISO and IEC. I responded that they should prioritize users first — it’s in the name after all — and noted that IFAN, like ISO, was ignoring all this climate change business by holding in-person meetings rather then saving some airplane fuel and doing them online. As you recall, ISO has gone all-in on using standards to enforce the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on climate change, but has refused to to take actual steps to curb its own climate-hostile activities.

I was slapped back by IFAN’s former president, Dave Felinski, who not only doubled-down on IFAN’s suck-up position to ISO, he then took it even further and decided that outing himself as a climate denier would be a good idea, as well as a bad speller:

Felinski also heads up the official ANSI Technical Advisory Group for B11 standards related to equipment safety, and represents the US on ISO TC 39 and ISO TC 199. His group is actually ANSI accredited for this role, even as ANSI has adopted ISO’s posture on climate change. Felinski has also acted as Standards Program Coordinator for the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI), which publishes a lot of stuff about addressing climate change.

So, let’s unpack that. ISO tells the entire planet that we need to pay attention to climate change, going so far as to mandate the insertion of related requirements into all its management system standards, whether environmental concerns are on-topic or not. It did so through executive fiat: no voting, no consensus, and in violation of all of ISO’s own procedures as well as the World Trade Organization’s TBT regulations.  Then, it refused to adopt practical climate-friendly changes to its own policies, like fully-remote meetings, to ensure it remains “attractive” to duped volunteers who want to travel around the world and write off the trips on their taxes.

Now we see they are not only entirely ignoring their own concerns for climate change, but actually allow nutjob, froth-mouthed MAGA lunatics like Felinski to spout debunked climate denier nonsense in their name.

To be fair, though, it’s not like he would face any consequence. ISO has embraced a host of horrible people, including a lot of racists (here and here and here and here, just for starters), so their concerns for the world are entirely performative. But those performances work; the UN, World Bank, IMF, OAS, and entire world governments buy into their theatrics and continue to hand them more and more power every year.

So, there’s no chance at all that either ANSI or ISO will boot him from any committees, since he’s dutifully pushing paper for them, even if he thinks their official positions on climate change are scams.

What a shit show.