Last week President Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. This was a mostly symbolic gesture, as the same alarmism being pushed prior to the agreement in 2016 is still being pushed now while nation-states like China are still ignoring it. Now Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry, under fire for boarding a private jet to Iceland to accept a climate award, is telling the United States and the world that the conditions of the Paris agreement are ‘inadequate’.
As the global climate elite push eating bugs and staying home to save the Earth on the masses, it’s worth posing the question: what will be adequate? With the Global Economic Forum in Davos approaching in April, we’re going to start hearing terms such ‘Climate Equity’ and ‘Climate Reset’ (a play on the WEF’s Great Reset) more frequently. We’ll probably also start to hear calls for climate lockdowns. I know, right now that sounds completely preposterous, but don’t these kooky ideas always find a way to bleed into the mainstream? Fifteen Days to Slow the Sun!
The possibility of climate lockdowns is already being floated by some of our greatest thinkers. They see a confluence of global crises as an opportunity. The perfect storm caused by COVID-19 and the resulting global economic meltdown offers a chance to take what they see as bold and dramatic action to save the planet. The Biden administration will certainly use the consequences of COVID to push through some green legislation, but just as before, it will not be enough in the eyes of progressives. There must always be more.
Mariana Mazzucato, an author and a professor in innovative economics at the University of London, raised the prospect of climate lockdowns in MarketWatch last September:
‘Under a “climate lockdown”, governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.’
The idea of ‘doing capitalism differently’ is the driving rhetorical motivation behind the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset (another term for the implementation of global Marxism).
Karl Lauterbach, an MP for the German Social Democratic party wrote in Die Welt last December that ‘we need measures to deal with climate change that are similar to the restrictions on personal freedom [imposed] to combat the pandemic.’ How long before this theory makes its way into news outlets and politicians’ speeches here?
Of course this idea will be explained away as simply ‘following the science’. The lockdowns which began in spring 2020 contributed to what scientists are calling the largest drop in CO2 emissions in years. The largest reason for this was a decrease of approximately 40 percent in automobile and airplane transport. The World Economic Forum praised this figure in a blog post titled ‘Emissions fell during lockdown. Let’s keep it that way.’
Climate alarmists like Greta Thunberg and John Kerry will be salivating at the prospect of using the emissions data to enact their ideas of a methane- and airplane-free future. How dare you refute it! If we can all just stay home for two weeks (which would inevitably become four weeks), it’s worth it to save the planet. Anyone who questions such proposals will be labeled a science denier and accused of wanting to kill their fellow neighbors (you know, like what you hear if you don’t wear a mask for a casual walk around the block).
How would governors and the federal government impose climate lockdowns? Simple: by declaring that climate change is an immediate public health and national security crisis, and using the same authority granted to them by public health departments to implement them under the same guidelines they did for COVID-19. Bernie Sanders and AOC announced a bill suggesting as much yesterday!
This was always the risk with the mass implementation of lockdowns. Once your leaders enforce one under the guise of public health, they will not simply set aside their power to do so again. Don’t worry though, they’re just following the science.