Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: Android | RSS | More
Having been knocked from their perch (at least temporarily) as the number one existential threat facing mankind by COVID-19, climate alarmists have taken to comparing the two “crises” and how the citizens of Planet Earth can learn how to tackle so-called climate change from how we’ve tackled coronavirus.
All it takes, you see, is a hefty dose of authoritarianism.
Time’s 2019 person-of-the-year, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg sees a direct connection between the response to the coronavirus and how governments should attack climate change. “[The response to the virus] shows one thing: That once we are in a crisis, we can act to do something quickly, act fast,” said the 17-year-old Thunberg, who believes that both she and her father contracted coronavirus though neither was tested.
“Though it must be in a different way to how we have acted in this case, we can act fast and change our habits and treat a crisis like a crisis,” Thunberg stated.
That’s true enough, if governments continue to act in authoritarian ways, such as limiting movement and closing businesses such as they have during the COVID-19 scare. But the costs of such actions, both financially and to our liberties, are immense. Had Greta studied economics in school instead of not going, she might understand that.
In Great Britain, climate activists claiming to be from Extinction Rebellion (XR), a global climate alarmist group, promoted flyers that said, “Corona is the cure; Humans are the disease,” in a now-removed tweet. Official XR leadership has denied any responsibility for the tweet or the flyers, which came from an account called XR-East Midlands.
But the XR-East Midlands account has been followed by other XR groups all over the U.K. If it is true that “far right groups” placed the anti-human placard and manned the XR-East Midlands Twitter accountwas, as the main twitter account for XR in U.K. claims, they’ve been sleeper agents disguised as climate alarmists for a while now.
Remember back when the Queen of England’s husband, Prince Phillip, made this pithy remark? “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.” It would seem that whoever is manning the XR-East Midlands Twitter account agrees with Prince Phillip’s Malthusian notions.
Sources more official than Thunberg and XR have also chimed in on how coronavirus relates to environmental issues. Inger Anderson, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program says that the COVID-19 outbreak is nature’s way of sending humanity a message. Speaking to The Guardian and referencing the coronavirus, Australian bushfires, heat records, and the locust invasion in Kenya, Anderson said, “At the end of the day [with] all these events, nature is sending us a message.”
“Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbor diseases that can jump to humans.” If Anderson is truly concerned about too much proximity with nature, then, then Anderson should have significant issues with various “green” projects, such as massive solar and wind farms that often include clear-cutting of forests to make room for them. Don’t such things contribute to the “continued erosion of wild spaces” that she’s so concerned about?
Climate alarmists worldwide have been attempting to use legislation aimed at coronavirus to sneak in climate related legislation.
In the United States, Democrats have attempted to ram through various “green” projects such as requiring airlines to offset all carbon emissions by 2025 and allotting money in the bill to study ways to cut carbon emissions in aerospace sector in the coronavirus stimulus bill.
Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the British government on climate issues, believes that the pandemic offers a possibility for a fresh start in the way the world thinks about and manages climate. “The COP [the annual UN climate summit] itself will have to change and the themes of the COP will need to be more driven by a green recovery,” Stark said. “Globally, the question will be … ‘Do we lock in the use of fossil fuels in our infrastructure choices … or do we instead look to a green stimulus?’”
The European Union announced today that any coronavirus recovery plan needs to be consistent with the “green transition” aimed at making the bloc “greenhouse gas neutral” by 2050. Of the 27 countries in the EU, only Poland is holding out on signing such a plan.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” former Obama acolyte and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel once famously said. Climate alarmists and leftists in general see opportunity in times of crisis. They hope to ride the coat tails of the coronavirus and advance the cause of climate change anyway they can.
Coronavirus and climate change do have some things in common. For instance, they’re both fueled by media hysteria. And in both cases, the cure is likely worse than the disease.
Photo: blackred / iStock / Getty Images Plus
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects, with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected]
