https://whatabouttheroads.co/climate-lockdowns-are-coming/
By MATT NILSSON
In this three-part series we will exam the transformation from COVID lockdowns to climate lockdowns. In Part I we will establish a timeline of the dark side of the environmental movement. In Part II we’ll be looking into the specifics of what a climate lockdown really means and what impact current lockdown measures have had on the environment. In Part III we will see how it fits into the bigger picture of sustainable development as described by international organizations such as the United Nations and what can be done to derail this agenda.
While much of the world remains held hostage by their governments there are impending signs of both hope and doom for the future. Across the United States the courts are overturning emergency orders enacted by governors, in Europe crowds continue to gather in huge numbers in protest of lockdown measures, while others reopen with “pre-covid” standards. Simultaneously, shocking levels of cruelty on behalf of the government continue to pour out of Melbourne and in parts of Quebec all forms of private social gatherings are now forbidden.
These terrifying trends are now being coupled with calls for what are being dubbed “climate lockdowns” to avert further destruction. In her article, professor Mariana Mazzucato calls for a total and radical overhaul of society molded by the hands of the government because of climate change. We’ll address the science she uses to justify these measures later. Nowhere does the article mention that the professor receives funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institutes or explain how that may have swayed her conclusions.
This comes as more and more data disrupts the narrative that COVID-19 requires pandemic status. Since March we’ve learned that PCR tests are unreliable, that the science behind masks is doubtful at best, that the virus still hasn’t been isolated, and that places that didn’t lockdown (Sweden, South Dakota, Nicaragua, etc) are faring just fine. The rise in protests and condemnations of lockdown policies makes complete sense in this context but a more alarming question still remains: why are so many governments stubbornly refusing to end lockdowns or even doubling down on these policies?
Perhaps it is because these measure were never about protecting the public’s health. The narrative of COVID-19 as a tool of control is very well-documented at this point but with climate lockdowns emerging as part of the story it’s worth focusing in on the environmental movement and seeing what tools of control have been deployed here as well. The idea that humans should be good stewards of the planet is not being questioned but the origins and evolution of environmentalism, and some of the key players involved, require close scrutiny as there is a dark side of this movement that can’t be ignored.
The Apocalyptic Origins of Environmentalism
Modern environmentalism can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s as scientific communities, grassroots organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and eventually governments became more engrossed in man’s relationship with the planet. On the plus side there was more attention placed on cherishing the natural world, respecting animal life, and reversing environmental degradation but there also emerged an apocalyptical view of the future where mankind would destroy the planet.
In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was released and warned of the impending death of hundred of millions in the coming decades due to resource depletion and food shortages brought on by overpopulation. This was his take on mankind’s growth:
A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people….We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.
Some of these decisions included eugenics-based solutions like forced sterilization and gene-editing. Though the theories in this book are now largely discredited it went on to become a best-seller and planted eugenics-based solutions in the public consciousness.
That same year the Club of Rome was founded. A group of industrialists, politicians, scientists, and academics met in Italy with dreams of ushering in a new global order. In 1972 they further popularized theories of a human-driven ecological collapse in The Limits of Growth which has been translated into dozens of languages and sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. The book echoed Ehrlich’s vision of a world of depleted resources, environmental destruction, and rampant food shortages in and around 2020 due to overpopulation. Their proposed solution was to have an elite group direct society through a “controlled, orderly transition” into a new vision of the world by means of population control.
Subsequent publications would expand on the organization’s dismal view of humanity’s potential and echo Ehrlich’s mankind-as-cancer metaphor. In 1975’s Mankind at the Turning Point they open their work with a lovely epigraph from a Rockefeller-funded scientist named Alan Gregg who believes, “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
Almost two decades later in 1991 The Club of Rome published another report, The First Global Revolution which proposed a plan for navigating the 21st century. The authors believed that humanity was on the verge of global societal change largely brought on by anthropogenic climate change and that current forms of government were not suited to find resolutions. Instead they proposed that a global system of interlocking non-governmental institutions above the nation state level be created. In order to convince the public that surrendering much of their sovereignty was worth it they needed to create a common enemy to work in unison against. This is what they came up:
In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.
It’s easy to dismiss these passages as the reflections from a small group of people from a different time. However, this isn’t just a fringe activist group; the men and women of The Club of Rome have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. Members have included David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Maurice Strong, Kofi Annan, Anne Ehrlich, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev among others. The influence these members carries extends into the United Nations, halls of governments around the world, major philanthropic organizations and environmentalist NGOs, prestigious universities, and other prominent think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
There is truth in this line of thinking. Time and time again governments have failed to do what is right in the name of the environment but this is the result of corruption, collusion, and incompetence which does not necessitate even more centralization and unaccountability from a supranational bureaucracy. The names and institutions mentioned above are the same ones supporting the tyrannical handling the current so-called pandemic, when they begin issuing demands for climate lockdowns will we really believe it’s because they have a strong desire to save the planet?
Environmentalism As Religion
In the last 40 years environmentalism has taken on many elements of a religion. Fewer and few people identify as traditionally religious in the western world but there is speculation that the human brain is hardwired for faith so it follows that in the absence of conventional religious devotion the mind would grasp for something else to believe in. This is of course not true of everyone who wants the earth to be habitable for future generations but for many devotees the parallels are uncanny.
An environmental priest class has emerged whereby climate edicts from Greta Thunberg, Bill Nye, and Prince Charles mean as much to the environmentalist as religious edicts from imams do to Muslims. Religious imagery from the Book of Genesis like the Garden of Eden evoked by climate activists when they envision a paradisiacal future where humanity acts in harmony with the planet once again. Should we fail to live up to this destiny divine retribution will come for modern man like it came for the sinners in Sodom and Gomorrah. The findings in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are used in green sermons, much like passages in the Bible, Koran, or Torah are in houses of worship. Holy sites like Jerusalem and Mecca are for religious pilgrims what Antarctica and Glacier National Park are for the environmentalists claiming they wish to see climate change in action.
When it comes to religion we already know what happens when dogmatic thinking goes too far. The religious wars and inquisitions of history are looked back upon as blights on the story of humanity’s progress through the ages. The environmental movement is relatively new but, as has already been seen in extreme cases, it can be hijacked by orthodoxy and blinded by apocalyptic visions. It is this sort of emotional thinking that allows for proponents of climate lockdowns to propose an inhumane agenda of extreme isolation, economic destruction, and centralization of power.
We’ve Reached The Tipping Point
Climate change goes by many names. In the past it was global cooling and then global warming before it became climate change. Ad executives are working on rebranding the phenomenon and it may soon be known as The Great Collapse or Climate Collapse. It turns out almost all observable natural phenomenon can be attributed to climate change as well. Droughts, floods, hotter temperatures, cooler temperatures, the extinction of one species, the abundance of another, hurricanes, earthquakes, and fires have all been cited as the result of climate change. Weirdly the sun’s impact on the climate is often left out in favor of blaming man.
The convenience of all of this does much to remove the veneer of global warming climate change being an infallible scientific doctrine, free from the subjectivity of man’s own desires. It’s what makes it possible for Mariana Mazzucato’s to casually drop “Shifting Arctic ice, raging wildfires in western US states and elsewhere, and methane leaks in the North Sea” as proof we have arrived at the “tipping point” on climate change without any citation or context. Depending on who you ask we have seen many so-called tipping points come and go for decades now so they need to be taken with a grain of salt, as do the uncited claims she makes.
First let’s head north into the Arctic. When she says that the ice is shifting she presumably means that the climate itself is shifting which is resulting in less ice. Yes, ice in parts of the Arctic have been on a downward trend (noted in the link above) over the past couple of decades but this trend is only correct if you stop looking at data from before 1979. There is no context given by Mazzucato here and when we find for example that the Greenland Ice Sheet is between 5,000 and 10,000 feet thick and the melt has only been 10 feet in the past 30 years we have to be careful of jumping to conclusions that this constitutes whatever a tipping point is.
The wildfires in the western U.S. and Australia are unpleasant to watch and tragic for those who live in those parts of the world. But, it’s worth stressing wildfires in these areas are absolutely natural phenomenon that have been going on long before the advent of climate change. It’s true that man has played a role in these situations but this has more to do with mismanagement than anthropogenic climate change. In Australia government policies have done much to prevent prescribed burns and other wildfire management techniques from happening which bona fied scientific researcher Jo Nova sees as the catalyst for the disaster of 2020. In the United States, California’s mismanagement of their forests is equally at fault while in Oregon arson is suspected as the cause of several fires.
In August, Greenpeace released a report on found two methane leaks off the coast of England, the result of Exxon Mobil and Sweden’s Stena Drilling Company drilling for oil in 1990. While this isn’t good news Greenpeace’s own report explains that, “The leaking borehole has been returned by Exxon Mobil to the British state who in 2000 determined that further monitoring was not required, believing that the reservoir would soon be depleted. But 30 years later the greenhouse gas keeps escaping into the atmosphere.” Their own findings show that government incompetence, and potentially collusion with Exxon, allowed this problem to continue on unabetted for three decades and yet, Mazzucato believes this justifies climate lockdowns for all of humanity as retribution.
Once again, the attempt here is not to throw the baby out with the bath water and denounce the environmentalist movement outright. Absolutely nobody denies that the climate changes and yes, the world is absolutely impacted by human presence and sometimes quite negatively. The way forward should be with open science, transparent dialogue, and accountability at all levels of society because otherwise it will be left to the elite to call the shows for the rest of mankind and we know that doesn’t usually go in mankind’s favor. Do we really trust that people like Mariana Mazzucato and her ilk at places like the Rockefeller Foundation, the same people calling mankind the enemy of the planet, have what’s best for humankind in mind when they call for climate lockdowns?
Climate Lockdowns and A Brave New World
In Part II we will take a closer look at Mazzucato’s proposals for climate lockdowns and see what impact the current lockdowns have had on the environment. Is locking down society as simple as confining people to their homes while the planet takes a break or is there something more to this call for tyranny?
