The following is an excerpt from Chapter 12 of The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown – By Marc Morano
CHAPTER 12 – COVID Lockdowns Morph to Climate Lockdowns
“The next crisis is already waiting for us around the corner, and it is the climate crisis.” —Klaus Schwab on July 14, 2020, during the World Economic Forum livestream on “COVID-19: The Great Reset”
The COVID lockdowns greatly accelerated the Great Reset, giving a major boost to the program of the progressive left and the climate activists, who want you to get used to living a restricted life where your everyday actions have to be approved by the government or okayed by a bureaucratic official. Our current virus-inspired government lockdown is the perfect template for the future the climate campaigners envision, with all of us living under a coercive government that takes the “climate emergency” seriously.
A “BBC Reality Check” claimed that the Great Reset has been “hijacked by conspiracy theories,” in part by “online activists who deny the existence of climate change.”
The BBC quoted Melanie Smith, an analyst who researches “disinformation,” explaining that climate skeptics focus on the Great Reset theory to “dismiss sustainability and renewable energy initiatives as an elite agenda for control.”
Why would anyone believe that the climate agenda is about an “elite agenda for control”?
Stay tuned for the answer.
In 2021 The Guardian blared this headline: “Global Lockdown Every Two Years Needed to Meet Paris CO2 Goals—Study.” The article, by Fiona Harvey, reported, “Carbon dioxide emissions must fall by the equivalent of a global lockdown roughly every two years for the next decade for the world to keep within safe limits of global heating, research has shown.”2
A prescient government-funded report by five universities in the United Kingdom (Cambridge, Imperial College, Oxford, Bath, Nottingham, and Strathclyde) titled Absolute Zero, released in November 2019, envisions what a society locked down for the sake of the climate would look like. “Stop doing anything that causes emissions regardless of its energy source…. Stop eating beef and lamb…. Either use 60% fewer cars or they will be 60% the size,” urged the report, funded by the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. By 2050, “All remaining airports close…. All shipping declines to zero.”
According to the report’s executive summary, there is no choice but to follow this draconian path because it is “the law.”
“We have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: that’s what climate scientists tell us, it’s what social protesters are asking for and it’s now the law in the UK. But we aren’t on track.”
Absolute Zero continues, “The big actions are: travel less distance, travel by train or in small (or full) electric cars and stop flying; use the heating less and electrify the boiler when next upgrading; lobby for construction with half the material for twice as long…. Each action we take to reduce emissions, at home or at work, creates a positive ripple effect….
“In addition to reducing our energy demand, delivering zero- emissions with today’s technologies requires the phasing out of flying, shipping, lamb and beef, blast-furnace steel and cement.”
Page 39 of the report bluntly states, “Ensuring carbon is at zero is a regulation issue, with prohibitions on the use of carbon similar to prohibitions on the use of asbestos.” Just to be clear, humans inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide.
“Let’s Not Let This Crisis Go to Waste”
The Ecologist magazine’s Gareth Dale summed up Absolute Zero: The “report recommends a radical transformation to the way we live. All shipping must be phased out by 2050, and likewise all use of cement-based mortar or concrete. In Britain, all airports except Heathrow and Glasgow will have to close by 2029, and those two by 2049. Aviation must become illegal by then.”
“Dismantle Capitalism”
“The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.” —climate activist Eric Holthaus welcoming the UN IPCC’s 2018 climate report
But despite the radical nature of the report, the House of Lords debated Absolute Zero in February 2020, and many members gave the report glowing reviews.
Lord Browne of Ladyton was enthusiastic: “Apart from the fact that Absolute Zero is the most accessible reading on this subject that I have come across, this report is important in three respects. First, net zero is a misleading concept. The true target is absolute or real zero. There are no significant technologies to create negative emis- sions. . . . We are beyond the 11th hour on this issue and academics are screaming for the Government to show more leadership in this regard.”
As was Baroness Walmsley: “The Climate Change Act commits us only to ‘net zero’ within the UK territory. That will not do. We need absolute zero and we must count all the emissions for which we are responsible.”
Lord Lipsey had misgivings: “I am not a denier at all; I strongly believe in dealing with climate change. But if we were to put this report before the British people, it would be received in much same way as was the Labour manifesto: ‘Oh, you cannot be serious.’”
But they were serious. Very serious.
“No One Wants to Become Climate Roadkill”
Canadian banker Mark Carney, a climate advisor to both UK prime minister Boris Johnson and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, has a plan to financially lockdown businesses that don’t adhere to the dictates of the climate agenda. “Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience, and more poverty: ‘Assets will be stranded, used gasoline-powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,’ he promises,” wrote Peter Foster, columnist for the National Post and the author of Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism.
“The agenda’s objectives are in fact already being enforced, not primarily by legislation but by the application of non-governmental—that is, non-democratic—pressure on the corporate sector via the ever-expanding dictates of ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) and by ‘sustainable finance,’ which is designed to starve non-compliant companies of funds, thus rendering them, as Carney puts it, ‘climate roadkill.’ What ESG actually represents is corporate ideological compulsion. It is a key instrument of ‘stakeholder capitalism.’
“Carney’s Agenda is promoted by the United Nations and other international bureaucracies and a vast and ever-growing array of non-governmental organizations and fora, especially the World Economic Forum (WEF), where Carney is a trustee. Also, perhaps most surprisingly, by its corporate victims. No one wants to become climate roadkill,” Foster wrote.
In September 2020 the forces behind the Great Reset raised the threat of a literal “climate lockdown.” Mariana Mazzucato, a WHO and UN advisor and Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, wrote a paper titled “Avoiding a Climate Lockdown.”
“As COVID-19 spread earlier this year, governments introduced lockdowns in order to prevent a public health emergency from spinning out of control. In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again—this time to tackle a climate emergency,” Mazzucato wrote.
“Under a ‘climate lockdown,’ governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban the consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling,” Mazzucato explained. “To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.”
“Let’s not let this crisis go to waste,” Mazzucato pleaded.
Mazzucato is not just any university professor. She serves on the United Nations Committee for Development Policy and was an advisor to the Scottish and Italian governments and the European Commissioner for Research, Science, and Innovation. She heads the Council on the Economics of Health for All, a division of the World Health Organization.12
Mazzucato’s website reveals that her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Mazzucato’s article “Avoiding a Climate Lockdown” “was first published in October 2020 by Project Syndicate, a non-profit media organization that is (predictably) funded through grants from the Open society Foundation[s], the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many, many others,” noted Kit Knightly of the OffGuardian news outlet.
“After that, [Mazzucato’s climate-lockdown article] was picked up and republished by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), which describes itself as ‘a global, CEO-led organization of over 200 leading businesses working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world.’ The WBCSD’s membership is essentially every major company in the world, including Chevron, BP, Bayer, Walmart, Google, and Microsoft. Over 200 members totaling well over 8 TRILLION dollars in annual revenue,” Knightly wrote.
“In short: an economist who works for the WHO has written a report concerning ‘climate lockdowns,’ which has been published by both a Gates+Soros backed NGO AND a group representing almost every bank, oil company, and tech giant on the planet. Whatever it says, it clearly has the approval of the people who run the world,” Knightly explained.
“The whole article is not an argument, so much as an ultimatum. A gun held to the public’s collective head. ‘Obviously, we don’t want to lock you up inside your homes, force you to eat processed soy cubes, and take away your cars,’ they’re telling us, ‘but we might have to, if you don’t take our advice,’” Knightly concluded.14
“Death by 1,000 Climate Faucis”
Kevin Hassett, the former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, warned that “the government’s pandemic power grab should make us more skeptical of climate policy.”
In an article titled “Death by 1,000 Climate Faucis,” Hassett explained that “the section of our ruling class” that is seeking “to take away our freedoms and control our lives found, in Tony Fauci, the perfect device for mass oppression.”
Hassett noted “the similarities between the apocalyptic rhetoric about COVID and that about climate change, often spouted by the same people.” He concluded that “the oppressive behavior of emboldened leftists . . . would unleash a thousand climate Faucis on us if they could.”
In May 2021 an International Energy Agency Net Zero report urged “behavioral changes” to fight climate change. The IEA report called for “a shift away from private car use,” a reduction in “upper-speed limits,” government-mandated thermostat “controls,” and limits on “hot water,” among many other restrictions.
The IEA report, titled Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector, explained how COVID lockdowns had inspired recommendations for climate-based restrictions. “The Covid-19 pandemic has increased general awareness of the potential effectiveness of behavioral changes, such as mask-wearing, and working and schooling at home. The crisis demonstrated that people can make behavioral changes at significant speed and scale if they understand the changes to be justified and that it is necessary for governments to explain convincingly and to provide clear guidance about what changes are needed and why they are needed,” the report stated.
“Regulations and mandates could enable roughly 70% of the emissions saved by behavioral changes in the NZE [net zero emissions].” These are the key points, in the words of the IEA report:
- Keeping air travel for business purposes at 2019 levels. Although business trips fell to almost zero in 2020, they accounted for just over one-quarter of air travel before the pandemic. . . .
- Keeping long-haul flights (more than six hours) for leisure purposes at 2019 levels. Emissions from an average long-haul flight are 35 times greater than from a regional flight (less than one hour)….
- Upper-speed limits, which are reduced over time in the NZE from their current levels to 100 km/h, cutting emissions from road vehicles by 3% in 2050.
- Appliance standards, which maximize energy efficiency in the buildings sector.
- Regulations covering heating temperatures in offices and default cooling temperatures for air conditioning units.16
In 2022, the International Energy Agency followed up on its 10-Point Plan to Cut Oil Use report in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the skyrocketing energy prices.
My headline at Climate Depot summed up the 2022 report: “Intl Energy Agency Urges ENERGY LOCKDOWNS: ‘Banning Use of Private Cars on Sundays…Reducing Highway Speed Limits…More Working from Home…Cutting Business Air Travel’ & SUV ‘Tax.’” I commented:
“COVID 2.0 has arrived?! The 2022 International Energy Agency’s (IEA) report sounds an awful lot like an energy version of COVID lockdowns. Instead of opening America back up for domestic energy production, we are told to suffer and do with less and are prescribed the same failed lockdown-style policies we endured for COVID. It is odd how COVID “solutions” also allegedly helped the climate and now the same solutions are being touted to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a bonus, IEA tells us these measures will also help “achieve vital climate goals.” Let’s simplify this: The proposed “solutions” to climate change, COVID, and now the Russian war are all exactly the same—hammer the poor and middle class with more restrictions on travel, less freedom, and even more surrendering of power to unelected government regulators.”
Time magazine’s April 2021 issue was devoted to celebrating the COVID lockdowns and urging climate lockdowns on that model. “The Pandemic Remade Every Corner of Society. Now It’s the Climate’s Turn,” blared the headline. The phrase “Climate is Everything” appeared at the top of the magazine’s cover.
Time claimed that COVID “can lead us to a better, greener world.” According to the article, which read like a press release from the World Economic Forum, “the COVID-19 pandemic has given the E.U. the perfect opportunity to accelerate the remaking of its economic agenda with climate at its core.” The magazine quoted Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, saying, “We are at the point where climate change means systems change—and almost every system will change.”
Climate activists have welcomed the economic slowdown. After all, climate campaigners have long wanted “planned recessions.” Warmist professor Alice Bows-Larkin, for example, has said, “Economic growth needs to be exchanged” for “planned austerity” and “whole system change.”
Brian Walsh reported in 2021 at Axios that the “degrowth” movement and advocates of “shrinking the economy” were buoyed to see COVID lockdowns crush the old normal. “Some environmentalists and economists are pushing for ‘degrowth’—stabilizing or even shrinking the economy—to avert environmental catastrophe,” Walsh explained.
“We Must Embrace . . . Ecological Leninism”
In 2020 Lund University professor Andreas Malm urged, “We must find a way of turning the environmental crisis into a crisis for fossil capital itself.” Malm pointed to Lenin as the model. “The whole strategic direction of Lenin after 1914 was to turn World War I into a fatal blow against capitalism. This is precisely the same strategic orientation we must embrace today—and this is what I mean by ecological Leninism.”
“State power should definitely be used to prevent luxury emissions perpetrated by the rich—private jets should be banned outright, as should SUVs and other vehicles that consume completely indefensible amounts of fuel. This is low-hanging fruit for the climate justice movement, as these sources of emissions are among the least socially necessary,” Malm continued.
“Some forms of consumption will indeed have to be limited or abolished outright—this cannot be done through markets or appeals to ethical consumption, but only through state regulation,” Malm added.20
“For degrowthers, simply cleaning up the global economy by switching from fossil fuels to zero-carbon sources of energy isn’t enough. Economic growth—the goal of essentially every government everywhere—is itself the problem,” Walsh reported.
Walsh noted that environmental activist Greta Thunberg berated delegates at a UN climate summit in 2019, saying, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
“The [degrowth] movement now has its own dedicated academic journals, associations and conferences,” Walsh wrote. “The global economy shrank by an estimated 4.3% in 2020, according to data from the World Bank,”
“The Absolute Power to Suspend Society”
“The green blob and its ‘High-Level Climate Action Champions’ have wet dreams about Lockdown. They have long sought the absolute power to suspend society: to hold people in their places, and to only permit what is convenient to the blob.” —UK climate skeptic Ben Pile in July 202021
Walsh reported. “That contraction was due both to the direct pain of the pandemic and the effects of social distancing measures, but it also led to a roughly 6% reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions—the biggest annual drop since WWII.”
“However accidental, 2020 represented perhaps the best example we’ve ever experienced of degrowthism in action,” Walsh wrote.22
And massive recessions, collapsing economies, and the resulting social unrest are just the ticket for the Great Reset and the progressive agenda. The more the pain and the more nasty consequences of the lockdowns, the more government solutions will be required.
“To Overhaul American Capitalism”
The New York Times let slip the truth about the Biden administration’s new “infrastructure” bill in 2021, calling it “the first step in a two-part agenda to overhaul American capitalism, fight climate change.”
Emergency Powers
“Progressive environmentalists” urged then president-elect Joe Biden to “go beyond naming a climate czar and declare an environmental national emergency,” reported Bloomberg News in December 2020.
“Invoking a climate emergency could give Biden the authority to circumvent Congress and fund clean energy projects, shut down crude oil exports, suspend offshore drilling and curtail the movement of fossil fuels on pipelines, trains, and ships, according to a research note by consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners. ‘The president’s powers to address cli- mate change through an emergency are very, very large,’ said Kassie Siegel, an attorney with the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, which is lobbying Biden’s team to act. ‘This is No. 1 on the list of things the Biden administration should do.’”24
Democratic senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon also urged Biden “to declare a national climate emergency” and use “every tool available to him.”
“We cannot wait. We need bold executive action that treats this crisis—quite literally—as the emergency it is,” Merkley said.
Shortly after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, Democrat senate majority leader Chuck Schumer beseeched Biden “to call a climate emergency.”
“I think it might be a good idea for President Biden to call a climate emergency,” Schumer said. “Then he can do many, many things under the emergency powers…that he could do without legislation.” Schumer said an emergency declaration would give Biden “more flexibility.”
In 2022 House Democrats urged President Biden to transition from the COVID emergency to a “climate emergency.” The Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded Biden declare a “climate emergency” using the executive powers of the presidency.
Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner of the Center for Biological Diversity explained: “the case for declaring a national climate emergency” in The Nation and claimed “there is no greater emergency” facing the world today, urging that Biden could use his presidential power under the Defense Production Act (DPA). “The Defense Production Act, or DPA, is a wartime statute that permits a president to marshal domestic industries to manufacture critical materials needed for the national defense,” Su and Golden-Krasner wrote. “The confluence of the climate emergency and Russia’s war in Ukraine make this moment an ideal opportunity for Biden to declare a national climate emergency.”
The environmentalists even claimed Biden could help solve racism with these “climate emergency” powers. “The DPA also permits the president to allocate these technologies domestically where they’re needed most: in partnership with environmental justice communities that have borne the brunt of climate harms and a racist energy system, helping actualize the president’s environmental justice priorities,” they explained.
Steve Milloy of Junk Science warned of one crucial way that climate lockdowns would be even worse than COVID lockdowns: “The #coronavirus police state is only temporary (I hope!). The climate police state would be permanent.”29
A Cure Worse Than the Disease?
The BBC featured an analysis examining “when governments abuse emergency powers” in April 2021. “There is emerging evidence that emergency powers are usually used to benefit governments rather than save lives. One study of natural disasters and the use of constitutional emergency provisions found that the more powers given to the executive, the higher the body count (controlling for disaster severity and size),” wrote Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge
You’re Going Nowhere Fast
Climate activists are eyeing “climate emergency” limits on travel modeled after the COVID travel restrictions. They don’t want to let you fly unless you have a “morally justifiable” reason.
COVID Lockdown: “People wishing to travel must first make a declaration as to why they need to travel.” In January 2021, Reuters reported that “Britain announced new measures to reduce travel on Wednesday with a requirement that people wishing to leave the country must fill in a form to explain why they are traveling, as well as introducing new hotel quarantine stays for some arrivals.”
“It is clear that there are still too many people coming in and out of our country each day,” Home Secretary Priti Patel said. “We will introduce a new requirement so that people wishing to travel must first make a declaration as to why they need to travel.”31
Proposed Climate Lockdown: “We can’t continue to treat cheap air travel as something compatible with a habitable planet.” According to meteorologist and climate activist Eric Holthaus, “seeing loved ones is pretty much the only morally justifiable use for luxury aviation emissions in a climate emergency.” Holthaus sets the rules: “It turns out, nearly all of those business trips weren’t necessary,” he wrote in 2020.
Under these proposed climate lockdowns, you will presumably need to get a government official’s approval to fly. You may be allowed to see your family or attend a wedding or funeral, but your travel plans may be rejected if you are merely seeking to go on a vacation or attend a business meeting.
Pierre L. Gosselin of the No Tricks Zone commented that the “USA [is] morphing into communist East Germany! Back then citizens [were] required to apply for an ‘Ausreisegenehmigung’ (permission to travel abroad) if they wanted to travel out of the country. Now it’s to be taken a step further by new Marxists: Even domestic travel has to be permitted!
”And climate campaigners are targeting U.S. air travelers for having the biggest carbon footprint in the world. “If you want to resolve climate change and we need to redesign [aviation], then we should start at the top, where a few ‘super emitters’ contribute massively to global warming,” said Stefan Gössling of Linnaeus University in Sweden. “We should see the [COVID-19] crisis as an opportunity to slim the air transport system,” Gössling added.
“The coronavirus may finally cause us to see air travel for what it is, a fuse burning in the climate bomb,” wrote a hopeful Christopher Ketcham for the Los Angeles Times. “As it happens, a lot less flying is required if we are to stabilize a non-nightmarish planetary climate for our children, our grandchildren and their children…. We must embrace a world that the coronavirus, perversely, is laying out for us. It is a world of less travel, less consumption,” Ketcham wrote.
These climate lockdowns are not theoretical. In April 2021 France announced that the nation was going to ban domestic flights where trains are available in a move to battle “climate change.” As CNN reported, “France is set to ban short domestic flights in favor of train services, after lawmakers approved a plan that will see several air routes discontinued to reduce emissions. MPs voted late on Saturday to suspend some flights by domestic airlines that can be made by train in less than two-and-a-half hours, as part of a wider climate bill.” CNN noted that France “will join a number of European countries seeking to move away from short flights.”37
And forget driving to the destination you’re banned from flying to. Eliminating private car ownership is a top priority of climate activists. Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang suggested in 2019 that because of climate change “we might not own our own cars.” Yang explained, “Our current car ownership and usage model is really inefficient and bad for the environment.” The solution? A “constant roving fleet of electric cars that you would just order up, then you could diminish the impact of ground transportation on our environment very, very quickly.”
Bill Gates, Climate Hypocrite
Bill Gates “was listed in 2019 as the number one carbon footprint of all the celebrities. . . . He spoke to the World Economic Forum about we have to change every aspect of our lives to fight global warming, but Bill Gates himself is not willing to do it. The last estimate, by the way, in 2010, was he paid $30,000 a month in his electricity bill at his home then. And since he has now recently bought a $43 million oceanfront property, [he is] not very worried about sea-level rise apparently.” —Marc Morano on Fox and Friends on January 10, 2021
#
“They’re Going after Freedom of Movement”
“In the UK they’ve proposed CO2 ration cards that the government or employers would monitor your CO2 levels . . . your energy use. . . . A CO2 budget for every man, woman, and child on the planet has been proposed by a German climate advisor. This is what we’re looking at,” I explained.
“We have a major UK report coming out, we have an International Energy Agency report that came out, calling for essentially the same type of lockdowns—everything from restrictions on your thermostat to restrictions of moving. You can only fly in a climate emergency when it’s ‘morally justifiable.’ . . .
“They’re going after freedom of movement; they’re going after private car ownership; they’re going after everything it means to be a free person and turning it over to the administrative state.” —Marc Morano on Tucker Carlson Tonight, June 22, 2021
Automobiles are in the crosshairs of the climate agenda. “Social planners, ecologists look to exploit coronavirus as golden opportunity to permanently remove cars from the road—hope ‘to save city dwellers…from the auto-centric culture’ and ‘remake cities,’” tweeted CFACT author Craig Rucker, referencing a Wired magazine article in April 2020.
No More Beer Runs
Flashback to 1975: future Obama science czar John Holdren warned that the United States was “threatened” by “the hazards of too much energy” and chastised Americans for driving cars to the store for a six-pack of beer.
“The U.S. is threatened far more by the hazards of too much energy, too soon, than by the hazards of too little energy, too late,” Holdren wrote in 1975. Holdren lamented that American society “uses its 5,000 pound automobiles for half-mile round trips to the market to fetch a six-pack of beer, consumes the beer in buildings that are overcooled in summer and overheated in winter, and then throws the aluminum cans away at an energy loss equivalent to a third of a gallon of gasoline per six-pack.”
Environmentalists, leftists, and authoritarians, in general, have long been horrified to see people enjoying the normal pleasures of life. But the COVID lockdowns gave them new opportunities to thwart those pleasures. In New South Wales, Australia, government officials prevented citizens from leaving their homes to shop—and then rationed the amount of beer and wine they could have delivered.
“If We Can Shut Down the World”
Climate campaigners were very excited that the COVID lockdowns spread globally and set up this Reset of society.
“The brakes placed on economic activities of many kinds, worldwide, have led to carbon emission cuts that would previously have been unthinkable…. What was once impossible (socialist, reckless) now turns out not to be, at all,” gushed the editors of The Guardian about the lockdowns.43
Prominent climate activists have made it clear that they expect the COVID lockdowns to usher in a new era of lockdown-type regulations in the name of climate change.
In a TikTok video, youth activist Jamie Margolin asserted, “If we can shut the world down to stop a virus, that means that it’s also possible to do the same for climate change! Treat ALL emergencies like emergencies!” In a Teen Vogue article titled “Coronavirus Response Should Be a Model for How We Address Climate Change,” Margolin asked, “What would it look like when the world actually decides to take on the climate crisis? It would look like what we’re seeing right now…. Everyone stop- ping everything and putting the world on pause to deal with the immediate crisis at hand.”45
Bill McKibben, founder of the climate group 350.org, sounded downright envious of the global response to COVID. “Who, now that we’ve seen how fast good governments can move, wouldn’t want to use this moment to help avert the even more dangerous crises that global warming is sending our way?”46
“This Is the End of Capitalism”
The climate activists are pushing hard to implement ESG or Environmental, Social, & Governance responsibility into our financial systems—a “climate credit score” for businesses. The American Enterprise Institute’s Ben Zycher testified to Congress that this is nothing short of “a blatant effort to use private-sector resources for ideological purposes.”
Talk show host Glenn Beck was even more blunt, declaring, “This is the end of capitalism.” As Beck explained, “It is basically at the barrel of a gun. The government and the big businesses have decided who’s going to get the money.”
Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress called ESG a “financially ruinous, and deeply immoral movement that perpetuates poverty . . . and threatens the security of the free world.” Epstein argued that “ESG was a movement cooked up at the UN” to coerce investors to “divest from fossil fuels in every way possible, and associate . . . with ‘renewable’ solar and wind in every way possible.”
The climate activist community had been lobbying for decades for this kind of coercive government intervention in the economy and society. The activists have long sought the opportunity to impose their worldview, implement central planning with a comprehensive administrative state, ban anything and everything in our lives that they deem insufficiently friendly to the climate, and remake society in its image.
Climate activists are eager to extend emergency declarations to climate change—and were also eager to use the Russian invasion of Ukraine and skyrocketing energy prices to further their agenda and condition the public to accept constant crises and deprivation.
Coronavirus “revealed what governments are capable of doing,” declared Michael Marmot, the chair of the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health. “With Covid-19, everything [on austerity] went out of the window. It turns out austerity was a choice,” stated Marmot. “The government can spend anything [in the context of the coronavirus crisis], and they have socialized the economy.”50
Ed Conway, the economics editor of Sky News and a columnist for The Times of London could not contain his excitement about the world shutdown. “Don’t take this the wrong way but if you were a young, hardline environmentalist looking for the ultimate weapon against climate change, you could hardly design anything better than coronavirus,” Conway wrote. “Unlike most other such diseases, it kills mostly the old who, let’s face it, are more likely to be climate skeptics. It spares the young. Most of all, it stymies the forces that have been generating greenhouse gases for decades.”51
Your financial institution and your own money will also be devoted to fighting “climate change” under the United States’ embrace of the financial New World Order.
“Large U.S. banks would have to integrate climate financial risk assessments into every aspect of their work under sweeping new draft supervisory guidance proposed by a top U.S. banking regulator,” according to U.S. News & World Report. “The principles touch on everything from how climate change affects boardroom governance, liquidity, credit, and operational risk, to the way banks project hypothetical future losses on their books and their ability to service poorer communities.”52
In 2022, President Biden issued an “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets” that cited “climate” six times and called for the study and eventual creation of a U.S. “central bank digital currency.” In public remarks at the time of the order, Biden stressed that “digital assets” have profound implications for “financial inclusion and equity; and climate change and pollution.”53
The Biden administration was working with environmental groups, industry, and labor unions to develop a new climate-friendly and equity-based “central bank digital currency.”
“Why would you be working with all of these people…on a new currency? The only reason you would be working with them on that is because the currency is going to be programmable. It’s going to be programmable, controllable, trackable, traceable, and you’ll be able to manage it, set restrictions for it—anytime you want,” warned Justin Haskins, the director of the Heartland Institute’s Stopping Socialism Project.54
Climate change concerns are also being used to manipulate the financial system in other ways. Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the author of the book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, explained how BlackRock founder and CEO Larry Fink is the “King of the Woke Industrial Complex” and acts as “the puppet master behind the scenes of Corporate America.”
“He is CEO of the world’s largest asset manager and what they do is they cause companies to bend the knee to woke orthodoxy because BlackRock says that we won’t invest in your company, unless you abide by these progressive standards, or we will dock the pay of a CEO or fire a CEO who refuses to bend the knee,” Ramaswamy explained.55
Fink has publicly admitted that he believes coercion is necessary to achieve his agenda. “Behaviors are going to have to change, and this is one thing we are asking companies. You have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock we are forcing behaviors,” Fink explained in 2017 at a New York Times forum. “You have to force behaviors, and if you don’t force behaviors, whether it’s gender or race or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you’re gonna be impacted,” Fink said. He added, “We’re gonna have to force change.”
BlackRock uses other people’s money to force this ideology on companies, according to Ramaswamy. “It is not their money. That $10 trillion doesn’t belong to BlackRock. Say what you will about George Soros, at least it’s his money. In this case, it is money that belongs to you, to everyday Americans in this country whose blood would boil if they actually knew the way their own money was being used to force a progressive social orthodoxy back onto them.”
“Master Level Ponzi Scheme”
“You’re watching a master level Ponzi scheme. 2020 crash gets laundered through covid bailouts. Covid bailouts laundered through inflation. Infla- tion laundered through war in ukraine. The war and its effects on the globe will be laundered through climate change. The perps walk.” —Class Redux Killa (@BLCKD_COM_PlLLD) on Twitter
“The three largest asset managers in this country, State Street, Vanguard, and the king of them all, BlackRock…together manage today over $20 trillion. That’s more than the GDP of the United States,” he said. They “are aggregating the money of everyday pensioners and retirees, et cetera,” Ramaswamy detailed. “They are using the private sector to effectuate a left-wing social agenda that they could not directly effectuate through Congress.”
“ESG [environment, social, and governance], DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), CSR (corporate social responsibility); there are three-letter acronyms—word salads—that are designed to hide the essence of what is going on,” he said.
“That is not the free market in action. It’s even worse than a monopoly or an ideological cartel. They’re working hand in glove with the party in power to be able to do their bidding through the private sector,” Ramaswamy explained.
“If you couldn’t get the Green New Deal through Congress, guess what John Kerry is doing. He’s getting every major banking CEO to sign the so-called climate pledge,” he added, calling it a “form of crony capitalism.”
“And here’s the kicker . . . they apply that to the U.S. companies, but they don’t apply it to the Chinese companies. So in the United States, they preach ESG. In China, they supplicate to the CCP,” he said.
“It is the defining scam of our time,” he concluded.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk agreed. Musk, who drew considerable scrutiny from the establishment after his bid to purchase Twitter in 2022 and turn it into a free speech outlet, called ESG “an outrageous scam” after his electric car company was demoted on the S&P Global index that tracks ESG standards.
“Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500, while Tesla didn’t make the list! ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors,” Musk tweeted.61
Fall of the Dollar?
“One of the pillars of the dollar’s status is the use of the dollar in the international oil market. The ‘petrodollar,’ though, may soon be replaced. Saudi Arabia is considering selling some oil for Chinese yuan instead of US dollars. India is considering using Russian rubles and Indian Rupees instead of US dollars in trade with Russia, including for the purchase of Russian oil. This will help get around US sanctions.” —former Texas GOP congressman Ron Paul in 2022
Credit Card Tracks “Carbon Footprint on Every Purchase”
Get ready for a China-style social-credit system when it comes to your personal spending habits and how they impact “climate change.” A new credit card called Doconomy is “working in tight collaboration with Mastercard” and in alliance with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The credit card was released in 2021 so you can monitor the effect of every purchase you make on your personal CO2 budget.
The Doconomy credit card enables “all users to track, measure, and understand their impact by presenting their carbon footprint on every purchase.”
The World Economic Forum praised the CO2 monitoring card. “While many of us are aware that we need to reduce our carbon footprint, advice on doing so can seem nebulous, and keeping a tab is difficult. DO monitors and cuts off spending, when we hit our carbon max,” the WEF statement on the Doconomy website reads.
Other credit card companies are getting into the climate conduct monitoring business as well. “FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE WITH EVERY SWIPE,” declares one new climate change debit card called the Aspiration Impact Measurement (AIM). “Our AIM feature shows you your own personal sustainability score based on your purchases—and the Planet and People scores of the places you’re shopping so that you can decide where to spend your money,” AIM’s website explains.
Currently, these new CO2-monitoring cards are all “voluntary.” The question is how long until they are mandated by big corporations in collusion with governments? Will this kind of credit card become mandatory under a declared “climate emergency”?
Meanwhile, prestigious scientific journals have published studies on using climate change as a vehicle in service of more centralization of power, along the lines of the curtailment of rights in the COVID lockdowns. A 2021 paper in the online journal Nature Sustainability argued that COVID lockdowns were the key to beginning “personal carbon allowances” in order to place “restrictions on individuals…that were unthinkable only one year before.”
The paper, with four academic coauthors, argued that the COVID lockdowns had conditioned the public to be “more prepared to accept tracking and limitations” in order to “achieve a safer climate.” The paper was titled, “Personal Carbon Allowances Revisited.”
“In particular, during the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on individuals for the sake of public health, and forms of individual account- ability and responsibility that were unthinkable only one year before, have been adopted by millions of people. People may be more prepared to accept the tracking and limitations related to PCAs (Personal Carbon Allowances) to achieve a safer climate,” the authors explained.65
The Independent promoted the idea of “personal carbon quotas” as “demonstrably doable” and suggested that “every person in the UK be given a monthly carbon budget to balance between heating, travel, energy and food.”
Climate skeptic Ron Clutz of Science Matters rejected these calls for government monitoring of your carbon emissions. “Enamoured by lockdown, the puritans wish for a perma-pandemic in which no-one, nowhere, will be happy,” Clutz explained. “This all sounds like one’s entire life would be recorded and regulated and monitored and meddled with by politicians who’ll punish or praise, all in pursuit of a vague utopia,” Clutz wrote. “What happens when we reach Net Zero and the weather doesn’t change? I can only guess . . . ‘That wasn’t real Net-Zero. Real Net-Zero has never been tried [emphasis in the original].’”67
Another respected journal, the American Political Science Review, published a paper in 2021 lamenting “democracy” and calling for “authoritarian environmentalism” modeled after COVID lockdowns to fight a climate “emergency.” The paper, titled “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change,” was written by Ross Mittiga, a politics professor at the Catholic University of Chile. Mittiga argued that during COVID-19 “severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach.”68
Another 2021 study, authored by a team of European researchers and published in the journal Global Environmental Change, also argued for a version of climate lockdowns. Reason author Ronald Bailey summarized the authors’ claims: “Americans must cut energy use by 90 percent, live in 640 square feet, and fly once every three years.”69 The authors advocated for limiting “new clothing,” eating a “plant-based diet,” and using “‘collective transport.” They also promoted economic “degrowth” and a universal basic income. The study was titled “Socio-Economic Conditions for Satisfying Human Needs at Low Energy Use.”
One of New Zealand’s top COVID public health officials praised the government’s COVID lockdowns and urged the same solution for climate change. “We can do this for the other diseases that we have here in New Zealand. We can do this for climate change,” microbiologist Dr. Siouxsie Wiles said on New Zealand television in 2021. “Why wouldn’t we do this for other things?” she asked.
This COVID-climate connection all started back in 2020, not long after “two weeks to flatten the curve.” The climate activists even co-opted that phrase. In May 2020, the Washington Post featured the headline: “We’re Flattening the Coronavirus Curve. We Can Flatten the Climate Curve, Too.”
Here is a small sampling, from Climate Depot reports, of even more calls to morph COVID and climate and impose similar restrictions on human freedom:
- “Climate is ‘greatest threat’ to global public health, say 230 medical journals: declare COVID-19 ‘response’ be ‘template’ for climate response’”73
- “Climate lockdown: ‘It’s time to ban the sale of pickup trucks’—‘shift away from relying on private vehicles entirely’”74
- “British Medical Journal study calls for meat & dairy price hikes to fight ‘climate change’—meat consumption in N. America must fall 79%—‘substantially fewer journeys by car’”75
- “Foreign Policy mag: ‘What if democracy & climate mitigation are incompatible?—democracy ‘is not necessarily the path to a solution. It might, instead, be part of the problem’”76
- “Business Insider mag: ‘Electric vehicles won’t save us—we need to get rid of cars completely’”77
- “Owning a car is outdated ‘20th-century thinking’ & we must move to ‘shared mobility’ to cut carbon emissions, UK transport minister says”78
- “First, they came for energy, then your SUV—& now: ‘Houses pose more danger to climate than vehicles’”79
- “Vogue article asks, ‘Is having a baby in 2021 pure environmental vandalism?’”80
In short, if you like living under the COVID lockdowns, then you’ll love living under government mandates to “solve” the “climate emergency.” The seeds of climate lockdowns were planted before COVID-19.
“We Can Actually Take Military Measures”
In 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate and mega–climate funder Tom Steyer laid out his plan for a climate police state. “I will declare . . . a state of emergency on climate on the first day of my presidency. I will use the executive emergency powers of the presidency to tell companies how they can generate electricity, what kind of cars they can build on what schedule, what kind of buildings we’re gonna have, how we are going to use our public lands,” Steyer declared. “We need to rebuild this country in a climate-smart way…. We don’t have a choice on this.”83
Big Tech Treats Climate Skeptics like Russia
In 2022, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Newsweek reported that “Google, which owns YouTube, has now suspended monetization on videos for all users in Russia.”81
As I commented at the time, “Big Tech does not differentiate between Russia & climate skeptics. . . . Google [had previously] demonetized skep- tical meteorologist Dr. Roy Spencer’s website for allegedly ‘unreliable & harmful’ climate information. . . . To all of you cheering on Big Tech and corporations banning and de-platforming anything ‘Russian’ right now, you may want to think again. If you ever find yourself on the wrong end of the official state narrative on climate, war, or COVID policies, this could be your free speech and your personal bank cards being banned. The coordination and speed of the censorship cancel culture are frightening and will be used against anyone including private citizens who dare dissent.”
There have been calls for military enforcement of climate regulations. In 2019, University of Copenhagen international relations professor Ole Wæver explained, “If there was something that was decided Internationally by some more centralized procedure and every country was told ‘this is your emission target, it’s not negotiable, we can actually take military measures if you don’t fulfill it,’ then you would basically have to get that down the throat of your population, whether they like it or not.”84
Making Us Dependent on China
“The net effect of a Green New Deal distills to replacing domestic energy production (and exports) of hydrocarbons with an unprecedented level of energy mineral imports. . . . China, for example, supplies about 90% of rare-earths for the world. On the cobalt front, China has also quietly gained control over more than 90% of the battery industry’s cobalt refining, without which the raw ore is useless.” —energy analyst Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute85
Other climate activists have demanded a World War II–style climate mobilization that would convert “a large portion of U.S. military into a kind of climate mobilization force.”
In 2016 Stan Cox, the author of the book Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, urged widescale rationing to ward off the climate threat. “Necessary steps will include phasing out fossil-fuel use within a decade,” Cox claimed, and “deeply cutting meat and dairy consumption; and converting a large portion of the U.S. military into a kind of climate mobilization force.” The climate “Victory Plan,” according to Cox, “calls for a declaration of a ‘national climate and sustainability emergency.’”
“For the Rich”
Christopher Bedford of The Federalist summed up the COVID- climate connection perfectly. “Wouldn’t it be grand, our technocrats think, if they could turn the COVID-19 emergency into a permanent emergency over climate? The possibilities are limitless,” Bedford explained, adding that “the leadership class has realized there’s a lot of value to keeping society permanently in crisis.”
#
