From Covid Lockdowns to Climate Lockdowns
Seemorerocks
These days I try to work things out in my head and try to reconcile contradictory ideas in my head and try to make each article I put together as if it was the last thing I wrote. I have been aware in recent weeks of talk about a “climate lockdown but have not looked further until I found this intelligent discussion:
It was an interesting reflection that they use the term LOCKDOWN to describe a situation where they intend to take draconian measures to further curtail human rights in the name of a climate emergency.
“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.”
By definition the term “lockdown” refers to the confinement of prisoners to their cells.
lockdown
Definition of lockdown
The very corporations who are largely responsible for the world burning now want to now tell the plebs how they should live their lives: No meat in the diet; no car except for those who can afford an electric car that has ALL the hydrocarbon elements as a gas-guzzler such as 12 gallons of oil in every tyre, not to mention the huge carbon footprint of putting yet another vehicle onto already congested roads.
As has been pointed out many times the elite, the Bill Gates’ of this world will continue to eat meat and to fly round the world in their private jets.
None of this is for them.
Indeed, it IS designed to produce a new form of feudalism.
As I have pointed out many times the corporate and globalist elite will use often inaccurate information (usually, generalisations) when they want to manipulate people into accepting their self-serving agendas but when it comes to specific observational information on how quickly the ecosystem is collapsing (and would make their insane agendas moot, they are full of denial.
The one big problem for me is that just about all the critics of lockdowns and the Great Reset are complete climate change deniers because they see it, not as a process of Nature but as an invention of the corrupt people that run the world. That would be the theme behind everything in the following segment, for example.
These days I am more forgiving because they do reveal the nefarious agenda behind what we are seeing. They are usually genuinely decent, conservative people, anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-bankster, anti-corporate.
Some of the denial does go to ridiculous lengths. The deniers will point the finger at someone like Al Gore and point out that he claimed the ice caps would met and “this hasn’t happened”. If you point out, with real evidence, that this is happening in real time they response will come back “it’s summer – what do you expect”? Then we have someone like Doc Burkhart on TruNews saying there is no overpopulation – you could fit the whole of the world’s population into Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
I don’t see how anyone could possibly take that seriously and yet so much of what they say about the affairs of the world is entirely rational and fact-based.
There is a climate “crisis” and there is population overshoot.
However, on the other side of the ledger we see an even greater degree of insanity. A lot of the people who talk about abrupt climate change are often not decent people – some are positively satanic in my view. When discussing anything relating to the world they support the very people who are carrying out genocide; they are pro-corporate, have no objection to any of the wars that are being waged. For instance, I came across the following from someone who obviously has no objection to eugenics programmes.
At best this is ill thought-through; at worst it is immoral.
Almost without exception they support policies of locking down the population, injecting them with poison and even as the narrative shifts no doubt support the contention that covid-19 came from a meat market and from a pangolin or a bat because that accords with their own agenda. I have a friend (who is very ill, admittedly) that is so one-eyed about climate change they gain a sense of security and safety from being under lockdown.
They now drive an electric car because it makes them feel good and ignore the fact that the car has a huge carbon footprint, has a battery made from lithium mined in Africa with child labour and were electric cars to become the norm coal would have to be burned to fuel them (because of the very climate change they are so concerned about.
Either that or the whole electricity grid would crash.
Getting back to the climate lockdown, we are being asked by the very corporations responsible for the whole thing to give up our meagre lifestyles while there is not even a suggestion that the main polluters stop polluting or that countries will give up their war machines that are one of the biggest sources of excess greenhouse gasses.
The whole thing is replete with hypocrisy and double standards. As Mr. Wolfe points out in the interview we are seeing a cross section of:
- Corporate capitalism;
- Marxism and
- Technocracy
In conclusion, I highly recommend taking the time out to listen to an intelligent coversation.
In the meantime, here are a couple of articles relating to this,
This article was originally published by Project Syndicate and reposted by WBCSD
Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, is Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She is the author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, and, most recently, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.
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.
Shifting Arctic ice, raging wildfires in western US states and elsewhere, and methane leaks in the North Sea are all warning signs that we are approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions.
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.
Many think of the climate crisis as distinct from the health and economic crises caused by the pandemic. But the three crises – and their solutions – are interconnected.
COVID-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation: one recent study dubbed it “the disease of the Anthropocene.” Moreover, climate change will exacerbate the social and economic problems highlighted by the pandemic. These include governments’ diminishing capacity to address public-health crises, the private sector’s limited ability to withstand sustained economic disruption, and pervasive social inequality.
These shortcomings reflect the distorted values underlying our priorities. For example, we demand the most from “essential workers” (including nurses, supermarket workers, and delivery drivers) while paying them the least. Without fundamental change, climate change will worsen such problems.
The climate crisis is also a public-health crisis. Global warming will cause drinking water to degrade and enable pollution-linked respiratory diseases to thrive. According to some projections, 3.5 billion people globally will live in unbearable heat by 2070.
Addressing this triple crisis requires reorienting corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems toward a green economic transformation. To achieve this, three obstacles must be removed: business that is shareholder-driven instead of stakeholder-driven, finance that is used in inadequate and inappropriate ways, and government that is based on outdated economic thinking and faulty assumptions.
Corporate governance must now reflect stakeholders’ needs instead of shareholders’ whims. Building an inclusive, sustainable economy depends on productive cooperation among the public and private sectors and civil society. This means firms need to listen to trade unions and workers’ collectives, community groups, consumer advocates, and others.
Likewise, government assistance to business must be less about subsidies, guarantees, and bailouts, and more about building partnerships. This means attaching strict conditions to any corporate bailouts to ensure that taxpayer money is put to productive use and generates long-term public value, not short-term private profits.
In the current crisis, for example, the French government conditioned its bailouts for Renault and Air France-KLM on emission-reduction commitments. France, Belgium, Denmark, and Poland denied state aid to any company domiciled in a European Union-designated tax haven, and barred large recipients from paying dividends or buying back their own shares until 2021. Likewise, US corporations receiving government loans through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act were prohibited from using the funds for share buybacks.
These conditions are a start, but are not ambitious enough, either from a climate perspective or in economic terms. The magnitude of government assistance packages does not match firms’ requirements, and the conditions are not always legally binding: for example, the Air France emissions policy applies only to short domestic flights.
Far more is needed to achieve a green and sustainable recovery. For example, governments might use the tax code to discourage firms from using certain materials. They might also introduce job guarantees at company or national level so that human capital is not wasted or eroded. This would help the youngest and oldest workers, who have disproportionately suffered job losses owing to the pandemic, and reduce the likely economic shocks in disadvantaged regions already suffering industrial decline.
Finance needs fixing, too. During the 2008 global financial crisis, governments flooded markets with liquidity. But, because they did not direct it toward good investment opportunities, much of that funding ended up back in a financial sector unfit for purpose.
The current crisis presents an opportunity to harness finance in productive ways to drive long-term growth. Patient long-term finance is key, because a 3-5-year investment cycle doesn’t match the long lifespan of a wind turbine (more than 25 years), or encourage the innovation needed in e-mobility, natural capital development (such as rewilding programs), and green infrastructure.
Some governments have already launched sustainable growth initiatives. New Zealand has developed a budget based on “wellbeing” metrics, rather than GDP, to align public spending with broader objectives, while Scotland has established the mission-oriented Scottish National Investment Bank.
Along with steering finance toward a green transition, we need to hold the financial sector accountable for its often-destructive environmental impact. The Dutch central bank estimates that Dutch financial institutions’ biodiversity footprint represents a loss of over 58,000 square kilometers (22,394 square miles) of pristine nature – an area 1.4 times larger than the Netherlands.
Because markets will not lead a green revolution on their own, government policy must steer them in that direction. This will require an entrepreneurial state that innovates, takes risks, and invests alongside the private sector. Policymakers should therefore redesign procurement contracts in order to move away from low-cost investments by incumbent suppliers, and create mechanisms that “crowd in” innovation from multiple actors to achieve public green goals.
Governments should also take a portfolio approach to innovation and investment. In the United Kingdom and the United States, wider industrial policy continues to support the information-technology revolution. Similarly, the EU’s recently launched European Green Deal, Industrial Strategy, and Just Transition Mechanism are acting as the motor and compass for the €750 billion ($888 billion) “Next Generation EU” recovery fund.
Finally, we need to reorient our energy system around renewable energy – the antidote to climate change and the key to making our economies energy-secure. We must therefore evict fossil-fuel interests and short-termism from business, finance, and politics. Financially powerful institutions such as banks and universities must divest from fossil-fuel companies. Until they do, a carbon-based economy will prevail.
The window for launching a climate revolution – and achieving an inclusive recovery from COVID-19 in the process – is rapidly closing. We need to move quickly if we want to transform the future of work, transit, and energy use, and make the concept of a “green good life” a reality for generations to come. One way or the other, radical change is inevitable; our task is to ensure that we achieve the change we want – while we still have the choice.
Here is a commentary.
Is a “Climate Lockdown” on the horizon?
If and when the powers-that-be decide to move on from their pandemic narrative, lockdowns won’t be going anywhere. Instead it looks like they’ll be rebranded as “climate lockdowns”, and either enforced or simply held threateningly over the public’s head.
At least, according to an article written by an employee of the WHO, and published by a mega-coporate think-tank.
Let’s dive right in.
THE REPORT’S AUTHOR AND BACKERS
The report, titled “Avoiding a climate lockdown”, was written by Mariana Mazzucato, a professor of economics at University College London, and head of something called the Council on the Economics of Health for All, a division of the World Health Organization.
It 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, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many, many others.
After that, it 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 totalling well over 8 TRILLION dollars in annual revenue.
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.
WHAT DOES IT SAY?
The text of the report itself is actually quite craftily constructed. It doesn’t outright argue for climate lockdowns, but instead discusses ways “we” can prevent them.
As COVID-19 spread […] 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 […] To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.
This cleverly creates a veneer of arguing against them, whilst actually pushing the a priori assumptions that any so-called “climate lockdowns” would a) be necessary and b) be effective. Neither of which has ever been established.
Another thing the report assumes is some kind of causal link between the environment and the “pandemic”:
COVID-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation
I wrote an article, back in April, exploring the media’s persistent attempts to link the Covid19 “pandemic” with climate change. Everybody from the Guardian to the Harvard School of Public Health is taking the same position – “The root cause of pandemics [is] the destruction of nature”:
The razing of forests and hunting of wildlife is increasingly bringing animals and the microbes they harbour into contact with people and livestock.
There is never any scientific evidence cited to support this position. Rather, it is a fact-free scare-line used to try and force a mental connection in the public, between visceral self-preservation (fear of disease) and concern for the environment. It is as transparent as it is weak.
“CLIMATE LOCKDOWNS”
So, what exactly is a “climate lockdown”? And what would it entail?
The author is pretty clear:
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.
There you have it. A “climate lockdown” means no more red meat, the government setting limits on how and when people use their private vehicles and further (unspecified) “extreme energy-saving measures”. It would likely include previously suggested bans on air travel, too.
All in all, it is potentially far more strict than the “public health policy” we’ve all endured for the last year.
As for forcing fossil fuel companies to stop drilling, that is drenched in the sort of ignorance of practicality that only exists in the academic world. Supposing we can switch to entirely rely on renewables for energy, we still wouldn’t be able to stop drilling for fossil fuels.
Oil isn’t just used as fuel, it’s also needed to lubricate engines and manufacture chemicals and plastics. Plastics used in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels, for example.
Coal isn’t just needed for power stations, but also to make steel. Steel which is vital to pretty much everything humans do in the modern world.
It reminds me of a Victoria Wood sketch from the 1980s, where an upper-middle class woman remarks, upon meeting a coal miner, “I suppose we don’t really need coal, now we’ve got electricity.”
A lot of post-fossil utopian ideas are sold this way, to people who are comfortably removed from the way the world actually works. This mirrors the supposed “recovery” the environment experienced during lockdown, a mythic creation selling a silver lining of house arrest to people who think that because they’re having their annual budget meetings over Zoom, somehow China stopped manufacturing 900 million tonnes of steel a year, and the US military doesn’t produce more pollution than 140 different countries combined.
The question, really, is why would an NGO backed by – among others – Shell, BP and Chevron, possibly want to suggest a ban on drilling for fossil fuel? But that’s a discussion for another time.
AVOIDING A “CLIMATE LOCKDOWN”
So, the “climate lockdown” is a mix of dystopian social control, and impractical nonsense likely designed to sell an agenda. But don’t worry, we don’t have to do this. There is a way to avoid these extreme measures, the author says so:
To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently […] Addressing this triple crisis requires reorienting corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems toward a green economic transformation […] Far more is needed to achieve a green and sustainable recovery […] we want to transform the future of work, transit, and energy use.
“Overhaul”? “reorienting”? “transformation”?
Seems like we’re looking at a new-built society. A “reset”, if you will, and given the desired scope, you could even call it a “great reset”, I suppose.
Except, of course, the Great Reset is just a wild “conspiracy theory”. The elite doesn’t want a Great Reset, even if they keep saying they do…
…they just want a massive wholesale “transformation” of our social, financial, governmental and energy sectors.
They want you to own nothing and be happy. Or else.
Because that’s the oddest thing about this particular article, whereas most fear-porn public programming at least attempts subtlety, there is very definitely an overtly threatening tone to this piece [emphasis added]:
we are approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions […] One way or the other, radical change is inevitable; our task is to ensure that we achieve the change we want – while we still have the choice.
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.”
Will there be “climate lockdowns” in the future? I wouldn’t be surprised. But right now – rather than being seriously mooted – they are fulfilling a different role. A frightening hypothetical – A threat used to bully the public into accepting the hardline globalist reforms that make up the “great reset”.
Many thanks to all the people on social media who brought this to our attention.
