The Inexperienced New Deal costume rehearsal

The Covid-19 lockdown as a blueprint for a everlasting financial shutdown to ‘save the Earth’

Paul Driessen

Greater than 1.four million instances of Wuhan Coronavirus and 106,000 deaths in the US alone have accompanied stay-home lockdowns, companies bankruptcies, over 40 million unemployed staff, plummeting tax revenues and unprecedented debt. Ongoing rioting, vandalism, arson and looting are compounding issues for a lot of cities and minority communities.

However the place many see catastrophe, others see alternative. Some need to use the crises to enact legal guidelines and welfare applications they might by no means get in any other case. Extra formidable activists see the lockdown as a blueprint or costume rehearsal for a complete power, financial and life-style transformation to “save the planet.” If three months of Covid lockdowns can cut back gas use and greenhouse fuel emissions, they argue, everlasting fossil gas bans are doable, important and ought to be undertaken instantly. 

5 years in the past, former UN official Christiana Figueres stated the true purpose of local weather actions was to “deliberately remodel the financial growth mannequin that has been reigning for at the least 150 years” – and change it with socialist-environmentalist international governance. Extra not too long ago, she stated post-Corona financial stimulus packages ought to be used to “kick-start” investments “in low-carbon infrastructure initiatives that may create jobs and put the world on a safer, fairer, extra resilient path.” Others need to use local weather change as a pretext for dictating how international wealth and sources can be redistributed.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of employees is on the identical web page. The Inexperienced New Deal “wasn’t initially a local weather factor in any respect,” he stated in Might 2019. It was “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy factor.” Presidential candidate Joe Biden and different main Democrats have endorsed the GND.

UN Secretary-Basic António Guterres believes “the pandemic may create a chance to rebuild the worldwide financial system alongside extra sustainable strains.” His setting chief thinks COVID-19 presents “an opportunity to do capitalism in another way.” The UN Inexperienced Local weather Fund says it “presents a chance to direct funds in direction of bolstering local weather motion” and “re-launch[ing] economies on low-emission, climate-resilient trajectories,” to manage local weather and climate and stop huge extinctions.

Briefly, echoing former Obama science advisor John Holdren, they need the US and different fashionable societies to de-develop and de-industrialize, set up low-consumption life types that guarantee “extra equitable distribution of wealth,” and inform poor nations how a lot “ecologically possible” growth they are going to be permitted to pursue.

Maybe most necessary, these “visionary” ruling elites can be in cost. They’ll outline what’s clear, inexperienced, renewable, sustainable, ecologically possible, safer, fairer, extra resilient. They’ll demand much less journey, commerce and commerce – for the plenty. They’ll dwell fairly effectively, whereas telling in the present day’s oilfield and manufacturing unit staff their industries should disappear they usually have to be content material with minimum-wage jobs putting in, sustaining and dismantling wind generators and photo voltaic panels made abroad.

Followers and implementers of Covid-19 lockdowns have been oblivious to the financial, societal and human devastation attributable to the lockdowns: not simply financial losses, depleted financial savings and ruined goals, however tens of millions of instances of despair, drug dependancy, alcoholism, home violence, weight problems, stroke, coronary heart assault, 1000’s of deaths from these causes, and suicide and homicide attributable to the lockdowns.

Add to that tens of millions of future or nonetheless uncounted deaths and disabilities from missed biopsies, skipped most cancers screenings and chemotherapy, missed early remedies for stroke and heart-attack sufferers, and organ transplants merely not carried out – as a result of “non-essential” medication was closed down, folks misplaced their medical insurance, or sufferers have been afraid to go to clinics and emergency rooms.

Many hospitals, clinics and practices misplaced a lot cash that they might have to shut their doorways. The cumulative long-term impression from that on healthcare, life spans, and loss of life tolls amongst overweight, diabetic, aged and severely ailing sufferers may very well be huge. These human prices will take years to manifest themselves and be calculated. Certainly, the last word value of the lockdown may very well be worse than the virus.

We nonetheless do not need dependable knowledge on Covid infections, instances and deaths – and don’t know whether or not deaths have been attributable to Corona, or merely related to the virus and primarily attributable to age or critical underlying well being issues. We don’t even know what number of susceptible aged folks died from Covid issues inflicted on them by selections by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and different officers to power nursing houses to simply accept recovering Corona sufferers and hold Covid-infected employees working in these amenities.

All that is from lockdowns lasting a number of months. Strategies that we “remodel” our financial system with costly, unreliable, climate dependent power – and endure power, employment, healthcare and different deprivations in perpetuity – border on homicidal madness. They might postpone or eradicate any financial restoration, lead to unimaginable distress and loss of life in now-developed nations – and condemn tens of tens of millions of individuals in nonetheless impoverished nations to horrible struggling, illness, hunger and loss of life.

As to saving the planet and guaranteeing “ecologically possible” growth, GND power programs could be vastly extra devastating to scenic areas, habitats and wildlife – and to human well being and welfare – than any seemingly results from artifical parts of future local weather modifications or climate occasions.

As Michael Moore’s new movie, “Planet of the People,” dramatically demonstrates, wind, photo voltaic, battery and biofuel applied sciences are the antithesis of fresh, inexperienced, renewable and sustainable. Even worse, the ecological devastation it paperwork is occurring in a world that’s nonetheless 81% depending on oil, pure fuel and coal, four% on nuclear and seven% on hydroelectric. The impacts and species losses could be orders of magnitude larger if we have been 100% depending on pseudo-renewable power sources.

Adopting UN-AOC power prescriptions would require actually tens of millions of 800-foot-tall wind generators, billions of photo voltaic panels, billions of half-ton batteries, 1000’s of biofuel plantations and clear-cut forests, billions of battery-powered autos, and 1000’s of latest and expanded mines to supply tens of billions of tons extra metals and minerals. The ecological impacts would attain each nook of each continent. Lots of of hen, bat, reptile and mammalian species would disappear. Family, hospital, faculty, enterprise and manufacturing unit electrical energy prices would skyrocket. Jobs and industries would vanish.

These prescriptions would additionally make the US enormously depending on China, not only for medical units and pharmaceutical parts – however for metals, uncooked supplies and part elements wanted in wind generators, photo voltaic panels, backup energy batteries, and protection, aerospace and high-technology purposes. And all that mining and manufacturing, in Asia and different distant lands, would require fossil fuels, at ranges far past something seen in historical past, beneath minimal to nonexistent air pollution, office security and human rights legal guidelines, accompanied by prodigious emissions of carbon dioxide.

Followers and implementers of GND transformations are willfully oblivious of those realities. They refuse to debate them or enable others to debate them – as a result of to take action would destroy their phony “saving the planet” narrative and quest for complete management over our lives, livelihoods, residing requirements and liberties.

No surprise the UN-AOC-environmentalist crowd went ballistic over Moore’s movie. YouTube yanked the film from its viewing platform, and “mainstream” media, social media, engines like google and knowledge websites are actually participating in blatant censorship on local weather, power and environmental points.

An more and more activist, liberal media advanced additionally needs to dictate and management what folks see, hear, say and assume on race relations, medication and just about each different political matter. From the NY Occasions and Washington Submit, to Fb, Twitter, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia, platforms that ought to be boards for sturdy debate as a substitute are used to dictate what’s true or false, permissible or banned.

US, EU and UN inexperienced new offers are only one part of the battle for our future. Corona lockdowns ought to function a bitter style of what may come – not as a costume rehearsal or blueprint for it.  

Paul Driessen is senior coverage analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and writer of books and articles on power, setting, local weather and human rights points.

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