Covid Plandemic, Climate Change, the Same Agenda By James Reed

Brownstone.org has done fantastic work over the Covid plandemic, exposing the agenda and reporting on the science as well, in an easy to understand fashion. They have made the connection between the Covid plandemic agenda and the present Big Thing of climate change hysteria, which was on the top of the elite fear porn charts before  Covid rose to number one. The short answer here is that both so-called crises are mechanisms to roll back freedoms and to reduce to poverty the people of the West, ultimately to produce a one world totalitarian regime. It figures, because nothing in these two regimes in any way enhances freedom and human dignity. With Covid, just review the CCP lockdowns China, with footage of desperate people committing suicide by plunging from high-rise buildings. Then reflect on the climate change agenda, of the elimination of traditional agriculture with meat production (too much nitrogen) and the cessation of fossil fuels (needed to make the modern world tick over, from fuel to fertiliser), which will lead to mass death, and a certain collapse of the West.

https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-emergency-climate-emergency-same-thing/

“In February 2022, 1,140 organizations sent President Biden a letter urging him to declare a “climate emergency.” A group of US Senators did the same, in October 2022, and a House bill, introduced in 2021, also called on the president to “declare a national climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act.”

Biden has considered declaring such an emergency, but so far he has declined, to the disappointment of many progressives.

The United Nations (UN) has urged all countries to declare a climate emergency. The state of Hawaii and 170 local US jurisdictions have declared some version of one. So have 38 countries, including European Union members and the UK, and local jurisdictions around the world, together encompassing about 13 percent of the world’s population.

Hillary Clinton was reportedly prepared to declare a “climate emergency” if she had won the 2016 election.

A “climate emergency” is in the zeitgeist. Those words were surely uttered by the billionaires, technocrats and corporate CEOs attending the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos.

But what does it actually mean for the president of the US to officially declare a “climate emergency?”

Most people don’t realize that under US law, a national emergency declaration triggers a set of emergency powers that allows a president to act without the need for further legislation.

The Brennan Center for Justice compiled a list of the 123 statutory powers that may become available to the president upon declaration of a national emergency (plus 13 that become available when Congress declares a national emergency).

The scope of these powers is difficult to summarize, except to say that if exercised to their maximum extent, they potentially encompass vast areas of American life.

For civil libertarians across the political spectrum, from left to right, a “climate emergency” should be a focus of concern.

Even environmentalists who may instinctively and understandably support the idea should be worried about the potential for the authoritarian model of “emergency” governance that arose during COVID-19 to overtake climate policy.

One can believe in protecting and preserving the planet, as I do, while insisting on environmental policies that are consistent with democracy, civil liberties, and human rights.

Elements of the left and right should be coming together to reject demands that we sacrifice democratic norms, rights, and freedoms for flimsy promises of safety from political and economic elites who seek to exploit a crisis — a cynical ploy that COVID-19 thoroughly exposed.

Recall that it was President Trump who issued a COVID-19 “national emergency” declaration on March 13, 2020. This was accompanied by “public health emergency” orders at the federal and state levels, and by the World Health Organization (WHO), which unleashed an intense phase of lockdowns and a tsunami of health-and-safety rules and restrictions — many imposed on the public in circumvention of the normal democratic process.

Before that, I might have supported a “climate emergency” without a second thought. Now, after three years of lockdowns, mandates, censorship and other heavy-handed policies, the trust is gone.

The leaders pushing for a new emergency who have failed to repudiate the abuses of the last one — even those with the purest of intentions regarding the environment — have lost credibility.

Many others feel the same way. We need to know exactly what a “climate emergency” really means.

So what would an official “climate emergency” look like?

Just like the “COVID-19 emergency,” it would be far-reaching, with potentially dramatic effects on the economy and society. Emergency measures may even cause serious harm to the environment — while failing to meaningfully address climate change.

Even if you tend to pay attention to climate-related issues, the implications of a “climate emergency” may surprise you.

How would a ‘climate emergency’ even work?

Environmental advocacy groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity have called on the Biden administration to invoke specific emergency statutes that would give him the power to:

• Ban crude oil exports.
• Stop oil and gas drilling on the outer continental shelf.
• Curtail international trade and investment in fossil fuels.

The Center for Biological Diversity says that these emergency powers would allow Biden to put the U.S. on the path to “jettison the fossil-fuel economy and burgeon a just, anti-racist, and regenerative America in its place.”

However, there are many reasons to doubt such grandiose claims. Numerous energy and materials experts, including the well-known analyst Vaclav Smil, have concluded that a rapid transition to “green” energy may not even be possible.

Further, the Biden administration would probably not take steps to quickly phase out fossil fuels at the risk of crashing the economy. As BlackRock noted its 2023 Global Outlook: “The faster the transition [the] more volatile inflation and economic activity.”

If Biden exercised his emergency powers, he would most likely use them to fast-track “green” energy projects while stopping far short of serious efforts to phase out fossil fuels.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 already set the precedent: It included hundreds of billions of dollars for “green” energy subsidies and opened millions of acres of public lands and offshore waters to fossil-fuel development.

This play-both-sides approach would obviously do little to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, which rose globally to 52 billion tons in 2022 (including about 36 billion tons of carbon) from 51 billion tons in 2021.

Even if Biden fully exercised the emergency powers identified by the Center for Biological Diversity, this would have little effect on emissions.

Climate experts who must speak on the condition of anonymity to “avoid upsetting colleagues” admit that “while a climate [emergency] declaration is important in terms of media attention and galvanizing the climate movement, it does not have significant impacts on carbon pollution.”

When you look at the wish lists of the Senate and House members who want Biden to declare a “climate emergency,” and the demands of the many activists who say we must reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050, the emergency powers listed by the Center for Biological Diversity barely scratch the surface of what most say is needed.

The big question is, what else will the government be tempted to do to reach net-zero by 2050 — a goal Biden already directed the US government itself to reach via executive order — once a “climate emergency” has been initiated?

Elizabeth Kolbert, a leading climate journalist, recently wrote an article “Climate Change from A to Z,” published in the New Yorker. Here’s what she says must happen to reach net-zero by 2050:

• The fossil fuel industry will essentially have to be dismantled, and millions of leaky and abandoned wells sealed.
• Concrete production will have to be reengineered. The same goes for the plastics and chemicals industries.
• The fertilizer industry will also have to be refashioned.
• Practically all the boilers and water heaters that now run on oil or gas, commercial and residential, will have to be replaced. So will all the gas stoves and dryers and industrial kilns.
• The airline industry will have to be revamped, as will the shipping industry.
• Farming “emissions, too, will have to be eliminated.”
• Electrical transmission capacity must be “expand[ed] so that hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, and buses can be run on electricity.”
• “Tens of millions” of public charging stations [must be installed] on city streets and even more charging stations in private garages.
• Nickell and lithium must be extracted for electric batteries, “which will mean siting new mines, either in the U.S. or abroad.”
• New methods for producing steel or building a new infrastructure for capturing and sequestering carbon” must be invented.

“All of this should be done — indeed, must be done,” Kolbert wrote. “Zeroing out emissions means rebuilding the U.S. economy from the bottom up.”

All of that must be done? We must “rebuild the US economy from the bottom up?”

What does it even mean to “revamp” the airline industry, or “refashion” the fertilizer industry or “eliminate” emissions from the farming industry?

In reality, most of those things cannot be done. They certainly cannot be accomplished within any reasonable exercise of presidential emergency powers.

If a president attempts to directly intervene in industry after industry to accomplish these unrealistic goals — or pretends for political reasons to be trying to accomplish them — a “climate emergency” could gradually expand in scope to unimaginable proportions, unless reined in by the Supreme Court or the political process.

These are not idle concerns. The pressure on the government to do something now is immense and growing, with the slow-moving democratic lawmaking process increasingly seen as an obstacle.

A 2021 report by Deutsche Bank said that we may have to accept “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship” to reach net-zero by 2050. The UN has suggested countries are moving too slowly, leaving us with no option but the “rapid transformation of societies.”

And Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said, “only root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”

“Getting to zero will be the hardest thing humans have ever done,” Bill Gates, who is heavily invested in numerous climate-related businesses, wrote in his final blog post of 2022.

Gates added:

“We need to revolutionize the entire physical economy — how we make things, move around, produce electricity, grow food, and stay warm and cool — in less than three decades.”

Many want the president to use his emergency powers to get started right now, without waiting for Congress to act.

But this would be a dangerous misuse of federal emergency powers, which were not intended to give the president an end-run around Congress, as senior director of Liberty & National Security at the Brennan Center for Justice Elizabeth Goitein warned. Nor were emergency powers designed to address a complex long-term challenge like climate change.

Once emergency powers are invoked, the temptation will be to expand them. The only way President Biden or a future president could reach for any kind of significant, broad-based climate goals using his existing emergency powers, Goitein said, would be to “stretch them beyond all recognition, using them in legally dubious ways Congress never intended … the idea that emergency powers are infinitely malleable is both false and dangerous.”

How a ‘climate emergency’ could infringe on civil liberties and human rights

How worried should we be that a “climate emergency” intended to “rapidly transform” our entire society by 2050 — which would be the 80th national emergency in US history — might gradually expand in scope to infringe on basic civil liberties and human rights?

A 2018 article in the Atlantic, “The Alarming Scope of the President’s Emergency Powers,” warned of nightmarish scenarios that could ensue if President Trump abused his emergency powers.

“The moment the president declares a ‘national emergency’ — a decision that is entirely within his discretion — he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority,” the article warned. “The president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts,” and much more.

We can certainly hope that a “climate emergency” would not morph into such a dangerous scenario. Historically, most national emergency declarations have been benign.

Yet the “COVID-19 emergency” initiated on Trump’s watch and carried on by Biden has unfortunately set a new and troubling authoritarian precedent that cannot be ignored.

Nowhere is that precedent more apparent than in the lingering notion of “locking down” the population.

In October 2020, University College of London economics professor Mariana Mazzucato, who chairs an economics council for the WHO, published an article expressly raising the possibility of “climate lockdowns” to address a “climate emergency.”

Mazzucato wrote:

“In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again — this time to tackle 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.”

What these “climate lockdowns” would amount to is various forms of “green austerity” — strict limits on consumption and personal behavior — imposed on the population.

This is a real possibility — not a conspiracy theory (despite the protestations of biased fact-checkers).

Far from being fringe, Mazzucato’s article about “climate lockdowns” as a response to a “climate emergency” was published by a website, Project Syndicate, that receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other influential organizations that vigorously supported COVID-19 lockdowns.

The article also was endorsed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a “CEO-led organization” that represents 200 of the world’s largest corporations.

Mazzucato is only one of many climate policymakers who want to harness the extraordinary technocratic/authoritarian powers that were used during COVID-19 “lockdowns” to fight climate change.

For example, a paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability cited the “window of opportunity provided by the Covid-19 crisis,” arguing that “Covid vaccine passports could be succeeded by personal carbon passports.”

“Carbon passports,” along with digital IDs, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), social-credit scores and other means of tracking and restricting consumption, travel, diet and personal behavior are routinely bandied about at the WEF and other elite technocratic organizations.

Worries about “carbon passports” take on added urgency in light of the recent G20 conference, which resulted in an agreement in principle to establish a system of digital vaccine passports for international travel, to be administered by the WHO.

How might such restrictions be incorporated into American law and life? There are various ways: legislation, agency rulemaking, international treaty, city ordinance.

A “climate emergency” is a powerful legal tool that could conceivably be used to impose “green” restrictions on the public in circumvention of the normal democratic lawmaking process, particularly if a presidential administration comes under pressure to stretch its emergency powers beyond their intended purpose.

Recall that it is not just presidents who can trigger a state of emergency. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), state governors and the WHO all have the power to declare a “public health emergency” within their respective areas of authority.

This is exactly what happened in early 2020, illustrating how a future “climate public health emergency” might take shape.

What happens if global, federal and state officials declare a ‘climate public health emergency’?

It was not only President Trump’s national emergency declaration that led to lockdowns and so many other abuses of power and violations of basic rights during COVID-19. His order helped establish the framework for emergency governance, but other “public health emergency” orders were crucial.

The WHO declared COVID-19 to be a “public health emergency of international concern” on Jan. 30, 2020. This move triggered a coordinated global response and had wide-ranging repercussions.

The next day, Trump’s HHS secretary declared a COVID-19 “public health emergency,” an order that has been repeatedly renewed and is still in effect.

Trump’s subsequent national emergency declaration on March 13, 2020, endorsed that order while authorizing HHS to exercise additional emergency powers.

Three days after that, on March 16, Trump issued the “coronavirus guidelines” that advised Americans to “avoid social gatherings in groups of more than 10,” which served as a basis for the lockdowns that swept the nation.

Governors of each state issued their own public health emergency orders, too. State public health agencies operating under those emergency orders were instrumental in enacting lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, vaccine mandates and other “emergency” policies in cooperation with federal agencies and the White House.

It is not far-fetched to think that the WHO, HHS and state public health agencies could eventually declare a “climate public health emergency,” following the COVID-19 script.

There have already been calls for the WHO to officially declare climate change a “public health emergency of international concern.”

At the direction of an executive order from President Biden, HHS recently established an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. “We will use the lessons learned from COVID-19” to address the effects of climate change on the nation’s health, said HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel L. Levine.

The WHO and major public health organizations — including the American Public Health Association (APHA), the American Medical Association (AMA) and top medical journals — already have declared climate change a “public health crisis.”

The Lancet called climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

We do not yet know if or when this “public health crisis” will turn into a full-fledged “public health emergency.” If it does, think of all the extraordinary powers that public health agencies claimed in response to the COVID-19 emergency, extending even to an eviction moratorium that grossly exceeded the agency’s lawful authority.

Now imagine those administrative powers applied to a new, even broader and much more long-lasting emergency that plausibly touches on so many different aspects of human health.

The public health leviathan is preparing to expand its powers in response to climate change, just as it did with COVID-19. We cannot predict how this effort will fare in the years ahead. The WHO may or may not declare climate change a “public health emergency.”

HHS may refrain from doing so, pursuant to recent Supreme Court precedent limiting the ability of federal agencies to address “major questions” like climate change without clear Congressional authorization. Politics, of course, will play a huge role. At this point, we simply do not know how a “climate public health emergency” will play out, but in the wake of COVID-19, it remains a serious concern.”