You knew they would try to pivot off the draconian COVID policies and use climate change as the pretext to deploy the same rigid controls over our lives. Now, perhaps a trial balloon is being floated for a “climate lockdown.”
The noxious idea is that we are at (yet another) tipping point, and that unless government radically seizes centralized control of the economy, it will be shutdown time. From, “Avoiding a Climate Lockdown,” by Mariana Mazzucato, Founding Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose:
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.
You can just imagine the authoritarianism Mazzucato proposes — meaning, it wouldn’t be capitalism at all. For example:
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.
Never mind that the U.S. has led the world in reducing emissions because of the fossil fuel known as natural gas!
The good news about all of this is that in the United States at least, it will never happen. I mean, if people rebel against lockdowns and controls in the midst of a pandemic, they are not about to let these radical technocrats thwart their living the good life based on global-warming hysteria.