The following individuals and groups, who have historically focused on denying or downplaying the risk of man-made global warming, have turned their attention to the COVID-19 crisis.
This set of examples focuses on comparisons between COVID-19 and the climate crisis, with viewpoints ranging from COVID being a real concern to suggest that climate change is not, to claiming both are either a hoax or invalid because of the use of computer models.
*Please note that automatic transcripts were generated for some of the video materials, and while we have reviewed the transcripts, there may still be errors. Contact DeSmog if you notice any errors and we will address them as soon as possible.*
These examples are taken out of a larger body of evidence DeSmog has gathered on COVID denial.
Alex Epstein
“The Tom Woods Show: Ep. 1627 Lockdowns vs. Human Flourishing: Is There Another Approach?” April 6
[32:17] I think I think these I should just say, I think these are much better than climate models. All modelers are generally better. But it’s, it’s the, I mean, climate models, it’s just so hard to model climate and nobody can really do it and so there’s a lot of dishonesty about, about that as such. With these kinds of models, I think there are people who can model it pretty well, but it’s, the question is what’s the purpose of modeling?
So is it to kind of understand certain kinds of broad scenarios, and hey, what happens if people… like if you if you really knew, for example, how much masks made a difference, then you could run a model that would tell you something important, and it might be it might be, hey, that’s the, that’s the high leverage point. We can do that. So what I’m concerned about is really that the the broader what I would call knowledge system, including their trusted news sources, and many political people, what they are doing is they’re taking catastrophic interpretations of models, which includes embracing some of the most irresponsible modelers.
But I think that there are many very responsible people who are, whom I do not want to throw under the bus. And I think they’re doing important work. And to some extent, they’re responsible climate modelers. But the problem is that most of people in climate modeling, it’s just, again, not something we can do very well, and so there’s an inherent dishonesty in people who are acting like we really know this.
But even with those, they’re just the same problem where, what they’ll even if they were accurate, about oh, it’ll warm two degrees by 2100 or 2050, or something like that. They don’t integrate in the the benefits that come from leaving people free to use fossil fuels. And just like here, people are not integrating what are the benefits of people continuing to live their lives and be free, and conversely, they’re not modeling enough what are the harms of restricting the action of really billions of people indefinitely? So it’s the abuse of the models and the privileging of the most irresponsible modelers.
“Power Hour: 4 Ideas About COVID-19 You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else,” Alex Epstein via SoundCloud (since removed, still available at Apple Podcasts), March 18
[00:57:49] Climate change fixation prevented us from paying attention to real threats like coronavirus or COVID-19.
Bjorn Lomborg
Links to “I’m skeptical about climate alarmism, but I take coronavirus fears seriously,” Boston Globe, March 14, 2020 by Jeff Jacoby.
CFACT
Bonner Cohen. “Climate alarmism and Covid-19 don’t mix,” CFACT, May 20
Of the many responses to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, none was more predictable than the effort by climate activists to exploit the crisis for their own political purposes.
It was an intolerable situation. Climate alarmists suddenly found themselves relegated to the sidelines as the country confronted a real threat, one with deadly consequences.
It didn’t take long, however, for the Climate Industrial Complex to come up with a slapdash study linking COVID-19 to fossil-fuel-induced climate change and for that message to be trumpeted by the usual suspects in the hope of drawing attention to an issue that was being overshadowed by events.
[…]
Americans, by overwhelming majorities, were not willing to sacrifice their livelihoods for the climate before they were put through the ordeal of COVID-19 lockdowns, and they certainly aren’t now.
A Harris poll taken May 12 found that 62% of U.S. adults surveyed said climate change wouldn’t damage the American economy if left unaddressed, the Washington Times reported. Yet a Reuters/Ipsos poll found last year that Americans were unwilling to install solar panels, carpool or take the bus, reduce eating meat, pay an additional $100 in taxes, drive an electric car or pay an additional $100 or more on their annual electricity bill to fight climate change.
Taken from Craig Rucker, “CFACT & Heartland expose lockdown aspirations of climate radicals,” CFACT post, April 30
Put to Marc and James last night was the task of answering this very important question: Is the coronavirus lockdown the future environmentalists want?
Marc Morano kicked things off by explaining that the climate Left has been clamoring for coronavirus-style lockdowns for years. These radical activists and bureaucrats are desperate to keep the shutdown going in the name of “climate action.”
“Lockdowns…this is what the climate community has preached for decades about global warming! And particularly, in the last couple years, [they wanted to impose] through the Green New Deal,” Marc said. “The climate activists for lack of a better word, are jealous!”
James Taylor analyzed statements from global bureaucrats such as the World Health Organization (WHO), revealing their true motivations.
“Another WHO official said, and here’s a quote: ‘What the COVID crisis exposes, is that we can do things differently. We must not go back to the status-quo. We cannot do that.’ To say that we should have a permanent, current situation of lockdowns and shutdowns and restrictions on freedoms, is just unbelievable that people might accept that,” Taylor said.
A great question and answer period followed James and Marc’s presentations, with questions covering a range of topics extending from climate change to government overreach.
While climate radicals drool over the shutdown of the global economy, our fight for freedom must go on.
As James Taylor said toward the end of the event: “This is a bait and switch at the expense of our most important and basic freedoms.”
To be sure, the climate radicals must not prevail. Let’s not permit them to keep our freedoms on perpetual lockdown.
Norm Kalmanovitch. “A more robust way of predicting COVID-19 than models,” CFACT, April 4.
Unlike the faked computer models responsible for creating the UN’s fabricated climate emergency https://clintel.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ecd-press-briefing.pdf the models used in predicting the outcome of the Covid-19 epidemic are both useful and necessary .Yet equally necessary is to use data based predictions as a complimentary alternative to the model based predictions that provides the positive outlook that a stressed US population is in desperate need of.
Please pass this on to your Whitehouse contacts with my compliments.
CFACT/Heartland Institute
“Is the coronavirus lockdown the future environmentalists want?” CFACT video featuring Marc Morano and Heartland Institute president James Taylor, April 30
Marc Morano [00:05:19] The lockdowns and a lot of the approach was a WW2 style fighting of the virus, we’re all in this together. This is what the climate community has preached for decades about global warming, and particularly, in the recent last couple of years, particularly about the Green New Deal. So, you have AOC, Ocasio-Cortez, calling for the WW2 style engagement, you have Greta Thunberg out there with the school strikes.
What I think the number one thing that’s happened here is first of all the climate activists are in complete and total shock that government and the world has reacted in many ways a unified way to the viral threat, and they have literally just dusted, knocked climate off the table. And the climate activists. for lack of a better word, are jealous. They are in shock, and they are in awe. They are in shock that all the stuff they’ve been essentially preaching; the WW2 style approach, lowering emissions, we’re all in this together, government action, getting people to actually mobilize and react; happened literally almost overnight with the virus.
And they couldn’t get bupkis from the public before, they couldn’t even get bupkis from democratic presidents with democratic congresses in years past, you know, anything actually passing Congress, even mild things by their book like cap and trade. So, they’ve been in awe of this. So the first thing is they’re jealous. The second thing is they’re praising this.
[…]
Marc Morano [00:10:40] Everything that they’ve wanted to see in society has now essentially become a temporary reality. And now many of the top UN leadership, many of the climate activists, people like John Kerry, Al Gore, they can’t avoid jumping on this bandwagon, and they are – I’m not saying they’re all happy that this happened – but they see this as an opportunity they can’t wait to exploit, and they are going to… they’re going to use, now, the virus fears going forward to bolster climate action.
James Taylor [00:13:03] It’s a time that’s very concerning. This is a very perilous time for freedom. Back 7 months ago we were told that we could expect up to 2 million deaths from coronavirus, and fortunately those models appear to have been greatly overstated, because now we are being told perhaps 60,000, maybe 100,000. Still quite a tragedy, but nowhere near the 2 million deaths. When those models made those predictions, it really gave me pause because I know how in the climate change debate, people program models, and the models are only as good, the outcome and predictions are only as accurate as the assumptions that go into the programming. And for climate change we have seen that the models predicted for example, the United Nations First Assessment Report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they said we could expect 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming per decade, that was in 1990. Here we are 30 years later and we’ve seen less than half of that warming. So when we saw the models predicting such a great death toll, I was hoping that the models would be just as wrong as they are for climate change and fortunately they have been.
[…]
[00:17:44] It’s very concerning to hear what some folks from the climate establishment, and even outside the climate establishment but for example from the World Health Organization, are saying regarding the COVID-19 response and climate change.
[…]
[00:20:06] These people are looking at an opportunity to cement, permanently, these restrictions on our freedom, these death knells to our economy, all in the name of gaining more control for their international organizations and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This is a very perilous time for freedom in our country and around the world.
Adam Houser [00:21:05] The first question I’ve got here is from Mark and it is ‘how do climate activists view handling all the attention and government shutdowns caused by the virus?’
Marc Morano [00:21:18] Well, right now they see, again, as a crisis opportunity. They don’t want the crisis to go to waste. And we’ve both quoted Christiana Figueres. She’s an essential figure in this. She’s the architect of the UN Paris Agreement. Her other big quote from a few years back was “we seek a centralized transformation that will make life on planet Earth very different for everyone, a new economic model.” So, this was Christiana Figueres as a UN Climate Chief. What is this but a centralized transformation of our culture. This lockdown as James was alluding to, has all the hallmarks of totalitarianism.
[…]
[00:22:40] So I think the climate activists are going to jump all over every aspect as we’ve mentioned, as James eloquently laid out, and they want these to continue. In fact there’s many quotes, one of the quotes was Teen Vogue, essentially Teen Vogue which is the youth climate activists featuring them saying this is a model, we need to essentially keep this going – so they want to keep these restrictions on, and they just want to morph from virus to climate.
Adam Houser [00:23:17] There are plenty of stories in the media each week linking the Wuhan virus with climate change. What is the overall kind of goal, the overall story here, is global warming making the coronavirus pandemic worse?
James Taylor [00:23:31] I’m glad you asked that because we’re seeing an increasing number of media articles, day after day, making that link, sometimes implicitly rather than explicitly, but nevertheless, making clear that they want leaders to believe that climate change makes the coronavirus and other pandemics worse.
And as I mentioned earlier, what we do know, the reason why flu season is in the winter is because colder temperatures inhibit the spread of influenza. In the southern hemisphere, the flu season is in June, July, August, their winter, and there are a few different reasons for this but this is something that’s not in dispute. For the coronavirus, scientists are still looking to ascertain whether this same impact of warmer temperatures will affect coronavirus. But that’s why we hear about perhaps a second wave in the fall. The reason why they say the fall is because they expect that here in the summer it’s going to be harder for coronavirus to spread from person to person.
So the long and short of it is this: if humans are causing some warming to the planet, and if we have earlier summers, earlier arrivals of summer, and later arrivals of fall, this is something that inhibits the spread of coronavirus. It’s going to reduce the death toll, it’s something that’s the complete opposite of what we’re hearing in the media. And it’s very concerning that folks in the media are so intent on spinning a narrative regardless of what happens in the real world, that they will twist and turn 180 degrees what’s happening in the real world compared to what they’re reporting. But the long and short of it is this: if there’s going to be any impact of warming temperatures, of global warming, of climate change, on coronavirus or other epidemics and pandemics, it’s going to make them less frequent and less severe.
Marc Morano [00:27:53] The history of human civilization has been at one with nature, until fossil fuels came along and lifted us out of that. If anything, fossil fuels and the modern way of living remove us from nature. Put us in air conditioned sky rises, long far away from jungles, and pathogens, and disease, and animal bites, and insects. So, it’s the exact opposite. If you want to reduce the idea of pathogens coming, you’d want more fossil fuels, more development, not a harking back to a bygone era when we lived in nature. So I just, I get so angry when I see these UN claims, and these other climate activists claiming that somehow because we’re advanced on nature there’s more viruses. It’s the opposite. The more we’ve removed ourselves through fossil fuel, the less chance we have of these kinds of pathogens.
[…]
[00:33:10] By the way, it’s the same model: When current reality fails to alarm, make scarier and scarier predictions. That applies in climate, classic example is polar bears. As the numbers swell to record numbers, how do you create alarm? “Well it’s much worse for the polar bear,” well how is that possible? – “well our predictions of 50 to 100 years are now much worse than they were just 5 years ago.” Same thing here with the coronavirus. They’re warning of second and third waves, “this could, might, may happen,” keep the fear alive, you can keep the lockdowns, you can maybe let off a little, and then just crack down again. These governors, the health bureaucracy in Washington, love it. This is their shining moment. This is what they wait for.
James Taylor [00:36:31] The climate activists have again skewed what it means to be protecting nature. So, for example, as I mentioned earlier, we would have to cover a third of the United States with wind turbines just to meet today’s electricity needs with wind power. And if we add transportation, probably half the United States. That is incredibly devastating to the environment. It’s not that we have to choose between environmental stewardship and a strong healthy economy with individual freedom, no they can go hand in hand, and really they naturally do go hand in hand, except when you have these collectivist restrictions imposed by the climate left on our society.
Marc Morano [00:45:27] Let’s turn the argument around on them. Instead of them using this and AOC, as I mentioned earlier, is cheering the collapse of oil prices and everything else. Let’s turn it around. The idea of green living is actually antithetical to virus panic and viral fears. Well, we use the virus fears to oppose their rules. We’ve always been told, you know, if a driver is going to a lone driver in a car, driving, commuting to and from work is bad for the planet and polluting. Well, given the age of virus scares and we’re all supposed to be terrified of all these viruses.
Now, why would you want to pack on mass transit that’s green approved? Why would you want to take the subway system? Why would you want to be on the commuter train when you Could take your glorious fossil fuel car in isolation away from the virus? So I would argue. Let’s turn the fears around, you know, where necessary to throw it back at ’em. And it was actually an article was actually article by Michael Barone recently called Anti Pandemic Rules, the Opposite of Anti-Climate Change Rules. Let’s use that against them because they want everyone living in crowded urban areas. I remember one climate activist years ago wanted everyone wanted to design cities after termite nests. The idea is to have everything just centrally planned, perfectly smart, smart planned out. If you now look at it in the lens of the virus scare, which they are promoting shamelessly, that doesn’t fly. So let’s use their own rhetoric against them.
CLINTEL
Message CLINTEL: “Fight virus not carbon” – Also posted at Heartland Institute and at CFACT.
Your Excellencies, compared to COVID-19 climate change is a non-problem! It is based on computer models and looks into the far future. In current health emergency, however, your attention to the peoples’ needs is today! Please, don’t continue pushing your zero carbon emission ambition in a time that the world is dealing with a deadly global crisis. Yes, there is an emergency, but it is NOT the climate.
While courageous doctors and nurses are saving many lives, climate alarmists and climate critics should stop fighting, step over their own shadow and work together against this deadly virus. In this difficult time, humility suits us all. World leaders, please show us the way! As a very first step, designated Green New Deal money must be redirected and invested in a significantly better global health system. In such a renovation process, don’t exclude critical professionals. History tells us that a pandemic like COVID-19 will happen again. At least, we must be better prepared.
CLINTEL’s ambassadors,
Nobel Laureate Professor Ivar Giaever, Norway/USA
Professor Guus Berkhout, The Netherlands
Professor Reynald Du Berger, French speaking Canada
Terry Dunleavy, New Zealand (New Zealand Climate Science Coalition)
Viv Forbes, Australia
Professor Jeffrey Foss, English speaking Canada
Jens Morton Hansen, Denmark
Morten Jødal, Norway
Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannes, Greece
Rob Lemeire, Dutch speaking Belgium
Professor Richard Lindzen, USA
Professor Henri A. Masson, French speaking Belgium
Professor Ingemar Nordin, Sweden
Jim O’Brien, Republic of Ireland
Professor Ian Plimer, Australia
Douglas Pollock, Chile
Professor Alberto Prestininzi, Italy
Professor Benoît Rittaud, France
Dr. Thiago Maia, Brasil
Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, Germany
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, United Kingdom
European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE)
“Corona and climate alarm: avoid misconceptions,” EIKE, March 27 (translated with Google Translate)
The climate alarmists are apparently currently suffering from media withdrawal symptoms and are trying to assess the risk of corona. Why are rash analogies misleading? What are typical mistakes in thinking and problem solving in complex situations? And how can we avoid them?
[…]
I would like to warn us climate realists against going to the level of Rahmstorf. We should not prematurely transfer our well-founded findings in the field of climate and energy to the corona crisis, about which we still know so little, due to superficial commonalities in science and business sociology. Those of us who have built up a knowledge base in the field of climate and energy for decades may be susceptible to mistakes in thinking in ostensibly similar situations.
H. Sterling Burnett
“CORONAVIRUS HIGHLIGHTS ECO–RADICALS’ ANTI–HUMAN AGENDA,” The Heartland Institute, March 27, 2020
Take note, people! Based on their own past statements, this is exactly what the radical environmentalists and global elites would bequeath you: a world of rampant death from disease and economic stagnation, a planet with far fewer people and much fewer possessions and comforts for those who survive.
We must wake up to the threat these misanthropic climate-crisis fearmongers pose to human flourishing and, after this current pandemic passes, embrace freedom of choice, free minds, and free markets. This is the best hope for creating an economy and health care delivery system able to prevent or respond rapidly to future pandemics.
“Media Lies Debunked: Coronavirus, Pandemics, and Climate Change,” Climate Realism, March 26, 2020
Climate alarmists and major media outlets are deceitfully exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to tell the public lies that climate change makes pandemics more likely and severe. In reality, the evidence is quite clear that warmer temperatures make pandemics and underlying outbreaks of viruses like the flu less frequent and severe.
[…]Contrary to the fear-mongering assertions in The Hill and Time, the overwhelming scientific evidence shows it is cold, not heat, that kills. Therefore, a modestly warmer world, with shorter, less severe winters, should result in fewer premature deaths from disease, viruses, pandemics, hunger, and other natural causes.
Independent Women’s Forum
Kelsey Bolar and Julie Gunlock. “Something COVID And Climate Change Have In Common? Unreliable Models,” Independent Women’s Forum, April 22, 2020
Many of the COVID-19 models have been wrong and now we’re all getting a crash course in just how unreliable they can be at predicting outcomes in the future. Reliance on these models can quite literally drive policies that can unnecessarily destroy economies.
[…]
While models can help scientists make ballpark estimates based on certain variables, not all variables can be predicted. For instance, models designed to predict climate change can’t account for natural climate variables, such as solar activity, cloud cover, volcanic activity and ocean activity. These variables play an important role, yet climate models aren’t sophisticated enough to include—never mind predict—them. It is therefore impossible to predict how these factors will change in the future or even whether they will completely overshadow any changes caused by humans.
[…]
Despite these clear limitations, climate models continue to be the impetus for drastic policy measures, such the much ballyhooed Green New Deal. This proposal would wreck the U.S. economy and significantly lower the living standards of all Americans, while doing nothing to significantly reduce carbon emissions worldwide.
[…]
Reliance on flawed models create a culture of alarmism that makes rational, thoughtful discussions and robust debates about workable solutions nearly impossible. Yet, in the cases of both coronavirus and climate change, that is exactly what must take place.
Joe Bastardi
“Climate change accused of being deadlier than Covid 19 — Fact check,” CFACT, March 17
This article: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sarah-mcinerney-climate-change-will-be-deadlier-than-covid-19-lstrdl6t7 tries to scare the daylights out of people who are already scared with an implication not supported by any facts today. We are all anxious about the unknown with this virus, so here we go, the predictable use of climate to scare people even more. But the facts are clear on climate over the last 100 years, the results on mankind are EXACTLY OPPOSITE. Which is even more remarkable given the growth of human life.
I guess if the Covid-19 completely fizzles out, which is also a possibility, then anything that happens in the weather globally over the next 20 years that is blamed for deaths, means perhaps it would be eclipsed. But the facts reveal that man’s adaptation via freedom, competition and capitalism, which is leading the way, is saying the EXACT OPPOSITE is happening!
[…]
Be open-minded, tolerant and don’t accuse those, that bring up ideas you may not have seen, of being someone they are not (example Climate Denier). Writing scare articles using what is admittedly a scary virus, and then saying, “climate change” is something worse, without showing people where we are today on the matter and the actual data, is not being open-minded nor tolerant of contrary ideas.
“Meteorologist: The Coronavirus Is Not A Climate Event,” Principia Scientific International, March 13 – also at CFACT
As predictable as the morning sunrise, we are hearing that the spread of the Coronavirus is enhanced by “climate change.”
No proof of that for one, and secondly, it runs counter to the fact that life THRIVED in warmer times. You have seen this chart many times so here it is again:
[…]
Over the years, after studying all this, I have made no secret that I believe the climate change agenda is a smokescreen for other agendas.
One of them is driven by the idea that there are too many people on the planet, using too much of the resources of the planet.
This apparently flies in the face of the “be fruitful and multiply,” which of course does not say be stupid and trash the planet, but then again does not imply that there is a set limit on what man can do with free will and a head turned toward a higher calling, something beyond the state.
But when I look at some of the statements by prominent people that are on the climate change bandwagon, I realize there is a link to population control.
And there is that word, control, the idea that one person knows better than another person what is good for the society as a whole.
“Covid-19 and climate false equivalencies,” CFACT, March 23
So I am not trying to be critical, but more observant here of what I see as a common denominator. When someone, for instance, is saying that the climate emergency is worse than the Covid-19 outbreak, that should raise red flags simply due to the time scales as Covid-19 can tear down much in a year. In fact in the US, because of the mild winter, the economy likely did better than was thought before the winter, as we had record housing starts in January. So right there the climate “emergency” had a result in the US that was positive while unless you are against progress for mankind, (that is another issue, the wish to diminish man’s progress) the warmer winter was great. The point is that in both issues, there are very good people that disagree, but a whole cottage industry that is swung by agenda has sprung up. So there are some dire messages here, but in the end, the facts show that warmer is better for life, very much opposite the possible fast result of COVID-19.
[…]
There is the argument in the man-made climate change community that we should have the same kind of response we have for COVID-19. This which is interesting in that if anything COVID-19 is showing, what happens when the business engine of the nation is shut down, it leads to misery. One can not argue that before this hit, life on the planet had improved dramatically over the last 100 years. This despite and aided in fact by warming. Yet a threat like COVID-19 will be something to show that the government is essential in stepping in for threats like this. Trying to portray a much more gradual event, arguably not hindering man’s progress but enhancing it, seems like a false equivalency. One thing is for sure, you are seeing what taking a couple of trillion dollars out of the economy can do. Imagine a 10 trillion dollar plan to fight “climate change”?! The Covid-19 event, like hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. are showing why there has to be a safety net. The question is the extent.
Mark Mathis
Mark Steyn
“Corona Catch-22,” Steyn Online, March 9
The best defense against an influenza pandemic is rising temperatures – or global warming. It seems an odd time for anti-Biden protesters to be rushing the stage demanding the slaughter of cattle herds when bovine flatulence may be all that stands between us and the abyss.
Patrick Michaels
“EU official exploits coronavirus to push awful climate change legislation,” Washington Examiner, March 9
Make no mistake: The proposed EU climate law will reverse a lot more progress and a lot more economic and environmental resilience than any probable climate change or, for that matter, coronavirus.
Patrick Moore
Martin Armstrong
Armstrong’s Letter to President Trump, April 13
My company developed a computer forecasting model that has picked every financial crash since 1987. All intelligence agencies are well aware of its existence. Our computer model has forecast wars and the political collapse of nations such as Russia in 1998. That forecast was even reported on by the London Financial Times prior to the event occurring.
To be direct, our computer is showing that if the economy remains closed beyond May 1 st, we are looking at a global economic decline that will not bottom for 13 years until we reach 2032
[…]
The solution must also take into consideration that this is a political war. The very same people who have been advocating shutting down the economy are seeking socialism under the banner of climate change. These people are behind the demand to shut down the world economy by using a virus where the death toll is on par or less than the annual flu.
“Gates & Fauci Conspiracy,” Armstrong Economics, April 9 (emphasis in original)
The conspiracy between Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci is in the open. We now have Fauci saying the same thing as gates – the country will NEVER return to normal until everyone is vaccinated against this pretend virus. Fauci has suggested that until a vaccine is developed, we will NEVER be allowed to do anything in public.
This is the overthrow of the United States. It is a conspiracy blended with the Climate Change agenda from day one.
“Oppressing Climate Dissent & COVID-19 Dissent,” Armstrong Economics, April 9
The agenda of these population/climate theorists is really Marxism. They are using the environment to pitch their economic agenda. Their push is to seize the industry and control it. This agenda is really quite serious. They exaggerate everything and refuse to address any criticism. They have indoctrinated the education system. In Canada, they were actually teaching kids that because of global warming, Russia would be able to invade Canada. They refuse to even consider that solar energy fluctuates. They act as if the planet has warmed from the Little Ice Age solely because of CO2. They will not allow anyone to challenge them and now they have Wikipedia removing dissent. When any movement must try to shut down dissent, it ceases to be a basic movement for the people and becomes a dictatorial movement that destroys human rights. They act like they never heard of solar panels.
Now we see the very same power trying to suppress any medical comment that COVID-19 is now justified for this level of hysteria.
“Gates – Stupid or Diabolical?” Armstrong Economics, April 8
There is no way the economy will EVER return to normal. People like Gates will insist upon his vaccines to be allowed to even work. He wants us to be tagged like cattle. What’s next? Sterilization and permits to have children? If you do not have a base level of IQ, you will be denied? Is that how he will reduce his paranoia about CO2?
Matt Ridley
“We all need to change how we live our lives to fight this generation of pandemics,” The Telegraph, March 1
Pandemics are frankly more likely to kill millions or disrupt the world economy than climate change. But if we learn the lesson that we must be more authoritarian, we’ll have got it wrong. Culture and practice can change without putting Big Brother in charge.
Covid-19 may yet peter out, but it looks unlikely after what has happened in Italy and Iran. It seems to be killing mainly old people and its mortality and infectivity may eventually be no higher than flu, but that is cold comfort.
Flu kills thousands a year, yet we treat respiratory infections fatalistically as an inevitable risk, the way our ancestors thought of consumption or smallpox. It should not be like this: we can do much more to stop these viruses spreading.
[…]
Wearing a face mask when you have a cold or flu should become the norm as it is in Japan.
Let’s use this epidemic, however bad it gets, to change our habits not just temporarily but for good.With 7.7 billion people on the planet, we are a very tempting target for new viruses and although we have interrupted many of the ways that they would like to spread, and are good at making vaccines, we are still subject to lots of respiratory infections that can occasionally kill us and will always inconvenience us.
We don’t need Big Brother to force cultural change on us; better that we do it voluntarily.
Richard Epstein
“Don’t Expect Millions To Die From Coronavirus, Says Richard Epstein,” Reason Foundation, March 18.
[00:09:02] Well, look, I think part of this has to do with the same issue in connection with global warming. I mean, I’m generally a pretty deep skeptic about the fact that the world is going to come to the end. If you start looking at all the short term indicators, none of them indicate stuff. But the alarmist literature on this stuff is simply enormous. And the immediate data is not carried, is not respected. Well, the same thing seems to be happening here. Everybody starts to think about worst case hypotheses and then you figure out how it is you model them. So when The New York Times presented its model with this sharp peak and this sharp decline, you try to figure out what are the assumptions behind it.
Richard A. Epstein. “Playing Politics With Coronavirus,” Hoover Institution/defining ideas, March 9.
Another journalist, James Traub, is also using the crisis to advance a political agenda. In his gloomy essay “Our ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Is Killing the Planet,” he uses the tragedy of the coronavirus outbreak to launch an explicit attack on the principles of classical liberalism. He challenges John Stuart Mill’s harm principle that allows individuals to do what they will until they engage in harm to other individuals. But his argument is tenuous, for there is absolutely no connection whatsoever between the coronavirus and global warming. Traub is just wrong to use this crisis to advance a goal of net-zero carbon and the Green New Deal. And implementing his policy proposals will do nothing to mitigate the current pandemic or a similar tragedy in the future.
The coronavirus outbreak has much more to do with the nefarious activities of the Chinese government and the rapid movement of people across the globe than with some tiny perturbation in global temperature over the last few decades. It is therefore deeply irresponsible for Traub to ask: “Are we willing to sacrifice personal liberty for global survival?” A world pandemic requires immediate attention to deadly risks, not woolly proposals to reform American society that make no more sense in times of crisis than in times of peace.
Richard Tol
Rupert Darwall
“The coronavirus pandemic versus the climate change emergency,” The Hill, March 29
The coronavirus pandemic shows what a genuine crisis looks like. No one has to catastrophize it; the facts speak for themselves. Inducing fear and panic is counter-productive.
Global warming is different. For more than three decades, climate change has been the catastrophe that’s always just over the horizon. It moves with glacial speed; there is plenty of time to prepare for it. Humans – the most adaptive species on the planet – have been adapting to a changing climate ever since they first wore animal skins for warmth. The idea that the generation born since 1988 has experienced anything approaching a global nuclear war is preposterous. Even last year’s destructive Australian wildfires were fueled by green policies that prevented controlled fires.
Rush Limbaugh
“The coronavirus pandemic versus the climate change emergency,” The Hill, March 29
The coronavirus pandemic shows what a genuine crisis looks like. No one has to catastrophize it; the facts speak for themselves. Inducing fear and panic is counter-productive.
Global warming is different. For more than three decades, climate change has been the catastrophe that’s always just over the horizon. It moves with glacial speed; there is plenty of time to prepare for it. Humans – the most adaptive species on the planet – have been adapting to a changing climate ever since they first wore animal skins for warmth. The idea that the generation born since 1988 has experienced anything approaching a global nuclear war is preposterous. Even last year’s destructive Australian wildfires were fueled by green policies that prevented controlled fires.
Spiked
Ben Pile. “Covid-19 is a frightening dress rehearsal of the climate agenda,” Spiked, May 12
From the outset, there has been a palpable sense of green jealousy of the virus as it stole attention from the climate fearmongers. For half a century, greens have been prognosticating the imminent collapse of society. Yet with each new generation, deadlines to stop the destruction of the planet pass without event. In reality, the world’s population has become healthier and wealthier, and we live longer lives than ever before. Panic about the virus achieved in days what greens have been demanding for years: grounded planes, empty roads, and a halt in economic growth.
[…]
The virus of green thinking has infected political leaders and their plans for the economic recovery, too. ‘No one hesitates to make very profound, brutal choices when it’s a matter of saving lives’, French president Emmanuel Macron told the FT: ‘It’s the same for climate risk.’
[…]
Greens also claim that the pandemic exposes the shortcomings of a fossil-fuel dependent world. The recent crash in oil prices proves this, apparently. As demand for energy withered, cargo ships containing oil approached depots that were at full capacity. Consequently, supply being far in excess of demand, the oil price, which was already sinking, went negative. This, said Sky News’ Ed Conway in The Times, was a sign of our ‘post-oil future’. ‘Eventually the world will wean itself off fossil fuels, so today’s oil producers’ days are numbered; only a handful will survive’, he wrote.
But the demand for fossil fuels is suppressed, not because of any inherent problems with fossil fuels, but because vast numbers of people have been immobilised. The reason the oil price plunged is the same reason videos of dancing nurses appeared on social media. Whereas many nurses are extremely busy, the lockdown has caused other health workers to become surplus to need.
[…]
On this timescale, we can see that far-reaching and regressive political agendas are hidden behind a preoccupation and oversensitivity to risk. And whereas the green agenda has played out in years, we can see in mere weeks that policymakers are indifferent to our lives and livelihoods, and will cynically embrace crises to advance their own interests. There will be no chance of an economic recovery if Britain, the EU and the rest of the world follow their existing climate-change agendas – there will only be a lockdown, or something like it, forever.
Steve Milloy
^^ Links to: “Anti-pandemic rules the opposite of anti-climate change rules,” The Mining Journal, March 30
Todd Myers
Todd Myers. “The Coronavirus Lockdown Has Not Made the Air Cleaner,” National Review, May 14
This counterintuitive result could be due to a number of influences, including weather. The key factor, however, is that in most places, human-caused pollution is small relative to natural sources. Even a significant reduction in the human contribution makes only a small difference.
So, why do so many activists claim the air is ‘physically cleaner’ in the United States?
In part because they want to believe it. Opposition to cars is a major theme in left-wing environmental politics, and it is simply assumed, without looking at the data, that less driving equals cleaner air. The large gap between the political rhetoric and scientific reality is a reminder that costly environmental regulations should be based in real-world data, not ideologically driven assumptions.
[T]he economic lockdown has provided a painful, but useful, natural experiment to test the potential benefits of future air-quality regulations. If a policy claims to reduce PM 2.5 by more than we are seeing currently, under a drastic reduction of car travel, we should be very skeptical.
[…]
[E]ven those (or most of those) claiming our air quality is better admit that shutting down the economy is not a good approach. Considering the painful economic impacts of environmental policy is important, not just for our prosperity, but for the environment.
