GET READY FOR CLIMATE-21 LOCKDOWNS.
Somewhere deep in the cranium of the climate intelligentsia a seed was planted to produce the florid idea that the global COVID-19 virus could serve as inspiration for humankind to once and for all tackle the looming climate crisis. Mark Carney, the global master of modern corporatism’s climate crusade, dedicates a whole chapter of his book Value(s) to the Covid/climate nexus. “If we come together to meet the biggest challenges in medical biology, so too can we come together to meet the challenges of climate physics and the forces driving inequality.”
The link between the virus pandemic and the climate policy pandemic was aggressively planted almost two years by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab. COVID-19, he said, opens the door to The Great Reset, a major remake of global power and politics. “The possibilities for change and the resulting new order,” Schwab said, “are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination.”
Schwab’s imaginings are now entrenched. From CEOS to medical writers to economists and scientists playing for power and attention, the policy transition from a war on the COVID-19 virus to the war on the CLIMATE-21 fossil fuels virus has been firmly established.
That message came clearly this week when 220 medical journals around the world — including the Canadian Medical Association Journal — published the same “editorial” under the headline: “Call for emergency action to limit global temperature increases, restore biodiversity, and protect health.”
The action plan, according to the world’s medical establishment, is a global application of the COVID-19 model: “Many governments met the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic with unprecedented funding. The environmental crisis demands a similar emergency response. Huge investment will be needed, beyond what is being considered or delivered anywhere in the world. But such investments will produce huge positive health and economic outcomes. These include high-quality jobs, reduced air pollution, increased physical activity, and improved housing and diet. Better air quality alone would realize health benefits that easily offset the global costs of emissions reductions.”
Medical people are amazing, but how did the editors of 220 medical journals from
India to Canada and East
Africa become experts in climate science, economics and the environment? They didn’t. The dental journals and other medical publications have merely accepted the official United Nations’ line on climate change to reach predetermined conclusions.
Say the doctors: “Governments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more. Global co-ordination is needed to ensure that the rush for cleaner technologies does not come at the cost of more environmental destruction and human exploitation.”
Given the current state of the global pandemic, the assumption that the COVID control experience shows the way forward may strike many as a little premature. It is not obvious that we need to fight the climate with big government interventions, backed by corporations, to totally reshape the global economic and power system.
One of the hundreds of corporate reshapers is Noel Quinn, CEO of Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC). In a panel discussion with Carney recently, Quinn said HSBC’S commitment to the new climate corporatism is being met with great client support thanks to the pandemic. “Clients are actually coming for that dialogue proactively rather than us having to go to them,” said Quinn. “I think COVID has helped in that regard. Everybody in the world has had a wake-up call on how fragile the world economy is. With that wakeup call, I think the pace of change has accelerated.”
The policy creep from COVID to climate hit the pages of Nature Sustainability journal last month in an article promoting Personal Carbon Allowances. It says, “the policy window of opportunity provided by the COVID-19 crisis, in combination with the need to address worsening climate and biodiversity crises,” make it possible for individuals to be allocated personal carbon allowances. In short, the COVID vaccine passports could be succeeded by Personal Carbon Passports.
More recently, the Covid/climate connection was cited by economist Mark Jaccard in a Policy Options commentary assessing the merits of the “sincerity” of carbon-control election platforms of Canada’s political parties. Jaccard said he used a computer economic model called gtech from Navius Research to conclude that the Liberals had the best plan to curb the output of greenhouses gas (GHG) emissions.
Jaccard says he has always been “nervous” talking about his “modelling” efforts on climate and carbon policy, since many non-experts are sceptical. But not any more, said Jaccard, thanks to “the work of the COVID modellers” who forecast the effect of lockdown policies. “If you want to bend the infection curve to stop a pandemic, you turn to health policy modellers,” writes Jaccard. Therefore, “If you want to bend the GHG curve to stop climate change, you turn to climate policy modellers.”
But COVID modellers may not be the best justification for climate and carbon policy modelling. COVID models were the basis for the lockdowns that were supposed to “flatten the curve” of the virus, a modelling exercise now viewed as totally flawed. Instead of flattening, as per the models, the curve of cases has been anything but flat and now appears to be rising again toward a fourth wave.
Before we link COVID and climate, and let doctors run the economy, maybe we could raise the possibility that the Jaccardian and other Un-driven climate and economic models might be as wrong, even more wrong, than the COVID curve models.
DOES COVID-19 JUSTIFY THE GLOBAL CARBON PLANS?