Pirate's Cove

It’s a shame that the media is not focusing that much on ‘climate change’ in these days of Bat Soup Virus (I only made it to page 4 of Google News for climate change, stories from past 24 hours, before they became mostly about other things, with climate change either as something small or mentioned elsewhere on the page), because it would be an eye opener for the casual Warmist what the Cult of Climastrology really stands for

WHAT THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY

GRETA THUNBERG COULDN’T do it. Bill McKibben and 350.org couldn’t do it, and neither could the Paris climate accord. But Covid-19 is cutting human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as travel and other economic activity in much of the world slow or halt altogether.

While the contraction in CO2 emissions set off by the virus may not be as pronounced as the related though distinct fall in “conventional” pollutants like soot and smog, it is far more consequential. Soot and smog poison and kill only in the present, while greenhouse gases stick around to maim the climate for the next century. Burning a fossil fuel today is tantamount to signing a death warrant for future generations. Conversely, forgoing an action that would have caused a fossil fuel to be burned creates a permanent benefit.

If what is in bold is the case, why don’t Warmists give up their own use of fossil fuels?

Is it cruel to point approvingly to the steep reduction in carbon emissions now unfolding, given the skyrocketing deaths, lost livelihoods, and widespread privation? And won’t the reductions be negated as the virus is tamed and emissions come roaring back? No and no.

Insane people gleeful over this tragedy.

The suffering is a different story. Were a happiness/misery calculator able to quantify the pluses and minuses to well-being from events befalling human society, the coronavirus’s flattening of the rising CO2-in-the-atmosphere curve would obviously be swamped by the lost life and the disordering of business as usual.

And yet business as usual must come to an end if we are to hand down a livable planet to our children.

The rub is how to slash carbon emissions with minimum suffering and maximum social and economic justice, and without nature forcing the reductions on us via pandemics or other chaotic black swan events that are surely in store.

Yes, that is the rub, one which the Cultists have failed to offer solutions to. Because they don’t have them. I’m not saying their policies would make the world look like it does right now, but, what, maybe half of what we’re seeing?

Second, the crisis is helping us see just how much our well-being depends on muscular, proactive governance. Government of the people and for the people is literally the thing that’s now needed more than ever.  The people must be sovereign over corporations and not vice versa — a point driven home by the tepid response of big business to Trump’s exhortations to step up manufacture of equipment to protect health care workers.

Interestingly, this fails to say that people should be sovereign over government. This is a clarion call for authoritative big government, the type that tells you where you may go and when. They type that arrests people for making their own choice to attend parties and churches. The type that applies laws and rules however they like, such as arresting a guy for paddleboarding despite not being near anyone. You have people snitching on neighbors for going out, even for exercise. There are even snitch lines established by government (and not just in the UK). You have government assuming more and more power for itself, like in Kentucky. Do Warmists consider that they themselves will be subject to the whims of government?

As for the super-rich, never have their fortunes been so fully revealed as hollow and corrosive. Worldwide, the wealthiest 5 percent of households collectively burn more carbon than the entire bottom half, according to a comprehensive new report from the University of Leeds. Could the past decade’s research and agitation on economic inequality now culminate, in the pandemic’s wake, in an insistence on transmuting extreme private wealth into a new collectively shared wealth of renewable energy and sustainable communities?

This, more than fossil fuel divestment or class-action litigation, is the kind of program that will actually cast off the yoke of the fossil fuel empire upon which the portfolios of the super-rich depend. In the process, the toxic aspiration to join the super-rich could be swept aside. Bye-bye, lusting after commuter helicopters. Bye-bye, hungering for one’s own island. Bye-bye, legislatures purchased by dark money.

This really isn’t about ‘climate change’, is it. And now they are using the suffering of billions to push their cult.

Read: CoC: People Suffering Is A Small Price To Pay To Solve The Climate Crisis »