Climate lockdowns!? New International Energy Agency’s ‘Net-Zero’ report urges ‘behavioral changes’ to fight climate: ‘A shift away from private car use…. upper speed limits’ & thermostat controls; limits on hot water & more!

On the May 18 and May 19 episodes of The Ingraham Angle, Ingraham pushed the idea that the “climate agenda isn’t really about saving the planet; it’s about controlling the people,” which she suggested could be achieved through COVID-19-style climate lockdowns.

Prompting this two-day rant was a new landmark report published by the International Energy Agency, which is far from “radical” or “left.” The IEA concluded that nations need to rapidly phase out oil and gas production in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. The report suggests systemic changes to the way we incentivize energy production, such as ending subsidies for fossil fuels and putting a price on carbon to help drive the transition to a clean economy. What Ingraham selected to cherry-pick (and decontextualize), during the May 18 episode, as proof that climate lockdowns are coming is an innocuous passage from the report that discusses the role behavioral changes like making your home more energy-efficient — not staying at home — can play in reducing demand.

During the May 19 episode, Ingraham pivots away from the idea that climate lockdowns will mean being mandated to stay home and suggests that even without stay-at-home orders, “there are a lot of ways for the left to effectively lock you down.” Ingrahm then goes on to invoke the gasoline shortages and high fuel prices that resulted from the recent cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, before rolling an “IEA wishlist of climate controls” across the screen which contained policy recommendations and consumer-based solutions like appliance standards that would in no way “lock down” individuals. In fact, many of these recommendations, along with assisting in the transition to a clean energy economy, would result in reduced energy costs for families.

Ultimately, Ingraham’s takeaway from the IEA report — “Can’t say that we didn’t warn you that this was coming. COVID gave them the playbook for how to bring society to its knees, and in fear, and now they have a new crisis, perhaps, to weaponize” — is widely out of step with the response from other outlets and journalists that covered this report, and with reality.

Before the two-night stint on Ingraham’s show last week, the idea had come up on the December 21 episodes of her show, and it popped up that same night on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

On Tucker Carlson Tonight, notorious climate denier Marc Morano told Carlson that the Biden administration’s plan to address the climate includes using the “COVID lockdown model for the climate emergency model,” which would allow them to go from “COVID lockdowns to climate lockdowns.” Morano suggested that the declaration of a climate emergency would allow the president to “bypass democracy” in order to mandate lockdowns.

On The Ingraham Angle, Steve Milloy, also a renowned climate denier and frequent Fox guest, told guest host Jesse Watters that “since the coronavirus pandemic started they’ve been talking about how we can go from a coronavirus lockdown to a climate lockdown.” Milloy went on to claim that the goal of the lockdowns would be to re-create every year the emissions reductions that were achieved during the pandemic, which he claimed could be accomplished through emergency executive powers.

Like Morano and Milloy, Ingraham also suggested that the mechanism to achieve a state of “lockdown” is a climate emergency declaration, which Hawaii has already declared and which Ingraham notes Biden is being pressured to do on the national level. The push by some climate groups and congressional champs for use of emergency powers to address the climate crisis has arisen because we have reached that level of urgency, and because there is little sign that Congress will act at the scale needed to address the crisis, if at all. In a Washington Post op-ed, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) outlined some of what could be accomplished through executive emergency powers: