https://nypost.com/2021/09/12/get-ready-for-climate-change-emergency-lockdowns/
Get ready for the left’s climate-change ‘emergency’ lockdowns
Excerpt:
By claiming we are in an unprecedented crisis, we distort not only a proper understanding of our technological abilities, but our moral outlook as well.
Ponder this rhetorical question, posed by a columnist at The Hill: “Could climate change finally expose China as a global outlaw?” So it wasn’t the concentration camps that did it. Or the ethnic cleansing. Or the slave labor. Or the decades of collectivist-induced economic misery and authoritarian control. Or the state censorship. It was Beijing’s violations of the Paris Accord.
Indeed, certain pundits have been openly envious of the ability of Chinese Communists to compel their citizens to adopt carbon-mitigation policies. The commissars must be such a disappointment to them.
The problem, though, is that today’s progressives often embrace illiberal ideas as a means of solving the climate “crisis.”
As a recent Nature journal piece notes, COVID-19 lockdowns have prepared people for “personal carbon allowances.” Restrictions on individual freedoms “that were unthinkable only one year before” have us “more prepared to accept the tracking and limitations” to “achieve a safer climate,” the piece notes.
And many self-professed defenders of our “democracy” have been clamoring for the Department of Health and Human Services to take unilateral action and treat climate as a “public-health issue” or to declare a “climate emergency.” The White House has given the issue a required identity-based twist, noting that global warming’s risks “disproportionately affect poor and minority communities.” (Which reminds me of P. J. O’Rourke’s old joke about NPR coverage: “World To End — Poor and Minorities Hardest-Hit.”)
Americans experienced the authoritarian reach of government during the pandemic. We see what normalizing those ideas can look like in Australia.
Carbon emissions are embedded into nearly everything in our economy. If Democrats believe that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be empowered to declare an eviction moratorium and unilaterally discard property rights, you can imagine what sort of things await this nation if they can declare climate change an “emergency.”
