Search Results for: lockdown

Energy Lockdowns Have Arrived: Wash Post touts ‘millions of Americans giving up control of their home thermostats’ – Laud ‘utility companies remotely shutting off’ your AC during heat waves to ‘prop up grids’ – WaPo admits solar & wind ‘only make electricity when the wind is blowing & the sun is shining’

Wash Post: – September 24, 2024: Ada Garcia, a Houston homeowner, didn’t have to touch her thermostat to pitch in. Her utility company remotely shut off her air conditioner nine times that day as part of a power-saving strategy that is already propping up grids around the country as they deal with booming demand and a growing share of unpredictable wind and solar power. … 

Garcia, who was working in her home office, had no idea that Texas was teetering on the edge of an energy crisis that evening or that Octopus Energy, her power company, was waging a battle in her living room to save the grid. …

Around the state of Texas, Octopus and other power companies raised thermostats, paused electric car chargers and tapped into home batteries in thousands more of their customers’ homes. They also paid stores, data centers and office towers to shut off lights and air conditioners and slow down their computers.

All told, Texas utilities made 2.6 gigawatts of electricity demand disappear in the critical moments when the grid was in crisis — the equivalent of a large nuclear power plant. That’s why programs like this one are called “virtual power plants.” …

Meanwhile, supply is becoming less predictable as power companies replace polluting fossil fuel plants with wind turbines and solar panels that only make electricity when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining.

Tripling the current capacity of virtual power plants by 2030 would help the U.S. grid meet rising electricity demand in a faster, cheaper, and cleaner way than just building new power plants, according to a recent report from the Energy Department. But for that to happen, millions more people would have to give companies power to fiddle with their thermostats and appliances.

 

‘Take the jab, shut up!’ – Watch: Climate lockdowns, control & restricted freedom – Morano’s candid interview from Vienna Austria – ‘The forces of totalitarianism have been crushing people’ since COVID

Premiered Aug 29, 2024 #climate #climateconference #climatescience Marc Morano, founder of ClimateDepot.com, believes the climate agenda mirrors legislative behavior seen during COVID-19, wherein decisions can be imposed without the need for voting, legislative action or lobbying. He argues that climate change is framed as a public health threat to limit personal freedoms by relying on “expert” recommendations. Morano highlights food, travel, and energy restrictions as potential tools for control. He urges individuals to defend free speech for alternative viewpoints and to resist coercive legislation from the outset. Additionally, he expresses concern over technological tyranny, urging Europeans to stand against it. # Morano excerpt: “The ruling class honestly believe that if we are left to our own devices — we the ‘the peasants’ or ‘the masses’ — are left to our own devices, we will create inequity, racism, environmental catastrophe, a climate crisis, a viral mass death with viruses. That’s why we have to be told to lockdown, mask up, take the jab, shut up!” “They actually get like a God complex, where they think they’re saving humanity. So when you say whether people will accept it or will they fight back, it’s a constant battle throughout the history of civilization. We’re going to ebb and flow right now, since Covid particularly — March of 2020. The forces of totalitarianism have been crushing people combined with the Net Zero climate agenda, and now we’re finally seeing the pushback. The question question is, how much of a pushback? And each time, people seem to be accepting this world with all of these limits, meat, restrictions, food restrictions, travel restrictions, energy restrictions, and they want to condition us. So, my hope is that people wake up.”

Watch: Morano on Rebel TV: Bill Gates: The WHO’s #1 funder & Gates has ‘his tentacles in every aspect of our society’ – Involved in ‘climate, agriculture, vaccines, blocking the sun & lockdowns’

https://www.rebelnews.com/bill_gates_the_world_health_organizations_number_one_funder By Rebel News Microsoft founder Bill Gates has expanded his influence far beyond the computer technology industry since bursting to fame with the Windows operating system. Gates’ influence and connections to global organizations and projects was a topic of discussion on Monday night’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, a feature interview with Climate Depot’s Marc Morano. Looking at Gates’ role as the primary funder of the World Health Organization, Marc told Ezra how the tech mogul is involved in so many different projects — many of which have questionable value to individual freedom and personal liberty: Bill Gates, involved in agriculture, involved in the vaccines, involved in blocking the sun through research through Harvard University. Involved with the World Health Organization. I mean, he’s got his fingers and tentacles in every aspect of our society. Involved in censorship, involved in pushing the COVID lockdowns. He’s telling the West, if anyone wants to know what to do in the next outbreak, Bill Gates’ answer is simple: copy what Australia did, follow Australia’s model. And Australia was probably the most totalitarian response to COVID next to China, maybe a close third next to Canada.  

Marc Morano speaks to Turning Point USA at San Diego State University in California – Talked COVID lockdowns as a model for a ‘climate emergency’

https://www.cfact.org/2024/06/15/marc-morano-speaks-at-san-diego-state-university/ By Greg Neff San Diego State University Driessen Fellow Sasha Reva recently organized a successful event featuring CFACT’s very own Marc Morano this past week. Marc gave a resounding presentation titled “Unmasking the Climate Agenda” to a nearly full house in an outdoor courtyard of an on-campus dining facility. Sasha partnered with the campus’ TPUSA chapter and Leadership Institute in organizing the event. The presentation showed how the Left would like to use the COVID lockdowns as a model for a “climate emergency” (just this week, the Biden administration announced that they were again considering declaring such an emergency before the election). As demonstrated by alarmist Justin Trudeau when he said he envied the dictatorial power of the CCP, they want to find a reason to perpetually give themselves COVID-era powers, and they view climate change as the perfect excuse, reported Marc. The audience was very appreciative to hear this information from such a renowned expert. One student who attended, Lily Alvarez, said, “I am currently a student in a Politics of Environment class, and it was very intriguing to listen to him challenge and elaborate on many key points about climate change that we were listening about all semester. This was a great learning opportunity, and it was interesting to hear from two environmentalists where they are essentially saying the opposite to each other. Marc was a real eye-opener on this topic!” https://x.com/ClimateDepot/status/1778453692284350802 Morano speaks in San Diego Calif. April 17, 2024 Marc Morano is the award-winning producer, writer and host of CFACT’s Climate Hustle feature films. He constantly shows up on FOX NEWS to discuss climate propaganda and how it targets all of us. He is author of “The Politically… pic.twitter.com/FoRgzzmPVa — Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) April 11, 2024

Climate Lockdowns: German Transport Minister floats driving ban on the weekends to meet climate-related goals

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/no_driving_on_the_weekends.html By Eric Utter   Germany’s transport minister (and progressive politician), Volker Wissing, last month vowed to ban driving on weekends to meet Germany’s climate-related goals. It’s either do that or else he wants the ruling coalition to pass more restrictions within the Climate Protection Act come July.   According to the German newspaper BILD, as cited by Politico, Wissing penned a letter to the coalition’s parliamentary group leaders, in which he bemoaned the fact that the reforms haven’t yet been approved. Wissing, whose initials are ironically those of Germany’s most famous auto maker told BILD, according to the Politico report that: “This serves neither the climate nor the reputation of the federal government.”   He added that reducing traffic to achieve climate goals would mandate measures such as “comprehensive and indefinite driving bans on Saturdays and Sundays.” A government telling its citizens that they can’t drive on weekends would seem like a hard sell at best, but then again we obeyed similar — and even more intrusive — measures during the COVID pandemic lockdowns.   Personal automobiles, long a symbol of freedom and prosperity, especially in the United States, are coming under increasing attack, as are the internal combustion engines which have historically propelled them. Moreover, there is proposed legislation in the works to equip all vehicles with absolute speed governors, to make it easier for government entities to “spy” on drivers, and to even simply shut off vehicles if Big Brother doesn’t care for the way you’re driving. Etc. In many urban areas, car lanes are being pushed aside in favor of bike and foot paths. The elderly, handicapped, and infirm? The hell with them, apparently. Ride your bike to work? No driving on the weekends?     There has been much talk of driverless cars, but what many Western leaders, the Biden administration among them, seem to really want is carless drivers.

Coming Soon: Lockdowns to Save the Environment?

https://themessenger.com/opinion/lockdowns-environment-climate-change-green-agenda-shutdowns By Kristin Tate Many Americans are only now beginning to realize the devastating impacts that COVID lockdowns had on our society, as many businesses struggle still to recover and children try to catch up with missed learning opportunities. But what if the pandemic was just a trial run for more drastic restrictions and lockdowns related to climate change? After decades of arguing that the world is at a climate tipping point, Democrats may try to enact restrictions to stop perceived global warming at an order of magnitude larger than the COVID-19 measures imposed during the height of the pandemic. And considering the pandemic’s ability to bring out authoritarian streaks in our leaders, this should be worrying for most Americans. Some claim that climate change is the “greatest health crisis of our time,” and Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates agrees it could be worse than the pandemic. Some bureaucrats are already laying the foundation for climate-related restrictions. For example, states such as New York and California have moved to ban the use of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, lawnmowers, and stoves. A combination of efforts could build, perhaps coercing mass support for draconian regulations and soft environmental lockdowns over the next decade. Do you really need a gasoline lawn mower, anyway? For many young people and city dwellers who don’t drive regularly, cut grass, or individually heat their homes, such actions to curb energy use may seem like no-brainers. Whether it’s a liberal U.S. president or some party apparatchik abroad, the restrictions will be packaged in some panacea like a scaled-down Green New Deal. There likely would be sweeteners — for example, perhaps your student loan could be eligible for dismissal if you voluntarily give up going to the office or owning a car. What, exactly, might environmental restrictions mean for ordinary Americans? Short flights could be banned, as France has done to “fight climate change,” or a carbon tax could be levied on travel. Some measures may be imposed through involuntary changes, such as a four-day school week. Such a change likely would be difficult for families working traditional schedules, but this hurdle will be framed as being for “the greater good” of the climate. A four-day mandatory workweek could do the same for families whose kids attend schools with traditional schedules. Local governments and utilities might limit access to power. A Colorado utility recently came under fire for changing its customers’ thermostats without their knowledge, and the same happened in Texas during extreme heat. Restrictions on gasoline cars could lead to a de facto rationing regime similar to that during the 1973 oil embargo. If you’re old enough, you’ll have bad memories of being able to purchase fuel only on certain days. But a climate lockdown will not be an all-hands-on-deck event, such as with the start of the pandemic. Those on the political left and in the administrative state know that hitting Americans with one regulation or tax or ban at a time may not spark a sharp reaction. Rather than mandating that you can’t leave your house, for example, you may slowly notice over several years that your work and personal habits have been restricted one step at a time. Many of the changes produced by the COVID lockdowns have made Americans more accustomed to severe measures. Earlier this month, a New York City school switched from in-person classes to remote learning in order to house migrants during severe weather. Yet there are many reasons why such a restriction is a bad idea: Learning outcomes during the pandemic were disastrous, especially for younger students. Test scores, basic fundamentals, socialization, and behavioral issues all became worse because teachers unions and Democratic policymakers insisted that schools had to close during COVID — in some cases lasting into 2022. When a precedent is set, the genie is out of the bottle. Schools could institute remote learning instead of a snow day or for a “climate day.” Once there is a model for institutions to scrap tradition for electronic facsimiles, the building blocks of a new lockdown are in place. At the same time, the pandemic shifted the American workforce significantly. In 2019, just 5% of Americans worked from home. Two years later, the figure had tripled. It would be relatively easy to require much of the white-collar workforce simply to stay at home to prevent environmental impacts. After all, the thinking goes, cutting back just one day of commuting to an office can cut your carbon footprint and working from home may reduce carbon emissions by more than half. There likely would be some workers and young people who would willingly go along with environmental lockdowns. Many people got to work remotely or received unemployment checks during COVID lockdowns, and now may prefer remote work. Make no mistake, the left will make climate shutdowns sound alluring. And people could virtue signal on social media about how it’s making the world a better place! Of course, the hypocrisies of the environmental restrictions likely would mirror those of the COVID era. For example, although some people were told that they could not visit dying relatives in the hospital during the pandemic, Democrats and their advocates in the liberal-leaning media went out of their way to explain that protesting in large crowds, on the other hand, was not a major risk of spreading the virus. In other words, don’t block the people breaking lockdown rules — they’re on the right team. Many of the same people enforcing lockdowns openly endorsed the demonstrations that erupted after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Similarly, the people who will push excessive climate restrictions likely will continue to travel by private jets. A sign in a store window says, “CLOSED’ like many others in New York during the height of the pandemic in April 2020.Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images To paraphrase what may have been Karl Marx’s only cogent pronouncement, history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The lockdowns of 2020 were ham-fisted efforts by both well-meaning and malicious politicians to grapple with the surprise of the first global pandemic in a century. But the next round of restrictions may be planned with icy precision and little thought about their practical effects. These will be framed however policymakers need them to be, and those who resist may be labeled anti-government extremists for not simply accepting them and rolling over. Kristin Tate (@KristinBTate) is a writer based in Texas focused on government spending, federal regulation and digital currencies. She is an on-air contributor for Sky News and routinely provides political commentary for U.S.-based cable networks. Her latest book is, “The Liberal Invasion of Red State America.”

‘Climate lockdowns are here & now’ – Marc Morano Joins Rose Unplugged From COP28 Climate Conference in Dubai

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/marc-morano-author-great-reset-joins-rose-unplugged/ By Cristina Laila Marc Morano, author of “The Great Reset” and founder of ClimateDepot.com joined Rose Unplugged this week to discuss the COP28 climate conference being held in Dubai. Morano is in Dubai at the COP28 climate conference where the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) was expected to roll out its food guidance for first-world countries in an effort to reduce carbon emissions. Kamala Harris is at the climate conference pushing a very expensive green agenda to the world. Biden’s climate czar John Kerry is also in Dubai where he promised to shut down all coal plants in this country. Why a Veteran-Owned Freeze-Dried Beef Company Unabashedly Embraces an America First Worldview Marc Morano also discussed the UN’s call on the United States to limit our consumption of meat by 90%!

Beware of Lockdowns 2.0 & Great Reset: ‘What happened in March 2020 was a high-tech coup d’etat against rights & freedoms. It has not gone away’

Join the Resistance BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE  Should governments know any limits to their power? One thousand years ago, after King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, the answer became yes. The state could not legally brutalize the population with impunity. That conviction led to the triumph of human freedom that gradually transformed life on earth, from lives that were nasty, brutish, and short to beautiful lives of flourishing and longevity. There was a new consensus—and it worked. That progress came to a strange and abrupt halt in March 2020. A challenging and transformative epoch was born. The churches and schools were closed. Small businesses, too. The freedom to travel was ended. Censorship became the norm. We were ruled by bureaucrats backed by fake science, fake news, and spying digital overlords. Their plans were ambitious, and they included vaccine passports, a central bank digital currency, 15-minute cities, and a life of masks, mandates, and restrictions. They didn’t get their full agenda through, but that was mainly because the vaccine for the pathogen, about which they panicked the world, did not work. That was an enormous failure, and a setback. But make no mistake: there has been no letting up on the bigger agenda. What happened in March 2020 was a high-tech coup d’etat against rights and freedoms. It has not gone away. That’s why there have been no apologies for the pandemic response. Too many people got rich, and they got most of what they wanted as a start to the Great Reset. There will be many more crises: more weird diseases, more anomalous weather patterns, more and unexpected reasons to panic the population into society-wide panic for another “all-of-government” response. The mainstream media will fall in line just like the last time. Same with all major social media and major corporate voices, all backed by deep-state bureaucracies, some of which didn’t even exist a decade ago. With a population less healthy, less educated, and more disoriented than in centuries, they might get away with it. … Make no mistake: representative government, as it came to be called, is right now in the process of being replaced by a biosecurity state that cares nothing for what its subjects believe or say. It’s massive transformation, and so shocking because we never thought we would live in such times. We never imagined that fundamental truths about human rights and freedoms would come to be dismissed as old-fashioned and no longer considered to be meaningful concerns. Our job is just to go along as nearly the entire planet is taken over by technocratic oligarchy that answers to no one but the 1 percent of ruling-class wealth. All the ideals of the past – freedom, democracy, an open public square, and government subject to the will of the people – are being thrown out. Yes, it began perhaps decades ago but the event that precipitated the massive push to reconstruct the country and the world was a pandemic that gave the excuse to destroy freedom, the limits of government, and even the idea of democracy itself. Our job was just to go along, no matter how bogus were the claims coming from elite circles. The challenges of our time are completely different from the past. We must counter ruling-class opinion on empirical, legal, and practical grounds. We need all hands on deck to make it clear: we will not relent, no matter how many strange edicts are issued from above, no matter how many big shots tell us otherwise, no matter how many tricks and ploys come our way. These are the critical years in which we must act. The great concern that you, and all people of sound mind, have is what happens when all our freedoms are gone. How do we get them back at that point? Let’s hope and work to make sure that it does not come to that. In truth, the overclass has overreached on a number of fronts. It is deeply vulnerable to being debunked and discredited, but the time is now. We don’t want to wait until it is too late.  

Finally! New Yorker Mag finally admits in 2023: ‘COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure’

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-fail-joe-nocera-bethany-mclean-book-excerpt.html By Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it “unprecedented in public health history.” … Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.” … The Chinese government, however, was committed to this “zero-COVID” strategy, as it was called. … One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. … Climate Depot’s Marc Morano comments: There was zero ‘mystery’ as to ‘why so many countries followed China’s example’. The World Health Organziation pushed global lockdowns as a uniform response. See: Morano’s 2023 Great Reset speech on COVID lockdowns: # New Yorker mag experts continued: But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When the Bush administration began debating what its pandemic strategy should include, it was only natural that Henderson be involved. … The men Bush chose to lead the effort believed that lockdowns could be an important component of a mitigation plan. They were heavily influenced by a model developed by Laura Glass, a 14-year-old high-school student from Albuquerque (aided by her scientist father), that purported to show that keeping people away from one another was as effective as a vaccine. Still, the weight of the evidence seems to be with those who say that lockdowns did not save many lives. By our count, there are at least 50 studies that come to the same conclusion. … COVID wasn’t the only thing people died from in 2020 and 2021. Cancer victims went undiagnosed because doctors were spending all their time on COVID patients. Critical surgeries were put on hold. There was a dramatic rise in deaths due to alcohol and drug abuse. It is not unreasonable to conclude from the available data that the lockdowns led to more overall deaths in the U.S. than a policy that resembled Sweden’s would have. … There were other negative consequences too. In the U.S., lockdowns forced hundreds of thousands of small business closures. They exacerbated inequality, as Amazon warehouse workers and meatpackers showed up to crowded workplaces while the “Zoom class” locked down at home. … Yet as late as the fall of 2022, there were still those who refused to acknowledge the damage done by lengthy school closings. One such person was Anthony Fauci. In August 2022, Fauci announced that he planned to retire at the end of the year. Over the next few months, he made the rounds to discuss how the country had fared during the pandemic. Invariably, he was asked whether he regretted his forceful advocacy of lockdowns, especially given its effect on children. At one forum, he said, “Sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences … on the economy, on the schoolchildren.” But, he added, “The only way to stop something cold in its tracks is to try and shut things down.” What he could never acknowledge was that “shutting things down” didn’t stop the virus, and that keeping schools closed didn’t save kids’ lives. Then again, to understand that, you had to be willing to follow the science. Excerpted from The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind, by Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean (Portfolio, October 2023). # Flashback March 14, 2020: Morano on TV warned against COVID lockdowns before they happened!Morano on then proposed COVID lockdowns: "Imagine this: quarantines, shutting down of industries, keeping kids home from school, shutting entire sporting events down. They’re looking at… — Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) November 1, 2023   # Related: Finally! New Yorker Mag finally admits in 2023: ‘COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure’ https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-fail-joe-nocera-bethany-mclean-book-excerpt.html By Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World […] Doctors from around the world unite to call for urgent ‘climate action’ – Claim ‘health professionals increasingly see patients suffering from harm caused by climate change’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/28/doctors-from-around-the-world-unite-to-call-for-urgent-climate-action Australian Associated Press Global health bodies are demanding international governments urgently phase out fossil fuels and fast-track renewable energy as health professionals increasingly see patients suffering from harm caused by climate change. The world’s leading GP and health bodies, representing more than three million health professionals worldwide, will deliver an open letter on Saturday […] Over 200 health journals call on the UN & WHO to recognize ‘climate change’ as ‘a global health emergency’ British Medical Journal: Published 25 October 2023: Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political leaders, and health professionals to recognize that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackled together to preserve health and avoid catastrophe. This overall environmental crisis is now so severe as to be a global health emergency… Human health is damaged directly by both the climate crisis, as the journals have described in previous editorials, and the nature crisis. … The World Health Organization should declare the indivisible climate and nature crisis as a global health emergency. The three preconditions for WHO to declare a situation to be a public health emergency of international concern are that it is serious, sudden, unusual, or unexpected; carries implications for public health beyond the affected state’s national border; and may require immediate international action. Climate change seems to fulfil all those conditions. …  We must recognise this crisis for what it is: a global health emergency.” # The Weather Channel: World’s Biggest Journals Join Forces, Demand Climate Crisis be Declared a Global Public Health Emergency New Study touts impact of COVID lockdowns: ‘Recessions & crises result in a permanent…increase in energy efficiency’ & boost renewable energy! – Published in journal Energy Economics https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140988323006187 Energy Economics  – Available online 21 October 2023, 107120 Excerpt: “The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility that crises provide a window of opportunity for greener energy and increase the share of renewable energy.” …  “The empirical analysis confirms that growth slowdowns, including those engendered by pandemics and financial crises, result in a permanent increase in energy efficiency and a corresponding decline in the energy intensity of output, with a disproportionate impact on dirty energy.”

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