‘It’s shown us what a future with less pollution and more active wildlife could be like.’
Expect to hear a lot more of this environmental propaganda in the coming weeks and months: green activists and their celebrity useful idiots treating the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic not as a crisis but an opportunity to be exploited.
On this particular occasion, the offending pillock is the BBC’s favourite pouty-lipped, perma-smiling astronomer Professor Brian Cox.
But Cox is far from the only leftist celebrity treating the Coronavirus pandemic as a blueprint for the kind of low carbon, low prosperity, anti-growth world greens would like to see emerging from the wreckage of the global pandemic. (All links at Climate Depot)
Others include the best-selling historian and Oxford professor Peter Frankopan:
One beneficiary will be the climate: after all, the world’s lungs are already breathing more easily thanks to the collapse of industrial production. Who is to say that this pandemic does not provide a turning point in world history.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama:
We’ve seen all too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic. We can’t afford any more consequences of climate denial. All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall.
Actress Hanoi Jane Fonda:
The melting of the Arctic ice sheet is releasing untold pathogens to which humans are not immune. Climate change guarantees that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic we will see.
To be prepared we need to care for each other. Realize that this collective, existential crisis cannot be dealt with individually, or by a small, under-funded, under-staffed government that caters to the fossil fuel industry.
Former Vice President Al Gore:
The scientists have warned us about the coronavirus and they’ve warned us about the climate crisis, and we’ve seen the dangers of waiting too late to heed the warnings of the doctors and scientists on this virus…Fossil fuels are a pre-existing condition for COVID-19
Former UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres
Slower economic growth from coronavirus “may be good for climate.” – “There is less trade, less travel, less commerce.”
None of this is accidental or coincidental. The global green movement and its many celebrity/high-level political supporters are treating the chaos, fear and increased authoritarianism generated by Chinese coronavirus as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance the kind of green, one-world-government totalitarianism which no populace anywhere in the West would have been prepared to tolerate in normal times.
As Marc Morano points out here, the lockdown world we are experiencing now is almost exactly the kind of world green activists have been demanding for the last few decades:
- Hated airline travel, promoted “flight shaming”? Now? The airline industry is wiped out.
- Hated economic growth, the hallmark of the capitalist system. Now? Growth wiped out.
- Called for lower emissions through “planned recession” or “degrowth” policies? Now? Achieved recession or worse — almost overnight.
- Hated eating out at restaurants? Now? The restaurant industry wiped out.
- Called for end of the hated gas-fueled cars? Now? Car driving and sales wiped out as global oil demand drops dramatically.
- Wanted meat-eating stopped? Meatpacking plants closing, demand for meat down as restaurants closed.
- Called for an end to “excess” consumption? Now? Done. Non-essential stores, businesses, movie theatres, vacations, etc shut down indefinitely in response to the coronavirus.
- Wanted kids to skip school to accomplish all of the above climate goals? Now the schools are canceled almost everywhere!
But instead of being embarrassed at being shown up as the anti-freedom, anti-prosperity Malthusian killjoys they are, the greenies are doubling down and trying to persuade us that the straitened, struggling, constrained, impoverished, collapsing world we’re now experiencing is something we should all embrace.
David Rose provided an insight into the strategy behind this in an article for the Spectator. Drawing on internal documents from the eco-fascist group Extinction Rebellion, Rose warned that many greens are greeting with glee the economic breakdown caused by the coronavirus scare.
He quotes one of the more ardent activists – former Green party candidate and associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia, Dr Rupert Read, who is often interviewed by the BBC:
…But there is a bright side, [Read] insists, because the virus will also test the ‘vulnerable, just-in-time systems’ of trade. This, in turn, ‘might set off cascading breakdown effects, given how interconnected we have allowed our global system to become, how fragile and un-resilient many of our systems are, and how close to the edge some of them are already. Corona might lead indirectly to partial or complete collapses, especially in more vulnerable countries.’
That is a prospect Read seems to relish. If, he writes, ‘the government tries to stimulate the economy to counter the corona-induced stock-market crash… we should firmly reply (if necessary, including via actions) that it is unacceptable to use the coronavirus as an excuse for more harmful economic growths [sic] that will simply exacerbate an under-lying eco-crisis that is also killing right now.’
Rose writes:
Extreme as Read and his cohorts are, there is every sign that other influential figures are beginning to argue on similar lines — that the post-crisis world needs to be both different and less enjoyable, with things such as cheap foreign holidays, easy mobility and rising standards of living consigned to the past.
‘When the corona crisis is over, we’ll remember there’s something infinitely worse and more destructive hanging over us: the threat to our planet,’ the veteran BBC reporter — and inveterate earner of air miles — John Simpson tweeted last week.
His point is well made. Green activists and their celebrity supporters actually want us to stay locked forever in a world of rationing, deprivation and immiseration. But while the rules will apply to us it won’t necessarily apply to them. Everyone quoted above – with the exception of hair-shirt academic Rupert Read – is comfortably a millionaire. The liberal-lefty Oxford don Frankopan, for example, is a Croatian prince married to an heiress to the Sainsbury grocery fortune, so is unlikely to be much affected if the green movement achieves its dream of forcing the world into permanent recession.
As Rahm Emanuel once famously said: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
The Green Blob has marked this lesson well. Too well.
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