Great news, Americans! You lost your jobs, your businesses collapsed, your children were denied an education, your freedoms were stolen, you were imprisoned in your own home, you were forced to wear a mask, you couldn’t travel  – but it was all worth it because guess what? In 2020, thanks to Chinese Coronavirus, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by ten whole per cent last year.

Happy now?

You should be, according to the New York Times, which can barely contain its righteous joy.

Below the headline ‘Covid-19 Took a Bite from U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 2020’, the standfirst crows:

‘Emissions plunged more than 10 percent. If the trend can be sustained, it would put the United States within striking distance of one of its major goals under the Paris climate agreement.’

It begins:

America’s greenhouse gas emissions from energy and industry plummeted more than 10 percent in 2020, reaching their lowest levels in at least three decades as the coronavirus pandemic slammed the brakes on the nation’s economy, according to an estimate published Tuesday by the Rhodium Group.

The steep drop, however, was the result of extraordinary circumstances and experts warned that the country still faced enormous challenges in getting its planet-warming pollution under control. In the years ahead, United States emissions are widely expected to bounce back once the pandemic recedes and the economy rumbles back to life — unless policymakers take stronger action to clean up the country’s power plants, factories, cars and trucks.

This is not the first time that the leftist media has tried to spin virtue out of the coronavirus crisis. In March last year, you’ll remember, the MSM was in ecstasies over the fact that — thanks to the total destruction of its tourist economy — Venice now had cleaner canals.

Here, for example, is the BBC version (But CNBC and ABC and CNN and the rest were all similarly delighted)

Residents of Venice are noticing a vast improvement in the quality of the famous canals that run through the city, which are running clear for the first time in years, and fish can even be seen in the usually murky waters.

What’s always completely absent from this eco-fascist take on the world is any sympathy for — or even understanding of — the human misery caused by the enforced shutdown of an economy.

The New York Times article is a case in point. What is striking — and indeed horrifying to anyone who doesn’t share the author’s eco-loon mindset — is the degree to which the piece appears to see economic shutdowns as a net positive for the planet.

Then, the coronavirus arrived. As governors placed their states under lockdown last spring and Americans sheltered in place, emissions started plunging across parts of the economy that had rarely seen sustained drops before.

Transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases, saw a 14.7 percent decline in emissions in 2020 as millions of people stopped driving to work and airlines canceled flights. While travel started picking up again in the latter half of the year as states relaxed their lockdowns, Americans drove 15 percent fewer miles over all last year than they did in 2019 and the demand for jet fuel fell by more than one-third.

Indeed, the impression given is that the author would be much happier if the economic decline continued indefinitely.

The steep drop, however, was the result of extraordinary circumstances and experts warned that the country still faced enormous challenges in getting its planet-warming pollution under control. In the years ahead, United States emissions are widely expected to bounce back once the pandemic recedes and the economy rumbles back to life — unless policymakers take stronger action to clean up the country’s power plants, factories, cars and trucks.

“The most significant reductions last year were around transportation, which remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels,” said Kate Larsen, a director at Rhodium Group, a research and consulting firm. “But as vaccines become more prevalent, and depending on how quickly people feel comfortable enough to drive and fly again, we’d expect emissions to rebound unless there are major policy changes put in place.”

This is not coincidental. The idea of ‘degrowth’ as a virtuous goal is a key tenet not only of hard-left environmental groups such as Extinction Rebellion but also of the Great Reset, which sees the economic destruction wrought by Covid-19 not as a crisis but as an opportunity for a ‘new normal.’

As I explain in more detail here, the Green Agenda IS the Great Reset.

This is discussed in two interviews I conducted with experts on the Great Reset – one, called Patrick Wood who has been following the Great Reset since its beginnings in the early 1970s; another a German economist called Dr Anthony Mueller.

Both confirmed that the Great Reset — world domination by a technocratic elite in which ordinary folk will own no property and will be subject to CCP-style social credit controls on their freedoms — is closely allied with the environmental movement’s concept of ‘sustainability’ and living within the planet’s means. In this view of the world, humans are considered a verminous plague on the planet rather than, as Christians prefer to see it, God’s greatest creation made in His image.

Once you understand this, the authoritarianism with which so many governments have responded to the Chinese coronavirus makes a lot more sense.