Sunday, July 19, 2026

The 'Climate Lockdown' Origin Story





If you look up “climate lockdown” with Google – or some off-brand Google substitute that pretends to independence until it actually matters – you will be greeted with an AI summary that begins:

A “climate lockdown” is a widespread conspiracy theory alleging that governments and global elites plan to use climate change as a pretext to impose COVID-style restrictions, strictly control populations, and permanently limit personal freedoms.

It’s a lie.

The AI goes on to say “first appeared on social media in early 2020, shortly after COVID-19 lockdowns were initiated”. That’s a lie too.

The term originated in a report written by an economist who worked for the World Heath Organization, the report to which the below article (originally published June 2021) was a response.

Although pitched as “avoiding a climate lockdown”, the report could more accurately be described as “floating the idea of a climate lockdown”. The idea was rejected. And rejected hard. Millions of “conspiracy theorists” came together to smother it in its cradle, and it worked. It was smothered.

These days “climate lockdowns” are only written about as a phantom of the diseased anti-vaxxer, covid-sceptic, climate denier mind.

Pieces like this one, from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government “misinfo review”:

The climate lockdown conspiracy

Or this, from the European Digital Media Observatory:

How “Climate lockdowns” conspiracy theories target authorities undertaking climate action

These are lies. Absolute, weapons-grade post-hoc coping mechanisms.

Make no mistake, if OffG hadn’t published this article, and dozens of other outlets hadn’t published their own, and millions of people hadn’t informed themselves and made themselves heard, not only would climate lockdowns definitely be a thing, we’d probably be in the middle of one right now.

If and when the powers-that-be decide to move on from their pandemic narrative, lockdowns won’t be going anywhere. Instead, it looks like they’ll be rebranded as “climate lockdowns”, and either enforced or simply held threateningly over the public’s head.

At least, according to an article written by an employee of the WHO, and published by a mega-coporate think-tank.

Let’s dive right in.

THE REPORT’S AUTHOR AND BACKERS

The report, titled “Avoiding a climate lockdown”, was written byMariana Mazzucato, a professor of economics at University College London, and head of something called the Council on the Economics of Health for All, a division of the World Health Organization.

It was first published in October 2020 by Project Syndicate, a non-profit media organization that is (predictably) funded through grants from the Open society Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many, many others.


After that, it was picked up and republished by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), which describes itself as “a global, CEO-led organization of over 200 leading businesses working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world.”.

The WBCSD’s membership is essentially every major company in the world, including Chevron, BP, Bayer, Walmart, Google and Microsoft. Over 200 members totalling well over 8 TRILLION dollars in annual revenue.

In short: an economist who works for the WHO has written a report concerning “climate lockdowns”, which has been published by both a Gates+Soros backed NGO AND a group representing almost every bank, oil company and tech giant on the planet.

Whatever it says, it clearly has the approval of the people who run the world.

The text of the report itself is actually quite craftily constructed. It doesn’t outright argue for climate lockdowns, but instead discusses ways “we” can prevent them.

As CV spread […] governments introduced lockdowns in order to prevent a public-health emergency from spinning out of control. In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again – this time to tackle a climate emergency […] To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.

This cleverly creates a veneer of arguing against them, whilst actually pushing the a priori assumptions that any so-called “climate lockdowns” would a) be necessary and b) be effective. Neither of which has ever been established.

Another thing the report assumes is some kind of causal link between the environment and the “pandemic”:

I wrote an article, back in April, exploring the media’s persistent attempts to link the CV “pandemic” with climate change. Everybody from the Guardian to the Harvard School of Public Healthis taking the same position – “The root cause of pandemics [is] the destruction of nature”:

The razing of forests and hunting of wildlife is increasingly bringing animals and the microbes they harbour into contact with people and livestock.

There is never any scientific evidence cited to support this position. Rather, it is a fact-free scare-line used to try and force a mental connection in the public, between visceral self-preservation (fear of disease) and concern for the environment. It is as transparent as it is weak.

So, what exactly is a “climate lockdown”? And what would it entail?

The author is pretty clear:

Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling.

There you have it. A “climate lockdown” means no more red meat, the government setting limits on how and when people use their private vehicles and further (unspecified) “extreme energy-saving measures”. It would likely include previously suggested bans on air travel, too.

As for forcing fossil fuel companies to stop drilling, that is drenched in the sort of ignorance of practicality that only exists in the academic world. Supposing we can switch to entirely rely on renewables for energy, we still wouldn’t be able to stop drilling for fossil fuels.


Oil isn’t just used as fuel, it’s also needed to lubricate engines and manufacture chemicals and plastics. Plastics used in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels, for example.

Coal isn’t just needed for power stations, but also to make steel. Steel which is vital to pretty much everything humans do in the modern world.




Flock Safety Defends Cameras After AI System Triggers Wrongful Police Stops Of Two Journalists



Flock Safety Defends Cameras After AI System Triggers Wrongful Police Stops Of Two Journalists 
 TYLER DURDEN


Plymouth, Minnesota - Automotive journalist Joel Feder and his wife were detained by multiple police officers in a coordinated stop while driving a Jaguar Land Rover press vehicle, after Flock Safety's automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras flagged the car based on a flawed database entry.

According to Feder's detailed account in The Driveofficers boxed in the $155,000 Range Rover in a Kohl's parking lot after the vehicle triggered alerts via Flock's network. Police had been tracking it for days, believing the New Jersey manufacturer plate (34 10 DTM) was stolen. 

Officers approached with hands on their weapons, ordered the couple out of the vehicle, and conducted pat-downs before verifying the car's legitimacy through Jaguar Land Rover. Feder subsequently obtained and published the body camera footage of the encounter.

The incident stemmed from an incomplete report of a similar plate (34 03 DTM) lost during a photo shoot in California, which was entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database simply as "34 DTM." Flock's AI system matched Feder's plate - ignoring the smaller middle digits - and generated alerts. Local officers did not fully verify the complete plate visible in Flock's own images.

The problem was not confined to one vehicle. Last Wednesday, fellow auto journalist Tim Esterdahl, publisher of Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, was pulled over by two officers in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, while driving his 14-year-old child in a $105,000 Range Rover Sport loaned to him by Jaguar Land Rover for review. Its plate: New Jersey 34 08 DTM. Jaguar Land Rover has been working to correct the underlying reports.

Flock Safety maintains that its cameras performed as designed, matching partial plates per law enforcement preferences for hotlist alerts. Chief Communications Officer Joshua Thomas told The Drive the system was asked whether those characters were present and correctly answered that they were - it simply was not built to flag that additional characters existed. He conceded that for alerts originating from NCIC rather than an individual agency's custom list, the system arguably should test for an exact match rather than mere presence, and called that fair feedback to take back to his team.

Thomas said Flock is working to get the original police report corrected and is meeting with the FBI officials who curate NCIC to develop a way for incomplete data to be flagged as such for officers seeing automated alerts in the field. He emphasized that a camera alert "does not equal probable cause," comparing it to an alarm going off, and stressed that the system depends on both valid inputs and humans verifying outputs.

But the scale is what makes the error rate consequential. Thomas said the system is roughly 99 percent accurate while performing approximately 20 billion reads per month - arithmetic that leaves on the order of 200 million misreads every month. How many of those escalate into armed stops is unknown.

Plymouth police acknowledged shortcomings in verification but pointed to the challenges of varying license plate formats nationwide. According to the department's Flock transparency portalthe city operates 18 cameras that read more than 580,000 license plates in a recent 30-day period, generating over 14,800 hotlist hits - one of which was Feder.


Broader Concerns Over Flock's Expanding Network

This case adds to a growing list of incidents underscoring the privacy implications of Flock Safety's widespread ALPR deployment. As we have previously reported on ZeroHedge, these camera networks - now operating in thousands of communities across dozens of states - create detailed movement logs of vehicles with minimal oversight, raising serious questions about unwarranted surveillance of law-abiding citizens.

Critics, including privacy advocates, have long warned that reliance on partial matches, inter-agency data sharing, and integration with other surveillance tools can lead to false positives, chilling effects on daily movement, and potential misuse. While proponents highlight their value in recovering stolen vehicles and aiding investigations, the aggregation of location data over time effectively enables broad tracking without individualized suspicion.


Iran Threatens ‘Full-Scale Offensive … No Political Border Will Be Safe’


Iran Threatens ‘Full-Scale Offensive … No Political Border Will Be Safe’


The Iran conflict threatened to boil over Saturday after a senior Iranian advisor threatened a “full-scale offensive operation” if U.S. airstrikes didn’t stop.

The ominous statements from Major General Mohsen Rezaei, a senior military adviser to Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, came after the United States finished a seventh day of airstrikes.

“If US strikes continue for several more days, we will move into a phase of full-scale offensive operations,” said Rezaei, who once served as the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

“Iran will no longer limit itself to retaliatory, like-for-like responses…and no political border will be safe,” he was quoted as saying by Iran’s news agency IRIB.

The two sides traded strikes which targeted bridges and other infrastructure, with Iran striking water and desalination plants in Kuwait, CNN reported.

Several American service members were injured in Iran’s retaliatory attacks, CBS News said Friday.

More...

Saturday, July 18, 2026

CENTCOM launches new wave of strikes on Iran after death of US soldiers


CENTCOM launches new wave of strikes on Iran after death of US soldiers

The United States launched a new wave of strikes against Iran on Saturday night, Central Command (CENTCOM) announced on X/Twitter, making the eighth consecutive night of attacks.

"The strikes are designed to further degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and swiftly punish Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces who launched attacks against American service members in Jordan last night," CENTCOM wrote.

Iranian media reported that the US military had targeted an area near the city of Hajiabad.

Earlier, CENTCOM had announced that two US service members were killed in action, one is missing in action, and four were injured during Iranian strikes on Friday in Jordan. 

The four injured service members were evacuated to Jordanian hospitals and have since been discharged, the statement added.

"Other personnel who were evaluated for minor injuries have returned to duty," the statement said.

CENTCOM is withholding further information, including the identities of the service members killed in action, until 24 hours after their next of kin have been identified. 



Venezuela earthquakes death toll surpasses 5,000 as thousands remain injured


Venezuela earthquakes death toll surpasses 5,000 as thousands remain injured


Venezuelan authorities said Friday that the death toll from two earthquakes that rocked the country last month has surpassed 5,000 and thousands remain injured.

The country's interim government said in a statement that 5,069 people have died from the earthquakes, which took place June 24, and 16,740 people are injured, according to the Associated Press

The massive 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes have also spawned more than 1,300 aftershocks as of Friday and 856 buildings have been damaged since the earthquakes, including 190 that have collapsed completely.

The United States has sent rescue teams to help Venezuela search and rescue missing residents, including 71 people and six K9 teams from Los Angeles County's Fire Department, Public Works and Health Department.

The State Department also activated a specialized Task Force and a Disaster Assistance Response Team to help with Venezuela and is coordinating with military assets already in the region to help with the search and rescue operations.