Climate Lockdowns To Come?

Climate Lockdowns May Be Next: Here’s What That May Look Like

Arjun Walia

What would a climate lockdown look like? Well, if such an initiative were to take place, governments would limit or ban the consumption of many foods. They would ban or limit private-vehicle use, or limit the distance one can travel in a gas powered car or perhaps even by plane.

Working from home could eventually become the permanent norm if special carbon taxes are put in place. Such taxes could be imposed on companies, limiting driving or air miles, and extend to individual employees. Children could be impacted by climate lockdowns, too. Schools, especially those heavily influenced by teachers’ unions, could impose permanent online-only days.

Delhi, India is already using a version of this concept to crack down on smog pollution.

Implementing significant restrictions like this, slowly but surely in the name of the collective common good, would allow the type of government control that would result in the littlest backlash as possible. This is what a collective alarmist level fear of climate change could lead to, especially given the tremendous growth of government control and power, which is fuelled by a significant amount of support for these types of actions.

Climate lockdowns and other restrictions will be framed as saving the people of the world from themselves. Who would ever disagree with such measures when it is framed under the guise of good will? Like we saw with COVID mandates, if climate mandates ever take place they will be promoted as an extremely noble and necessary action. Those who disagree and present evidence that such actions are not useful or impactful, and instead cause more harm, will most likely be silenced, censored and ridiculed.

Authoritarian systems are often created by people who believe that they have the highest and noblest intentions. Totalitarian countries and theocratic dictatorships are typically founded and promoted by those who are convinced that their actions will benefit humanity.

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.”

Thomas Payne

Germany’s new health minister Karl Lauterbach recently proclaimed that addressing climate change would require steps imposing restrictions on personal freedom, similar to those implemented to deal with pandemics. Lauterbach isn’t the only European to call for climate-related restrictions. On September 22, 2020, London, UK-based professor Mariana Mazzucato published an article entitled “Avoiding a Climate Lockdown” in which she says,

“In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again – this time to tackle a climate emergency.”

In November 2020, the Red Cross stated that climate change is a bigger threat than COVID and should be confronted with “the same urgency.” Bill Gates insisted that dramatic measures are needed to prevent climate change, claiming it will be worse than the pandemic. Despite millions of people supposedly having died from COVID, former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney last year predicted that climate deaths would exceed those of the pandemic.