'Climate Emergency' To Come?

Would a ‘Climate Emergency’ Open the Same Door to Authoritarian Governance as the ‘CV Emergency'?

W. Aaron Vandiver

In February 2022, 1,140 organizations sent President Biden a letterurging him to declare a “climate emergency.” A group of U.S. Senators did the same, in October 2022, and a House bill, introduced in 2021, also called on the president to “declare a national climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act.”

The United Nations (U.N.) has urged all countries to declare a climate emergency. The state of Hawaii and 170 local U.S. jurisdictions have declared some version of one. So have 38 countries, including European Union members and the U.K., and local jurisdictions around the world, together encompassing about 13% of the world’s population.

A “climate emergency” is in the zeitgeist. Those words were surely uttered by the billionaires, technocrats and corporate CEOs attending the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos.

How a ‘climate emergency’ could infringe on civil liberties and human rights

How worried should we be that a “climate emergency” intended to “rapidly transform” our entire society by 2050 — which would be the 80th national emergency in U.S. history — might gradually expand in scope to infringe on basic civil liberties and human rights?

“The moment the president declares a ‘national emergency’ — a decision that is entirely within his discretion — he is able to set aside many of the legal limits on his authority,” the article warned. “The president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts,” and much more.

...the “COVID-19 emergency” initiated on Trump’s watch and carried on by Biden has unfortunately set a new and troubling authoritarian precedent that cannot be ignored.

Nowhere is that precedent more apparent than in the lingering notion of “locking down” the population.

In October 2020, University College of London economics professor Mariana Mazzucato, who chairs an economics council for the WHO, published an article expressly raising the possibility of “climate lockdowns” to address a “climate emergency.”

Mazzucato wrote:

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

What these “climate lockdowns” would amount to is various forms of “green austerity” — strict limits on consumption and personal behavior — imposed on the population.

Far from being fringe, Mazzucato’s article about “climate lockdowns” as a response to a “climate emergency” was published by a website, Project Syndicate, that receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other influential organizations that vigorously supported COVID-19 lockdowns.

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