UN Economist Proposes Climate Lockdowns
By Paul Homewood
The novel coronavirus shutdowns and restrictions are slowly being lifted in most areas, but already warnings of a “climate shutdown” have begun reverberating on the environmental left.
A leading U.N. economist who advises European governments last week sent up a trial balloon via an article titled “Avoiding a Climate Lockdown,” arguing that 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,” wrote Mariana Mazzucato, a University College London economics professor who is a member of the U.N. Committee on Development Policy. “To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.”
Climate change skeptics immediately flagged her article on Project-Syndicate.org, which warned that the COVID-19 shutdowns have provided a blueprint for how to reduce emissions in a “climate emergency.”
“When COVID came along and the entire world went into a grip of fear and immediately started locking down, everything the climate activists had been demanding almost happened almost overnight,” said Marc Morano, founder of the anti-climate change website ClimateDepot.com. “In short, the COVID lockdown is a trial run for the climate lockdown.”
Climate change and the coronavirus pandemic have been linked repeatedly by prominent figures such as former Vice President Al Gore and billionaire Bill Gates, who said in an Aug. 4 op-ed, “As awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse.”
In July, the World Economic Forum launched the Great Reset Initiative to “jointly and urgently build the foundations of our economic and social system for a fairer, sustainable and more resilient post-COVID future.”
“They are not letting a crisis go to waste,” said Mr. Morano, who last week released the documentary “Climate Hustle 2.” “They’re calling for a socialist great reset against capitalism. They’re going to try to morph climate and COVID together and you’re going to go from a COVID lockdown to a climate lockdown.”
The conservative Media Research Center noted that Ms. Mazzucato‘s, article appeared on Project Syndicate, billed as “the world’s opinion page” and funded by, among others, billionaires Bill Gates and George Soros.
“George Orwell is turning over violently in his grave,” said Joseph Vazquez on NewsBusters. “Tracking PS’s funding explained the tyrannical radicalism. Three groups within Soros’s Open Society Network ($1,242,105), along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($5,280,186), have given PS at least $6,522,291 between 2012-2019.”
The pandemic lockdowns wound up reducing global emissions by about 5% from 2019 levels by mid-June, but climate activists have argued that greater reductions are needed to avoid a “climate crisis.”
“You think that one-month lockdown was bad in spring 2020?” tweeted University of Colorado Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr. “So imagine 20x, non-stop for the next 50 years.”
Ms. Mazzucato criticized granting COVID-19 recovery funds to oil-and-gas companies during a Friday interview on Bloomberg television.
“Last year, the International Panel on Climate Change argued that we just have 10 years left, 10 years left until climate breakdown basically is irreversible, but in 2019, so just last year, subsidies for fossil-fuel companies were estimated at something like $20 billion a year in the U.S. and $55 billion a year in the European Union,” she said. “What we actually need is a new social compact.”
Ms. Mazzucato founded the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, and wrote “The Value of Everything” (2017) and “The Entrepreneurial State” (2013). She has served as an adviser to the Scottish and Italian governments, and European Commissioner Carlos Moedas.
Her website biography says her work has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and Mr. Soros’ philanthropy, the Open Society Foundations.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/sep/28/professor-floats-idea-climate-lockdown-bans-red-me/
So basically you can either have communism or communism!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I would like to leave an appropriate response to this political advocacy but it would use the sort of language which wouldn’t be acceptable.
If we haven’t seen the sorts of climate disasters these self- deluded m*r*ns were predicted in 35 years despite increases in CO2 showing no effect but increased crop yields and forest growth, and a 5% cut in emissions had no effect anyway, why should we listen to them?
The whole UN IPCC Global Warming /Climate Change scam was invented to try to change the world
Various IPCC leaders have said that the whole thing was , not about climate , but about taking control of Western countries economies so that they could bring about a ” One World Socialist Government ”
So it is no surprise that they are still pushing the same old lies . Even after the Lockdowns proved that human emissions were so small as to be insignificant .
Global CO2 levels did not change & air quality in cities was no different to before the Lockdown ..
And every prediction by the IPCC has proved to be a lie .
https://alarmistclaimresearch.wordpress.com/
Welcome to UN Agendas.
The globalists are nearly there.
Amazing how every climate ‘solution’ just happens to involve fundamentally changing capitalism, eh? The most successful socio-economic system invented in human history needs replacing, and let me guess….THEY will be running the new system?
How about they GTFO?
Will the lockdown help slow down the rise in atmospheric co2?
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/09/23/emission-reduction-atmospheric-co2/
Atmospheric CO2 was not and is not a problem. Quite the reverse in fact. It is also not the basis of the current welcome 350 year old warming ( and non existent crisis)
Thank you.
There is little doubt that Capitalism is facing some problems as the wealth spread is deteriorating and the wealthy are the main backers of this type of junk-science. The majority of people have seen through climate-science fiction as is obvious from the low level of interest that it generates even on the BBCs website and how low it is on every poll that is made of concerns.
In the western world, the comfortably-off have become evangelists for semi-scientific prophesies and believe that the majority should suffer to correct these: this is not party-politics but fanaticism. My granddaughter and her friends have almost made Greta whatsername a saint, being totally brainwashed by teachers and the media!
The young are attracted to the anti-industry, back to nature, save the planet and wild animals idea. Industry means mining the beautiful Earth, cars mean ugly roads, money supposedly creates nasty inequality and poverty (ironically). Capitalism is the system that seems to be keeping it all going. However, in reality, the globalists want the power to reduce industrial development. This is not what socialists want. Theoretically, socialism is about the working classes becoming more powerful and controlling the economy. What the globalists, Greens and people like Mazzucato want is the very opposite.
Were it not for Capitalism and creation of wealth of the people who fund these nutters to give their utterances a platform they would be nonentities living in their own little world within Capitalist endowed and taxpayer funded Universities. The undermining of the Wests economies started with the 1992 Rio Environmental Conference, which to quote
“Let us pause and look at the genesis of today’s madness – Maurice Strong who stated ‘Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized nations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?’ How better to accomplish the collapse then to create mass hysteria proselytized by the willing dupes in our education system that CO2 is going to destroy the world because allegedly it will cause the temperature to go up 3*C. Are you kidding? 3*C.
The political arm of the IPCC state the strategy is to use the climate hoax as a way to enact Strong’s preaching”
Exactly.
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more.”
—Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-chair of IPCC WG III, New American, Nov. 19, 2010
The royal WE. And where are THEY 10 years later?
It would be funny if it weren’t so serious but all of these groupthinking idiots are totally oblivious to the fact that their Net Zero wet dream is totally impossible. For proof see my paper and appended correspondence at https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/fossil-fuel-dependency-shows-net-zero-is-impossible/.
The gilet jaune protests in France over escalating energy prices (played down here by the complicit MSM) would be like a playschool softball fight compared to what will happen if they try to push through their rotten agenda.
Mr. Brodie…I read your paper and I saw the response. “As colleagues have outlined previously, our advice is that the global climate emergency is irrefutable. That is why Scotland was one of the first countries in the world to declare a climate emergency.”
What I didn’t see (nor would anyone) was any realistic plan to address this irrefutable climate crisis. Nothing that could lower the global temperature anomaly, or even the CO2 that is supposed to be the “control knob” for the Earth’s climate.
I’ve been hitting my head against a brick wall for years trying to persuade our politicians that they are on a fool’s mission trying to “tackle climate change”. I’ve never, ever had a reply that has any credibility or has shown that they have any inkling of how misguided or futile their strivings are. They refuse to pay any attention to rational arguments which go against their ideological beliefs. Maybe it’s me that’s mad trying the same thing over and over again expecting (or hoping) eventually to get a different result.
In the 1950s a psychologist called Festinger did a study on a group who believed in flying saucers and found that the more their beliefs were proved wrong, the more cognitive dissonance kicked in and the more they doubled down on their obsession. The climate change fanatics of today seem to be no different.
We are seeing other examples of this disastrous behavioural trait these days, mostly played out as rationalists versus ideologues, such as Brexit leave v. remain and Coronavirus lockdown sceptics v. hard lockdown.
Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) is on the right track when he says “The third dimension is where trained persuaders operate. This worldview says humans are irrational 90% of the time”, see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/09/08/the-climate-of-scott-adams/.
Well, Hitler and his SS managed to get enough support to murder millions. Maurice Strong and his ilk were/are like Hitler. Note, there is legislation on the statute books implemented by committees and local authorities up and down the land – bringing about what Strong et al wanted/want.
This is the Nazi party all over again. They think they see an opportunity to take over the Reichstag and apply all their nasty little plans! They need to be exposed NOW! Hiding behind what exactly….. a scientifically unsupported claim!
If they want to focus on a REAL emergency why are they not calling the 27% increase in the World population since 2000 a crisis? Why are we in the UK not calling a NINE MILLION and growing increase in other registered population also since the year 2000 also a national crisis?
oh yeah and what will people feed their cats and dogs?
As for population growth, it always happens when there’s an increase of activity on the Sun which did coincide with the 60’s and 70’s baby boom, but population is drastically diminished by a Grand Solar Minimum which is where we are shortly to be in according to NOAA etc
This is just another example of the strategy proposed by the early Fabian Society based on that used by Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus against Hannibal: ‘wearing the enemy down by attrition rather than pitched, climactic battles’ (Wiki).
Mazzucato’s ideas are outrageously extreme but that’s not the point.
The purpose of the persistent promotion of these ideas is slowly and incrementally to shift the Overton window of acceptable policy and that strategy seems to be working so far.
‘A new idea fills the window of what the public regards as unthinkable, causing the desired idea to shift into the window of what the public views as sensible, without its proponents necessarily having explained any benefits of the desired idea’ (Wiki).
Exactly Hitler et al’s strategy. Who was it who said, ‘If you tell a lie often enough…?’
Some people may have “academic” knowledge, but totally lack common sense.
What is it with these over-promoted lock-down enthusiast Italian economists ? We have Sir Anton Muscatelli , Vice Chancellor at Glasgow University, locking up the students in their halls and threatening them with expulsion if they don’t stay in their rooms. And now Mariana Mazzucato, advocating denying people the freedom to travel or eat meat Both of these scum are using fear as a tool to (try and) control people. I don’t think its a stretch to paint them as fas*ist. The funding for Ms Mazzucato’s ‘work’ just makes things worse. I’m no fan of conspiracy theories, but when different diseases all seem to share a common source of infection, you begin to wonder…
On the subject of meat, I’m currently on holiday on the Isle of Harris, and at Taobh Tuath there’s a substantial and beautiful herd of mixed Highland, Galloway and other cattle I didn’t recognise grazing on the machair as well as being fed some draff from a local brewery/distillery (I’m not sure which). What would Ms Mazzucato prefer was done with the machair or the by-product? Just let it all go to waste? My despair at all this manipulation is morphing rapidly into anger.
Hitler was a vegetarian.