I&I Editorial

Christiana Figueres, at one time the United Nations’ climate director, says the coronavirus might be good for the climate “because there is less trade, there’s less travel, there’s less commerce.” She didn’t say it, but given her past statements, it’s not hard to imagine she’d be OK with any global or Western crisis that hurt the economy.

After all, Figueres is the woman, the former executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, who admitted some years ago that the “fight” against global warming was a cover to crush capitalism.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres, considered “the world’s most important environmentalist,” said in 2015.

Those comments are similar to those of Rajendra Pachauri, a former chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said he was “not going to rest easy until” he had “articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That’s the real issue. Climate change is just a part of it.”

For these world “leaders” to militantly crusade against the only economic system — the free market — that has lifted hundreds of millions out of “grinding” poverty is beyond cruel.

Speaking on Britain’s Channel 4 Television last week, Figueres showed that her crusade against capitalism, which is simply basic human enterprise liberated from government controls, remains unchanged.

“You know one thing that I think is actually very positive, could be very positive” from the coronavirus outbreak, “is that if we really sustained several months of reduced travel, we may realize that we don’t have to travel as much,” she said.

“What is not helpful is just a help that would be here for a few months but then we jump back to bad traditions. So you know, can this have actually behavioral change impact, maybe, and let us hope.”

Of course she couldn’t resist telling us to stop enjoying ourselves at the dinner table, because “if we continue to eat animals, we will actually be poisoning ourselves and being the genesis of new diseases that we have not seen before.”

To her credit, Figueres did seem to lament the potential spread of disease rather than celebrate it as means to replace capitalism with socialism and cull the human herd. But there are many others in the alarmist community who are not so generous. At the extreme of the alarmist movement are cruel misanthropes who prefer a world without humans.

“Population control and reduction is a view shared by other leading AGW (anthropogenic global warming) supporters,” write warming skeptics Anthony Cox and Joanne Nova for Australia’s ABC News. “Leading green commentators … see humanity as a threat to nature, and again their solution is for the population to be severely reduced to a few million living in a non-technological primitive state.

“This message, that humanity is bad and destructive, is one that is increasingly informing AGW philosophy and promotion.”

This view has become so acceptable that the Guardian not long ago gave space to the ideas of a man who said 50 years ago he “concluded that the best thing for the planet would be a peaceful phase-out of human existence.”

The global warming scare wasn’t around a half-century ago when Les Knight “dedicated his life to campaigning for the extinction of the human race,” in the words of writer Tom Whyman. Yet, continues Whyman, Knight “appears to be willing to claim as allies people who remain voluntarily childless as a result of concerns over climate change.”

Unlike Whyman, quite a few alarmists only recently adopted the misanthropic view and already have children they probably don’t want to get rid of. Instead, they poison their kids’ minds, and scare them for no reason.

“A growing number of children are being affected by eco-anxiety – concern about ecological disasters – new research suggests,” Britain’s Independent recently reported.

A poll showed the young “are feeling frustrated and anxious about the state of the planet.” Eight in 10 say “the problem of climate change was important to them, and more than a third saying it was very important.”

Almost one in five of the kids surveyed admitted they have had “a bad dream about the climate crisis, while 17% said they have had their sleeping and eating habits affected by their concerns.” 

These kids are the victims of the sort of exploitation and parental fear-mongering that has made Greta Thunberg a global public figure. It’s child abuse.

An assortment of other examples of the alarmists’ malevolence is their repeated silencing and crushing dissenting voices; their appetite to prosecute and imprison oil executives who provide the fuel that drives the world’s economy; their hypocritical conduct, flying the globe in private jets and buying expensive homes, as the Obamas reportedly have, in neighborhoods they tell us will be under water due to warming, yet demanding the little people make do with less under a climate-saving regime imposed by them; and the primitive and indefensible mob behavior of the Extinction Rebellion.

The latter is a “doomsday cult,” a “criminal enterprise” that would “recreate that old, unforgiving world in which we all ‘ate locally,’ never traveled, danced around maypoles for fun, and died of cholera when we were 38,” writes British columnist Brendan O’Neill.

In other words, the near-perfect representative organization for global warming hysteria.

Not everyone who believes in the global warming narrative is reprehensible. Many decent, well-meaning people have been sucked into the alarmist orbit. We suggest they take a hard look at the characters leading the climate crusade. If they do it with open minds, they’re likely to reconsider their premises.

— Written by J. Frank Bullitt