The answer to the question in our headline is: All the way to full tyranny. Don’t think so? Take a look at where the warming alarmists have already gone.

• Carbon passports are catching among the climate clergy. “Personal carbon allowances could help curb carbon emissions and lower travel’s overall footprint. These allowances will manifest as passports that force people to ration their carbon in line with the global carbon budget,” says a report from a ​​small group adventure travel company. “By 2040, we can expect to see limitations imposed on the amount of travel that is permitted each year.” CNN reports that “several laws and restrictions have been put in place over the past year that suggest our travel habits may already be on the verge of change.”
• In Great Britain, “property owners who fail to comply with new energy rules could face jail time as the government pushes ahead with net zero measures,” according to media reports.
• Ann Carlson, the White House’s acting National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator, “has long stressed the need to force Americans to live climate-friendly lives,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. While an academic at UCLA, she insisted the federal government is duty-bound to “induce behavioral change” by enacting policies that “make the bad behavior more expensive.” She has also said we “could benefit from a simpler life” but doesn’t believe “most people will engage in dramatic behavioral change” unless they are “forced” to. 
• Meat will be off the menu if the climatistas get their way.
• United Nations researchers recently told the Guardian “that scientists should be given the right to make policy prescriptions and, potentially, to oversee their implementation by the 195 states signed up to the U.N. framework convention on climate change.” Journalist Alex Newman – correctly – says doing so “would undermine self-governance while ushering in an ‘insane’ totalitarian technocratic form of government.”

“How we live, heat, get around, travel and what we eat could soon no longer be an individual decision, but increasingly be dictated by the state,” says Kristina Schröder, who served under German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Germany’s Federal Family Minister from 2009 to 2013 regards the pandemic restrictions as “a blueprint for the climate movement on how to enforce fundamental restrictions on basic rights” and is “convinced that large sections of the climate protection movement are also fighting our way of living and our economy at least as much as they are fighting climate change.”

She is also persuaded that “if a technical solution were to be found tomorrow that would allow us to render CO2 harmless overall, large sections of the radical climate protection movement would not be relieved, but disappointed.”

She’s absolutely right. The damnable scheme to save the planet from human greenhouse gas emissions is, to borrow from H.L. Mencken, the “false-face for the urge to rule it.” 

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board