The usual places have been buzzing over the latest “deadline” to save the planet, one that’s quite interesting in both its timing and its delayed dissemination. A BBC report quotes “Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute,” whom it dubs “one of the world’s top climate scientists,” as saying:

The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute.

Thing is, he said this back in 2017. That it’s emerging now, with “Eighteen Months To Save The Planet” hysterics, is noteworthy.

Did it get lost in the cacophony of (failed) climate doomsday predictions? Or, is its elevation on the eve of the second Democratic Presidential debates not a mere coincidence?

I’m not a conspiratorial sort, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe ulterior motives don’t exist. In fact, I am convinced that a lot of politicians, bureaucrats, and people in power see in global warming the opportunity to seize power, to force change upon people who don’t want it, to undermine the liberties of capitalism and free markets in favor of statist forms of government. With them running the show and pulling the strings, of course.

With energy being a huge part of our lives and of economies, a global warming action plan of the form almost universally proposed is a golden opportunity for the control freaks. There are several telltales that support the notion that doomsaying is a Trojan horse for big government and killing liberty:

• The remedy being peddled, a wholesale reduction in carbon emissions of 40% or more in the next dozen years or whatever, requires global conformity. Yet, many of the big players in the Paris Accords (which are wholly voluntary, and which allow participants to change their promises unilaterally) are merely promising to halt their increases in emissions in a couple decades.

• Nuclear power, the greenest and most carbon-free of all energy forms (and FAR more compact than wind or solar), is not only not part of the conversation, it is being abandoned by nations that currently enjoy its safety and cleanliness.

• The “Green New Deal” and other grand plans are saddled with heaps of social justice plans, wealth redistributions, irrelevant regulations and takeovers of other sectors of economies, and similar pork. Why, if the emergency is so dire, would all this extra crap guaranteed to foster resistance be piled on?

• African nations are planning to build dozens of coal burning power plants. China is exporting the same tech all over Asia and the Middle East. A bit of noise is being made about that, but the overwhelming focus remains on America and Western Europe. If the rest of the world is planning to increase its coal burning, nothing that America and Europe do will make a hill of beans difference in atmospheric carbon levels. But, still, we hear only that we must rush to decarbonize the American economy.

• Research into atmospheric geoengineering, which would not require global compliance and would almost certainly be cheaper, in both money and human lives/living standards than brute-force carbon caps, is not only not being funded, it is actively eschewed and derided by the alarmists. That it might actually work appears to be of concern rather than hope, because it would not require massive government interventions. The opportunity to impose socialism in some form would be lost.

As I’ve noted before, anyone who asserts we must act promptly to remediate global warming and does not lead with “nuclear power” is either a naif, an unserious/ignorant person, or has a hidden agenda. I’ve discussed my both my views and my remedies here, and there are many global warming skeptics out there who acknowledge some human contribution to climate change but don’t believe the carbon-cap path is wise, proper, effective, or even doable, but all such are dismissed with the “denier” disparagement.

That, in my opinion, is no accident. Global warming is a classic “never let a crisis go to waste” opportunity. Dishonest power-seekers see it as a yellow brick road to fulfillment of all their dreams of domination and control, and as a way to massively erode the human liberties they show daily contempt for.

Take note of one more interesting tidbit regarding this latest doomsday prediction. It coincides, ‘coincidentally,’ with the next Presidential election. If you’re a suspicious sort, and it’s not hard to be given all the points I offered above, you might be inclined to think that the doomsayers are telling us that we can save the planet if we elect a Democrat to the presidency next year.

After all, Obama promised that his election would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

The idea that an American president could single-handedly effect the global changes demanded by the alarmists is laughable. China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa, and the developing nations around the globe are not going to drastically cut their carbon output. No amount of carbon emissions reduction in America, not even the absurdly drastic Green New Deal, will make a hill-of-beans difference in atmospheric carbon (oh, and for what it’s worth, we’re doing better at emissions reduction, even after leaving the Paris Accord, than most of the Accord’s first world signatories).

The only rational conclusion to all this is that climate change is being leveraged in an effort to seize power and curtail our liberties.

• About the Author

About Peter Venetoklis

I am twice-retired, a former rocket engineer and a former small business owner. At the very least, it makes for interesting party conversation. I'm also a life-long libertarian, I engage in an expanse of entertainments, and I squabble for sport.

Nowadays, I spend a good bit of my time arguing politics and editing this website.

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