COVID lockdowns, carbon taxes, and the coming ‘climate emergency’
What do COVID lockdowns, so-called global warming, carbon taxes and a “climate emergency” have in common? Read on to find out…
A few weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund (MNF) issued a “call for global climate action” based on lessons learned from the reduction of carbon emissions during the COVID lockdowns (via ZeroHedge.com):
At the height of the covid lockdowns and mandates a massive portion of the global economy was shut down, leading to supply chain instability, huge job losses and a stagflationary crisis. However, climate change propagandists argued that the event was actually a positive for the planet when it was revealed that emissions fell by 5.4%. They asserted that the covid lockdowns were a practice run for what they called “climate lockdowns” – Presenting a plan for scheduled disruptions to global economic activity as a means to slow the effects of climate change. (Emphasis mine)
Globalists also presented climate lockdowns as a kind of collective social punishment in the event that populations refused to cut carbon output on their own. As World Economic Forum “Agenda Contributor” Mariana Mazzucato argued in 2020:
“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. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.
Many think of the climate crisis as distinct from the health and economic crises caused by the pandemic. But the three crises – and their solutions – are interconnected…“
Open lockdowns of developed nations might not ultimately be the tool that globalists use to reach net zero, but carbon taxation on an oppressive scale could end up having the same effect. Carbon taxes could act like steep interest rate increases commonly used by central banks to slow economic activity during inflation. An indirect economic shut down of this magnitude would be absolutely devastating for western nations in particular, resulting in crippling energy shortages, food shortages, job losses, and eventually total collapse and a population plunge.
In April 2020, I wrote an article outlining how Donald Trump and the Republican Party had joined forces with Democrats to advance AOC’s Green New Deal and to use the lessons learned from COVID mandates and lockdowns as a model for addressing the future “climate crisis” using the same tyrannical sledgehammer we witnessed during the so-called pandemic.
However, Trump’s involvement with leftist climate policies began way before COVID.
In early 2017, just weeks after his inauguration, Trump met with a group of Republican has-beens and the Climate Leadership Council led by former Secretary-of-State James Baker to discuss the need for a carbon tax to fight global warming.
For the uninitiated, James Baker’s law firm represented Exxon and Rex Tillerson and lobbied for Tillerson to get his old job as Trump’s Secretary of State. Tillerson was a believer in global warming, a supporter of the Paris Climate Agreement that Trump pretended to oppose, and an advocate of carbon taxes to fund the fight against so-called climate change.
Baker called his “carbon fee and dividend” scheme an “insurance policy” against ecological disaster:
“I really don’t know the extent to which it is man-made, and I don’t think anybody can tell you with certainty that it’s all man-made. [But] the risk is sufficiently strong that we need an insurance policy [sic], and this is a damn good insurance policy.”
According to Baker, his carbon tax idea “is a good proposal, it’s simple, it’s conservative, it’s free market, it’s limited government.” But in reality, there’s nothing conservative, free market or limited government about it. Obama proposed a plan just like it in 2013 — proving that when the socialists have an “R” after their names, it’s all good. And just like Obama’s bill, Republicans promised to use the revenues collected from a carbon tax to redistribute the wealth to the “poor” due to the inevitable increase in energy prices.
The woman Trump said he’d be having sex with if she wasn’t his daughter, Ivanka Trump, served as daddy’s de facto climate czar beginning in 2016. And true to her life-long status as a Democrat and supporter of their far-left agenda, Ivanka promoted global warming policies that even warmed the heart of her environmentalist hero, Al Gore.
Under her watchful eye — usually behind closed doors — Ivanka saw her global warming agenda succeed within the Republican Party. For example, after declaring so-called climate change “real” in February 2019, House Republicans called for a “conservative alternative” to the Green New Deal to provide “sensible, realistic, and effective policies to tackle climate change.” A few months later, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced what he called a “common sense rebuttal” to the Green New Deal, dubbed the Green Real Deal. According to Gaetz, his proposal is a “real, serious plan to address climate change.”
Another area where Ivanka’s global warming agenda saw some success involved carbon taxes. In July 2019, Nationalist Conservatives joined forces with Democrats on carbon tax legislation, and it received considerable acceptance by the Republican Party — not as a way to “fix” global warming, but as a way to raise billions of dollars in new revenue to pay for their spending addiction.
By the way, carbon taxes and climate mandates aren’t going away simply because Ivanka won’t allegedly be working for daddy during his second term. Instead, they will receive new life under the “leadership” of Elon Musk. In a February 2021 interview with Joe Rogan, Musk pushed carbon taxes as the best way to deal with so-called global warming:
“The No. 1 way to decrease carbon dioxide emissions would be to levy a tax on carbon.”
Of course, a carbon tax could give an electric vehicle company like Musk’s Tesla a leg up in the market, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with his advocacy of imposing such a tax.
Knowing that the word “tax” isn’t all that popular, Republicans have been giving this idea a new spin by incorporating another socialist objective of the carbon tax — wealth redistribution. As we creep closer to witnessing the implementation of carbon taxes, be on the lookout for the word “dividend” instead of “tax” whenever the unibrow makes proposals in this area. Money collected by these “dividends” will be redistributed to American families in the form of checks.
For those who claim that Trump would never embrace the idea of carbon taxes or climate lockdowns, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, during his failed 2020 campaign, the wannabe dictator openly promised to soften his climate change rhetoric and shift his position in favor of pro-environment messaging ahead of the election.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party claim to be the last bastions of conservatism and the defenders of liberty. But their embrace of lockdowns and carbon taxes show us that they are no different than their Democrat counterparts: more government control, wealth redistribution, an ever-increasing reliance on Washington, and the complete destruction of liberty.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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