The Price of 7% [Joe Mannix]

Did your life get better in 2020? Did you feel sure-footed about the future? Were you confident in your leaders and their science? Did the world around you improve?

Your answer is probably "no." The answer most people would give you is "no." And yet, something was achieved in 2020. One major, world-changing "benefit" of he lockdowns, the control of movement, the industrial decline, the shipping interruptions, etc. did show up in a place that was briefly a topic of conversation among the elite. It was brief only because the elite saw it as good news, but made normal people very angry.

That "good news" was related to "the climate." The "carbon" detractors noticed that there were meaningful declines in CO2 emissions during 2020, almost entirely due to the COVID response. Per Stanford - the figure most often used - the decline was a whopping 7%. You may remember the gleeful discussion of this that briefly appeared, from advocating for "climate lockdowns" to megalomaniacal lust to remake the world in the COVID response's image to appease mother Gaia.

Even setting aside the absurd obsession with CO2 emissions as the cause of all that ails us and everything downstream from it (the premise of made-made, carbon-fueled "climate change" is preposterous), we can assess some of the costs of that 7% reduction. If CO2 is the demon of our era, how much did we pay to vanquish - temporarily - 7% of that demon? Was the cost bearable on its own terms?

Economically, the costs were tremendous. According to the WEF itself, the economic cost of the COVID response was about $11 trillion, with likely $10 trillion more in downstream effects on profitability, ongoing costs, etc. Taking their numbers at face value, that is $11 trillion dollars committed that must be paid off over the course of years and in exchange we got a ... 7% decline in carbon emissions. 13% of 2020's gross world product. Each point of carbon decline cost about two points of global economic output. At the micro level, according to Forbes, at least 100,000 businesses that had to close due to the COVID response failed as a result. At least 100,000 businesses were killed off in the initial period of the response.

But economics are secondary. Per the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, year-over-year liquor sales increased by almost 250% by April of 2020. 60% of people admit to having increased alcohol consumption. Almost half of people cited stress as driving increased alcohol consumption. Binge drinking rose. Alcohol aside, drug overdoes deaths increased by nearly 30% in 2020, with fentanyl marking the sharpest rise. A lot more people died of addition and overdose in 2020 than in 2019.

Other health factors also got worse. Setting aside things like COVID itself, medical treatment deferment, drug availability, etc. - things directly attributable to the COVID-related policy problems - there is a major factor that can be tracked due to shifting lifestyles: obesity. Per the CDC, the obesity rate ticked by half a percentage point between 2019 and 2020. This is a meaningful increase with meaningful negative implications for ongoing health.

Then there the non-quantifiable consequences. The personal misery so many people feel. The hopelessness. The inability to do what they want to do. The level of trust in institutions. The limitations on expression. The consequences are writ large all around you, and probably writ large in your own life.

But why am I talking about this? It can't be relevant. These were the costs of COVID, not the costs of addressing climate change. The two cannot be compared. The obscene cost of a mere 7% decline cannot be extrapolated out for a discussion of responding to climate change generally, because the "climate improvement" was merely a secondary effect, right?

To some degree (pun intended), this is probably true. But to the greater degree, I think it is directly comparable. The plans to "tackle the world-historic problem of climate change" look awfully similar to the COVID response, at least in the initial phase. From Oxfordshire's "15-minute city" (a climate lockdown by another name (also, don't comment on old threads)) to the direct calls for curtailing travel and restricting movement, limiting business opportunities, subsidizing transitional activities and various other facets of the great schemes are all more like the COVID response than they are different. The COVID response and its resultant decline in CO2 emissions is rapidly becoming the proposed model.

Will a CO2-only focus be more efficient or effective as compared to a coincidental effect? Who knows. Probably not. The real problem is that we now have an inkling - in one small way, but very real - of what the consequences of their plans will be in the real world. We now have a small indication of the consequences of the kinds of policies that outfits like the UN, the WEF and every major government on earth are pursuing. The consequences are poverty, misery, hopelessness, poor health and eventually death. Even if a CO2-focused version of the playbook is twice as effective, that is still catastrophically damaging.

When the climate con-men start talking about reductions in CO2 emissions and start lying about the price of that, remember to look at the world around you. Look at your life now vs. your life in 2018 or 2019. That is the price you already paid to achieve a small fraction of their goal.

posted by Open Blogger at 07:02 PM

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