Spring is well underway over most of the Northern Hemisphere. While plenty of people are enjoying balmy breezes and spring wildflowers (up here in the Great Land, we have to wait a while longer for those things), others are leveraging the warming weather to decry the supposedly warming planet. The United Nations (UN), which never saw a socialist pry-bar it didn't try to apply to the free world, is no exception to that.
Simon Stiell is the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Did you know they had one of those? Nor did I, but it's not too surprising. The UN has a plethora of offices designed to hector us to behave in the ways that the UN wants us to; we are fortunate indeed that, unlike our government, the UN can only nag, not compel.
In another example of the UN's nagging, on Wednesday, Simon Stiell took to X/Twitter to claim that we have two years left to save the planet.
We have two years to save the world.
— Simon Stiell (@simonstiell) April 10, 2024
Starting now, we need:
🔑 A quantum leap in climate finance
🔑 Bold new national climate plans by all nations that protect people, boost jobs and drive inclusive economic growth
More 👉 https://t.co/LmM3rX8fpc pic.twitter.com/zJjIdh0VEK
A quantum leap in climate finance? Bold new national plans? That sure sounds a lot like taxing and spending us into oblivion. It would also be interesting to know what Mr. Stiell means by "inclusive economic growth," bearing in mind that these climate initiatives are always anti-growth.
The Biden administration is already planning to slam us with taxes and fees in the name of the environment; that is, of course, without consulting us folks who live out in the environment and whose lifestyles would be rendered untenable if these climate scolds were to get everything they want. And the legacy media accepts their claims without question — sometimes with laughable cluelessness.
See Related: SHOCK: Biden Administration Environmental Rules Estimated to Cost Americans Almost $1 Trillion
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Reuters, unsurprisingly, reported the pronouncement from a UN bureaucrat as straight news.
Governments, business leaders and development banks have two years to take action to avert far worse climate change, the U.N.'s climate chief said on Wednesday, in a speech that warned global warming is slipping down politicians' agendas.
Scientists say halving climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 is crucial to stop a rise in temperatures of more than 1.5 Celsius that would unleash more extreme weather and heat.
Yet last year, the world's energy-related CO2 emissions increased to a record high. Current commitments to fight climate change would barely cut global emissions at all by 2030.
Here's the thing: Climate hysterics have been making claims like this for decades. They've always been wrong.
In 2019, "Think Progress" breathlessly reported we had 14 months to save the planet.
In 2009, United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed, "We have fewer than fifty days to save our planet from catastrophe."
In 2009, failed presidential candidate Al Gore breathlessly reported that "...there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap... could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years." In 2006, Al Gore also claimed that unless we took "drastic measures" to control greenhouse gases, Earth would pass the point of no return in ten years — that would have been in 2016.
And coming back to the UN, in 1989, the Associated Press cited the UN: "UN Predicts Disaster if Global Warming not Checked."
None of these things have happened. The planet just spins on, as it has been doing for 4.5 billion years, growing warmer and colder at intervals all along.
Here's the interesting bit: While no specific nations are mentioned in Mr. Stiell's pronouncement, climate scolds always seem to turn their attention to the United States and Europe when shrieking hysterically about climate change, but they seem much less inclined to mention China and India, two nations who are building more coal-powered electrical plants by the day, with the concomitant increase in carbon emissions. One suspects that this is because the governments of China and India still have enough fortitude to tell the UN and climate scolds alike where to head in.
So here we are, another day, another hand-wringing pronouncement on climate change, one that calls for more spending, more regulation, more economy-killing rules, more taxes, more fees, more central planning, more socialism. It's the same old song proponents of socialism have been singing since the 19th century, dressed up in a coat of green, and just as socialism always does, it would lead to tyranny — if we let it.
A recent documentary on the subject reveals the depth to which the panic over climate change has pervaded our society. Warning: This depiction of the possible effects of climate change could be frightening to young children and the hyper-sensitive.
