Analysts Say World Leaders Should Fight The Virus, Not Carbon

Often obsessive focus on climate wastes scarce money and distracts from real health crisis

Many trillions of dollars are proposed to be spent in dubious “green new deals” around the world. In an “Open Letter to World Leaders,” the Climate Intelligence Foundation says this proposed spending should instead be spent on health care, especially virus prevention, protection and cures.

The Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL), provides a reason up front. It says: “Your Excellencies, compared to COVID-19, climate change is a non-problem! It is based on immature computer models, and it looks into the distant future. In the current health emergency, however, your attention to the peoples’ needs is today! Please, don’t continue pushing your zero carbon emission ambition in a time that the world is dealing with a deadly global crisis. Yes, there is an emergency, but it is NOT climate.”

CLINTEL addresses its letter specifically to the leaders of the UN and EU, saying “People need an inspiring narrative that promises them a hopeful future. Today, for instance, it is totally inappropriate that the billion-dollar Green New Deal focused on climate is still on the agenda of leaders such as Mr. Antonio Guterres of the UN and Mr. Frans Timmermans of the EU.”

The reason is clear – there is no manmade climate and weather crisis.

Fight The Virus Not Carbon
Fight The Virus Not Carbon. Image by NewsBlaze

The Europan Union could make a difference in the fight against COVID-19 almost immediately, extending over the next 7 years. To do this, it could reprogram €100 billion ($110 billion) of European Green Deal money. They have a Just Transition Mechanism that aims to “help mobilise at least €100 billion over the period 2021-2027,” through “financial support and technical assistance to help people, businesses and regions that are most affected by the move toward the green economy.” CLINTEL suggests replacing the Mechanism’s “green economy” with “corona crisis.”

Having already committed the Union to a compulsory transition to a “green economy,” the EU knows it will force tens of millions of its people into unemployment. The so-called “green economy,” would make the EU uncompetitive and more poor than it is today.

CLINTEL says the proposed spending of a trillion euros in the European Green Plan (EGP) is a foolish attempt to control the global climate. They know that China, India and other emerging economies are in the process of building hundreds of new coal and gas-fired power plants, hundreds of new airports, thousands of fossil fuel-based factories, and millions of internal combustion vehicles.

A far wiser decision would be to put money into improving health care for their people, with priority going into virus protection. The current news coming from Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Britain and other EU countries related to coronavirus is dire. Those AU leaders who are awake and seeing the effect this is having on their people know it is true.

In the United States, President Trump signed the $2.2 trillion emergency relief bill, Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. It is the largest relief package in US history. The Act provides money to help hospitals and state and local governments, assist with critical medical needs, and provide relief for small businesses and furloughed workers. An earlier bill was purposely delayed by Democrats who had inserted a massive amount of pork into it. Those provisions were all eliminated in the final bill sent to the President’s desk.

According to CLINTEL, a European Green Deal would cost many trillions of dollars, as would the US Green New Deal endorsed by Democrat presidential candidates, to address conjectural future risks. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says his version of the Green New Deal would cost “just” $11 trillion, but other estimates estimate the cost to be as high as $93 trillion!)

Some of money allocated should go to upgrading the health care system, testing people and getting COVID patients respirators and medicines that work, conducting clinical trials to evaluate anecdotal evidence about various treatments, and saving lives! Other spending is to assist families whose breadwinners have been laid off by the lockdowns and quarantines, and businesses that have been closed down.

In the USA, around 15 million workers are unemployed in the restaurant industry alone, plus millions more in restaurant support industries. If the business lockdown continues for an additional month or more, some 75% of independently owned restaurants will never reopen, business insiders say. Moreover, across the USA, it is minorities who are most seriously harmed by the shutdown, since they dominate the worst-affected sectors.

The rest of the money should simply not be spent, especially since it’s mostly more government debt. Spending it would further damage the economy and future taxpayers, in Europe and the United States.

CLINTEL calls the green new deals “foolish.”

The United Nations is obsessed with its faux manmade-climate-crisis. It continues to pressure all nations to adopt expensive zero-carbon-dioxide plans, preferably by this November, before the Glasgow climate summit.

CLINTEL says the UN’s obsession with climate underscores how wrongheaded and intransigent the UN has been for decades. The current virus problem must be urgently addressed instead, along with preparation for the inevitable subsequent viruses.

The economic crisis due to the shutdown engineered to stop the coronavirus pandemic will hit all countries, including those with relatively small virus outbreaks at the moment or in the future. With proper prevention and response systems in place, there is no reason these economic disasters should escalate. But those systems will not be in place in impoverished nations – largely because UN, EU, climate and other eco-imperialist activists for decades have prevented those countries from building fossil fuel, nuclear and even hydroelectric generating plants, forcing them instead to be content with minimal, unreliable, habitat-destroying wind and solar power.

CLINTEL has strong advice for world leaders. “To revive the global economy, don’t further increase government debts. Instead, apply the money intended for your costly Green New Deal to the present needs of people and society. Call it the COVID-19 RECOVERY PLAN. Be aware that, in today’s crisis, the conjectural policy of CO2 reduction is highly counterproductive!”

Letter Summary

Here is the letter’s eloquent summary statement: “The world is moving to an open global economy of ten billion people. Top priority must be given to significant investments in a global health system that makes any pandemic less catastrophic. Considering COVID-19, climate alarmists and climate critics should admit that global warming is a non-problem. Therefore, stop fighting, step over your own shadow and work together against the deadly virus. In this tough battle we need each other!”

What CLINTEL Says

Imagine what would happen if abundant, reliable, affordable electricity from fossil, nuclear and hydroelectric were replaced by expensive, limited, intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar power. The impacts on our coronavirus response, healthcare, living standards and life spans would be horrific.

Without reliable, on-demand energy sufficient to power modern, industrialized society – which neither wind nor solar power can provide at current levels of technology – hospitals could not maintain sterile conditions. Food and vaccines could not be grown, developed, preserved or transported. Protective equipment to safeguard front-line health care workers from COVID-19, and respirators for critically-ill patients, could not be delivered where they’re needed, let alone manufactured in the first place.

We would not even have clean water or reliable sanitation systems. We would not have jobs, industries, decent living standards, or anything approaching a vibrant, functioning, job and tax-generating economy.

That’s the situation African and other impoverished nations found themselves with Ebola – and will find themselves if (when) COVID-19 reaches them. It is where a GED or GND would take the United States.

President Trump is absolutely right. We need to fight the coronavirus and keep it from spreading. But we also need to begin soon to balance the virus threat against threats created by our response to the virus: deaths from COVID-19 itself (which could be overstated) versus deaths due to mass unemployment and recession because of the shutdowns: from stress, depression, despair, strokes, heart attacks, suicides and murder-suicides … amid bankruptcies, loss of life savings, and destruction of years’ of work and sacrifice.

And yet there are some who applaud the corona-economic recession for driving down fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions – or want more wind and solar mandates and subsidies built into any corona response plans.

Our health and economic emergency is real and immediate. The manmade climate emergency is years or decades away – if it even exists outside the realm of computer models that generate worst-case scenarios but cannot even forecast average global temperatures accurately … and pseudo-scientific studies that blame every observed (and imagined) temperature shift, climate fluctuation and extreme weather event on fossil fuels.

Fight the virus, not carbon.

Story by Paul Driessen and David Wojick

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. David Wojick is an independent analyst specializing in science, logic and human rights in public policy, and author of numerous articles on these topics.

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