Will Ohio Disaster Be Used to Declare Climate Emergency?

A train fire is seen from a farm in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3, 2023. (Melissa Smith via AP)

Commentary

More evidence that the green agenda has nothing to do with the environment is that the president who has earmarked trillions of dollars for green initiatives has no plans to visit the site of the catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

The toxic chemicals that spilled from the wreckage and seeped into the soil and water are likely to cause devastating, long-lasting damage to the area’s ecosystem, including its human inhabitants. But Joe Biden doesn’t want to hear about it.

Maybe that’s a good thing. At some point, the party that takes as its motto “never let a crisis go to waste” is likely to use a manmade disaster such as the one in Ohio to implement a climate emergency. What would that look like? Imagine the most disastrous features of the COVID-19 emergency, such as lockdowns and mandates, plus limiting and then shutting down access to fossil fuels from domestic and foreign sources. And it would be forever. The climate emergency is nothing but a political instrument to seize power and turn America into a one-party security state.

As Brendon Fallon and I discussed in a recent episode of “Over the Target,” Americans know that the Democrats want to declare a climate emergency because senior party officials won’t stop talking about it. Biden entertained the idea as recently as last summer, urged on by Democratic senators such as Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and thousands of left-wing-funded activist organizations.

Former President Barack Obama hinted at the likelihood of a future climate emergency declaration in April 2020, just a month after the COVID-19 lockdowns were imposed.

“We’ve all had to adapt to cope with a pandemic,” he wrote in a tweet. “Climate change will force far harsher changes on our kids. All of us should follow the young people who’ve led the efforts to protect our planet for generations, and demand more of our leaders at every level.”

Hillary Clinton said she was all in, too. To accommodate the green fanatics in far-left Bernie Sanders’s camp, early drafts of Clinton’s 2016 presidential platform pledged that she would call for a climate emergency within her first 100 days in office. Her loss didn’t stop activist officials from backing Donald Trump into what was essentially a climate emergency by proxy—the COVID-19 response.

He thought he was fighting a pandemic while many in the Democrat-controlled bureaucracy under him were likely rehearsing for the long-desired climate emergency. To them, it hardly mattered that lockdowns failed to stop the progress of COVID-19—they were looking over the horizon and saw the implementation of COVID-19 measures as a proof of concept for the coming climate lockdowns. Rationing and then forbidding access to gas and oil would limit mobility and shut down everything, from businesses to schools. What would that look like? How would people respond?

It’s true that Americans now know that unconstitutional government diktats destroy their families and businesses, and some, perhaps many, of us are unlikely to stand down again. But the fact is that the pandemic response was a real-life wargame against the U.S. public, and the federal government has probed our weak spots: They’ll be sharper next time, too.

Sure, mandates and lockdowns don’t stop COVID-19, just as honest and independent medical experts had predicted at the outset. But that wasn’t the point. Emergency measures proved wholly successful in transferring wealth to the ruling class from the middle class and bestowing formidable powers on the political echelon.

Elites announced the arrival of the new two-tier spoils system they had ushered in by openly disdaining the very public health measures they had imposed. California Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t forget to mask and social distance while dining at an exclusive Napa Valley restaurant. He virtually posed for a series of photographs that illustrated the new dispensation and his place in it: He and other like-minded authorities weren’t simply above the law, they were the law—or the science, in the case of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

We can expect the same with a climate emergency, but worse. Why? Because the metrics are fake. For all the cooked pandemic data—PCR tests run at high cycles, death tallies including those who died with COVID-19 as well as those who died from it, and so forth—it was eventually impossible to hide numbers showing that the virus was running its course, as all viruses do.

In contrast, the numbers used to verify forecasts of catastrophic climate change are tailored to fit the emotional needs of a mass millenarian movement and the political exigencies of a hard cynical core that sees the green agenda as nothing but a device to acquire more money and more power. The end-of-time cult’s predictions for the precise year of the apocalypse are periodically adjusted because reality refuses to comport with their all-seasons hysteria. In the event that their leadership imposes a climate emergency, they'll forge whatever data is needed to secure their hold on power, even if it fails to salve their psychic wounds.

The good news is that there’s a way forward. Indeed, it’s the ruling establishment itself that provided the roadmap.

As the pandemic routed through the population, policymakers recategorized “the deplorables” as “essential” workers whose labor was necessary to keep the country running while the rest hid at home. By choosing to not share their invaluable talents for a time and thereby impose temporary to prolonged shutdowns, the “essentials” would reestablish a balance of power before the establishment has a chance to lock us down for good.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.