Global Warming Hysteria: Climate Lockdowns, Klaus Schwab, COVID-19, and the “Great Reset”
When Does the New World Order Plan for the Next Pandemic to Hit?
Excerpt from The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation.
While the political left worldwide saw the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown as a way to end global dependence on fossil fuels, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum headquartered in Cologny, Switzerland, saw COVID-19 as an opportunity to perpetuate globalism by implementing what he called the Great Reset. Schwab was not willing to be left behind by an ecology/environment-led global leftist movement that was demanding a green orientation to reimagine capitalism. Schwab declared climate change as an opportunity for forward-thinking multinational corporations to pledge the implementation of big-dollar green initiatives. Schwab noted that General Motors (GM), America’s largest car manufacturer, had promised to go carbon neutral in its global products and operations by 2040. Apple committed to being 100 percent carbon neutral in its supply chain and products by 2030. Schwab announced he is “really excited” about these changes and believes the trend of a more stakeholder-centric view of the world is ahead. Schwab announced he has “a new mindset” about the need for climate action. He was confident the World Economic Forum could assist forward-thinking globalist corporations to “get it right.”[1]
In a book published in June 2020 entitled COVID-19: The Great Reset,[1] Schwab laid out an aggressive plan for governments and corporations to rethink capitalism in a post-COVID-19 world where we are vulnerable not only to pandemics but also to the ecological/environmental dangers of global warming and climate change. In an article he published on the World Economic Forum’s website in the same month his book was published, Schwab gave a succinct summary of his vision.[2] In that article, Schwab defined his Great Reset plan as having three components: (1) governments must steer markets “toward fairer outcomes,” including upgrading international trade agreements and creating “the conditions for a ‘stakeholder economy’”; (2) governments must develop policies that promote equitable outcomes, implementing wealth taxes, the withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies, and new rules regarding intellectual property, trade, and competition; and (3) corporations must “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges,” working with universities to develop vaccines and health testing centers in anticipation of the next pandemic.[3] With these directives, Schwab has morphed his long-term interest into establishing a global economic system dominated by multinational corporations into a plan where those corporations must include green initiatives and operations. At the same time, governments must prepare to deal with future pandemics and lockdowns. Schwab encouraged governments to use government relief funds not to build corporate profits but to build “‘green’ urban infrastructure and to create incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.”[4]
In his book, Schwab made clear that the coronavirus pandemic plunged the world into a crisis with “no parallel in modern history.”[5] He characterized the COVID-19 crisis as changing everything. In the introduction to the book, Schwab wrote the following:
We cannot be accused of hyperbole when we say it is plunging our world in its entirety and each of us individually into the most challenging times we’ve faced in generations. It is our defining moment—we will be dealing with its fallout for years, and many things will change forever. It is bringing economic disruption of monumental proportions, creating a dangerous and volatile period on multiple fronts—politically, socially, geographically—raising deep concerns about the environment and also extending the reach (pernicious or otherwise) of technology into our lives. No industry or business will be spared from the impact of these changes. Millions of companies risk disappearing and many industries face an uncertain future; a few will thrive. On an individual basis, for many, life as they’ve always known it is unravelling at an alarming speed. But deep, existential crises also favor inspection and can harbor the potential for transformation. The fault lines of the world—most notably social divides, lack of fairness, absence of cooperation, failure of global governance and leadership—now lie exposed as never before, and people feel the time for reinvention has come.[6]
Schwab correctly understands that the Overton window has shifted to demand government and corporate policies must accept the IPCC conclusions that the world faces a global crisis requiring decarbonization to prevent global warming that causes catastrophic climate change. For his multinational corporations to continue with their globalist objectives, Schwab insisted that they learn to adapt and operate in a global, politically correct environment that embraces and promotes the green agenda. To be clear, the Overton window is a conceptual construct identifying politically safe ideas that are deemed perfectly acceptable for public discussion. Views outside the Overton window are too radical for the public to accept and, hence, too dangerous to be principles of public policy.[7]
The point is that the politically correct public policy debate worldwide has shifted to accept global warming and climate change ideology as indisputably genuine. Schwab understands that the World Economic Forum and multinational corporations must establish corporate policies that advocate reducing CO2 emissions. Put simply, global warming and climate change have become the only views considered orthodox, mainstream, or correct. To complete the analysis, Schwab constructed his Great Reset to make sure multinational corporations will continue to play a central role in dominating the emerging globalist economy, even when globalism itself goes green. Given this perspective, it becomes clear that Schwab’s Great Reset embraces green operating policies. To oppose decarbonization orthodoxy would be suicidal. In other words, Schwab appears to have concluded that if multinational corporations cannot stop a green consciousness from dominating global ideology, he has no choice but to embrace a green future for the worldwide economy.
In his 2020 book, Schwab acknowledged the COVID-19 pandemic could be a setback for the green movement. He acknowledged that governments wanting to achieve recovery would be under pressure to “pursue growth” at any cost to cushion the impact on unemployment. He understood that companies would be under such pressure to increase revenues that “sustainability in general and climate considerations in particular will become secondary.” He appreciated that low oil prices if maintained after the pandemic ends could drive both consumers and businesses “to rely even more on carbon-intensive energy.”[8] Yet, Schwab concluded that “scattered factual evidence” convinced him that “the future would be greener than we commonly assume.”[9] The enduring crisis, Schwab wrote, would be the climate crisis, not the pandemic risk. In conclusion, he stressed the following:
Hopefully, the threat from the COVID-19 won’t last. One day, it will be behind us. By contrast, the threat from the climate crisis and its associated extreme weather events will be with us for the foreseeable future and beyond. The climate risk is unfolding more slowly than the pandemic did, but it will have even more severe consequences.[10]
Skeptics of the Great Reset fear a Schwab-created future that ends up in Orwellian globalism. Under the Great Reset, multinational corporations will intensify efforts to work with governments to monitor people. With artificial intelligence (AI) Internet technology, a partnership between global corporations, international NGOs, and government could exploit pandemics for social control. An Orwellian future can require vaccine passports to maintain social compliance. In a subsequent iteration, AI-created and -held social acceptability scores can be used to determine who gets a job, who gets a bank account, and even what personal freedoms are permitted.
Those doubting Schwab’s intentions should visit the World Economic Forum webpages specifically lauding Texas as an example of the “energy transition” to a decarbonized energy world that Schwab now considers inevitable, provided the World Economic Forum remains in control.[11] The Texas State Legislature has passed laws mandating various percentages of green energies, including solar and wind, that must constitute a specified percentage of the electricity generated in the state. At the same time, as energy companies in Texas have moved to comply, using green renewable fuels to generate electricity, and increased brownouts and blackouts have resulted.[12] Texas households are also beginning to understand that energy companies are implementing control measures to reduce brownouts and blackouts. For instance, Texas utilities are installing technological measures such as “‘smart’ thermostats” that will enable the energy companies to increase the home temperature to lower air conditioning during hot spells and raise temperatures during cold periods without the homeowner’s consent.[13]
Conclusion
The ecological/environmental left has joined with politically motivated neo-Marxists to transform the Green New Deal into an attack on capitalism. For Green New Deal radical activists, the mixture of fighting for decarbonization as an energy policy and advocating a broad socialist agenda is an easy transition. Today, decarbonizing has morphed into neo-Marxism. Climate change activists also want to fight inequality, impose social justice, fight racism, and create government-funded, minimum annual income, along with government-guaranteed employment.
Green New Deal activists have further radicalized to embrace 1960s-style movement organization tactics.
Four accomplished progressive authors—Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos—wrote a 2019 book entitled A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal advocating movement tactics. Consider the following excerpt from the book:
Tackling the climate crisis will require action from unions, social movements, Indigenous peoples, racial justice groups, and others to take back power from the elites who’ve presided over the climate emergency. That’s why the Green New Deal must combine climate action with attacks on social inequalities. Only then can we build enough public support and grassroots organizing to break the stranglehold of the status quo, and give people reasons to keep fighting for more. For all its flaws, the original New Deal excelled in creating a positive feed-back loop between public spending on collective goods and mass mobilization, thus overcoming anti-socialist hostility from the business class and political elites. A Green New Deal would likewise have to make climate action viscerally beneficial, turning victories into organizing tools for yet greater political mobilization—and for ongoing liberation. Done right, investments in climate action could facilitate real freedom for everyone, the kind that only economic security for all makes possible.[14]
Moving beyond John Holdren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has found in decarbonization an “end of world” fear powerful enough to unite progressives into an ideological battle against capitalism itself. Reluctant to characterize the movement as neo-Marxist, the Green New Deal movement has preferred identifying FDR and the social welfare programs his administration crafted during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Blind adherence to doctrinal ideology is key to the fanaticism necessary to create a successful social or political movement. Eric Hoffer explained that active mass movements strive “to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.”[15] He pointed out that the facts on which a true believer bases his conclusions “must not be derived from his [i.e., a true believer’s] experience or observation.”[16] For true believers, “the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine, and there is no truth nor certitude outside it,” Hoffer insisted.[17] “To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.”[18]
Hoffer concluded his comments on the importance of ideology (that he calls doctrine) for true believers by commenting in his 1951 book that the fanatical Communist refuses to believe any unfavorable report or evidence about Russia. The militant Communist refuses to see “with his own eyes the cruel misery inside the Soviet promised land.”[19] The same holds for progressives who transform a supposedly scientific argument about CO2 emissions into the political fight against capitalism. The Green New Deal movement insists we must move to solar energy and wind power only because these are not hydrocarbon fuels. The Green New Deal assumes solar energy and wind power are essential to a future committed to social justice. But, as we will see in the next chapter, the experience of the Obama administration to implement a green plan raises serious questions. Will the world these neo-Marxists control be any more productive, more livable, or more abundant in the decarbonized future they plan to create?
[1] Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset (Geneva, Switzerland: Forum Publishing, 2020).
[2] Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of World Economic Forum, “Now is the time for a ‘great reset,’ World Economic Forum, WEForum.org, June 3, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, “Introduction,” pp. 11-20, at p. 11.
[6] Ibid.
[7] For an explanation of the Overton Window, see: “The Overton Window,” Mackinac Center for Public Policy, https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow.
[8] Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, p. 145.
[9] Ibid., p. 149.
[10] Ibid., p. 151.
[11] Alex Gilbert and Morgan Bazillan, “What can the Texas electricity crisis tell us about the future of energy markets?” World Economic Forum, WEForum.org, February 23, 2021, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/texas-electricity-crisis-energy-transition/.
[12] “What’s the Difference Between a Blackout and a Brownout?” DirectEnergy.com, no date, https://www.directenergy.com/learning-center/difference-between-blackout-brownout.
[13] Seth Hancock, “World Economic Forum: Controlling Our Energy and Destroying Our Future,” LibertyLoft.com, July 2, 2021, https://thelibertyloft.com/world-economic-forum-controlling-our-energy-and-destroying-our-future/.
[14] Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (London and New York: Verso, 2019), p. 7.
[15] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Chapter XIII, “Factors Promoting Self-Sacrifice,” Part 56, p. 79.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., p. 79.
[19] Ibid., p. 80.
[1] Marguerite Ward, “The founder of the World Economic Forum explains why ‘a new mindset’ is giving him hope for climate action, and shares which companies are getting it right,” Business Insider, April 22, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/wef-chief-klaus-schwab-bill-gates-right-about-climate-change-2021-4.