RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/490001-the-coronavirus-pandemic-versus-the-climate-change-emergency

Protecting public health was a core function of governments long before the expansion of the state in the 20th century. “Great fears of the sickenesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up,” Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary on April 16, 1665. “God preserve us all.” Londoners trying to flee the plague had to obtain a certificate of good health signed by the lord mayor, who also enforced a curfew and a lockdown of plague households. A generation after the Great Plague, Massachusetts was passing laws for the quarantining of smallpox patients.

Nineteenth century urban Britain experienced a huge rise in deaths from infectious diseases. In 1849, more than 50,000 people died from a cholera epidemic that swept London. The previous year, Parliament passed the landmark Public Health Act. According to historians of the act, “public health was not a party matter, nor was the need for comprehensive sanitary legislation controversial.” That year, the physician John Snow made the first great epidemiological breakthrough with his discovery that fecal contamination causes cholera.

A framework of public health law and improved medical knowledge led to the construction of vast networks of clean piped water, high-velocity sewers and recycling of waste. The Victorian sanitation revolution occurred during the zenith of classical liberalism, when public health was understood to mean measures that have to be applied to whole communities and not preventive activity, such as the campaign against the so-called epidemic of childhood obesity. A genuine pandemic, spreading geometrically across the globe in a matter of weeks, shows the phoniness of that “epidemic.” 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/25/covid-19-a-glimpse-of-the-dystopia-greens-want-us-to-live-in/

Greens just can’t help themselves. As the rest of us do what we can to tackle or withstand the Covid-19 crisis, they treat it as a sign, a warning from nature, a telling-off to hubristic, destructive mankind. The speed with which they have folded this pandemic into their misanthropic narrative about humanity being a pox on the planet has been shocking, but not surprising.

Right from the top of the UN, they have been promoting their backward belief that this virus is a reprimand from nature. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, says ‘nature is sending us a message’ with this pandemic and other recent disasters, including bushfires in Australia and locust invasions in Kenya. Of course nature is doing no such thing, because nature is not a sentient being, however much the new religion of environmentalism might fantasise that it is.

The Guardian reports that Andersen thinks humanity’s ‘destruction of the natural world for farming, housing and mining’ is making pandemics more likely. In short, human growth, modern society itself, is now getting its comeuppance. We think we can farm and mine and, erm, build houses as we see fit, but here comes nature with her punishment: a terrible disease. This is positively Biblical. Gaia is God in this scenario, coming to punish us for our sins.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/goodbye-green-new-deal/

After a couple of weeks of great economic sacrifice, it’s already proving hard for Americans to take. No one will sign up for a lifetime of it.

What will happen next with the coronavirus epidemic is unknown, but it seems certain to claim one very high-profile victim: the so-called Green New Deal.

Good riddance.

The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing.

What is under way right now in response to the epidemic is in substance much like the Green New Deal and lesser versions of the same climate-change agenda: massive new government spending, political control of critical industries, emergency protocols modeled on wartime practice, etc.

But the characters of the two crises are basically different.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/27/if-the-covid-19-models-are-wrong-what-does-this-mean-for-climate-models/

It wasn’t long ago, just in recent days, in fact, that we were being told the coronavirus was going to kill more than 2 million Americans. But some researchers are indicating the forecasts of doom were driven by faulty models.

What then, are we supposed to make of the models that have been fueling the global warming hysteria?

The forecast used to predict 2.2 million U.S. deaths and 510,00 deaths in Great Britain was produced by Imperial College in London. It is “the epidemiological modeling which has informed policymaking in the United Kingdom and other countries in recent weeks.”

OK, but is the information reliable? Epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta is doubtful.

“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” he said in the Financial Times.

Gupta’s team of researchers at Oxford believe both the hospitalization and mortality rates are much lower than the worst estimates, and immunity is more widespread than previously thought.

The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed from professors of medicine at Stanford who said “projections of the death toll” reaching 2 million to 4 millon “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” They believe “epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for” a number of important factors.

https://www.city-journal.org/banning-single-use-plastic-bags-covid-19

The ban on single-use plastic grocery bags is unsanitary—and it comes at the worst imaginable time.

The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those “sustainable” shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public. These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses—and spread the viruses throughout the store.

Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens. In New York State, a new law took effect this month banning single-use plastic bags in most retail businesses, and this week Democratic state legislators advanced a bill that would force coffee shops to accept consumers’ reusable cups—a practice that Starbucks and other chains have wisely suspended to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus.  

John Flanagan, the Republican leader of the New York State Senate, has criticized the new legislation and called for a suspension of the law banning plastic bags. “Senate Democrats’ desperate need to be green is unclean during the coronavirus outbreak,” he said Tuesday, but so far he’s been a lonely voice among public officials. 

The COVID-19 virus is just one of many pathogens that shoppers can spread unless they wash the bags regularly, which few people bother to do. Viruses and bacteria can survive in the tote bags up to nine days, according to one study of coronaviruses.

https://www.thepiratescove.us/2020/03/12/un-general-secretary-claims-climate-change-is-bigger-threat-than-coronavirus/

Because, this silly virus is a distraction from the Really Important Issue, which is why lots of global big wigs took long fossil fueled flights and limo rides

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, is worried that the coronavirus panic will distract people from the fight against climate change, which he says is far more important. Speaking in New York at the launch of a new UN climate report published on March 10, Guterres said, “We will not fight climate change with a virus.”

He was referring to a question about the coronavirus’ impact on the planet, and how there has been a drop in global greenhouse gas emissions due to the sudden economic slowdown. China’s CO2 emissions have dropped by a quarter, equal to 100 million metric tons. While this may have short-lived benefits for the planet, Guterres insisted that we cannot lose sight of the big picture.

“The disease is expected to be temporary, [but] climate change has been a phenomenon for many years, and will ‘remain with us for decades and require constant action’… Both [COVID-19 and climate change] require a determined response. Both must be defeated.” (snip)

Guterres said, “I call on everyone ― from government, civil society and business leaders to individual citizens – to heed these facts and take urgent action to halt the worst effects of climate change.” What’s interesting is that everyone is doing precisely this to deal with the spread of the coronavirus, which goes to show that governments, individuals, and businesses have the global capability to take rapid and strong action, but have lacked the will to do so until now. Now if only this momentum could be funnelled toward fighting climate change with the same dedication.

Except, Coronavirus is real. It may be very overblown in the scare factor, but, it is real, and more deadly than the flu, at least for older folks and those already sick. ‘Climate change’ is simply a way to scare people into allowing government to control their lives and take their money.

https://www.city-journal.org/banning-single-use-plastic-bags-covid-19

The COVID-19 outbreak is giving new meaning to those “sustainable” shopping bags that politicians and environmentalists have been so eager to impose on the public. These reusable tote bags can sustain the COVID-19 and flu viruses—and spread the viruses throughout the store.

Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens. In New York State, a new law took effect this month banning single-use plastic bags in most retail businesses, and this week Democratic state legislators advanced a bill that would force coffee shops to accept consumers’ reusable cups—a practice that Starbucks and other chains have wisely suspended to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus.  

John Flanagan, the Republican leader of the New York State Senate, has criticized the new legislation and called for a suspension of the law banning plastic bags. “Senate Democrats’ desperate need to be green is unclean during the coronavirus outbreak,” he said Tuesday, but so far he’s been a lonely voice among public officials. 

The COVID-19 virus is just one of many pathogens that shoppers can spread unless they wash the bags regularly, which few people bother to do. Viruses and bacteria can survive in the tote bags up to nine days, according to one study of coronaviruses.

The risk of spreading viruses was clearly demonstrated in a 2018 study published in the Journal of Environmental Health. The researchers, led by Ryan Sinclair of the Loma Linda University School of Public Health, sent shoppers into three California grocery stores carrying polypropylene plastic tote bags that had been sprayed with a harmless surrogate of a virus.