Posted on 07/23/2022 6:16:34 AM PDT by MtnClimber
On March 13, 2020, then President Trump declared a “national emergency” due to the newly-arising outbreak of the Covid-19 virus. Three days later, on March 16, Trump set forth a program of “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” The program included strong recommendations for anyone who felt sick, or had tested positive for the disease, to stay at home during the two-week emergency window.
Here we are now some two years and four months later. The supposed Covid-19 15 day “emergency” has been repeatedly extended, first by Trump through the last ten months of his term, and then for the additional 18 months since January 2021 by President Biden. It’s been two-plus long years of lockdowns, work from home, business closures, school closures, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and on and on, with little to no evidence that any of it ever did any good.
On Monday July 18 (2022) President Biden extended the Covid-19 “emergency” for yet another 90 days to mid-October. You might think that the whole concept of an “emergency” has lost all meaning if it can somehow persist for more than two and a half years, well past the point where normal people have stopped paying any attention to it whatsoever. “Emergency” used to mean something immediate, like a hurricane or a tornado wrecking a town, or someone having a heart attack, or a shooter actively firing. By any reasonable view of the word “emergency,” things connected with Covid-19 that might have fallen under that term ended months if not years ago. But for a bureaucracy, what the term “emergency” means is the opportunity to issue orders that you could not otherwise issue, and pass out money that you could not otherwise pass out. Now that you have gotten a taste of the heady drug of “emergency” powers, why would you ever give them up if you could avoid it? Years later, it’s still an “emergency” if the bureaucrats want it to be. Or at least, that’s their view.
Which brings us to the so-called “climate emergency.” Since the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA on June 30, the bureaucracies in the “climate” space, together with all the environmental activists, have been thrown into a tizzy. The Supreme Court just declared that the bureaucracies have no power to fundamentally transform the use of energy in the economy without a clear direction from Congress, which on the climate issue cannot be found in existing statutes. And it has become clear that no further such statutory direction is likely to emerge from Congress before the mid-term elections in November. After November, changes in the make-up of Congress will probably make further such legislation even less likely, if not completely off the table for years if not decades. So what is a self-respecting climate alarmist to do?
To those over there on the left, the answer seems obvious: Demand declaration of a “climate emergency.” With that declaration, the statutory gap could perhaps be filled by another whole category of laws providing special powers in the event of a declaration of “emergency.” The calls for President Biden to make such a declaration have been everywhere since the Supreme Court’s decision at the end of June. In the politician category, a collection of Democratic Senators (Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Alex Padilla of California, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Bernie Sanders of Vermont) sent a strong letter to Biden on July 20 making the demand:
Declaring the climate crisis a national emergency under the NEA would unlock powers to rebuild a better economy with significant, concrete actions. . . . Under the NEA, you could redirect spending to build out renewable energy systems on military bases, implement large-scale clean transportation solutions and finance distributed energy projects to boost climate resiliency. All of these actions would employ Americans in new and emerging industries while securing American leadership in global markets.
Environmental groups were out even ahead of the Senators with the same demand. Here is Greenpeace on July 8:
Congress and the Courts are failing to protect our communities from the climate crisis and it’s time for President Biden to be the leader we need. By declaring a climate emergency, President Biden unlocks an expanded set of powers under the National Emergencies Act and other federal laws.
There are many, many more examples of the same demand from all the usual suspects.
Indeed, there was lots of talk that Biden was going to make the big declaration on Wednesday, when he went to Massachusetts to give a speech at a closed coal-fired power plant. He somehow stopped just short of the formal “emergency” declaration, but took the occasion to emit the usual clichés about the impending climate apocalypse, including liberal use of the term “emergency” itself. Excerpt:
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world,” Mr. Biden said. . . . “This is an emergency, an emergency, and I will look at it that way.”
It’s entirely possible that the climate “emergency” declaration could issue literally any day now.
What would declaration of an “emergency” mean? The idea is that there are plenty of existing statutes out there granting the Executive powers of various sorts in the event of such an “emergency,” provided that there had been a formal declaration of it. Thus arguably there would be a way around the lack of clear statutory authority that sank the EPA’s power plant regulations in the West Virginia case. The Nation on July 21 gives a rundown of some of the powers that the Executive could purport to exercise in the event of such a declaration with respect to the climate:
[S]uch a declaration would enable the Biden administration to access funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program for combating the impacts of heat waves, extreme weather events, and natural disasters and could enable faster implementation of critical mitigation strategies. An official climate emergency announcement could also allow the Biden administration to curtail crude oil exports and stop offshore drilling through laws and exemptions related to national security and energy development. The Biden administration could access financial support for clean energy infrastructure through FEMA and the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, and it could cut energy costs for families by supporting domestic offshore wind projects, helping to facilitate an affordable clean energy transition.
Here’s the problem. There is no sense in which the climate is an “emergency” within the ordinary meaning of that word in the English language. Predictions by climate models of a few degrees of temperature rise over the next century are the opposite of an “emergency.” Indeed, the statutes granting various “emergency” powers to the Executive all deal with the question of time periods too short to give the Congress time to enact legislation appropriate to the situation at hand. That circumstance is the opposite of what we have with the climate.
But if you are on the left, or a climate activist, this situation is just too important to wait for Congressional action that may never come. An “emergency” must be declared, to last for — how long? A hundred years? During which time, the bureaucrats can issue whatever orders they want, and spend whatever funds they want, all in the name of saving the planet. None of which will or can have any effect on the 85% (and growing) of world carbon emissions that come from outside the U.S. and which the U.S. government cannot affect in any way.
It’s all a huge insult to the intelligence of the American people. I doubt that the courts will be fooled, most particularly the Supreme Court.
The issue is not the issue. More power and control is the issue.
Instead, maybe the problem is overpopulation of illegals in California, causing a water shortage in the desert areas of LA? Maybe we are simply seeing more weather because we have people living in areas that they never lived before?
Better to focus on picking up litter, leaving no trace, and doing things we can individually do to continue making the US one of the cleanest and most successful countries on the Earth.
Besides, if India and China, two of the worst polluters, can continue with coal, etc., and are exempted from environmental constraints, then are they real in the first place? Are they simply a way to destroy America?
Exactly. There are no convincingly clear indicators that aren’t just bulldozed-through-intimidation and Chicken Little fear mongering, and there are no real clear markers of success. Hell, they can’t even tell you what the ‘ideal’ climate (e.g., temperature, rainfall, humidity, etc.) is for cripe’s sake.
They can’t even take unadulterated (e.g., Michael Mann’s “Hide the Decline”) historical ‘climate’ data and put that in their models and get the same outcomes we see with WEATHER today.
I have a weather thingy on my phone. It repeatedly broadcasts its ‘10 day forecast’ AND a more detailed one for the day for my particular area. It ALWAYS is being ‘adjusted’ to reflect what really happens so they can go back years later and claim their ‘predictions’ were right.
IMO, the CRIMINALITY involved here is that they are brainwashing little children in schools and scaring them to death over this nonsense..
Good video. I don’t think man can have any impact on climate.
Back in late 2020, many of us predicted that the covid emergency would be followed by a climate emergency. We noticed how they gleefully reported how the lockdowns had reduced the global carbon footprint/reduced emissions etc.
There’s been a pic of Plymouth rock floating around on social media. It’s still above water.
No, I don’t think so either. It is simply gaslighting. They know it’s ridiculous too, but it is one of the vehicles they are using to implement communism.
They just have to find a con that enough people believe for long enough that they hand off their freedom. COVID didn’t last long enough, and “climate change” has lasted too long. I think they’re messing up by pushing it so hard. I don’t think anyone is worried about it anymore.
Excellent post!
And did Republican Congressional and Senate representatives have their own press conference declaring a call for such emergency unconstitutional and that they will fight it both in the courts (SCOTUS) and upon recapturing both houses in November??? 🤔🤨
“ALLEGED (man made) climate change!” The day the climate stops changing will be a really bad day. People comment about certain places like Glacier National park or Kilimanjaro and the glaciers being gone. I suppose one could say the same about Yosemite. Yup. In case you missed it the glaciers are gone from Yosemite valley Why yes Virginia. People REALLY are THAT stoopid. Bring back Pangea!
Get Ready For The 100 Year Long Climate “Emergency”
—
or
Get Ready For The 100 Year Long Democrat-manufactured Climate “Emergency” under absolute Democrat rule.
And the buoy at the southern tip of Key West, and the castle in Europe, and NYC Battery Park, and the naval station in Corpus Christi, etc. Nothing has flooded.
The covid emergency was to condition us for the forthcoming loss of our freedoms. This declaration of emergency is phony too. It is not an emergency.
If we recover from this, there will be an unending series of “emergencies”.
I well remember being told on March 13th, 2020 that the schools would be closed for “two weeks for deep cleaning.”
Who knew it was be two years before the schools opened back up?
The effects of this have been devastating for our students - who are now an average of two years behind due to “remote learning” (which in my personal experience they hated).
“Maybe we are simply seeing more weather . . .”
Extreme weather events have always occurred intermittently, and if you check sources like “Watts Up with That” you should be able to find documentation that indicates the occurrence of tornadoes, droughts, heat waves and the like is no more common in the last few decades than it was before then. The media (and the usual greenie suspects) just harp on them more when they occur now.
My favorite case is that associated with hurricanes - after the disaster that was Katrina, the climate alarmists assured us that we were only seeing the beginning: with the horror of global warming, killer hurricanes would become more and more common. Then we went almost ten years before another serious hurricane (Cat 4 or Cat 5) made landfall in the US! If I remember correctly, there may not have even been a Cat 3 (or at worst, maybe a couple of Cat 3’s) during that time period that hit the US.
Yep. But I’d add that “More power and control is the issue.” is true for maybe 20% to 30% of the climatistas, but the other 70% to 80% are in it for the big money to be made. This is the new Computing and Communications frontier that lasted from 1980 to 2020.
It will be about as effective and costly as the War on Drugs — which has been going on as early as 1890 — and has been as effective as a 1/2 to 3/4 point FED increases to harness 10.8% [effective rate closer to 20%] inflation.
It is nothing more than a way to pay off political allies — with new green deals and programs — like most of those that failed after Obama fed them millions.
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