Is this what a Green world would look like?

By Paul Homewood

Steven Pollard writes in UnHerd:

It’s chilling enough hearing the medical forecasts for the impact of coronavirus. But the economic forecasts are almost as worrying.

Many businesses have already sent most of their staff home. At some point it seems likely that almost everyone bar essential workers such as healthcare providers will be ordered to work from home. The impact on the economy will be cataclysmic. One forecast, by the respected Centre for Economics and Business Research, suggests that London’s output would fall by £495 million a day for as long as such a state of affairs continued.

Should it last even a week, the CEBR calculates that the London economy would lose £2.4 billion in output. Since the capital is responsible for approximately 20% of the UK’s GDP, this would mean the British economy shrinking by 6% during any lockdown. No wonder: manufacturing, for example, would simply stop if there are no workers to, as it were, manufacture anything.

You might think that such a scenario would be universally viewed as a disaster. And you would be wrong. Because there is one group — an influential group, whose influence is ever-growing — for whom such a shutdown (albeit not one caused by a pandemic) is not a disaster but a first order policy goal.

I refer, of course, to the Green movement.

Full post here.

Green activist, Jamie Margolin, sees the coronavirus crisis as a template for dealing with climate change here. If governments can shut down whole economies, she argues, why should they not do the same to “solve the climate crisis”?

The ultimate goal of Margolin, XR and the rest of the rabble is control. Control of how lives, what we eat, how we travel, what we buy, where we work. They see in governments’ reactions to the coronavirus an opportunity to bring this about.

Meanwhile Lubos Motl adds his take:

About 94,000 people are currently infected with Covid-19, a bit over 7,000 have died plus 78,000 have been cured. The number of deaths per month approximately doubled from the previous one-month period as the disease moved from China to Europe or elsewhere. Asia seems to have tamed the disease completely. China has largely reopened for business despite a dozen of new deaths per day.

Those 7,000 deaths should be compared with approximately 650,000 deaths due to flu in the world in the recent year. Covid-19 clearly continues to be a negligible killer relatively to flu – and the latter hasn’t ever led to any significant hysteria. Covid-19 may be seen to have the potential to surpass flu as a killer (and probably has done so in Italy) but nobody knows whether this potential may be realized in the whole world. Even if Covid-19 becomes the most important killer among respiratory diseases, it will be just a quantitative change in the industry of flu-like diseases.

We’re seeing amazing restrictions on the human movement, contacts, events, economy. I am writing it from the first day (out of 8) of the Italy-style softcore martial law in Czechia. Similar restrictions are imposed almost everywhere. Every hour, a country joins the lockdown; Canada did it minutes ago. Half a billion schoolkids are skipping classes now – Greta Thunberg is no longer too special. Bars and restaurants are closed in about one-half of the world. Carmakers are stopping the production in all of Europe. You can read comments on social networks written by people who were just laid off every second. Also, I think that the real estate prices are likely to drop once the closed hotels and other things are being sold.

Read more here.