Climate Objectives

One of the persistent objectives of climate change alarmists is concentrating populations in cities, in smaller dwelling units, close to public transportation and places of employment. Their objective is to reduce energy demand and consumption for space conditioning and miscellaneous energy end uses and reduce transportation energy consumption for commuting.

One obvious disadvantage to this objective is that many people prefer the suburban or rural lifestyle and must be coerced into compliance. Another is that urban development leads to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, increasing the average temperature to which the population is exposed, aggravating the existing warming, to the extent that warming is an actual concern.

The current COVID-19 pandemic exposes another downside to the urbanization strategy. Living in close quarters and traveling by elevator, escalator, bus, light rail or subway makes “social distancing” during an epidemic or pandemic extremely difficult, if not impossible. Even walking on crowded sidewalks or in crowded markets raises exposure risk. Several large cities are currently requiring “sheltering in place” during the COVID-19 pandemic, since “social distancing” is far less practical than in suburban and rural settings.

This leads us to another of the persistent objectives of climate change alarmists and Malthusians – population control and population reduction. Reducing the population would reduce the ultimate population density of the cities, while also reducing the land area required to grow the food necessary to feed that population.

Numerous approaches to population reduction have been identified and several have been tried. All have been successful in reducing the population for a time, but overall population has continued to grow. History has shown that plagues and pandemics are highly effective but non-selective and difficult to manage population reducers. They are most effective in densely populated cities in which avoiding contact with the infected is most difficult.

Climate change alarmists tend to be globalists and socialists. Socialism’s less nuanced cousins, national socialism and communism, have used mass slaughter as an approach to population control and even genocide. This approach is more selective than plague or pandemic and far easier to control. However, it leaves societal revulsion in its path. This revulsion requires ruthless authoritarianism for its control.

The communist regime in China has controlled population growth and composition through stringent regulations on births per couple and selective abortion. However, they allowed parental sex selection, which resulted in a severe shortage of young females. Parental selection is now being permitted in several other nations, in addition to abortion for convenience and for the elimination of Down Syndrome and other birth defects.

Several nations are also permitting euthanizing the aged and infirm, in some cases against their will. There is also currently discussion of allowing the aged to die untreated as the result of COVID-19 infection, as an approach to preserving available hospital beds for younger and otherwise healthier patients.

Some climate change activists have suggested that euthanizing the old or allowing them to die untreated is one way to eliminate old climate change skeptics so that their cause can be advanced more readily.