“Let them eat cake,” famously attributed to Marie Antoinette by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has become universal shorthand for a monarch’s total disregard for her famished citizens stealing and wreaking havoc in the streets to survive. World leaders are making the same faux pas this week at their opulent stay in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, for COP27, the United Nations’ climate change conference.
While they eat the best food in the world and enjoy luxurious tourism opportunities, they will leave the conference telling billions of people that the only way to combat the “climate crisis” is to stop eating meat, stop production of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, and, well, stop eating entirely. The Malthusian climate cult isn’t about saving the world — it’s all about depopulation.
When the world gets tired of the lies and energy poverty, will those leaders want a “climate amnesty,” like the pandemic amnesty now desperately sought by U.S. leaders who shut down schools? Probably. But they don’t deserve it.
There are nearly eight billion people who will be affected by the COP27 convention. Of those, 800 million people still live in dire poverty without access to any electricity. 3.3 billion people have access to less electricity than the average American refrigerator. While the 30,000 globalist elites bend the knee to the false god of the net-zero agenda, billions face hunger and lack of fuel needed to keep warm this winter. This scarcity is driven by the decarbonization agenda that has permeated the political elite class around the world.
The media and world leaders have framed people as “the enemy” of the planet. This inhumane messaging has been so effective that there is a huge following of young people who truly believe they have no future and will do anything they are told — including sitting in the streets blocking ambulances to protest, throwing soup and pies at priceless paintings, gluing themselves to any surface, and repeating objectively false propaganda. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, not realizing the policies they promote will destroy lives without affecting the climate in the slightest.
Despite this, countries—developed and undeveloped—have jumped on the climate bandwagon and are demanding trillions of dollars for climate finance and reparations. Africa’s political elite may welcome the bribes, but the governed should be forewarned. Germany declared that it would get rid of fossil fuels and become 100% renewable, but after spending $500 billion over 20 years, fossil fuels went from supplying 86% to 79% of the country’s energy — a tiny shift hardly worth the massive cost. With looming threats of rolling blackouts come winter all across Europe, and wintertime freezing deaths on the rise, it would seem German energy producers are waking up. Reports earlier this month that efforts to boost energy supply included demolishing a wind farm to get to the coal underneath.
All over the news this past week has been the left’s call for “pandemic amnesty” after all the mistakes they made during the COVID-19 pandemic. A final plea before the election, they’re scrambling to rebrand their plot for power as honest mistakes. But they weren’t just mistakes; they ruined the lives and livelihoods of millions by shutting down businesses, mandating experimental vaccines, and seeking power and control through every avenue they could. Now they just want us to forgive and forget, and though we may forgive, we will never forget. We can’t forget because we can’t let it happen again.
And yet, the left is actively conducting the same power grab under the guise of the “climate crisis.” The claim that the world cannot hold more than 1.5 billion people prioritizes the planet over human lives. While liberal world leaders are currently calling for net-zero carbon emissions, they may find themselves fleeing from their countries in the future when their climate policies backfire. That’s what happened to the former president of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was the first candidate in the world to run on a net-zero campaign and the first to show us from start to finish what net-zero policies do to a country. They took a country from prosperity to poverty, not over decades, but in just one year. After banning the use and importation of nitrogen-based fertilizers, food production dropped 50% and prices increased 80%, impoverishing millions.
Globalist political leaders demonizing affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels and nuclear may find themselves on the road begging for amnesty when their people weary of freezing and starving. Out of one side of their mouths, leaders say people need to stop flying and eating meat. Yet they plan their next extravagant trips to pontificate from their private jets. The Bill Gateses and Taylor Swifts of the world are wealthy enough that paying for expensive energy, and going vegan won’t affect their lives. The rest of us — especially those still suffering from energy poverty in developing nations — won’t be so lucky.
Jason Isaac is Director of Life:Powered, a national initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation to raise America’s energy IQ.
