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Salvo 01.12.2023 5 minutes

Get Ready for ‘Climate Change Death’ Tracking

“Morgue in hospital, low angle view”

The Left needs the metric to justify removing more of your rights.

Anyone following the regime’s playbook already understands that when you disagree with it, you’ll be accused of killing someone. Don’t take the vaccine, don’t lock down, or don’t wear a mask—you’re killing grandma. Question voting and balloting procedures, and your words will provoke a deadly insurrection. Suggest that a man can’t get pregnant, and you’re guilty of stochastic terrorism.

The regime characterizes conservatives as killers for their opinions, yet its partisans celebrate abortion up to parturition. It wants to let murderers out of jail, and is now moving to destigmatize the “dignified” culling of the elderly and infirm.

Climate Change Is the Gospel

Climate change is the platform from which the regime seeks to achieve power by creating a rationale for laws and regulations that dictate where and how people can move, live, purchase, and work.

So it makes sense that climate change would re-emerge as a priority just as the world moves on from a pandemic, where the body count of those dying “from” or “with” Covid was used to justify repressive policies such as lockdowns, shutdowns, election process changes, and the prevention of the practice of your religious faith.

A New Metric

With Covid more or less spent as a coercive lever, the regime needs a new body count to justify continued undemocratic policymaking and execution. Climate change stands at the ready. So be prepared to start hearing about “climate change death” numbers.

Anytime someone runs himself over with his truck in the snow, it will be labeled a climate change death. The cause of death isn’t the point. The number is what matters.

If the authorities can gin up sizable enough death numbers, it can use them to support its climate change agenda and create a sense of urgency. Anything somewhat weather-related will do.

The messaging? Climate change kills people now. We need to stop climate change. To do so, you must surrender more and more of your human rights and freedoms.

According to Wired, the U.K. government has already begun to work on establishing a quantitative measure for climate change deaths. The U.K. Office for National Statistics (ONS) now reports “climate-related deaths and hospital admissions in England and Wales.”

The initial report tracked the trends from 2001 through 2020. Plans are to release new results on an annual basis.

This is bad news for climate change activists, however. The initial report revealed that deaths associated with either warm or cold temperatures went down between 2001 and 2020. “On average,” Wired reports,  “27,755 fewer people were dying each year due to unusually warm or cold temperatures.”

Oddly, the magazine’s take was that climate change itself “might have actually prevented over half a million deaths in England and Wales over this period.” Perhaps a more objective observer would look at the same patterns and find no proof that climate change is causing the harm alarmists say it is. But if climate change is your gospel, any data—even contrary evidence—proves that climate change is a global emergency.

When the numbers are inconvenient, anecdotes combined with loose speculation do the trick. In the summer of 2021, the Pacific Northwest experienced a kind of heat wave that for other parts of the country is the norm. But many residents of Washington and Oregon don’t have air conditioning.

The weather event contributed to a spike in emergency room visits and a certain number of deaths, mostly due to heat exhaustion and heat stroke among those with underlying health conditions or who were elderly.

According to Buzzfeed, Washington counted 119 heat-related deaths between June 26 and July 2 of that year and another 38 in August. Buzzfeed did its own “analysis” and was able to arrive at a much scarier climate change death number, estimating that “roughly 670 people were killed by the heat in Washington and Oregon in the week ending July 3.”

We Know How This Ends

We’ve seen this before. We know how it works.

Alarmism speaks to the personal health and safety of you and everyone around you. You could die if something isn’t done. You could die if the person next to you doesn’t make the required sacrifices. After all, if you care about the planet and your fellow humans, it’s the least you can do. Do your part.

Just give up the car, they say. Just ride the bus. Just move into the city, and live in an apartment. Just turn in your guns. Just have less than two kids or none at all. Just let the government and its agents rate your social behaviors. Just stop eating the damn meat. Just use a smartphone passport to go where you want to go. It’s all for the good of the planet. It’s how you will save your own life and the lives of others.

The celebrity memes practically write themselves. Cue actor Mark Ruffalo and a group of B-list celebrities for the YouTube video. Staring somberly into your eyes through the lens of the camera, slightly disheveled to demonstrate that the video is not contrived but serious. Really serious. Citing those numbers, they’ll say do it for your family. Give it up. Give it all up. That’s how you will mitigate the climate change death toll. It’s up to you. Surrender will set you free.

But the battle isn’t over yet. People of good will and a little courage must resist the forced march into collective penury in the name of salvation. The Covid debacle put a dent in the scientistic narrative, and we as capable self-governing adult citizens must keep pushing against the attempt to establish rule by elite experts.

The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.

The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.

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