UK declares a ‘climate emergency’ amid wave of alarmist protests and rhetoric

By Michael Bastasch

The U.K. is in the grip of a climate change panic. Weeks of incessant protests and alarming rhetoric culminated in U.K. lawmakers declaring a “climate emergency.”

For 10 days in April, protesters with the group Extinction Rebellion occupied public squares, blocked London traffic and even glued themselves to benches calling on the government to declare a “climate emergency.”

Inspired by a 16-year-old Swedish activist, thousands of students skipped school in February to demand the U.K. government declare an emergency over global warming. The incessant protests sparked waves of media coverage and brought climate change back into news headlines.

Parliament declared a “climate emergency” Wednesday and called on the government to mandate the U.K. hit “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 — the motion is non-binding, thus does not actually obligate the government to act.

“This can set off a wave of action from parliaments and governments around the globe,” Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn told protesters gathered outside Parliament Wednesday, BBC reported.

The U.K. Committee on Climate Change, which was created by the 2008 Climate Change Act, recommended Thursday that greenhouse gas emissions go to “net-zero” by 2050. The current U.K. goal is to cut emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

But while far-left environmentalists celebrated the “climate emergency” motion, they were not happy with the committee’s recommendation.

Extinction Rebellion’s spokesman, University of East Anglia philosophy professor Rupert Read, called it “a recipe for slow mass-suicide.” The group demands complete decarbonization by 2025.

Not everyone has been caught up in the alarmist wave. Skeptics of activists’ catastrophic global warming claims pointed to what they see as flaws in the Committee on Climate Change’s plan.

“Attempts to deliver these policies would ultimately fail, but in the attempt the UK would further harm its already declining productivity, and so erode the UK’s ability to compete internationally and thus deliver an acceptable standard of living for its people,” reads a statement from the Global Warming Policy Forum, which was founded by former conservative lawmaker Lord Nigel Lawson.

“This is not a sustainable low emissions strategy, and even if accepted by government is very likely to end only in humiliating and distressed policy correction,” the group said. “A wise government would reject this advice.”

Many Labour Party officials and environmentalists, however, see the fight against climate change as a war for humanity’s very survival.

“It is a war against climate change,” Labour Member of Parliament Ed Miliband said on BBC radio.

“We are going to have to eat less meat overtime,” Miliband said. “We can’t have unlimited airport expansion.”

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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Jwslubbock

5 thoughts on “UK declares a ‘climate emergency’ amid wave of alarmist protests and rhetoric

  1. Regarding going 100% RE,

    States with RPS mandates had electricity prices 26 percent higher than those without.

    The 29 states with RPS mandates (plus the District of Columbia) had average retail electricity prices of 11.93 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

    The 21 states without RPS mandates had average retail electricity prices of only 9.38 cents/kWh.

    https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/

  2. The UK has gone utterly bananas regarding 100% RE by 2050.
    That means no fossil fuels.
    UK Brexit will make it even worse/less affordable.
    It looks like Maine, a very poor state, with a new governor, is going nuts as well.
    She wants to put up wind turbines everywhere, destroy many miles of ridge lines, to catch mediocre winds, to send electricity to Massachusetts.
    She wants to put heat pumps in energy hog houses, which is MORE costly than highly efficient traditional
    She wants Joe and Jane Worker in Maine to drive EVs, even though they do hardly reduce any CO2, on a life time basis.
    New England would make NO difference no matter what it does, with India, China , etc., building hundreds of coal plants in future years. See table 4A.
    http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/ifo-institute-study-casts-doubt-on-climate-saving-credentials-of
    With enough subsidies, even pigs can be made to fly.

    • She must have gone to UVM. Vermont has been on this insane highway to bankruptcy for the last 20 yrs. Wind turbines, solar panels, mandatory fees and increased taxes to fund “weatherizing” old farmhouses and subsidizing the purchace of heat pumps and electric vehicles. Despite complaints about ruined views, infra-sound, depopulation of large and small game, and lowered property values, the Legislature still pushes 90% RE by 2030.

  3. I think the English dweebs should be more worried about extinction from mussie hoard they’ve
    let run lawlessly over their landscape. But if their that worried maybe they should just all jump
    off the london bridge and end their suffering…It would pollute the Thames for a while
    but eventually they’d wash out to sea..

  4. McKay sure wouldn’t want for material if he were around to re-write Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

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