Last March US Congressman James Clyburn, the late Democrat Majority Whip, make a shocking statement. While speaking to other leaders of the Democrat party via teleconference, he blurted out that the coronavirus crisis was “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
Sadly, Clyburn was only the first of many politicians in Western nations to make extreme comments along these lines. However, a new column by a German MP is probably the most extreme yet.
Karl Lauterbach is a member of the German national parliament for the Social Democrats [SPD]. He was the deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group from 2013 to 2019. He is also a professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne and has held the position of SPD shadow health minister of Germany.
On December 27th, the German newspaper Die Welt published an op-ed by Lauterback titled “Klimawandel stoppen? Nach den Corona-Erfahrungen bin ich pessimistisch.” This translates to “Stop climate change? After the Corona experience, I am pessimistic.”
Lauterbach begins by praising the German government for enacting strict new lockdown measures. He calls for the lockdown to continue until the virus is virtually gone. He says the goal should be no more than 25 cases per 100k per week.
He does, however, concede that the coronavirus pandemic will be all over by next fall. At which time, he says that Germans need to begin fighting climate change with the same kind of restrictive measures used to fight the virus.
Lauterbach explicitly calls for Germans to sacrifice their “personal freedom” to fight alleged manmade climate change.
Somit benötigen wir Maßnahmen zur Bewältigung des Klimawandels, die analog zu den Einschränkungen der persönlichen Freiheit in der Pandemie-Bekämpfung sind.
We therefore need measures to deal with climate change that are analogous to the restrictions on personal freedom in combating pandemics.
Currently, Germany is shutting down all nuclear power plants. In 2010, nuclear power accounted for almost 25% of German electricity. The final plants will be closed in 2022. Studies show that as German nuclear power plants have shut down, air pollution and CO2 emissions have surged in the nation. Germany is now increasingly dependent on natural gas from Russia to make up the difference. Meanwhile, many German politicians are also clamoring to shut down coal-burning power plants.
