12 February 2021 — Tropics of Meta
We need no longer speculate about whether we live in a climate emergency. The scientific verdict has been out for some time now, each year’s report grimmer than the last. The UN World Meteorological Organization’s most recent report tells us that Arctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting at faster rates, the oceans are moribund, that there were a record number of hurricanes in the Atlantic, floods in Asia and Africa, droughts and wildfires in the Americas, and climate refugees the world over. And this is to say nothing of deforestation, depleted soils, polluted air and water, and biodiversity loss. The World Wildlife Fund’s most recent report tells us that mammal, bird, fish, amphibian, and reptile populations have fallen an average of 68% since 1970. “Our relationship with nature,” as they put it, “is broken.”
By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as harbinger of their proposed socioeconomic upheaval suggests that if Covid-19 hadn’t come along by accident, they would have created it (had they been able).
The New Dark Age 