I’m not going to move to Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., or Seattle. You can’t make me, so don‘t try.
Those cities have all joined what they call “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has the most bizarre list of “ambitious targets” one could imagine, the ultimate extreme of the nanny state. They won’t actually implement any of the “target” goals, because if they do, as one writer succinctly put it, “people will die.” I’m not ready to sacrifice my own life for the good of someone else’s order, so I just won’t be going to those fourteen cities.
We have previously discussed New York’s decision to ban old coal-fired pizza ovens, as well as Administration initiatives to ban gas stoves, ordinary dishwashers, furnaces, air conditioners, and more. It all masquerades as parts of the attempt to fix the climate, by banning things – things we all depend on in our daily lives. But it isn’t really about climate change; it is part of a much broader agenda, an attempt to control human behavior and modify generations of tradition and behavior. Consider the “target” goals of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and its member cities. Those goals include halting all consumption of meat, ending the use of all dairy products, restricting everyone’s diet to 2500 calories a day, and limiting people to purchasing only “3 new clothing items per person per year.” So be careful, if you buy a shirt, a pair of shoes, and a T-shirt, then you can’t have any socks until next year. This is not long-term big-picture philosophizing – they want this done by the end of this decade. By 2030.
Further, if you thought the attack on automobiles was complete, these people are just getting started. This coalition’s target is to eliminate all privately owned vehicles” by 2030. Note that they don’t oppose all vehicles – just privately owned ones. Meaning they can still have cars, but you can’t. That will make it difficult to visit friends and family in places like Grand Junction, especially because they close with this gem of a goal: “1 short-haul return flight every 3 years per person.” That is defined as any flight less than 1500 kilometers (932 miles). So in their world, flying between these big cities is fine, flying from DC to Denver is OK, but that final leg to Grand Junction is destroying the planet and should be stopped!
These targets were published in a report called “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World.” Perhaps predictably, it was mostly funded by the billionaire whose attempt as mayor of New York to ban large sodas earned him the nickname, “Nanny Bloomberg.” Almost 100 cities around the world have joined, racing for status as the most enlightened.
The group has talked about these goals for some time, but until they recently republished the report and renewed the publicity drive, few people had noticed. In response to the negative exposure they must have known would come, they have responded with a series of denials, disclaimers, and “we don’t really mean it” statements. One conservative talk radio host made a big issue of it and was subjected to press releases from a French press “fact-checker” site. It explained that the proposed bans were not really policy recommendations because the coalition is not a policy-making body. The “fact checker” quotes the report itself, explaining that “This report does not advocate for the wholesale adoption of these more ambitious targets in C40 cities; rather, they are included to provide a set of reference points that cities… can reflect on when considering different emission-reduction alternatives and long-term urban visions.” But the report also defines its targets and says “If C40 cities change their food consumption habits in line with the identified progressive targets, [food-related] emissions could be cut by 51 percent.”
I am not a conspiracy theorist and don’t want to split hairs. We should take the authors at their word, assuming they are not really trying to do what they advocate doing. It is only “based on a future vision of resource-efficient production and extensive changes in consumer choices.”
Fine. Even they don’t admit it, I know none of the fourteen American cities will really ban meat, dairy, clothes shopping, cars, or plane flights. But I don’t want to live in a city where they even think those might be reasonable goals to dream about for some utopian future.
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