If anyone doubts the reality of that headline, they either didn’t see the Democrats’ climate townhall, or they need to go back and watch it with an open mind. The alarmists’ objective, which fits perfectly with leftist and progressive politics, is to put themselves in charge of the world.

CNN’s climate townhall, a slog that lasted seven grueling hours, was a prohibition-fest. The candidates suggested banning nuclear energy, fracking, offshore drilling, conventional automobiles, all fossil fuels, even red meat, plastic straws, and babies. It devolved into a contest to see which Democratic presidential aspirant could propose the greatest volume of proscriptions.

And for what? Is our ever-changing climate an existential threat? Hardly. A slightly warmer planet “is not going to be the end of the world,” says Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.

“The world is just becoming more challenging,” he told a Finnish magazine earlier this month. “In parts of the globe, living conditions are becoming worse, but people have survived in harsh conditions.”

While he’s neither a denier nor skeptic — he is probably best described as a “lukewarmer” — Taalas says he’s concerned about the fanatic elements that are even attacking the “climate experts” who are promoting the man-made global warming narrative. They, he says, “claim that we should be much more radical.”

“They are doomsters and extremists; they make threats,” he said.

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore tweeted that Taalas’ statement is “biggest crack in the alarmist narrative for a long time.”

“The meteorologists are real scientists and probably fed up with Greta, Mann, Gore, & AOC catastrophists. Good on him.”

The climate townhall is not the first time those who sow fear have revealed their usually veiled, and always dark, reasons to continue to feed hysteria.

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, has acknowledged the activists’ objective is not to save the world from overheating but to hijack markets and tear down capitalism.

Activist and influential author Naomi Klein asked, “what if global warming isn’t only a crisis?” in a preview of a documentary inspired by her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

“What if it’s the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?” The world must “change, or be changed,” she says, because an “economic system” — our free and open markets — has caused environmental “wreckage.”

The former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last week said Miami will not exist “in a few years” due to the effects of global warming, has admitted the New York Democrat’s radical climate plan is a ruse.

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Saikat Chakrabarti said, according to the Washington Post Magazine. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti asked an aide to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee while the pair met at a Washington, D.C. coffee shop in May. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

Sam Ricketts, Gov. Inslee’s climate director, initially said “yes,” changed it to “no,” the Post reported, before finally settling on “it’s dual.” Ricketts said the other half of the GND’s objective is “building an economy” that has “more broadly shared prosperity, equitability and justice throughout.” Which of course would require a massive shakeup of private economic affairs.

Al Gore’s daughter Karenna, who established the Union Theological Seminary’s Center for Earth Ethics, apparently “isn’t so sure” our current political system can “save the climate.” According to Vox, “she sees the Center’s work as exposing ‘the deeper root cause of climate change: a value system and an economic development paradigm based on short-term economic gain.’”

Karenna Gore believes “globalized capitalism and the big corporations that drive it are ‘just draining the integrity and the meaning out of life.’” So she has a better world in mind. “I don’t think we can do all of the same stuff, with the same mentality, and just solar power it,” she says.

Stirring up public fears of an imminent environmental disaster is an old game. Armstrong Economics reminds us that “climate change has been a routine scare tactic since the 1930s.”

“It resurfaced after World War II when they were trying to stop rebuilding industry and the housing market which had been destroyed, … appeared again in the 1960s when there was a great expansion in housing,” then was “flipped upside down” in the 1970s when we were told global cooling “would destroy civilization.”

Today it “is a political issue being used to raise taxes and to regulate human activity by removing ever-greater proportions of our human rights and freedom.”

When we say “tyranny,” we’re not talking about a new reign of terror or being compelled to live under Cuba- and North Korea-like oppression. But what word best describes a government system that issues prohibitions based on whim, and would forcibly redistribute ever greater sums of wealth in the pursuit of consolidating political power?

Until someone suggests a better word than tyranny, it’s the one we’re going to have to use.

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