2024 in Retrospect: Has Climate Started To Change?

Will there be any liability for forcing down harmful Covid measures on us and are we going to correct course in our climate policies?

A liberal economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek has very precisely formulated an important observation about the relationship between emergencies and individual liberties: “'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.”

That this observation of Hayek’s is still valid today is a painful lesson we have learned from the experience of recent years, and will probably continue to learn. For example, the Covid crisis now seems, in retrospect, downright surreal in terms of its absurd policies of coercion and force that was used by the authorities. What really amazes me, however, is that, when talking about this crisis, there are still great many people who, instead of analysing the events, want to bury their heads in the sand or if that cannot be done, attack the recollector and suggest that the case should altogether be forgotten.

For example, the United States House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic published a report at the beginning of December which thoroughly analysed the Covid crisis and the coercive measures used in it. The report took up more than 500 pages and summarised several years of work by the same committee. It literally ripped apart all the lies and failures of the Covid crisis. It confirmed the fact that the virus came out of a lab in Wuhan, China – though as we remember, considerable efforts were made to cover the fact up and to ridicule those who spoke about it. The report also found that pretty much all the policy decisions and measures meant to supposedly limit the spread of the virus and protect the vulnerable did more harm than good eventually. That includes rules of social distancing, isolating healthy populations, enforcing vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, limiting health care services, etc. Besides those measures being unscientific, they were directly harmful to people’s health and well-being, and disproportionately more for those people who were at no real risk of Covid itself, which means most of the people. They were divisive and denied fundamental rights to large groups of people that refused to go along with calls for vaccination. It is important to note that only few countries, such as Sweden and some states in the US, did not enforce such policies upon their citizens.

Although the fact that Covid policies were harmful and unjust might have already been clear to anyone who cared to take time to consider them impartially and factually, it is certainly of importance that they have now been clearly condemned also in an official document, such as the said report. We have written about the report itself at greater length here and here.

Here are some notable articles and interviews related to Covid crisis and other health topics that we published this year:

Fighting the Flawed Science and Statistics of the Covid Event

FREEDOM RESEARCH PODCAST #17. Dr. Clare Craig. Consequences of the Covid Crisis: We Have Not Had the Pushback We Need

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty: Censorship and Propaganda Took a Giant Leap Forward During the Covid Crisis

Professor Peter C. Gøtzsche: Healthcare Is Much More Corrupt Than People Think

Jeffrey A. Tucker's Take on the Pandemic, Its Aftermath and the Struggle We're in Now

What is a Lockdown?

Analysis: OFFICIAL COVID-19 CLAIMS - untouched disinformation or when fact-checking goes silent

But now comes the main question – has anything changed since the report of the Congress was published? Have the ones responsible for the harms been somehow identified and held liable? The problem is that if there is no liability and public condemnation, we should expect the same things to happen again in similar circumstances, i.e. in a proclaimed crisis. Once the safeguards of individual liberties are down, they ‘become eroded’. But maybe it is too early to tell what happens next.

What kind of change should we expect?

For there is reason to expect change in the social and political climate, if the US president-elect, Donald Trump, who will get into office in three weeks, really does deliver on his promises. The most promising bit so far is his choice of personnel to head up the key US agencies overseeing health care and drug companies – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the US Secretary of State for Health and Human Services, Dr Marty Makary for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Dr Jay Bhattacharya for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Big Pharma share prices have plunged into a deep depression following the news, as investors fear that emphasis will now be placed on the safety of drugs rather than on company profits.

Hopes are there that the incoming Trump administration will also stop if not reverse the erosion of public freedoms. As we know, one of Trump's closest advisers, entrepreneur Elon Musk, is a great supporter of freedom of expression, for example, even if his own social media platform X can still be seen as having certain shortcomings on the issue. His position on this and X’s open commitment to free speech has brought Musk repeatedly under attack from authorities in many parts of the world. For example, X had to finally give in to pressure from the Brazilian authorities this year and censor the accounts they wanted censored. A number of top US and EU nomenclature politicians have also spoken about the need to censor social media, and have even suggested threatening Musk with jail if he and X do not comply. One can be rather certain that such talk will now largely come to an end. This does not, however, immediately mean that the UK's left-wing government will stop jailing people for social media posts that have been declared inappropriate. Or that the German police will no longer raid the homes of 14-year-old boys when their TikTok video hashtag has been deemed unlawful. But we can still hope that an expected change in the US will have some positive impact on Europe as well.

And what we can also expect is a change in the US climate policies. Trump is presumed to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and take a more pragmatic approach to the field of energy production, i.e. cut subsidies for wind and solar, and produce more gas and oil. Trump has picked Chris Wright as his nominee for the position of his energy secretary – and he is a fossil fuel executive who supports the development of oil and gas industries, including fracking. Wright has been quite vocal in calling out activist actions on climate change and has often been heard criticising something that he calls the “top-down” approach to climate change, characteristic of liberalist and left-wing groupings. He argues that the climate movement around the world is “collapsing under its own weight.”

These energy/climate policies will undoubtedly have far-reaching implications for Europe as well, although an ideological push for ‘renewables’ will still be hard to crack here. So it remains to be seen how quickly will today's European leaders adapt to a new reality, as so far they have been ramming ahead at all cost, despite the evident economic difficulties their ‘green’ policies have brought on people. But we will see what happens.

Here are some climate and energy policy related articles we published this year:

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. on Climate Alarmists' Talking Points: Scaring People with Misinfo Will Not Get Them Behind Climate Policies

UK example: making car use increasingly inconvenient

“We're robbing them of their ambition.”

Our Rising 'Climate Costs': Are They Really Proof of Climate Change Causing More Devastating Extreme Weather Events?

Professor Alar Konist: Our Energy Policies Should Not Go From One Extreme To The Other

Professor McKitrick: Climate Story Is A Good Way of Expanding Government Power

Producer of Climate: The Movie Tom Nelson: Climate Scare Will Crumble Sooner Than You Expect

“To Use Terms Like 'Global Boiling' Is Clearly Absolute Nonsense”

Climate Models, Catastrophe Scenarios and the Imaginary Climate Crisis

The Cold Truth of the Warming Climate

Professor Valentina Zharkova and the Little Ice Age Which Has Already Started

Climate Movement and Its Socialist and Religious Vibes

Dr. Jennifer Marohasy: There Is No Climate Crisis

“We can bring CO2 emissions to zero, but this will not prevent climate change”

Analysis: GLOBAL BOILING ERA - untouched disinformation or when fact-checking goes silent

“The 'Green Deal' Has Taken on a Religious Overtone”

Trench Wars of Climate Science