The World Health Organization and Climate Change in the COVID-19 Era

The World Health Organization (also known as the Bill Gates Health Organization) has become an instrumental driver of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and is largely responsible for many of the more egregious examples of pandering.  Recent but relatively little covered comments by WHO's Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus provides us with an interesting but unexpected link between the pandemic and one of the world's most divisive issues.

 

"Throughout history, outbreaks and pandemics have changed economies and societies. This one will be no different. 

In particular, the pandemic has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change.

The pandemic has given us a glimpse of our world as it could be: cleaner skies and rivers.  Building back better means building back greener." (my bolds)

 

Now, you might think that WHO, whose mandate is global health, should have relatively little to do with the thorny issue of climate change and yet, its General-Director has managed to link the two issues.  But then again, look at the gentleman who is behind the World Health Organization:

 

Mr. Gates has a very strong interest in global climate change as shown in this TED talk from February 2010:

Here are some quotes from his talk:

"CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses.

 

Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be, and where the positive feedbacks are -- there's some uncertainty there, but not very much. And there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. I asked the top scientists on this several times: Do we really have to get down to near zero? Can't we just cut it in half or a quarter? And the answer is, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. And so that's a big challenge. It's very different than saying, "We're a twelve-foot-high truck trying to get under a ten-foot bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under." This is something that has to get to zero.

 

Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year -- over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. It's been constantly going up. It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero." (my bolds)

Fortunately, for all of us, Gates has a solution:

"This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication. So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person is using on average, the energy, on average, for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. So let's look at each one of these, and see how we can get this down to zero. Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero."

 

That's right, it's in the title of his talk - innovating to zero!

 

In a recent posting on his blog "GatesNotes" he observes the following:

 

"You may have seen projections that, because economic activity has slowed down so much, the world will emit fewer greenhouse gases this year than last year. Although these projections are certainly true, their importance for the fight against climate change has been overstated.

 

Analysts disagree about how much emissions will go down this year, but the International Energy Agency puts the reduction around 8 percent. In real terms, that means we will release the equivalent of around 47 billion tons of carbon, instead of 51 billion.

 

That’s a meaningful reduction, and we would be in great shape if we could continue that rate of decrease every year. Unfortunately, we can’t.

 

Consider what it’s taking to achieve this 8 percent reduction. More than 600,000 people have died, and tens of millions are out of work. This April, car traffic was half what it was in April 2019. For months, air traffic virtually came to a halt.

 

To put it mildly, this is not a situation that anyone would want to continue. And yet we are still on track to emit 92 percent as much carbon as we did last year. What’s remarkable is not how much emissions will go down because of the pandemic, but how little.

 

In addition, these reductions are being achieved at, literally, the greatest possible cost."

 

Now, it's pretty easy for Bill Gates to encourage all of us to change our lifestyles in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions when you live in a 66,000 square foot home:

 

 

...and fly around the globe in your own private Bombardier BD-700 Global Express jet rather than travelling in cattle class like the sweaty proletarian masses:

 

...and can afford to buy an all-electric Porsche Taycan which starts at $185,000 US for the Turbo S model:

 

Apparently, in Gates' world, the mantra of "do as I say not as I do" is alive and well.

 

Given that the World Health Organization received $455.3 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2018 - 2019, it really should not be terribly surprising that WHO's profound interest in two of Bill Gates' favourite hobbies, vaccines and global climate change, has become a key part of its narrative.