Original article (in Croatian) was published on 13/07/2022
Internet conspiracy theorists are using an article by renowned economist Mariana Mazzucato to claim that a “climate lockdown” is ahead of us.
Misinformation announcing the alleged introduction of “climate lockdowns” began to spread on social networks. The last such example was published on the 2012 Transformation of Consciousness Facebook page, where disinformation and fake news were often spread.
The video, which was originally posted on a private Facebook profile back in April, begins by claiming that an economist working for the World Health Organization (WHO) wrote a report on climate lockdowns published by NGOs supported “by [Bill] Gates and [George] Soros” and groups representing banks, oil companies and technology giants.
The text to which the video refers was published on the Project Syndicate page, authored by Mariana Mazzucato, and shared by the Social Europe web portal. Mazzucato is a renowned professor of economics at the College London University, the founder of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, and the author of the global bestseller “The Entrepreneurial State”, also published in Croatia.
In the “controversial” text, she writes about how the world is approaching a tipping point when it comes to climate change, a moment that requires dramatic interventions to protect the future of civilization.
Climate lockdown
In her article, however, Mariana Mazzucato does not advocate the introduction of “climate lockdowns”, but warns that such drastic measures could become inevitable if the world fails to adapt to the climate crisis in time. After all, her text is entitled “Avoiding Climate Lockdown” and contains a warning that drastic measures in the future can only be avoided by a timely green transition.
Mazzucato states that climate change will exacerbate the social and economic problems highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic: a lack of capacity to manage public health crises, the limited ability of the private sector to withstand sustained economic disruption, and growing social inequality.
The video highlights a part of the article in which Mazzucato writes about the concept of climate lockdown:
“Under the climate lockdown, governments would limit the use of private vehicles, ban the consumption of red meat and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil fuel companies would have to stop drilling”.
“So, ‘climate lockdown’ is a mix of dystopian social control and impractical nonsense, probably designed to sell an agenda”, the video comments.
“Reset”
The author of the article on Project Syndicate claims that to avoid a scenario in which we need “climate lockdowns”, we should revise existing economic structures, make capitalism “different”, and reorient corporate governance, policies, finance and energy systems towards a green economic transformation.
The author of the video draws the conclusion from this that Mazzucato proposes “the Great Reset” of the entire society and also states that there is a “threatening tone” in her article.
In the video, on the other hand, some other information that Mazzucato presents, which builds on the claims from the text mentioned in the video, is deliberately omitted.
Real problems
For example, the author writes that the movement of arctic ice, wildfires and methane leaks in the North Sea are warning signs that require certain changes. The text takes a critical look at the fact that we demand the most from ‘basic workers’ (including nurses, supermarket workers and delivery drivers) and pay them the least.
“Without fundamental change, climate change will exacerbate such problems”, she wrote.
Mazzucato states that the climate crisis is a public health crisis and that global warming will cause the degradation of drinking water and enable the development of respiratory diseases.
Furthermore, she emphasizes that corporate governance should reflect stakeholders’ needs rather than shareholders’ whims and that building an inclusive, sustainable economy depends on productive cooperation between the public and private sectors and civil society.
“This means companies must listen to unions and labor collectives, community groups, consumer advocates and others”, Mazzucato writes.
There are a series of measures proposed by the author in the text – as little state aid as possible to save companies and spend taxpayers’ money for productive purposes, a special tax to discourage companies from using certain materials and raw materials, better protection of the youngest and oldest workers, and reduction of economic shocks in regions that are in a disadvantageous position.
Term of climate lockdown
As stated in the analysis of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), in September 2020, the think tank’s analysts identified a new trend on social networks related to the term climate lockdown.
It was used by climate skeptics who claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic is just a precursor to “green tyranny” and that governments and global elites will restrict civil liberties under the pretext of fighting climate change.
ISD investigated how the term is used on social networks, namely on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
The analysis states that the term, although in use since September 2020, began to be used more widely after some mainstream media, such as The Guardian, mentioned the term climate lockdown in their articles.
IDS states that Mariana Mazzucato’s text published on the Project Syndicate web portal also contributed to the more frequent spread of this term. Although those articles did not deal with the climate lockdown in the direction of its advocacy and the announcement of the “big reset”, the term was taken up by right-wing and marginal web portals and the community gathered around the notorious QAnon conspiracy theory.
In a review of the 150 most “retweeted” Twitter posts mentioning the climate lockdown between September 2020 and April 2021, analysts found that as many as 29 percent contained the terms “great reset” or the World Economic Forum, and slightly less than half ( 44 percent) contained some reference to a “conspiracy of elites”.
Faktograf has written about such conspiracy theories several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
Conspiracy theories about the new world order and the great reset have been circulating on the Internet for decades and appear now and then in a new form, most often the one related to current events on a global level that are then connected to the alleged secret plans of the global elites to manage the world population. Such conspiracy theories are often argued with factually incorrect claims. No one has yet offered any proof that there is a conspiracy by global elites to eliminate part of the world’s population.