Silicon Valley agency declares 'climate emergency'

FPI / February 9, 2020

Silicon Valley’s transportation authority issued a resolution last week declaring a “climate emergency.”

“Global climate change caused by human activities has resulted in a climate emergency which demands mobilization at a massive scale to halt, reverse, mitigate, and prepare for the consequences of the climate emergency and to restore the climate for future generations,” states the resolution, which was approved unanimously by the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) board of directors.

The Santa Clara County, California-based agency said the resolution was adopted based on its belief that “climate-related natural disasters have increased exponentially over the past decade, costing the United States more than double the long-term average during the period of 2014 through 2018, with total costs of natural disasters during that period of approximately $100 billion per year.”

The VTA also declares that individuals and families on the frontlines of climate change often find themselves “living with income inequality and poverty, institutional racism, inequity on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, poor infrastructure, and lack of access to health care, housing, clean water, and food security.”

In June 2018, the Berkeley City Council in California issued a similar resolution as it declared a worldwide climate emergency, insisting that climate change is “the greatest crisis in history” while blaming it for the deaths of “millions.”

Droughts, famines, and diseases produced by global warming “have already killed millions of people in the Global South,” the Berkeley declaration said, adding that the earth is “already too hot for safety and justice.”

“The global economy’s overshoot of ecological limits and, increasingly climate change, are driving a global fresh water scarcity crisis and the sixth mass extinction of species, which could devastate much of life on earth for the next ten million years,” the resolution predicts.

Climate change “has been linked to the Syrian War, the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria, as well as the famines, water shortages, and resulting conflict in Yemen, Somalia, and South Sudan,” the Berkeley declaration said.

Writing for Breitbart on Feb. 8, Thomas Williams noted that, last September, “a diverse group of more than 500 experts in the sciences, academia, economics, business, law, and other fields sent a ‘European Climate Declaration’ to the Secretary-General of the United Nations insisting that there is no climate emergency and asking for a high level, open debate on climate change.”

The European Climate Declaration states: “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address the uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real benefits as well as the imagined costs of adaptation to global warming, and the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of mitigation.”

The signatories declared that there is “no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent” while underscoring the costliness and negative side-effects of CO2-mitigation measures.

“There is no climate emergency,” the text states. “Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm.”

The signatories also assert that it is “cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions” on the basis of results from immature, general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is currently founded.

“We urge you to follow a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation,” the text reads.

Free Press International