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The Guardian reports U.N. climate scientists are finally saying the quiet part out loud: they want the authority to prescribe specific climate policies and the ability to track or monitor the compliance of the 195 nations that are signatories to the Paris climate agreement with those prescriptions or mandates. Per The Guardian:

Senior climate experts are calling for an overhaul of the structure and powers of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in despair at the slow pace of climate action.

Five lead authors of IPCC reports told the Guardian that scientists should be given the right to make policy prescriptions and, potentially, to oversee their implementation by the 195 states signed up to the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC).

Sonia Seneviratne, an IPCC vice-chair and coordinating lead author since 2012, said: “At some point we need to say that if you want to achieve this aim set by policymakers then certain policies need to be implemented. …”

Scientists should be able to call for fossil fuel cuts and phaseouts, she said.

The honesty of these scientists is refreshing. In truth, the IPCC process has never been truly about preventing climate change, which is a process humans cannot control, but always about aggregating more power to bureaucrats and the governments that employ and empower them. This is not the first time U.N. spokespersons, and other would-be climate tyrants, honestly admitted that preventing climate change was a pretext for a government reset of the economy and governing systems. For example, in 2015, Christiana Figueres, then the executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that climate policies are not about saving the planet or the environment but about the power to remake society into a socialist paradise (as if there has been or ever could be such a thing).

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres said.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, admitted the same thing concerning her Green New Deal, saying, “[t]he interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

And, in February 2021, Massachusetts Undersecretary for Climate Change David Ismay said at a climate conference in Vermont that in the Northeast there were no more big climate “offenders” to break, now it was time to “break” the people.

In the end, authoritarians will always try to cloak their ambitions in paternalistic terms—“we must do this for the good of, ‘the people,’ ‘the proletariat,’ ‘the volk,’ ‘society,’ ‘the planet.’” Pick your term from the appropriate region and time period, but it is in reality all about increasing their own power and aggrandizing themselves, necessarily at the expense of average people.

The truth should be an absolute defense against climate authoritarians’ ambitions. In particular, the truth spoken by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, head of Dubai’s state oil and renewable energy companies and the host of COP 28. During a presentation prior to the conference, he stated:

There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5. You are asking for a phase out of fossil fuels, please help me, show me, the roadmap for a phase out of fossil fuels that will allow … for sustainable socio-economic development. Unless you want to take the world back into caves.

Al Jaber’s assessment is a sober and accurate description of reality. Thankfully, as detailed at Climate at a Glance and Climate Realism, there is no need for a premature phase out or shutdown of fossil fuels. Extreme weather is not worsening and deaths from weather events have declined by more than 98 percent. In addition, as the Earth has modestly warmed crop production and yields have dramatically increased with a corresponding decline in hunger and starvation, and deaths attributable to non-optimum temperatures have substantially fallen.

There is absolutely no demonstrated need to eschew the benefits of modern society that fossil fuel use makes possible. Also, there is certainly no justification for giving up essential liberty or economic progress to climate czars in a vain effort to control future weather.

In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that with the advent of big government funding big science, the people should jealously guard their liberty.

“[H]olding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite,” Eisenhower said.

His prescient and wise counsel is truer today than ever before.

This piece originally appeared at HeartlandDailyNews.com and has been republished here with permission.