While she didn’t get it into the $2.2 trillion bill to stimulate the economy and help businesses survive the nearly nationwide shutdown during the Coronavirus pandemic, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tried to insert tax credits for solar and wind and CO2 emissions standards for airlines as part of her effort to get America to fight global warming.

And as Tilak Doshi reports in Forbes, she wasn’t the only climate-change opportunist:

Across the pond, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen doubled down on the EU’s climate commitment with a €1 trillion Green Deal. …

In an odd twist of logic, Frans Timmermans, leading the Commission’s work on the European Green Deal, said that the focus on the coronavirus pandemic “showed the need for climate laws”. In the revolutionary language of the EC’s Green Deal, all policy matters including coronavirus-related public health and economic stimulus legislation would have to be in line with net zero emissions by mid-century. …

International bureaucrats have echoed these calls for stiffening the resolve to pursue climate legislation in the face of the mounting Covid-19 crisis. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency 
and a prominent advocate of EU climate policy, advised world leaders and heads of financial institutions to exploit the “historic opportunity” presented by the pandemic and “use the current situation to step up our ambition to tackle climate change.” Christiana Figueres, former head of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and architect of the Paris Agreement, tweeted “Well put @IEABirol…We have a massive crisis = opportunity on our hands. We cannot afford to waste it. Recovery must be green.”

Meanwhile, Arthur Wyns, climate-change advisor to the World Health Organization, muses on how the pandemic, like climate change, requires a global response—and along the way claims that global warming has made extreme weather events more frequent and severe (a claim contrary to the hard data, as Roger Pielke Jr. proves in Disasters & Climate Change which can be found in our online store.)

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.