#Lockdowns: The Door Opener for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and 15 Minute Cities

Many people are claiming it is a conspiracy theory to be concerned that "15 minute cities" might become a new form of #Lockdown - this time for climate versus COVID. Michelle Stirling, Communications Manager for Friends of Science Society, took a look at the time line of some events and 'targets' - from Yvo de Boer (then Exec Sec of the UNFCCC) claiming at the Paris Agreement of 2015 that we'd have to shut down the global economy - to the report by a consulting firm "ARUP" called "Deadline 2020" which said the C40 cities should get citizens down to a 2 tCO2e (2 ton carbon dioxide equivalent) footprint through a 15 minute city structure, where all services are within a 15 minute walk or bike ride. [Canadians had a typical carbon footprint of ~17 tCO2e per capita in 2016; Cubans have a carbon footprint of about 2 tCO2e per capita. Stark difference.] Curiously, in September of 2019, a very large report called "Exponential Roadmap" came out in which climate activist scientists Johan Rockstrom called for a "Moonshot" (alluding to the Apollo missions) and an application of a kind of "Moore's Law" (alluding to the rapid capacity increase in computing power on a chip, but for emissions reduction). Rockstrom also advocates for a global carbon tax LAW and his starting point is $400/t. The confluence of these proposals and the timing of long-term lockdowns (when we were told it would just take 2 weeks or a month to 'flatten the curve') indicates that we may have already been through "climate lockdowns" that piggybacked on the COVID epidemic, setting the stage for the WEF's Fourth Industrial Revolution (for which many 'solutions' for 15 minute cities are in the works. Michelle speculates, with various points of evidence, that behavioral 'nudge' psychology has been employed and that patterns of behaviour have been tracked and analyzed during the lockdowns, to provide data to 'nudge' people into the 'comfort and convenience' of 15 minute cities. While the idea of restructuring very DENSE city areas with little room for cars into these 15 minute walking cities might make sense for places like Barcelona on the balmy Mediterranean, they make little sense for low densities cities in Canada, where temperatures are freezing half the year and cabin fever is a 'thing.' The confluence of health care and climate change is also an uneasy mix, and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty's book "The New Abnormal" is cited as a resource. COVID has upset global geopolitics as well, and this means supply chains will continue to fall apart, as outlined in Peter Zeihan's book "The End of the World is just the Beginning..." about geopolitics. Based on his research, nations will need all the financial and material resources they can find to manage the bumpy road ahead - and 'human-caused' climate change will be the last of our concerns as solar activity enters a Grand Solar Minimum. This is a somewhat speculative presentation, but worth watching to see how climate change is being used as a lever to take away your freedoms.