By Kit Knightly

Offguardian

The “public health policies” allegedly in place to fight Covid19 are being rebranded as “saving the planet”.

Yesterday was Earth Day. The traditional day environmental hashtags temporarily trend across all social media sites. This year was no different, with the exception of the stronger than usual whiff of agenda.

The narrative of the “deadly viral pandemic” is slowly losing momentum. Whether this is through the public having “post viral fatigue”(as it were), or a deliberate shift in media talking points is unclear. But there’s certainly less energy in the story than at this time last year.

That said, it’s also perfectly clear that governments around the world are in no mood to give up their newly acquired “emergency powers”, and that alleged “anti-covid measures” are not going away anytime soon.

Especially lockdowns, which are being freshly marketed as “good for the planet”.

The narrative that locking down the public was “helping the Earth heal” actually dates back to last March, when it was reported all across the world news that only a few weeks of lockdown had cleared up the water in Venician canals so much there were dolphins swimming through the city.

This story later proved to be completely untrue, but that didn’t stop dozens of outlets from picking up the story and running with it.

At various times in the intervening year, Covid has been sold as a having an environmental silver-lining. Including potentially “saving the planet”.

Just last month, the Guardian published a story with the headline:

Global lockdown every two years needed to meet Paris CO2 goals – study”

That this is all about marketing and opinion control is only further evidenced by the fact that, with a few hours, they edited the headline to remove mention of lockdowns, the new one reading:

Equivalent of Covid emissions drop needed every two years – study

At around the same time, they had another article, warning that emissions will increase to “pre-pandemic levels” once lockdowns are ended. Another saying lockdown has taught us to “love nature”. And another claiming the UK’s “star count” had increased thanks to lockdown.

All this kicked into another gear on Earth Day, the theme of which is Restore Our Earth^TM (yes, it really is a registered trademark).

Yesterday morning I woke up to a news alert on my phone, claiming this Earth Day we should “celebrate how much the planet has healed during lockdown“.

Later, I saw an advert for a new documentary titled “The Year the Earth Changed”, chronicling the ways nature has rebounded during lockdown, and how much the “Earth has healed”.

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Via https://off-guardian.org/2021/04/23/climate-is-the-new-covid/