The tweet included a link to a news story claiming that Spain and Portugal had seen over a thousand people had die in the past week, due to the heatwave (they’ve since amended that number to over 2000).

The climate crisis is a public health crisis. https://t.co/klk2fgccWQ

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 20, 2022

I don’t want to get into the maths of it, but across two countries totalling around 58 million people, 2000 in a week is not very many at all.

And, as I pointed out on Twitter, in a post-Covid world we can’t really be sure what “died due to the heat” even means.

Apparently the #Heatwave2022 is going to kill thousands upon thousands of people.

But if we learned anything from #COVID19, that means people dying in September will be listed as “heatwave related deaths”, because they “died of any cause within 60 days of it being really hot”

— Kit Knightly (@kit_knightly) July 17, 2022

Case in point – we’re already seeing drownings termed “heatwave deaths”…because they wouldn’t have been swimming if it wasn’t so hot.

But we’re not here to fact-check yet more figures or definitions. The point of this article is to highlight the message behind the tweet, and it’s not a new one. It’s all about taking the powers the states have acquired through “covid”, and then applying them to “climate change”

Maybe that means “climate lockdowns”, or “climate passports”, or rationing fuel or banning travel…but whatever terms or phrases they eventually use, it’s definitely some authoritarian fantasy made flesh.

That’s the target, and it has been from the beginning.

Since the earliest days of the “pandemic” there have been consistent (and ludicrous) attempts to try and associate “Covid” and “climate” in the public mind. They started by directly linking the two, and to this day try and make out that climate change will cause more zoonotic pandemics. But that never really hit home.

The more consistent and pervasive messaging has been an effort to rebrand “climate change”, not as an environmental problem but as a “public health” problem.

This messaging first appeared in March 2020, when the pandemic was less than three months old the British Medical Journal published a paper titled “The WHO should declare climate change a public health emergency”, which argued that global warming was far more dangerous than a simple virus, and should be treated just as seriously.

Nobody really listened. In the two years since they’ve tried to bring it back over and over again, but it never lands. Just weeks into lockdown we were already being told that lockdowns were healing the planet, and journalists were asking “if we can do this for covid, why not climate?”

By September of 2020 they were talking about “avoiding a climate lockdown”. March of 2021 saw reports springing up claiming we needed a “covid lockdown every two years” to meet out climate goals. In summer of 2021 the latest IPCC report prompted talk of “hinging from covid to climate” that never really took off.

This past March the think tank Public Policy Project repeated the demand that the WHO recognise climate change as a “public health emergency”.

And just yesterday, the BMJ was back at it, publishing two articles on the same topic. One warning about “The inconvenient truths of health and climate crises that can’t just be ignored” and another titled Groundhog day: the signs of a climate emergency are with us again

There’s a new push in the works, and the thinking behind it is clear. After decades of propaganda that saw “global warming” become “climate change” become “global heating” and eventually “climate emergency”, people simply are not scared of it.

Maybe it’s subconscious knowledge that it’s a propaganda campaign, maybe it’s the literal 60 years of failed prophecies, but whichever it is people are not scared, not like they were of Covid anyway.

The powers-that-be have pretty much admitted this themselves, there’s a revealing Sky News article about it from just a couple of days ago, headlined:

Why is it so hard to get people to care about climate change?”

We saw, during Covid, the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team published a memo which said people were not scared enough of Covid, and the messaging needed to change in order to scare people into compliance:

The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.

That same thinking holds with climate change. They want it to be the new covid, but to get there they need people to feel “an increased level of personal threat”.

That means hitting the dangers of climate change hard. It means fudging death numbers and manufacturing alarming statistics. And it means peppering those headlines with influential figures – like Hillary Clinton – calling climate change a “public health crisis”

That’s why the heatwave is being talked about in such absurd terms. That’s why the UK declared its first ever “heatwave” national emergency, and why Biden is considering declaring a “climate emergency” (whatever that means).

It’s why we’re seeing warnings of “thousands dying”, and suddenly getting “wildfires” (that turn out to be arson). It’s why doctors have started literally diagnosing “climate change”, as if it were a disease.

They want – and need – to change the climate conversation. It’s not going to be about the environment anymore, it’s going to be about “public health”. Climate change is being rebranded – it will no longer be a threat to the planet, from now on it is a threat to you. And as soon as they that message has a grip on people, they will turnaournd and say “so, about those climate lockdowns.

Image via Shutterstock. Article cross-posted from Off-Guardian.