Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham argued in a tweet that ”climate lockdowns will come right after the Covid lockdowns.” Prominent climate sceptics Steve Milloy and Marc Morano made similar claims, and news outlets like Fox News and Breitbart also included content about planned climate lockdowns in their on-air broadcasts and online articles. The phrase climate lockdown received growing attention across social media platforms as high-profile influencers, pundits and hyper-partisan media outlets argued that governments were actively preparing to use the climate crisis as a pretext for restricting individual freedoms, akin to the measures introduced in response to COVID-19. Financial news site Marketwatch later republished a large portion of the article. In it she called for radical economic transformation and a “radical overhaul” of energy to mitigate the climate crisis and any potential restrictions that might eventuate, such as limits on car use, meat consumption and extreme energy-saving measures. On 22 September 2020, economist and University College London Professor Mariana Mazzucato published an article for Project Syndicate titled ‘Avoiding a Climate Lockdown’. ![]() ![]() In mid-April 2020, a Guardian editorial called for the post-lockdown world’s ‘return to normal’ to be challenged to continue reducing carbon emissions. Most initial uses of the phrase had positive connotations, contrasting the relative urgency with which one deadly threat (COVID-19) was being approached, to the other catastrophic, long-term issue of climate change. The phrase ‘climate lockdown’ emerged after the first COVID-19 lockdown was imposed in Wuhan on 23 January 2020, appearing a mere two days later in social media posts. More recently, it has been used to instil fear over proposed ‘15-minute cities’. Discussion about climate lockdowns first gained traction on social media in September 2020 as reports emerged on the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on global pollution, and some actors began to argue that these restrictions were in fact a precursor to future climate-driven lockdowns. The term ‘climate lockdown’ refers to a conspiratorial narrative which claims that global elites are using climate change as a pretext to restrict individual freedoms and civil liberties.
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