Ukraine War Narrative Turns From Russia to Climate Change | Crossroads

Good evening and welcome to Crossroads. The United Nations General Assembly is bringing together world leaders in an opportunity to address the threats they face. During yesterday's speeches, many spoke about the adversaries of the free world. Among the anticipated speeches was from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And when he took the podium, the embattled leader who has turned to the world for aid spoke about the threats he believes his nation's faces, climate change, watch. Even though humanity is failing on its climate policy objectives, this means that extreme weather will still impact the normal global life and some evil state will also weaponize its outcomes. And when people in the streets of New York and other cities of the world went out on climate protest, we all have seen them. And when people in Morocco and Libya and other countries die as a result of natural disasters. And when islands and countries disappear underwater. And when tornadoes and deserts are spreading into new territories. And when all of this is happening, one unnatural disaster in Moscow decided to launch a big war and kill tens of thousands of people. Natural disaster in Moscow. Many commentators online were quick to question what Zelensky was talking about. Most people thought he'd be talking about Russia and asking for more aid in the fight against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why is he talking about climate change? And how is he trying to link the alleged threat of climate change with Russia? Well, to understand this, we need to unravel some history. You see, support for Ukraine started off pretty high globally. When Russia invaded the country in February 2022, the United States and a good part of Europe stood behind Ukraine. That support started to fade, however. In Europe, the war is blamed for soaring energy prices. They need Russian energy since, as President Trump warned Europe before about this, Russia has a monopoly on the energy infrastructure in the region. This was only made worse with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, and of course in the United States, the Ukraine war is turning into a partisan political issue. While some Republicans, like Mike Pence, stand behind the war, many others criticize the current administration for runaway spending on Ukrainian aid, when the US is facing notably financial problems of its own. But on the Democrat side, and among many of the leftist countries throughout the world, the Ukraine war represents something else. While many of them appear to generally stand by Ukraine, the war derailed some of their key agendas on climate change. They blame Russia for throwing a wrench into their plans. They're mad at Ukraine for not pushing hard enough towards victory. The ongoing war is eating into the agendas that many on their side of the political aisle demand. To understand this, we need to go back to 2021. The war had not yet started. President Biden had only recently taken over the White House. It appeared that Trump was pushed off the political stage never to come back again, and the world was looking to build back better from the COVID emergency. Shortly after Biden came into office, one of his first moves was an executive order on climate change. In January 2021, he issued an order on tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad. It's about coming to the moment to deal with this maximum threat that we exist with that's now facing us, climate change, with a greater sense of urgency. In my view, we've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis. We can't wait any longer. That's why I'm signing today an executive order to supercharge our administration's ambitious plan to confront the existential threat of climate change. It is an existential threat. And just like we need a unified national response to COVID-19, we desperately need a unified national response to the climate crisis, because there is a climate crisis. Now that set into motion a whole of government system that could remake America and the world in the image of the agenda around climate change. It put the so-called climate crisis at the center of United States foreign policy and national security. Biden also stated in the order that, quote, together we must listen to science and meet the moment. This did many things. Among them was to create a special presidential envoy for climate and similar ones like it, in fact. In the White House, there was also a new office of domestic climate policy that would run within the executive office of the president. It would let the office directly coordinate and monitor the agenda and its progress. And this was no minor initiative. It included on that task force leading members of Biden's cabinet. This is the Secretary of Defense, Treasury, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Homeland Security, Energy and many others too long to list. Among the others, though, the Attorney General and also the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and counterterrorism. And again, the list goes on. Now, some may wonder what climate change has to do with the Department of Defense. How is this a military issue? Why is the Department of Homeland Security involved? Wasn't that made to fight terrorists? What about the Treasury or housing or just about every other branch of our government for that matter? The executive order states that the task force shall facilitate the organization and development of a government wide approach to combat the climate crisis. And apparently that involved just about everything, encompassing the entire nation and even including state, local, tribal and territorial governments. Not to mention the global agenda tied in with it, foreign agreements, things like the Paris Accord, for example. And even this was just a small picture of how broad all of this was. Now another piece of it was a new initiative for the American people. It was the Civilian Conservation Corps, the establishment media frame. This is a kind of revival of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. It was touted as a jobs program, a way to get American citizens out in the workforce. Fast Company wrote that it would look different from the original Civilian Conservation Corps, the program that sent American to live in workers camps. The problem with the old one is that it only hired men. And as Fast Company states, the camps were racially segregated. It also only paid them around $30 a month. But this time under Biden's revived program, it said they'd be making a living wage around $15 an hour. Now Grist framed as a type of carrying out of the spirit of the Green New Deal that was Representative AOC's climate proposal that aimed to essentially tear down and remake all of America. It wrote this. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had reportedly sold Secretary of State John Kerry on the idea of a climate corps. The resemblance to the New Deal program, it even has the same acronym, CCC, may explain why the proposal sounds like part of a Green New Deal. Now it framed the programs as being all about jobs and justice and using these to carry out the climate agenda. Now it was all on track. It looked like soon the whole world would be following this new model. The workers' paradise seemed within reach. And then something happened that shattered their dreams. Russia invaded Ukraine. And when that happened, it also derailed the climate agenda. AP News, in fact, ran the headline in 2022 that, quote, Ukraine war upends Biden's agenda on energy, climate change. And it noted that Biden was forced to rein in rising energy costs, even if those moves run counter to his agenda for addressing climate change. He released millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. strategic reserves in order to stop gas prices from skyrocketing even worse than they have. Bloomberg noted that releasing of energy crude oil wasn't just about fighting off high prices. It was about optics during an election year. Now, make quality of life too poor and you might lose some votes. Stay tuned after the break. We'll go deeper into how the war in Ukraine was transformed into a war against climate change. Well, folks, that's it for YouTube for the rest of the episode. Come join us on Epic TV, where we have a lot of great original content, documentaries, special features. The rest of this episode, we're talking with Trevor Loudon, more about the Ukraine-Russia war. And I think the other side of the argument that's not often talked about, which is Russia's ties to the Chinese Communist Party and their agenda, something that's really important to understand if you want to see both sides of this, and especially when it comes to the actual global agendas and what they actually mean. It's an important discussion. I hope you join us for it. Again, that's on Epic TV, 25 cents a week right now, special sale. And I will see you there. People from 160 countries illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and gave themselves up to Border Patrol. But what about the ones who evade Border Patrol? These are known as the Gottaways. You can safely assume that anybody that went through the extra effort to avoid U.S. Border Patrol was not an asylum seeker by default. It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, but somewhere down the road if somebody rapes and kills somebody, and we find out that they came through here on my watch, that's unacceptable. These men had surrounded my house, they were banging on my back door, they were banging on my front door. I can't understand it unless you're out here seeing it every day. 21 dead bodies on the road. Is it wrong to ask people to come to your front door of your home? Then why would it be wrong to ask people to come to the front door of our nation? Their primary goal is to circumvent the checkpoints, go undetected. People that do not want to surrender, those are going to be the potential terrorists, the criminals, the real threat to the U.S. We were hoping the federal government would step in and do something, but they didn't. We have no clue who they are or where they're going, that's the scary part.