New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday what might become the most intrusive government program in history, and I’m including fictional programs like Malcolm McDowell having his eyelids held open so he could be forced to watch propaganda for hours on end in the movie version of A Clockwork Orange.
PJ Media’s own Rick Moran reported that Adams told New Yorkers on Monday that “Food impacts everything. It impacts our physical health, our mental health, our way of life, and today we are saying to New Yorkers, and really to the globe, that it impacts our planet.”
What Rick left out is this: it might also impact residents’ underpants, apparently.
Please, someone, tell me I’m wrong about this one. And if I am, I hope at least you’ll get a laugh or two out of what follows in this article. But if I’m even just half-right — the jokiest parts of this article are obviously just jokes, after all — then our would-be world-savers have gone completely off the deep end.
Adams signed his city on to something called the C40 Good Food Cities Declaration which aims to “increase access to balanced and nutritious food to city residents and halve food waste.” C40’s website includes a lot of lofty buzzwords and phrases but not much in the way of details. But here’s what we do know about what New York, London, and 13 other cities have signed their people up for:
Consumption-based emissions inventories will enable London and New York City to develop a suite of actions to incentivise more sustainable consumption in collaboration with people and businesses. The project will also pioneer new ways for other cities to measure emissions from urban consumption.
What does that mean? In short, C40 signatory cities like New York and London will have to figure out exactly what city-dwellers buy, eat, throw away, and — if I’m reading this correctly — emit from their hindquarters in gaseous form.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” said former mayor and current UN Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions, and president of the C40 Board, Michael Bloomberg.
Remember when Bloomberg was a moderate? Good times.
And you thought the IRS was intrusive. Sure, they want to see receipts from your business lunches, but not from your trip to the john afterward.
I’m wracking my brain, trying to figure out if I’m reading something into C40’s goals that isn’t really there. But when I read that C40 is “committed to understanding the impact of their cities’ consumption by measuring their consumption emissions,” what else am I supposed to take away from that?
And then when I read that C40 demands “taking action to address the emissions,” I’m hoping that the best-case scenario means gently nudging people to eat supposedly “better” foods. The worst-case scenario… I dunno, corks?
Left unsaid is exactly how New York will so carefully track what residents eat and emit. For the garbage, I picture the ghost of George Orwell forced to go through everyone’s trashcans at night while muttering, “I warned you…”
For the rest? Gentle reader, you know I love and respect you, and have often waded knee-deep through the internet muck to bring you the information you need to make sense out of this crazy century we’ve been fated to inhabit together. But there’s no way I’m searching the internet for fanciful (for now) human fart-tracking devices.
Adams, according to the Gothamist, acknowledged that interrogating people’s food choices won’t be easy. He admitted: “I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation.”
Nevertheless, it’s full speed ahead on monitoring what everyone eats, throws out, and emits, because Mother Gaia wants him to.
The voices in my head never did anything worse than tell me to have another drink. In fact, they’re telling me to do that right now.
