An article I wrote for Forbes about J.D. Vance published on July 18th began as follows:
Within a day of ex-President Trump’s announcement of “climate denier” Mr. J. D. Vance as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, the climate industrial complex and supportive mainstream media had the knives out.
Little did I know that within a day of publishing that article, the knives would come out for me.
The editors of Forbes deleted my article, stating that “we had to take down your latest Forbes article about J.D. Vance because it did not meet our editorial guidelines which we take seriously”. This was followed by a short note stating that I was sacked as a contributor. Similar complaints of not abiding by the magazine’s guidelines were made by an editor on a couple of previous published articles.
What editorial guidelines? “Avoid advocacy, opinion, polemic and rumour-mongering.”
I have yet to read any Forbes piece that avoided opinion, given that Forbes contributors are opinion columnists and not journalists who are hired to merely report the news. The contributor’s role, one would have thought, is to offer opinions and advocate certain lines of argument about current affairs or topics of interest based on a reasonable reading of verifiable data. Otherwise, what is the contributor’s purpose?
But here is the catch. It depends on whether you are “on message”. Are you with or against the accepted narratives? If against, you are cancelled. That is how the establishment operates – within Forbes and in the mainstream media – as I found out.
“Avoid Advocacy”
Here is the lead paragraph of a recent article in Forbes entitled “GOP Platform: Back To The Carbon Age” in the weekly column “Current Climate” by two “Forbes Senior Editors”:
Ahead of the Republican Party’s National Convention that kicks off today in Milwaukee, the GOP released its official platform of key priorities for a second potential Trump Administration. As with any such political document, it’s long on platitudes and slogans, but very short on detail. But there’s at least one clear takeaway in the document: it prioritises increasing energy from fossil fuels while ignoring the carbon-fuelled climate crisis that’s triggered record-setting heatwaves and earlier and more intense hurricanes.
The authors assert that the GOP official platform “prioritises increasing energy from fossil fuels while ignoring the carbon-fuelled climate crisis”. They further claim that the “carbon-fuelled climate crisis” has “triggered record-setting heatwaves and earlier and more intense hurricanes”. By these leading statements, the reader is led to believe that both constitute “settled science”.
Here is another example of writing from another recently published Forbes article that allegedly does not constitute advocacy or opinion:
Imagine not being able to get the warning about the approaching hurricane or tornado. How would you know when to evacuate to stay safe or board up your home or business? Or make sure your staff is protected? It’s not a bad dream, it could be the reality if Donald Trump takes office again.
My suggestion that the policy positions of J.D. Vance in support of fossil fuels and sceptical of climate alarmist claims are consistent with the verities of physics and economics got me cancelled. But arguing that if Donald Trump takes over, it would be “a bad dream” is perfectly fine in a Forbes world allegedly devoid of advocacy or opinion.
Settled Science
To suggest that fossil fuels have “fuelled the climate crisis” is, we are led to believe, neither an opinion nor advocacy. Forbes’s readers are told to accept “the carbon-fuelled climate crisis” as established science, though it is nothing of the sort. There is no “settled science” – an oxymoron to begin with – regarding climate change. It is apparent that Forbes would have cancelled John Clauser, a Nobel Laureate, for Physics in 2022 – like the IMF did – since he does not give obeisance at the altar of climate change as Forbes staff evidently do along with their preferred contributors and senior editors.
Indeed, if Dr. Clauser were to write, as he did, that the climate emergency narrative is “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”, he would have received a termination letter pronto from the senior editors of Forbes. And if he had said, as he did, that “climate science has metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”, that would certainly have sealed his fate.
The Forbes editors seem oblivious to the fact that the latest IPCC assessment report, by finding little support for the much-proclaimed link between climate change and extreme weather events, “is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist” as Roger Pielke Jr. puts it.
What is even more remarkable is that Forbes’s senior editors seem out of step with their own Editor-in-Chief and grandson of the magazine’s founder, Steve Forbes. Mr. Forbes said in his column last month that some $6 trillion had been spent on “so-called renewables” such as solar and wind over the past two decades which “barely made a dent” in the use of fossil fuels in the global economy. Yet in the linked Forbes article above, the authors criticise the GOP platform for not making specific references to solar and wind (along with geothermal and hydropower). Perhaps they should have checked with their own Editor-in-Chief before indulging in “climate groupthink”, which Mr. Forbes warns his readers against.
Au Revoir Forbes
My first Forbes article was published more than five years ago in April 2019 entitled ‘The World Bank’s Misguided Green Energy Policies To Persist’. Since then, I have published a range of pieces on climate, energy and public policy. Readers often remarked in personal comments to me that they found it surprising that a mainstream business magazine such as Forbes allowed such contrarian and sceptical writing to be published. My response was to say that Forbes was exceptional in providing a broad range of informed opinion to their readers.
Alas, that is no longer true, and climate groupthink has captured yet another media outlet. Newer hires at the Forbes editorial office from a younger more “woke” generation of journalists may well have tipped the balance in support of the climate alarmist narrative. Gone are the days when informed analysts such as Roger Pielke Jr., Michael Schellenberger, Diana Furchtgott-Roth graced the pages of Forbes.
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an energy consultant, member of the CO2 Coalition and an ex-Forbes contributor.
Below is the article that Forbes memory-holed.
Trump’s VP Pick Is A Climate Sceptic And the Knives Are Out
By Tilak Doshi
Within a day of ex-President Trump’s announcement of “climate denier” Mr. J. D. Vance as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, the climate industrial complex and supportive mainstream media had the knives out. A few headlines of the past 24 hours are an indication:
New York Times – “J.D. Vance Is an Oil Booster and Doubter of Human-Caused Climate Change”
Independent – J.D. Vance: “Climate Activists Alarmed by Trump’s ‘Dangerous’ Pick for Vice President”
Guardian – “Climate Advocates Fear Picking J.D. Vance for VP Is ‘A Dangerous Step Backward’”
The umbrage taken by media commentators is familiar. CNBC laments that “the former venture capitalist though is a known critic of climate change and renewable energy [italics added].” U.K.’s the Independent newspaper reports that “[c]ampaigners are responding with alarm to the selection of climate denier and Ohio senator J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee, with activists warning he represents a “dangerous” voice for the U.S.” Mr. Vance’s “eagerness to please Donald Trump” adds to the image of the Vice-Presidential nominee as an unprincipled politician seeking office.
Climate advocacy group Fossil Free Media spokesperson Cassidy DiPaola asserted that “This [VP] choice signals that a potential Trump-Vance administration would likely double down on fossil fuel expansion at a time when we desperately need to transition to clean energy.” Communications Director Stevie O’Hanlon of Sunrise Movement, a climate activist organisation, said that “Like Donald Trump, J.D. Vance has proven that he will make it a top priority to roll back climate protections while answering to the demands of oil and gas CEOs.”
Does Mr. Vance have a principled stand and is his stance on climate and energy policy worthy of consideration?
Climate Denialism
As the highly polarised debate over climate change over the past few decades has amply demonstrated, the discourse often descends into ad hominem attacks and name calling. “Climate denier” is a charge that is often used by proponents of climate alarm to shut down critical debate and to deplatform climate sceptics. Lena Moffitt, Executive Director of the environmental advocacy group Evergreen Action, said this of Mr. Vance: “Donald Trump has chosen an avowed climate denier as his running mate who has used his time in Congress to vote against the environment and shill for fossil fuel corporations at every opportunity.”
The “denier” accusation is among the more pernicious if popular epithets used to denigrate sceptics of the so-called “consensus science”. It invokes a comparison to those who engage in Holocaust denial. To be sure, most observers would consider it ludicrous to suggest that questioning the accuracy and predictive power of scientific models is like questioning the historical fact of the genocide of Jews in Europe.
What Is Mr. Vance’s Position on Climate?
Putting aside epithets and journalistic hit-pieces, it seems a fair question to ask just what do politicians sceptical of the climate alarmist narrative believe? And what are their policy positions regarding the Paris Agreement’s “Net Zero by 2050” target? This policy target is an imperative, at least nominally, for most current governments in North America and Western Europe.
Mr. Vance – lawyer, businessman, former Marine and writer of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, arisen from the humblest working-class background – places himself firmly in the populist Right movement. It now looks very likely that Mr. Trump will be the next U.S. President. The assassination attempt on Saturday, his miraculous split-second turn of the head which saved him and the iconic picture of his raised fist with the U.S. flag in the background seconds after being injured make him almost irresistible. Thus Mr. Vance will likely join the Donald Trump next year as his VP in an administration that will seek to rapidly unwind the myriad policy and regulatory constraints that the Biden administration has imposed to shackle the U.S. oil and gas industry at every turn.
Vance has also criticised the “green energy fantasy” of the Biden administration, pointing out that “solar panels can’t power a modern manufacturing economy” and “that’s why the Chinese are building coal power plants”. He has similarly called out wind power turbines. At the Turning Point Action conference last year, he said “they’re hideously ugly. They kill all the birds. And they’re mostly made in China.” The Biden administration’s all-out support for EVs comes in for the same critique. In a July 2022 radio interview, he said: “The whole EV thing is a scam. If you plug it into your wall, do these people think there are Keebler elves back there making electricity in the wall? It comes, of course, from fossil fuels.”
Mr. Vance’s climate scepticism goes beyond encouraging U.S. oil and gas dominance in global markets once again – a strong theme of Trump’s first term in office – if the Republicans get elected to office. He has come out fiercely against the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) movement. In an interview with Breitbart in 2022, he said: “ESG is basically a massive racket to enrich Wall Street and enrich the financial sector of the country, at the expense of the industries that actually employ a lot of Ohio’s workers for middle-class jobs.” The push against ESG occurring through the red states in the U.S. and the increasingly evident lack of success of ESG-focused firms and investment advisors suggests that Mr. Vance has probably got a better finger on the pulse than his critics would care to admit.
Who’s More Credible?
As a climate change sceptic, Mr. Vance stands in good company. For instance, the 2022 Nobel Laureate in Physics John Clauser exposed in a recent lecture how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models and analyses do not meet basic standards of scientific enquiry. IPCC models have been used as “proof” of scientific consensus by politicians and activists to support claims of a “climate crisis”. Another example would be Richard Lindzen, an American atmospheric physicist and Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who published an assessment of the global warming narrative in 2022. Prof. Lindzen finds climate alarmism “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the U.S. hobbling its energy system.” Whatever one’s views on climate science, it is apparent that Mr. Vance is not a wild-eyed outlier in his scepticism of the claims of climate policy advocates, as asserted by his many critics.
J.D. Vance’s criticisms of subsidy-supported renewable energy and EV sectors accord with the empirical evidence emerging in the current context of higher inflation, higher interest rates and a deep slump in renewable energy stocks. For instance, an Associated Press report last November described the travails of the Biden administration’s ambitious plans for offshore wind: “The cancellation of two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey is the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, jeopardising the Biden administration’s goals of powering 10 million homes from towering ocean-based turbines by 2030 and establishing a carbon-free electric grid five years later.” This news was preceded by earlier reports of developers cancelling three offshore wind power projects in New England. They said their projects were “no longer financially feasible” despite the ample subsidies on offer.
The news on the EV front, called out as a “scam” by Mr. Vance, is just as dire for green technology enthusiasts. As David Blackmon, a keen observer of the renewable energy space, notes: surveys show that the vast majority of U.S. car buyers will not purchase an EV even at “bargain basement” prices (and despite Government subsidies); the overall growth in private EV sales in the U.S. has slowed “to a trickle”, just as is happening in the U.K. and EU; and the market for used EVs is practically non-existent. “Pure play” EV maker Fisker recently declared bankruptcy while Rivian approaches the same fate. Giant U.S. automakers GM and Ford have turned to gasoline-powered vehicles to sustain their profits as the global EV sales slowdown force them to delay investments and cut costs in their EV production lines.
Partisans may criticise the man all they want, but the realities of thermodynamics and economics support J.D. Vance. He may prove to be the best Vice President in a Republican administration geared towards supporting the country’s oil and gas industries and ‘Making America Great Again’.
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