According to the UK’s Telegraph, just hours after President Trump issued executive orders to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, Ed Miliband, the British Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, “warned” Mr Trump that the rise of Net Zero is “unstoppable”. The tendentiousness of the Telegraph’s headline is remarkable. Just who is this mere Department Secretary to “warn” the Chief Executive of the world’s leading economic and military power of anything?
Evidently, the British Secretary is deluded enough to take up the mantle of responsibility to warn President Trump of ignorance in energy affairs. But Mr Miliband has company, ranging from leading academics to senior global leaders conferring at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Rather than simply dismissing his antics as another sign of Mad Ed’s silly climate posturing, it behoves us to take his warning at face value.
Is the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement really such a big deal?
No Big Deal…
Appearing before the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee a day after President Trump’s inauguration, Mr Miliband sought to downplay the impact of America’s planned withdrawal from the international climate treaty which Mr. Trump had announced on the same day.
He said
Other countries believed it was in their national self-interest to remain in the Paris Agreement and to continue working on these (climate) issues, because they saw both the advantages of moving forward on this and the dangers for them of not moving forward. So I think the transition is unstoppable, not fast enough, but unstoppable.
Presumably, M. Miliband was referring to Mr Trump’s previous withdrawal from the Paris agreement during his first term in office from January 2017, a move which was promptly reversed by President Joe Biden in January 2021. President Biden’s administration reversed almost every energy initiative of the previous administration. It sought to portray the first exit from the Paris agreement – and Mr Trump’s first-term Presidency – as an aberration from the liberal-progressive ‘arc of history’. After all, as it was widely claimed by the Democrat establishment and its media shills, wasn’t the Trump win in 2016 only made possible by Russian collusion?
In 2017, when Mr Trump first gave notice of withdrawal from the Paris agreement, a statutory delay of four years from the date of the agreement coming into force in November 2016 applied. In effect, the US was out of the agreement for only a few months before Trump’s first term Presidency expired. This time around, the statutory delay is one year. Thus from 2026 onwards, at least to the end of Mr Trump’s second term, the US will be not participate in any of the Paris agreement commitments including any financial obligations.
The US thus remained a party to the Paris agreement for almost the entirety of President Trump’s first term, during which its administrative staff continued participating in programmes and initiatives that were pursued under the Obama Presidency. The US State Department continued to participate in the ongoing negotiations, including co-chairing with China the Enhanced Transparency Framework.
At the COP29 UN annual climate summit held in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the shadow of Trump’s triumphant election win, Mr John Podesta – President Biden’s Climate Envoy – had no hesitation in telling governments around the world to “keep faith” in their efforts to “combat global warming”. He confidently asserted that the Trump Presidency could only slow, not stop, the transition from fossil fuels:
For those of us dedicated to climate action, last week’s outcome in the United States is obviously bitterly disappointing. … But what I want to tell you today is that while the United States federal Government, under Donald Trump, may put climate action on the back burner, the work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States.
Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and later the White House Climate Adviser for President Biden, accused the Trump administration of having “abdicated its responsibility to protect the American people and our national security” by leaving the Paris Agreement. Now representing an environmental NGO, Ms McCarthy assured her audience that “our states, cities, businesses and local institutions stand ready to pick up the baton of US climate leadership and do all they can — despite federal complacency — to continue the shift to a clean energy economy”.
The belief that the global climate agenda signified by the Paris agreement is undiminished despite the re-election of Donald Trump is not restricted to US Democrat and environmental NGO activists. At last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said:
The coming years will be vital well beyond Europe. All continents will have to speed up the transition towards Net Zero and deal with the growing burden of climate change. …The Paris Agreement continues to be the best hope for all humanity. So Europe will stay the course and keep working with all nations that want to protect nature and stop global warming.
…But Trump’s Second Shot Makes It a Big Deal
President Trump’s second term is unlikely to repeat the mistakes of his first one. He has taken a sledgehammer approach to replacing Democrat activists in Government with staff more inclined to his ‘MAGA’ vision. President Trump has long said he believes the biggest mistake he made during his first term was hiring people disloyal to his campaign promises.
Harvard University’s Robert Stavins – a leading academic who has done decades of research and published extensively on international climate negotiations – seems to find it disappointing that “Trump now seems determined to purge the upper ranks for the executive branch of anyone other than loyalists”. As if an incoming President would seek to hire disloyal staff!
Few would disagree with White House spokesman Steven Cheung, who said that: “No one should be surprised that those being hired should align with the mission of the administration. Nobody in private industry would ever hire someone who isn’t mission focused, and the Government should be no different.” Brian McCormack, Chief of Staff to National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, finds President Trump’s hiring decisions similarly unexceptional: “Every President is entitled to have a staff and the advisers that he needs to implement the goals that the American people elected him to pursue.”
President Trump’s detractors have suggested that despite his pulling the US out of the Paris agreement, it will matter little to the global climate agenda. The ‘show must go on’ and true believers will step in to the breach. Thus, last week’s Reuters headline about billionaire climate warrior Michael Bloomberg who “steps in to help fund UN climate body after Trump withdrawal”.
Climate alarmists Ed Miliband, Ursula von der Leyen, Gina McCarthy and Michael Bloomberg share an underlying presumption that the energy transition away from fossil fuels to the brave new world of renewable energy and ‘clean tech’ is made inevitable because ‘markets demand it’ and technological change has made it possible. In the great moral crusade to ‘save the planet’, they share the fatal conceit that what they want is what the world needs.
Yet, Trump’s second term takes place in a vastly changed world from his first. The rise of populist parties in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, France, Germany and the UK – dismissed as the ‘far Right‘ by the mainstream media – in a Europe stricken with deindustrialisation and recession has fundamentally altered the policy presumptions that held sway just a few years ago. Ms Von der Leyen’s own party, a constituent of the European Parliament’s EPP which is the EU’s most influential political group, is now recommending a freeze of the CO2 duty, abolishing renewable energy targets and reverting to pre-2019 ‘green wave’ policies.
If Brussels is looking shaky in its anti-Trump predilections, the world of international business seems to have collapsed like a house of cards in its previous trumpeting of the ESG agenda. The ESG movement, a crucial pillar in the business sector’s buy-in of the Paris agreement, has had a series of reversals recently.
The Net Zero Asset Managers initiative and Climate Action 100+, which pushed ESG goals and decarbonisation of the American economy, suffered a flurry of high-profile exits by companies such as BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company. “More than 70 companies have left woke ESG organisations like NZAM and Climate Action 100+ since the Committee’s investigation started,” Republican Jim Jordan told the Daily Wire.
The Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was established in April 2021 under the auspices of the United Nations and its champion Mark Carney, the ‘rock star central banker‘. It was dedicated to helping lenders reduce their carbon footprints. The group has been abandoned in quick succession by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Morgan Stanley.
The ESG colossus, which seemed to have reigned supreme in business boardrooms the world over in the past decade, has now been irretrievably compromised. The adage ‘go woke, go broke‘ was right on target.
Markets and Technology Will Not Drive the Energy Transition
No, the markets do not drive the so-called energy transition and technological change obeys the laws of physics and economics. For instance, in the transportation sector, neither markets nor technology has made electric vehicles affordable or popular. Within hours of being sworn into the White House, President Donald Trump signed an executive order meant to end policies supporting EVs. In his inauguration speech, Mr Trump said: “We will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers. … In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice.”
President Trump has not only given Americans their freedom to buy cars of their choice, a very big deal in that country. He has also eased bureaucrat-imposed efficiency standards for dishwashers, showerheads, refrigerators, laundry machines, toilets, gas cookers, incandescent lights and the like. Mr Trump, in short, has rescued the American consumer from the dead hand of an impoverishing green ideology that yields ultimate power to an efficiency technocracy.
These measures are part of President Trump’s flurry of executive orders which remove regulatory obstacles to the rapid development of fossil fuel resources and all associated infrastructure while seeking to prevent wind farms from being built on federal lands and waters.
President Trump’s executive order for the US to exit the Paris agreement is a huge deal, not least in saving the nation hundreds of millions of dollars which would have been spent on climate boondoggles such as President Biden’s euphemistically termed Inflation Reduction Act and vast transfers in climate funds pledged to developing countries. Let not the naysayers say otherwise.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
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Fingers crossed it’s contagious. The worldwide scrapping of Net Zero can’t come soon enough. The politicians just need a convenient justification so they can say “we tried but ultimately had to cease our very well-intentioned and science-led efforts to save the planet from climate catastrophe”.
Figuratively spoken, the problem is that Ed is actually mad, ie, that we’re literally ruled by lunatics. Or by people willing to accelerate a car towards a brick wall for as long as those who keep claiming it’ll ultimately budge can still make themselves heard. The outcome is the same in either case, at best, a near-miss almost catastrophe.
Well, as I already wrote last time: Europe is both larger and much more populous than the USA. While I wish people in America all the best (minus not desiring to be ruled by them), the USA remains climate politics periphery (although a big chunk of it) and the people behind this doubtlessly hope that they’ll be able to undo whatever Trump did and preferably, even the man himself, in the not too distant future.
They’ve already succeeded with the first once and almost succeeded with the second and hence, they have a reason to hope that they’ll be able to pull this off again.
This battle is far from over. Not even in the USA.
The Battle is never over.
Combatants:
Those who follow rules.
Those who think.
Someone who falls for the propaganda of a rapacious government (and the forces behind it!) is nevertheless a victim.
So you are happy to get poorer, in order to pursue a false nostrum…..that has to be a special kind of stupid.
How did you arrive at that weird conclusion?
I just wrote that the likes of Miliband and von der Leyen telling Trump off is not that unrealistic, considering that Europe is the bigger part of the climate agenda region, that significant forces in the USA would love to rejoin it and that they already succeeded with this once.
Trumps election just means someone, although unfortunately not us (Europeans), has won a battle here but not (yet) the war itself.
China is larger and more populous than either Europe or the US, but somehow even more peripheral to climate – which is odd given its 30% of global emissions. I wouldn’t want to be ruled by China either, but that seems entirely possible in the future.
I think the rulers of Peking have already reached the limit of expansion they can sustain by military occupation. Otherwise, China would be considerably larger.
Yes.
The participants of the farce that is COPXX, make commitments to make commitments by some future date which is a moveable feast and gets pushed back as that date approaches.
Only the true zealots and fanatics – that is Germany and UK, and some States of the US, like California – actually are destroying their economies with the delusions of the lunatics in charge.
From that point of view US withdrawal from COP makes no practical difference. The real difference is the change within the the Federal Government to eject the eco-zealots therein, so that government apparatus carries out the policies of the Executive and not business as usual irrespective of who is in the White House.
Without the US dedicated to the Green Deal/Net Zero and leading the charge, it really doesn’t matter what anyone else does or wants – it’s dead. The US won’t be pressuring the developing economies to adopt Net Zero ruin, it will itself “drill-baby-drill” and by that example encourage fossil fuel use, and the BRICs led by fossil fuel rich Russia – whose economy depends largely on fossil fuels – will certainly politely ignore the whole nonsense.
So that for the most part leaves us here – an island floating in a sea of oil, with cellars crammed with coal and gas – to pretend we can lead the World over the precipice into oblivion.
And Germany closed its nuclear plants at the start of the war in Ukraine. That is not cutting CO2, that is cutting energy full stop. Amory Lovins, a significant figure in the intellectual underpinning of Germany’s Energiewende (transition) has said “If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.” In other words de-industrialisation in Germany is the plan, and Germans need to wake up to it quick.
IMHO if we want to reduce our impact on the planet we need to get a lot better at recycling, but one of the drawbacks to that is high energy costs. We can “save the planet” and maintain lifestyles, but to do so we need cheep energy. Of course the lifestyles of our globalist overlords will not be in doubt whatever happens. Riches for them, poverty for us. That why they are all building protective bunkers at the moment.
Well the plan is certainly working which reminds me to check out who is closing down this week on blackoutnews.de.
In any case, the Paris Agreement has turned out to be pretty well meaningless: since 2015 (when it was enacted) global emissions have increased by 8.5%. Moreover, the so-called ‘energy transition’ is a chimera: humanity is emitting more greenhouse gases than ever today and ‘renewables’, despite vast investment, are having only a trivial impact on the overall position.
In a few years we will be able to compare our economy hamstrung with net-zero regulations and expensive renewable energy against the US economy unleashed with plentiful cheep energy and deregulation. In fact we can already see the difference, Europe is de-industrialising at pace. With Trump’s America First it looks like good jobs will return there. Populism is on the rise in Europe, when we see our continued decline compared to America’s rise it will be unstoppable.
I worry that Germany will decide it needs to “acquire” France and its nuclear infrastructure. To keep Germans safe, you know. To keep us all safe. The whole planet.
And I worry it might be time for a new “emergency”, a new plandemic maybe? Globalists are on the ropes, but they are not about to give up, and they still have a few levers to pull. Maybe a financial crash? A false flag to provoke the US into a war with Iran? They will have had their lizzardy heads together in quite corners in Davos to decide on something.
You can rest assured that a lot of people in France will be extremely relaxed because Germany doesn’t even have a civil nuclear infrastructure anymore. If it’s additionally relying on the French nuclear infrastructure, all the better.
Nit sure the French would take kindly to being forced to do that, if that’s what you meant… also they have nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear power stations… Germany is a bit close to home to bomb, however a little device in the middle of Berlin would I’m sure deter any aggression
Ooh, another Reichstag fire. Just the job.
French nuclear doctrine demands a nuclear first strike in response to a conventional invasion. That’s supposedly targetted at Russia but Russia invading France is not very likely, hence, Germany is a much more probable choice.
But the person I was replying to is possibly under the misimpression that “Germany” controls “Europe” (instead of not even controlling Germany, as it actually is) as that’s a frequently propagated myth.
Good points – I’d be fairly sure in times of crisis they’d be up for changing that doctrine pdq if necessary!
” ‘clean tech’ is made inevitable because ‘markets demand it’ and technological change has made it possible”
What we have here is technocracy in the making where “experts” know best and run everything. Technocrats can be critical of Fascism & Communism but are no different with the power residing in the few and the rest of us being ‘managed’.
Unfortunately, this isn’t really a technocracy as the people in charge are still our ordinary politicians not particularly qualified for anything except parliamentary shouting competitions who have been fooled into believing that technological change have made some possible despite it’s not economically viable right now by self-interested ‘experts’ seeking to sell this otherwise useless stuff to politicians.
Britain was supposed to be a “self-driving car superpower” by now. Looks like the money thrown this vanished together with the concept.
The Singapore of Europe.
Also:….the Saudi Arabia of Wind….
With…..a world beating Track and Trace system….
I’d be happy if they just filled potholes all day rather than putting up meaningless 20mph signs which we all ignore
It will also be a massive boost to the economy, as consumers will have far more money to spend and will cost nothing ….the only people upset will be the US equivalent of Moonbat and the Doom Goblin.
The Doom Goblin has moved onto other things now, re Gaza.
Not the brightest bulb in the box, is she.
Down syndrome, in all likeliness, misdiagnosed as autism because that’s more fashionable, despite the former is a so-called learning disability while the latter isn’t.
You can easily see the delusional, ideological, groupthink extremist world that Miliband and the other climate cult people occupy. They have no idea they have been totally manipulated and controlled by powerful political forces. They probably actually really believe this nonsense they have been programmed to drive. It sounds a lot like a religion.