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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