It has taken President Trump and his ‘energy dominance’ agenda less than 60 days to put the entire edifice of the climate juggernaut – over 30 years in the making – at risk of collapse. As with much of the President’s agenda in foreign policy, economic policy and the culture wars, his energy team is charging full steam ahead, firing off policy and regulatory initiatives at a pace designed to overwhelm the capacity of opponents to respond. It is leaving the administration’s zealous climate adversaries scrambling to oppose the Trumpian counter-revolution.
Yet, it is not apparent that the climate industrial complex – that unholy alliance among “self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners” referred to by Bjorn Lomborg – can easily be halted in its tracks. The sheer scale of its influence across rent-seeking corporations, Left-wing billionaire foundations and myriad climate NGOs, its deep rootedness in the Western psyche and its pedagogic hold over the younger generation from elementary schools to universities cannot be underestimated. The task ahead for the Trump administration is fraught with challenges, not least activist judges who can continually put up legal obstacles to the President’s executive authority every step of the way.
Leftist Tears and Sceptic Schadenfreude
A brief scan of recent headlines in the legacy media shows how distraught the true believers in the Church of Climate have become. A Bloomberg opinion article published on Wednesday laments: ‘Years of Climate Action Demolished in Days.’ Co-authors Mark Gongloff and Elaine He constructed a detailed if not exhaustive list of climate-related actions of the Trump administration’s first 52 days. They claim with trepidation that “nothing could have prepared us for the breadth or intensity of the assault on climate action that Trump has unleashed”.
A Wall Street Journal article reported that the fossil fuel industry is getting its “revenge” on green activists, with environmentalists “reel[ing] under President Trump’s pro-fossil fuel and anti-climate actions”. The New York Times complains that “in a few short weeks, President Trump has severely damaged the Government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country and the planet.” The Guardian claims that Trump officials “decimate environmental protections” and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “takes aim at almost every major pollution rule in what environmentalists call an act of ‘malice toward the planet’”.
It is no surprise that the pearl-clutching concerns expressed by the climate zealots and their media enablers have led to evident schadenfreude among sceptics. Charles Rotter of the Watts Up With That? website puts it across with relish as “common sense, courtesy of Mr Trump”:
It’s hard not to chuckle while reading Bloomberg’s opinion piece, ‘Years of Climate Action Are Being Demolished in Days by Trump.’ One gets the sense that Mark Gongloff and Elaine He were typing furiously through a cascade of tears, their trembling hands barely able to clutch their reusable bamboo keyboards. Their anguish is palpable — and deeply entertaining.
In a picture of two clinking champagne glasses on X, Mark Morano of Climate Depot links the Bloomberg opinion piece to the comments: “This is how it’s done! Thank you, Mr President! @realDonaldTrump” and “cheers”.
“A Dagger Straight into the Heart of the Climate Change Religion”
The progressive think tank Centre for American Progress claimed that “the United States has accomplished more on climate change under the Biden administration than during any other Presidential administration”. Like the Obama administration, the Biden administration did just about everything in its power, in a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, to wage a regulatory onslaught on US oil, gas and coal while showering taxpayer largesse on favoured ‘green’ industries. This culminated in the most obscenely large boondoggle in US fiscal history, misnamed, equally obscenely, as the Inflation Reduction Act, to support ‘renewable’ projects to ‘save the planet’ from a ‘climate crisis’.
The Trump administration has taken a radical approach to bringing back some level of normality with cost-benefit analysis – the stuff of bread-and-butter economics – to energy and environmental policies. Much like how a good surgeon would take aggressive measures to excise metastasized cancer growth in a patient’s body, President Trump’s energy team has gone for a root-and-branch overhaul of energy and environmental policies which focus on business costs and consumer welfare rather than on some hypothesised, impending climate apocalypse.
While the Trumpian energy dominance agenda is equally a ‘whole-of-government’ effort, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin occupies the policy hot seat. Under his watch, the agency launched the most far-reaching deregulatory action in US history. In 31 separate actions, the agency seeks to eliminate “trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and hidden taxes”, to lower the cost of living for American families, reduce prices for such essentials such as buying a car, heating a home and operating a business. Mr Zeldin said that he was helping drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion”.
The EPA’s formal reconsideration of the ‘endangerment finding’ will drive that dagger. It was that finding which empowered the Obama EPA to regulate CO2 as a ‘criteria pollutant’ which, by definition, harms human health. It gave government agencies carte blanche to conduct the war on fossil fuels and intrusively regulate consumer choice on appliances and consumer durables including cars. It gamed investment incentives to privilege favoured ‘green’ projects. The Obama administration’s ‘Clean Power Plan’ forced unavailable technology on coal and new natural gas plants in order to benefit unreliable, intermittent wind and solar electricity. It brought in electric vehicle regulatory mandates via tailpipe emission standards which put the death sentence on petrol and diesel-powered cars.
The endangerment finding was sanctified by the Supreme Court’s Chevron deference decision of 1984 that granted regulatory agencies broad leeway to interpret legislation. This gave the Democrat-run EPA control over CO2 emissions and, hence, most human activity. The over-ruling of the Chevron deference principle by the Supreme Court last year and Mr Zeldin’s likely successful reversal of the endangerment finding bode well for President Trump’s energy dominance agenda.
Demise of the Net Zero Insanity
In the court of law, the ending of the Chevron deference principle strips away the privileges of an unaccountable, partisan bureaucracy over the implementation of public policy. In the court of public opinion, the election of Donald J. Trump has given impetus to a return to normality in public policies related to energy and the environment. Dystopian Net Zero policies no longer have a stranglehold in the machinery of state in the US. Sadly, populist political parties in the EU and UK – demonised as the ‘far Right’ – that support moves against costly and intrusive climate change rules and regulations are marginalised by political firewalls and a compliant media.
Nothing is certain in politics. The Trump administration has its work cut out at least until the mid-term elections and nothing can be taken for granted by ‘energy dominance’ proponents. Between now and the mid-terms, the strategy for the Trumpian counter-revolution can only be ‘full steam ahead’ and ‘take no prisoners’. Fighting ‘gentlemanly’ along The Marquess of Queensberry Rules, as Victor Davis Hanson has long reminded us, is not going to cut it.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He 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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Marvellous.
Wonderful to read some uplifting news for a change and I wish Donald Trump and his administration much success in destroying the climate change thieves. And this is the only thing that the climate change industry is about – stealing from taxpayers in order to impoverish and control. Sadly, there is little sign of such commitment amongst any of our political class.
Keep the faith, Mr Piggles. Bliss to be alive this sunny morn.
It is Marvellous news indeed.
Be assured that the Reform Party is committed and determined to abolish this Net Zero madness inflicted upon us by the Uniparty and most others. Reform will abolish the Climate Change Act, renewables subsidies, Electric car and heat pump mandates..
“Schadenfreude”
Yes, exactly.
Another morning, and another two articles pertaining to energy-sustenance, from the learned Dr Doshi and the forensic Mr Pile. Just needs another dose of reality from the redoubtable Mr Morrison at 11:30 Hrs to complete the hat trick in time for high noon.
Battle-lines drawn for decades – witness IPPC economist and movie-making legend, commenting yonks ago…
“…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
“…You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity.”
Whatever works best will prevail in the end – in the BRICS countries it has all along, and Uncle Don is now signed up too. Reality generally trumps ideology in the long run.
Might take a while in Europe yet. Rome wasn’t sacked in a day and the Club of Rome won’t be either. Cease not from mental fight until Jerusalem rebuilt in green and pleasant lands.
https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/digital/digital-collections/limits-growth
(Mods – For some reason, I can’t embed link to “Club of Rome” – is link icon broken?)
Moderator here: far be it from me to suggest that we don’t want any links to the Club of Rome… but in the interests of evenhandedness, try this https://www.clubofrome.org/
Thank you for that link – Know thine enemy.
As an article on Gateway Pundit asked recently – where are the arrests? I know Donald and his team, including the lovely Karoline Leavitt, have a lot to do but they need to start arresting those guilty of election interference and fraud or risk the prospect of losing control of the House and/or Senate at the mid terms. The Wisconsin supreme court election looks like a far left Democrat will be ‘elected’ in a state that voted Trump by a large margin. She will then redraw the voting districts to favour Democrats, stop voter ID and continue ballot boxes for Democrat electoral fraud.
Those Pardons that Biden was supposed to have signed we all done by AUTOPEN rendering then void, so you may get your wish.
First, show them the waste.
Then, show them the more serious stuff.
Then, show them the horrendous stuff.
That way, they will be more likely to assimilate it all.
I wonder how many people understand that humans are one of the main emitters of CO2. And so by declaring CO2 to be a harmful pollutant, they have declared humans intrinsically harmful, not by any wilful, voluntary action but simply by being alive.
You have to wonder how much of that is stupidity and how much is just plain evil.
Don’t forget the same evil-ones declared children to be harmful and a health risk to granny.
Good news indeed.
Take the money away and reality reasserts itself, like those darn Copybook Headings.
Follow the money. Wind solar EVs etc cannot survive without subsidies or huge hikes in consumer costs. We never had subsidies to build petrol and diesel filling stations in the early years of the car industry. Follow the money.
Never mind …. I’m sure eliminating the 1% we in the UK add to global CO2 emissions will #Save The Planet.
So looking forward to Red Ed’s next Ukulele performance. Last time it was Blowing in the Wind …. perhaps next time he could do Pennies from Heaven. Because that’s all the British economy will have when he’s finished destroying it.
Yes the ride is definitely turning, but there will be pushbacks. The EU and the UK’s parasitic politicians won’t allow the destruction of their net zero altar. But we have faith and hope Trump will save us, one step at a time.
common sense will win
Sadly the Uk and eu did not get the memo yet. Left behind is how I always think of europe. By their own choice.
perhaps one day the daily sceptic will include an interview with astrophysicist Willie Soon. He will give the reader all the reasons the net zero mantra (Uk) is a scam.