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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“everyone eligible for release apart from violent criminals jailed for more than four years”
So how many violent criminals have been released and, in the case of domestic abusers, why have their victims not been informed?
Dreadful. And even if any of these women-hating psychos breach their injunction orders/probation conditions, can anybody seriously trust the police and the courts to actually step up to the plate and do their jobs efficiently? There’s zero trust there, as far as I’m concerned;
”A woman nearly killed by her ex-husband received this letter on Friday informing he’ll be out of prison 9 months earlier than planned under the government’s early release scheme
Elizabeth Hudson says the decision not to exclude domestic abusers from early release is “unbelievably cruel”.
https://x.com/matt_dathan/status/1833399098101145769
Maybe it was one of these ‘charmers’;
”HM Prison Wandsworth will be one of the first prisons to release offenders under the early release scheme in a few hours. Needless to say, people will struggle to find accommodation, with an already overworked and understaffed probation service.”
https://x.com/Lillyin_London/status/1833397497504440428
I’m looking forward to the great contribution that thing is going to make to our society.
Going to spend the rest of its life with its hand out, for sure.
What on earth is the Anti-White Party (formerly the Labour Party) up to? Because it’s looking very much that either our anti-white government is making room for more patriots in our prisons, or the anarcho-tyranny state is more organised and directed than I thought.
What it has always been up to, Marxist Socialism – the destruction of free society, free markets just for the joy of it.
Destabilising Society:
1) Flood with uneducated, impoverished immigrants with non-compatible cultures, brought up in unstable, violent conflict zones, inured to murder and mayhem, and use of bladed weapons in social interactions.
2) Empty the prisons of criminals.
Object: justifies strict new restrictions and legislation on speech, movement, dissent, demonstration and step up selective, heavy-handed policing to maintain law and order and protect minorities.
Nice summary
Just when we thought Labour’s plucked-out-of-thin-air policies couldn’t sink any lower, they’ve just plumbed new depths of depravity. If it were not for the colossal spending on net zero and housing illegal immigrants in not-too-shabby accommodation, there would be plenty of room in the national budget for building new prisons.
But no – of course they must continue to throw money at pointless projects whilst releasing dangerous criminals onto the streets… So much for “locking them up and keeping us safe”. Perhaps the “dangerous criminals” they want the real criminals to be replaced by in prisons are dissenters and those with the wrong kind of message to share on social media.
When you add to this the fact that people are literally doing time for something they said online, it looks a lot like the only reason the prisons were not already populated by those treacherous Facebook bandits who would hardly say boo to a goose if they ever left their bedrooms, is because there wasn’t the space!
Let the drug dealers, abusers and child molesters out…what could possibly go wrong.
Good to see Starmer appealing to Labour’s core voter base. No longer is it the poor downtrodden worker. Instead they woo the drug dealer, the wife beater and the child molester.
Notice how reporters on TV News speak of prisoners being freed after only 40% of their sentence instead of the usual 50%.——-They say this with not even a hint of irony, or with any clue in their reporting that they might see how absurd this is? Why have a sentence dished out and then see it as perfectly normal for the criminal to be released after serving half the sentence handed down, as if this was perfectly reasonable. —-It isn’t. It is totally absurd, and typical of the silly Liberal Progressive world we are all forced to live in, and disagreeing with the absurdity makes a person a “far right extremist”
Djaber Benallaoua
I bet his ancestors didn’t fight at Waterloo or on the Somme.
He’s likely to be back behind bars before he ever gets the chance to vote.
I wonder if the MSM is going to report on the offences perpetrated by these criminals Starmer has let loose on the British public. I rather doubt it …. but hopefully The Daily Sceptic will.