Peter Murphy
Peter Murphy is Senior Fellow at CFACT. He has researched and advocated for a variety of policy issues, including education reform and fiscal policy, both in the non-profit sector and in government.
“Darling, I’d like to watch the president tonight on television”.
[She responded:] “No you can’t; the wind isn’t blowing.
There’s no television tonight darling, the wind isn’t blowing.”
– Donald Trump
Istanbul, Turkey
If you want to know in about two minutes what the President-elect of the United States really thinks about the climate change agenda, watch and listen here. Hint: he doesn’t think well of ‘renewable’ wind energy or much else on the climate docket. Neither does his Vice President-elect, JD Vance, who described it thus, “I think wind [power] is the biggest scam out there; it’s total [bs].”
I found this clip on my way with CFACT leadership to the COP29 United Nations Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, with a stop-over in the historic city of Istanbul, Turkey, for a pre-conference meeting and time-zone adjustment.
Having already served four years as president, Mr Trump’s climate policies are all too familiar to the climate change cottage industry’s mass annual gathering. His second term election victory this week may turn COP29 into a proverbial funeral parlor.
US Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont and climate fanatic extraordinaire, last week on the eve of the election warned that if Trump wins, “the global struggle against climate change is over; because if the largest economy in the world, the United States, pulls back, so will China, so will Europe.”
Fresh from his re-election to the Senate at age 83, Sen Sanders’ climate warning became more palpable with Donald Trump’s own re-election to the presidency. But, the senator’s naivete was on display in that he fails to realize China has zero interest or intention of implementing any climate change agenda, and that Europe already is ‘pulling back’ from climate policies.
Then there is the former Vice President Al Gore, the vapid US Pope Emeritus of Climate Change, who also is having a bad week on the eve of COP29. In an email to his list, Mr Gore described the election’s aftermath as “dark days” for the climate change efforts, and facetiously conflated the issue to Martin Luther King, Jr and the civil rights struggle. But, hey, “we can’t linger in despair,” Mr Gore wrote. “Our planet doesn’t have time for that.”
The Climate Summit this week upcoming is being referred to as the “Climate Finance COP” with the hope that the “New Collective Quantified Goal” will double from the $100 billion in annual funding commitments to $200 billion. The problem is that nations fell well short of the $100 billion, which makes it sheer fantasy they would fulfill twice that amount. This is especially true from the incoming Trump administration and soon with Republican majority control of Congress, which has no appetite for climate spending. Nonetheless, watch for some amorphous ‘pledge’ at the conclusion of the summit for some fantastical increase in commitments, upon which everyone will declare the gathering yet another roaring success, then jet home to reality.
Another major agenda item for the Climate Summit is to follow through on last year’s COP28 “historic agreement” to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.” That, too, is not going so well since oil and gas development and exports have increased in the US (under the outgoing Biden administration, no less), in Azerbaijan (ironically, the host country of COP29), and other nations.
There also will be more hollow commitments to increase renewable energy capacity and energy efficiency in a vain attempt to reduce global fossil fuel demand.
To state the obvious, Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency is, to put it mildly, a fly in the ointment of the UN’s climate ‘pledges,’ ‘commitments,’ and ‘goals.’
Just days following his re-election, the Trump transition team is drafting executive orders to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords and to open up western federal lands for new oil development and mining. President Trump had withdrawn from the Paris agreement during his first term, only to have President Joe Biden rejoin.
The President-elect also is contemplating relocating several federal agencies out of Washington, DC, among them is the Environmental Protection Agency and its 7,000 bureaucrats. My own recommendation is to transfer the new EPA headquarters to scenic Fairbanks, Alaska, north of Mount Denali, to get a first-hand, daily experience how much the planet is warming. (Note: the temperature in Fairbanks this coming week will range from minus 9 to 12 degrees).
During this all-to-brief layover in Istanbul we casually are encountering the friendly Turkish people, all of whom knew the name “Trump,” regardless of whether they spoke English, and nearly all of whom welcomed his return as US president.
While hardly a scientific sample, I expect a sharp contrast among climate summiteers in nearby Azerbaijan to be decidedly cooler to Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power.
This article was originally published by CFACT.
