Tilak Doshi
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.
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.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
