Delingpole: Slowly, the Green Swamp is Draining from the White House…

Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn steps off Air Force One as he arrives
AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Climate alarmists are expressing great concern about the departure of National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn from the White House. They believe it is a sign that their influence over President Trump is waning – and with it their chances of persuading him to reverse his decision to quit the Paris climate accord.

According to E & E news:

George David Banks left last month after failing to get a permanent security clearance. He handled international energy issues and was viewed as a top voice pushing for re-engagement in the Paris climate accord. That, combined with Cohn’s exit, weakens the prospects that the United States will remain in the global agreement. Trump has said he’ll pull out of the Paris pact, but he can’t formally do that until November 2020.

“One thing is for certain, the pro-Paris crowd has certainly been dealt a setback these past few weeks,” said Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research.

Good. With the possible exception of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Javanka, Cohn was surely the most powerful and dangerous advocate for green lunacy in the Trump administration.

That’s because, apart from being a Democrat, Cohn – as former COO of Goldman Sachs – is a Vampire Squid man through and through.

Goldman Sachs, like most of the financial sector, is aggressively pro-climate change action.

From its website:

Climate change is one of the most significant environmental challenges of the 21st century. Delaying action on climate change will be costly for our natural environment, to humans and to the economy, and we believe that urgent action by government, business, consumers and civil society is necessary to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

This has nothing to do with science, let alone with moral conscience. As ever with Goldman Sachs, it’s about the money.

The financial sector is heavily exposed to the climate change scam. Were it to collapse a large number of serious players would lose a lot of money on green schemes that they had been assured by their brokers were bullet proof: wind farm investments generating a guaranteed nine per cent or more per annum; fossil fuel shorts predicated on the notion that as “stranded assets” doomed to be kept in the ground in order to stave off “global warming” coal, oil and gas will soon be rendered obsolete by renewables; etc.

Only one cloud looms over Cohn’s departure: the possibility that he might be replaced by someone just as wedded to the Climate Industrial Complex – Peter Navarro:

“Global climate change resulting from the widespread burning of fossil fuels has the potential to be one of the most important environmental problems of our time,” Navarro said in a 2000 paper he co-wrote with a doctoral student in economics. Navarro was then an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. The paper promoted wind power as a “weapon in the arsenal to combat global warming.”

In a 2007 paper, Navarro said “that global warming is a very significant problem and that carbon dioxide emissions are the principal cause of global warming.”

He’s also promoted a carbon tax, writing in 2007, “Economists correctly and perennially argue that the most efficient and direct path to American energy independence and clean skies would simply be to tax oil imports and gasoline as well as carbon.”

However, as the above article – from E & E news – goes on to argue, Navarro’s principles on the green issue appear to be quite malleable. He has since adjusted his views so that they are more in line with Trump’s:

Despite his past warnings about climate change, he was a supporter of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. He wrote in a July 2017 USA Today op-ed that withdrawal “will save the U.S. economy an estimated 6.5 million industrial-sector jobs, and his regulatory rollbacks have already saved more than $60 billion in unnecessary costs for American companies.”

He added that Trump “has unleashed America’s energy potential — a great boon for American manufacturers and consumers. And employment in the coal industry is up, contrary to the cynics’ forecast.”

Better still, Navarro comes with this fantastically promising anti-endorsement from the Green Blob:

 “Any good will Peter Navarro had in 1992 has been squandered by his myopic worldview and work on behalf of a hateful, xenophobic administration,” Sierra Club spokesman Adam Beitman said yesterday in a statement.

Liking the guy already.

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