Delingpole: Three Great Signs that Trump Is Winning the Climate Wars

Donald Trump is #winning the climate wars.

Here are three signs that despite stiff opposition not just from greens and Democrats, but from elements (such as Javanka) from within his own administration – Trump is on course for crushing victory over the Green Blob.

Scott Pruitt is cleaning out the Augean Stables (aka the Environmental Protection Agency)

Essentially the EPA is and always has been a communist sleeper cell introduced to the heart of the U.S. government system by Richard Nixon in the mistaken belief that paying Danegeld to your enemies will make them leave you alone. Since 1970, it has swollen to embrace more than 17,000 employees, many of them deep-green ideologues on a holy mission to rein in economic growth, restrict consumer freedoms and reduce living standards by introducing ever more swingeing environmental restrictions on both businesses and private individuals. The EPA is the viper in America’s bosom.

But now the viper is being defanged.

Here is one example, which the Washington Post reported under the headline Pruitt’s new science advisers add more industry experts, conservatives to the mix.

Pruitt has placed 66 new experts on three different EPA scientific committees, many of whom hail from industry or state government, and espouse more conservative views thn their predecessors. Two of the new chairs — Texas’ top toxicologist Michael Honeycutt, who will helm the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), and consultant Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox, who will chair the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) — have harshly criticized the way the EPA has conducted science in the past.

Honeycutt has accused the EPA of “overstating” the risks associated with mercury, a neurotoxin, and of disregarding “good science which demonstrates a chemical is not as toxic as it thinks it is.” Cox wrote that the EPA’s methods for calculating the public health benefits of stricter national smog standards are “unreliable, logically unsound, and inappropriate for drawing causal inferences.”

 Under a new policy Pruitt instituted this week, scientists receiving EPA funding cannot serve as the agency’s advisers. Seven advisers stepped down rather than relinquish their grants, agency officials said, while two opted to forego the federal money in order to continue serving.

In WaPo’s eyes this is clearly an undesirable move. But actually it’s a vital correction. For years, the leftist bureaucrats, technocrats and activist scientists at the EPA have been waging war on the U.S. economy under the guise of protecting the environment. Leavening that mix with a few conservatives and people from industry should reduce its ability to do any more harm. As for the new policy on funding: how can you possibly be both an adviser to an agency and a recipient of its grant funding? This grantee cronyism should never have been allowed in the first place.

The GOP’s proposed tax plan is going to hit renewables (and Tesla) hard

When the GOP announced its new tax plan, Tesla’s share price crashed by more than seven percent. If you’d listened to my Breitbart podcast with Simon Cawkwell and shorted Tesla’s shares you’d have made money. Damn it, if I’d followed my own advice to short Tesla , I too would have made money. But I didn’t because even though I don’t believe in Tesla’s product, I do have enormous faith in Elon Musk’s remarkable ability to go on charming and wheedling taxpayers’ money out of government to prop up his failing industry. We’ll see.

What’s certain is that GOP’s proposals to withdraw subsidies from the electric car and “clean” (lol) energy industry are great news for the U.S. taxpayer, great news for the consumer, great news for industry, great news for the economy. Just the proposed repeal of the $7500 electric car credit will save the U.S. taxpayer $4 billion a year.

Maybe best of all it’s going to hit the wind industry harder than a Cat 5 hurricane.

“The House proposal would pull the rug out from under 100,000 U.S. wind workers and 500 American factories,” AWEA Chief Executive Tom Kiernan said in a statement.

Squeal piggies, squeal. Your giant, ugly, inefficient, bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes have trashed wildlife, blighted views, reduced property values, engendered insomnia and ill-health – all while raking fat profits for rent-seekers at the expense of the poor saps (taxpayers again) who have to subsidize these monstrosities.

The United States is the world’s most powerful fossil fuel economy. Why hamstring its competitive advantage by tying it up with renewables?

At the latest round of UN climate talks in Bonn, the U.S. delegation is promoting the clean energy virtues of – wait for it – fossil fuels…

Top trolling by the U.S. delegation.

According to reports, members of the Trump administration will lend their support to an event to promote fossil fuels and nuclear power as solutions to climate change.

Speakers from coal giant Peabody Energy, among others, will make a presentation to highlight the role that coal and other fuels can play in curbing the impacts of rising temperatures.

A White House spokesman said in a statement that the discussion aimed to build on the administration’s efforts to promote fossil fuels at the G20 meeting this year.

“It is undeniable that fossil fuels will be used for the foreseeable future, and it is in everyone’s interest that they be efficient and clean,” the spokesman said.

As you can imagine, the BBC is very unhappy about this. So too are all the renewables bloodsuckers:

“Fossil fuels having any role in tackling climate change is beyond absurd. It is dangerous,” said Andrew Norton, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development.

“These talks are no place for pushing the fossil fuel agenda. The US needs to come back to the table and help with the rapid cuts in emissions that the situation demands.”

The reality is, though, is that this represents another massive victory for Trump and the U.S. over the global Climate Industrial Complex. To understand why, read this superb commentary by Peter Foster. In turn, his argument is based on Rupert Darwall’s must-read book Green Tyranny.

Trump, by abandoning the Paris climate agreement, and reversing his predecessor’s attempts to bypass Congress on environmental matters, has heaved a mighty wrench into the European-based thrust to impose global bureaucratic “governance” under the pretext of saving the world from climate catastrophe.

Beyond all the blather about Trump’s presidency representing the triumph of redneck ignorance and deplorable racism — and whatever Trump’s personal shortcomings — Darwall notes that one of the main reasons for his victory was that the American left had abandoned working people in pursuit of identity politics and radical environmentalism. “From being the voice of working people,” writes Darwall, “the Democratic Party has become the political arm of the Climate Industrial Complex,” an unholy alliance of bureaucrats, NGOs, green corporate rent-seekers and Silicon Valley “oligarchs.” With additional funding (as they like to say on PBS) from a raft of mega-billion-dollar foundations built on capitalist success but seemingly dedicated to destroying capitalism.

Precisely. Renewables were never meant to “save the planet.” They’re actually just a pretext, promoted by green ideologues, exploited by the globalist elite to weaken the United States’s economy and curtail her freedoms.

Trump arrived just in the nick of time to prevent this.

I call that #winning.