U.S. Mid-Terms, Tom Steyer and the Death of 'Climate Change' As a Serious Political Issue

There are many reasons to celebrate the Republican party surge in the US mid-term elections but for me they boil down to two words: “Tom” and “Steyer.”

If you had to pick one person who embodied everything that is most irritating and wrong about the Obama administration – the Solyndra-style crony capitalism, the war on free markets, small business and cheap energy, the hypocrisy, the injustice, the dogged pursuit of suicidal leftist causes – then liberal billionaire Tom Steyer is your man.

And this is what is so good about the US mid-term results. Not only did they personally cost Steyer many millions of dollars in wasted campaign expenditure – nearly $75 million of the funding for his Nextgen Climate superPAC came out of his own pocket: think how many tartan ties you could buy with that! – but they represented the US electorate’s comprehensive repudiation of the notion that “climate change” is the most pressing political issue of our age.

No it isn’t. It really, really isn’t. Anyone with half a brain could have told you that the economy, for a start, is much more important. The idea that anyone should ever have thought otherwise – especially people as eminent and influential as the President of the USA and his Secretary of State John Kerry (who considered climate change at least as great a threat as Islamic State) – will surely remain one of the greatest puzzles to future historians of the Obama administration.

Why, these historians will wonder, did Obama choose to stake his reputation – in his second term especially – on an issue so relatively trivial and so liable to blow up in his face as new scientific evidence emerged (eg the fact that there has been no “global warming” since 1998)?

One of the answers they’ll come up with, presumably, is Tom Steyer.

Steyer isn’t, of course, the only creepy rich liberal hypocrite to talk the green talk while privately feathering his nest with fossil fuel interests, nor is he the only one to have abused his cosy relationship with Washington by encouraging it adopt “clean energy” policies from which his own investments benefit.

Numerous liberal one-per centers (aka the Billionaires Club) have had their snouts in the green trough in one way or another for years, whether it’s Al Gore with his (now happily) defunct Chicago carbon trading exchange, or the various Hollywood celebrities who enjoy preferential land deals in return for championing the work of The Nature Conservancy, or all the “investors” in “clean energy” scams which only exist because they were propped up by taxpayer- and QE-funded  “green jobs” stimulus dirty money. It’s just that Steyer happens to be about the worst of the bunch, that’s all.

Anyway, what the mid-term results would seem to suggest is that the American people have lost what little remaining appetite they had for the Great Green Climate Scam. And that maybe, with luck, we’ll be seeing a bit of pushback from Congress on the disastrous measures which have been foisted on the US economy in the name of lining the pockets of green crony capitalists and obama campaign donors saving the planet from the greatest threat it has ever known.

There’s encouraging talk that the Republican controlled Senate may now nix the $12 million it pays annually to the corrupt, self-serving, politicised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Which isn’t a lot of money to remove from the insatiable green maw. But it’s a start. And it won’t half irritate the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who, like Obama and Kerry, seems determined to stake his reputation on ridding the world of the evil ManBearPig.

Better still is the news that James Inhofe is likely to lead the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee when the Republicans take control of the Senate next year, replacing Barbara Boxer. The symbolism could scarcely be more delicious: a robust climate realist (“denier” as his enemies would call him) and longtime scourge of environmentalist nonsense seizes the iron throne from a Californian Democrat eco-loon so rampantly green she makes the WWF look like Exxon. Already you can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth from Inhofe’s arch enemies at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The next couple of years in America’s climate debate are going to get very ugly. But in a good way because now, at last, it’s the realists rather than the alarmists who hold the balance of political power.