Al Gore Declares Climate War on Donald Trump

Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming next U.S. President took a major hit this week as rumours strengthened that Al Gore will be supporting her campaign.

According to WaPo:

The decision by Gore to plunge into the campaign during the final weeks shows the extent to which Democrats remain concerned that Clinton has yet to connect with many millennials, some of whom are backing third-party candidates this year. The former vice president, a climate activist, will speak about not just Clinton’s plan to address global warming, but also the idea that voting for an independent presidential candidate could deliver the White House to Republicans in the same way that Ralph Nader’s candidacy helped undermine his presidential bid in 2000.

Well, perhaps. An alternative possibility is that Gore’s intervention will focus voters’ attention on one of Hillary’s biggest weaknesses: her dedication to an anti-science, anti-human, anti-free-markets ideology which, in defiance of reason or evidence, seeks to hamstring U.S. industry and punish consumers in the name of dealing with a non-existent problem.

Make no mistake, environmentalism is one of the clearest and most important points of difference between the two main presidential candidates.

Under a Hillary presidency, green crony capitalism will flourish: the corrupt, meddling, dishonest Environmental Protection Agency will grow more powerful and intrusive; activist groups like the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy will grow more shrill and demanding in their war on freedom and property rights; fossil fuel producers (coal especially) will be punished while more taxpayers’ money will be squandered on subsidising bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes and other “clean energy” ventures; regulations on everything from zoning to agricultural land-use to clean air will grow more stringent; enviro-capitalist cronies like Tom Steyer will be enriched; energy intensive industries will be punished; consumers will be hit in the pocket.

Under a Trump presidency, the green blob will be slain causing massive – but necessary – stock market disruption as the entire, Enron-inspired green Ponzi scheme unravels and the Augean stables containing three or four decades’ worth of environmentalist ordure are finally swept clean.

Which, of course, is one reason why the liberal media – which for years has been unquestioningly pushing the green narrative without doing any due diligence as to its accuracy – is having such conniptions at the prospect of a Trump victory. According to this WaPo editorial, Trump will cue the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, at the very least.

It took global negotiators a quarter-century to strike the Paris climate agreement, an international accord aimed at slowing global warming. The agreement represents the best hope for a world in which no one country acting alone can do enough to fight this global threat. Donald Trump could destroy the agreement with a stroke of a pen, and with it any hope that the world will keep the planet’s temperature within the boundaries scientists say are safe.

The Paris deal represents a major U.S. commitment, but it is not a treaty with the force of law. President Obama submitted the U.S. emissions goal; Mr. Trump could withdraw it just as easily. He also could deeply undercut or eliminate the basis for any future U.S. commitment. Mr. Trump has promised to rescind the Clean Power Plan, which obliges electrical utilities to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by cutting down on coal burning and increasing their use of natural gas and renewables. The Environmental Protection Agency drew up the plan using authorities that Congress gave it decades ago in the Clean Air Act. Mr. Trump could press the agency to revoke it or water it down.

Mr. Trump also would have considerable sway over the state of the nation’s land and water. He has promised to use that power to quash regulations on drilling and to open federal lands to coal, oil and gas production. He could do more; for example, he could attempt to use executive discretion over drilling royalties, pipeline construction, permitting, drilling leases, oil and gas exports, and other matters to reward firms and people he likes or to punish those he does not.

All this is true, but in a good way. Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, though it would largely be a symbolic gesture because the agreement is not legally binding and therefore meaningless, would represent a bravura act of trolling; but rescinding the Clean Power Plan would cut costs to business and benefit consumers, while opening up federal lands to the oil and gas industries would drastically increase the fracking boom which has brought America prosperity and increased energy independence.

Those who worry about the environmental costs should be aware that the EPA’s clean air policies are a) based on the junkiest of rigged junk science and b) that the difference it makes to “global warming” – if any – will be immeasurably small. By the end of the century, Bjorn Lomborg has calculated, America’s Clean Power Plan will reduce the world’s increase in temperatures by a spectacular 0.004 degrees C. Yes, that’s four thousandths of a degree!