I’ve just watched the London liberal media’s heads exploding like ripe watermelons.
It was great – a bit like that No Pressure video that the enviro-loons made a few years ago, only better because this time the victims weren’t blameless schoolchildren but grisly, puffed-up, righteously eco, Trump-and-Brexit-hating TV and newspaper Environment Correspondents, all of whom hate my guts. (They hate yours too, so don’t get smug.)
The occasion was a press conference hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation for Myron Ebell, head of the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team. Satan’s Emissary, as liberals prefer to think of him.
Ebell had come to tell them about Trump’s plans for the environment and energy, which I won’t repeat here because you know them already. (It’s going to be beautiful, that’s all you need to remember.)
No, the reason I went wasn’t to hear what Ebell had to say but to watch how his audience reacted.
You know that scene in The Omen when Damien’s parents try to take him into a church? It was a bit like that. Or maybe the one in The Exorcist, where Regan’s head does a 360 degree spin.
They hated it. (Especially the bit where Ebell told them that Trump would definitely be pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate treaty) They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They curled their lips. They laced their questions with the bitterest scorn. But they didn’t really tune into Ebell’s measured, silken, soft-spoken answers because, hell, they knew what he was saying just had to be wrong and they didn’t really understand what he meant anyway.
The reporter who set the tone – and if nothing else, you’ve got to admire his honesty – was the one from Channel 4 News who told Ebell: “It will occur to you that this room is full of people like myself who consider that nothing you say has any basis in fact. So what you’ve been telling us is essentially meaningless.”
Ebell replied with some painful home truths. “Elections are surprising things…” he began and went on to explain to the mystified audience why and how it was that Brexit happened and Trump happened.
Basically, he argued – perhaps channelling Michael Gove – people have had enough of the “Expertariat”. And with good reason: “The expert class is full of arrogance and hubris.”
I did debate with myself beforehand whether or not to a five hour round trip just to attend this one hour conference. (There was another Breitbart piece I’d been planning, which might have been cleverer or more interesting or got more traffic, I don’t know.)
But, hell, it was worth it for a number of reasons.
One was the joy of watching the feline Ebell goading the audience with his amused erudition, sweet politeness, and crushing one liners. He’s a cultured, fearsomely intelligent man: Cambridge-educated. (Bizarrely, he was a friend there of Oliver Wetwin, though I don’t think their politics much align these days.)
When the press essentially accused Ebell of representing evil oil interests, he replied by noting the vast power and corruption of what he called the Climate Industrial Complex – from grant-grubbing scientists to regulation-hungry rent-seeking businesses – which feeds on the global warming scam.
When someone invoked battery technology and Elon Musk, he quietly wondered how “the largest recipient of federal taxpayer subsidies in the history of the world” could be represented as any kind of role model.
When asked about the Endangered Species Act he replied – to audible gasps of disgust and hatred – that he’d been trying to reform it for years (without much success) because it didn’t do much for endangered species but did an awful lot of damage to private property and land use rights.
Perhaps the main reason for going, though, was to witness at first hand one of the main reasons why the Great Global Warming Scamsters have got away with so much for so long: the abject failure of the media to do its job and interrogate the alarmist narrative.
The press comes in for a lot of stick. But though I think that on the whole journalists are a lot more principled, brave, and committed species than they are generally given credit for, I’d certainly make an exception for those in the Energy, Environment, and Climate sectors.
With one or two exceptions – none immediately spring to mind, but I’m sure there some – they are a bunch of despicable fails. They’re far too much in bed with the environmental movement; far too ready to transcribe their stories almost verbatim from the press releases of Greenpeace and the WWF or whichever renewable energy outfit has given them the sweet-talk; and far, far too reluctant to question the bullshit fed to them by the compromised scientists who have been milking the climate scare for the last four decades.
Unfortunately, I arrived too late to catch the bit in the conference where someone asked Myron Ebell what Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief policy adviser, thought about climate change.
“Well you can get an idea from the fact that when he was at Breitbart the guy he recruited to write about it was James Delingpole…” Ebell said.
No wonder I got so many hate-filled glares when I poked my head into the crowded room, 15 minutes late.
The feeling’s mutual. But that’s OK because I’m on the right side of history, whereas their view of the world is toast. Welcome to the suck, guys. It’s only just beginning…