Anyone who doubts that President-elect Donald Trump means business on slaying the “Green Blob” really needs to look at the guy he has just appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is a friend of the fossil fuel industry and an outspoken critic of the EPA’s activist agenda.
Though his academic degrees are in political science and law, Pruitt has been a vocal public denier of the overwhelming consensus of the world’s climate scientists that the Earth is warming and that man-made carbon emissions are to blame. In an opinion article published earlier this year by National Review, Pruitt suggested that the debate over global warming “is far from settled” and claimed “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”
Does Pruitt sound to you like the pick of a president-elect who is having second thoughts on his aggressive stance towards the environmental lobby?
Yet still some people are worried — for understandable reasons.
First, there were reports that Trump had softened his position on global warming: “Trump now believes that climate change is real,” claimed Mother Jones.
Next came the shocking news that Trump — encouraged by his eco-friendly daughter Ivanka — had sat down for a meeting with Al Gore, who claimed afterwards that they’d had an “extremely interesting conversation.”
Then Trump met with yet another green advocate, Leonardo DiCaprio, apparently to discuss “how to create millions of secure, American jobs in the construction and operation of commercial and residential clean, renewable energy generation.”
So what exactly is going on here?
In two words: fake news.
Sure the meetings did happen, but the spin that has been put on them by the liberal MSM is pure wishful thinking.
It doesn’t require a special inside track to the Trump administration to realise this. Rather, it’s a matter of plain common sense.
Here are some reasons why Trump isn’t about to go soft on environmentalism.
It was the coal states that helped win him the presidency.
As Rupert Darwall wrote shortly after the result:
President Obama launched an outright war on coal, with the outcome we all saw last week. Four of the top five coal-producing states voted Republican, including Pennsylvania, which swung from blue to red, and Robert Byrd’s West Virginia, which gave Donald Trump his second-highest vote share. Of the ten states most reliant on coal for their electricity, seven voted Republican last week, including Indiana and Ohio, a swing state. Last Tuesday, President Obama’s War on Coal claimed its most prominent political casualty: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Trump does not betray his friends.
No one shilled for the Democrats harder than the green lobby.
Obama has sought to define his presidency by its mission to combat “Climate Change.” The Obama administration was — with luck at any rate — the very zenith of the Green Blob’s power over the U.S. economy, as illustrated by its promotion of renewables, its war on fossil fuels (from fracking to its nixing of Keystone XL), and devastating measures like the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Had Hillary been elected, it would have become heaps worse.
What possible good reason would Donald Trump have for shackling himself to the doomed legacy of the failed, corrupt, and hated Ancien Regime? And why would he possibly wish to court the good opinion of green activists like billionaire Tom Steyer, whose NextGen Super Pac was dedicated to stopping him from winning?
Trump’s loathing for renewables — especially bat-slicing, bird-chomping eco-crucifixes — is deep and personal.
Trump hates wind farms because they ruined the countryside round his golf courses in Scotland. When he met Nigel Farage recently, he urged him to campaign against them.
Trump is a people person, not a Gaia person.
The fundamental problem with many of the Watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) of the environmental movement is that they’re misanthropists. They care about their green fantasy version of what the planet should look like (basically as it was in the Stone Age) more than they do for the people who actually live on it and who want to enjoy a better future for their children through the medium of economic growth. They actually want to STOP economic growth because they think it’s bad.
Trump, on the other hand, wants to Make America Great Again. Does anyone seriously imagine that he’s going to try to achieve this by creating more taxpayer-funded Potemkin jobs in the “sustainability” industry just because some ex-pretty-boy mummer by the name of Leo DiCaprio with an IQ the size of his shoes dreamed it up while flying to save the world in his private jet?
Trump is surrounding himself with people who totally get “the science.”
From transition team member Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute to Scott Pruitt his new EPA Administrator, Trump is surrounding himself with people who totally get the global warming scam. They don’t buy into the fake science which has been promulgated by Big Eco for the last three or four decades; they don’t trust the skewed data put out by government institutions like NASA and NOAA; they’re not cowed by the ad hominems and bullying and Appeals to Authority which have hitherto made such effective weapons for green propagandists; they don’t believe what they read in the Guardian and The New York Times.
If Trump is really going green, why do you think the greenies are so angry with him right now?