On my Delingpole podcast this week we solve one of the great political mysteries of our time: how did President Donald Trump get to be so totally darned amazing on the environment, energy and ‘climate change’?
My guest Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is pretty sure he has the answer.
(Few people know more about the climate scam than Horner. He witnessed the green blob’s slimy machinations at first hand during his brief tenure as a lawyer at Enron where he was shocked to see activists from green pressure groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists round a table with oil industry representatives from BP etc, all conspiring on the Baptists and Bootleggers principle to perpetuate and exploit the great Global Warming Swindle. This was in the days of the Clinton/Gore White House: the Green Blob has been feeding on the US taxpayer for a very long time.)
So Horner – who sat on the Trump EPA transition team – has the perfect insider perspective to explain what’s going on in the White House.
Horner understands the magnitude of Trump’s achievement so far. Even Trump announcing his plan to pull out of the UN Paris climate agreement required immense determination and moral courage. After all his decision wasn’t only resisted by the usual Democrat suspects and green lobbyists: it also came up against stiff opposition from key members of the Administration, among them, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Economics Advisor Gary Cohn.
In fact, argues Horner, probably nowhere in DC is the swamp more heavily defended by the liberal politico-media establishment than the EPA and the climate change industry.
“There is no organized lobby against it. There is so much money being poured into it. Remember the smear effort on Myron Ebell, who ran the Trump EPA transition team, which is how I became involved? Well why did the New York Times and the Washington Post run coincident pieces smearing Myron and then the entire herd followed? This is the EPA. It’s this backwater fiat created by Nixon some time ago but has now consumed our economy. ‘Why do you rob banks, Willy?’ ‘It’s where the money is.’ Why do you go smearing Myron Ebell, the guy running the EPA transition team? Why protest with light shows projected onto the EPA building? These were an obvious product of editorial board and PR campaign meetings – all dedicated to going after the guy running the EPA transition. Because this is where the money is. This wasn’t the Department of Defense. Or the sprawling Agriculture Department. Or the Health and Human Services with Obamacare. It was targeted on one guy because this was their means of discrediting the Trump energy/environment agenda which is where the wealth transfer is….”
No other GOP presidential candidate – not Rubio, not Cruz – would have delivered on climate change in the same way as Trump has. They would, quite simply, have been overwhelmed by the swamp. So how come Trump has proved so exceptional in tackling the Green Blob? It’s not like he’ll have read lots of books on the subject because his attention span just doesn’t allow for it. No, according to Horner it’s much simpler than that. It’s because Trump does not think like a politician. Rather, Trump made his decision using much the same gut feeling he uses on his business deals – which he wasn’t sidetracked by any of the “green jobs” “save the world” crap which other politicians find so seductive…
“Here’s what I firmly believe. I’m convinced that the penny dropped for others, as it did me, when Donald Trump gave his editorial board interview to the Washington Post. It’s often mocked – where he said: “I’m not a big believer in global warming. Not a big believer.” And then he continued in a very important way. And if you follow the way Donald Trump speaks it’s perfectly clear what he’s saying. He said, “You know, a lot of people are making a lot of money off of this.”
“He was not saying this as a politician says it. (‘And if we use spoons not shovels we can create even more jobs...’ That sort of playground thinking is very common among politicians.) And whatever anybody thinks about Donald Trump you can be confident of this. At 21, at Le Cirque, somewhere at some point, somebody who is making a killing off the rents of the global warming industry laughed it up a little too loudly or once too many times around Donald Trump. Because what he said to the Washington Post was “You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. Goldmans is making a killing out of this.” That’s what I heard him say. Politicians normally fall for this. But not Donald. Instead – what I heard him say “They’re making a lot of money out of this” – he said: “You’re propping up, sometimes even standing up industries, to transfer taxpayer money to them. And he didn’t go into Energy Poverty or the Economic Drag or the inefficiency or the opportunity cost or the 2.2 jobs. He just said: “You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. A lot of people are making a lot of money off this.” And to me he was saying “This is something of a scam.” You can take his Chinese hoax comments, you can take hoax in any context but the fact is the way they’re playing out the global warming industry there are many scams involved and I think he was aware of this. I do think at one point somebody laughed a little too loudly…”
This is why those of us who love Donald Trump love Donald Trump. Because he’s not a politician. His critics use his inexperience against him. No, it’s the fact that he hasn’t been infected by the values of the DC swamp that make him impervious to its evil influence.
A politician would have been sidetracked by all the talk of “green jobs” or “saving the planet.” But Trump made his decision using much the same gut feeling he uses on his business deals. “Something about this climate change business stinks,” he likely said to himself, at some stage.
And if so he would have been quite right. It does.