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“I’m feeling very flat today,” snuffled Amanda McKenzie, CEO of Tim Flannery’s crowd-funded Climate Council. As she should, given that President-elect Trump will end the trillion-dollar renewable-energy scam so beloved by the council.
McKenzie continues, “Progress on climate change can feel hopeless and it’s tempting to give up and turn away.” But instead, she rattles the tin for donations of $10 a month “to allow us to undertake some massive projects next year that will power communities and everyday Australians to spearhead our renewable energy transition.” Good luck with that, Amanda.
Throughout the Western world, green lobbies are likewise oscillating between despair and self-delusion over the Trump election.
Trump’s agenda – as per his election website – includes
- Unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves.
- Declare American energy dominance a strategic economic and foreign policy goal of the United States.
- Become, and stay, totally independent of any need to import energy from the OPEC cartel or any nations hostile to our interests.
- Rescind all job-destroying Obama executive actions.
- Reduce and eliminate all barriers to responsible energy production, creating at least a half million jobs a year, $30 billion in higher wages, and cheaper energy.
Trump says Obama’s onslaught of regulations has been a massive self-inflicted economic wound denying Americans access to the energy wealth sitting under their feet: “This is the American People’s treasure, and they are entitled to share in the riches.” ore than that, the president-elect’s common-sense policies make the 20,000 climate careerists and activists in Marrakech, led by Vice-President John Kerry, seem comically irrelevant. They were supposed to be implementing the feeble Paris climate accord – notwithstanding that China has just announced a 19% expansion of coal capacity over the next five years.
But with the US leadership no longer concerned about climate doom, the rationale for these annual talk-fests (22 to date) has evaporated. Robert McNally, energy consultant and former George W. Bush adviser, says climate change policy “is going to come to a screeching halt. The Paris Agreement from a U.S. perspective is a dead agreement walking.”
The agreement now has only the EU’s backing in terms of actual and significant cuts to emissions, although Australia is also now pledging to do its tiny bit for foot-shooting insanity. The EU’s continued subsidies to renewables will merely worsen its competitiveness vis a vis the new energy powerhouse across the Atlantic.
Trump has pledged not only to rip up the Paris deal, but to withdraw all US climate funding to the UN. The UN climate fund is supposed to build to $100b a year for Third World mendicants. Obama has given $500m so far and pledged $3 billion to the UN climate fund, but Trump will divert those billions to domestic environmental projects such as the Florida Everglades. As he told supporters, “We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. We don’t even know who’s doing what with the money.”
Obama, unable to get his climate legislation through the Republican-controlled Congress, used regulatory powers instead to get the job done. Trump can now neutralize those efforts simply by reversal or non-enforcement of the regulations.
One of the climate war’s best-kept secrets is that there is no real constituency for renewables, other than vested interests and noisy green groups.[1] That’s why both candidates gave global warming so little prominence in the campaign. Nearly a third of Americans think the global warming scare is a total hoax.
It’s a similar story internationally: a UN annual poll last month (9.7m respondents) had “action on climate change” rating dead last among 16 issues, with top ratings going to education, health care and jobs. Even people from the richest nations rated climate action only 10th. The poll in 2015 got the same result.
Trump’s personal view on climate-change science is that CO2 is probably causing some warming but the scare is vastly exaggerated.[2] He will therefore reverse Obama’s assault on the coal and coal-fired power sectors and give them a better chance to compete with natural gas.
Trump’s choice of key climate advisers is a nightmare for the warmist establishment. To transition the US Environmental Protection Agency from climate activism, he’s picked outspoken skeptic Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy & Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute . The CEI is equivalent to Australia’s Institute of Public Affairs.
Ebell laughs at his leftist critics and cites to congress his Greenpeace listing as a leading “climate criminal”. He thinks warming will not be a problem for one or two centuries; meanwhile we should expand access to all types of energy – on an unsubsidized basis.
Canadian climate scientist Tim Ball told a Melbourne seminar this week that Trump is getting science advice from satellite meteorologist Dr Roy Spencer. Spencer’s data has demonstrated that orthodox climate models have exaggerated actual warming by a factor of two to three. His own readings from satellites showed no significant warming for the 21 years up to the 2015-16 El Nino spike. He emphasises the vast uncertainties about climate forecasting and the still-unknown roles of natural forces.
Spencer, who holds a NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for global temperature monitoring, believes the near-universal funding of climate research by governments causes a bias towards catastrophic forecasting, since governments won’t fund non-problems. He wants funding to be at arm’s length from political interests. For the Department of Energy, Trump has picked energy lobbyist Mike McKenna, with ties to the industry-backed American Energy Alliance and Institute for Energy Research.
Trump’s election is rocking the climate-scare industry to its foundations. Four decades of madness is coming to an end.
Tony Thomas’s book of essays, That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print, is available here
[1] A YouGov poll of 18,000 people in 17 countries last February found only 9.2 percent of Americans rank global warming as their biggest concern. Their biggest concern was global terrorism (28%).
[2] His understudy Mike Pence hits the same note: ‘I think the science is very mixed on the subject of global warming’.
And the primary drivers for the herd turning, the political elites and their academe’s man made global warming now discredited as the ground cools, ‘Simple Simon Said’, Stupid.
Tony,
As I read your article, just like Miley Cyrus, tears came to my eyes and I yelled: “Yeah!, Go Trump!”
Hunt, Flannery, et al will now have to earn a living and eat bread and water without gravy. How delicious it is that eventually truth wins, although not yet in backward Oz
At last! Someone who is not afraid to call out these pseudo scientists who have been draining the public purse for years with flawed and unreliable data. And that den of iniquity, the UN, has been fostering these shonks for years, seeing the scam as a way to get billions of dollars for nothing.What a pity the UN wasn’t more focused on the REAL problems facing the world, like overpopulation, clean water, access to regular food, health and education. Go the Donald!
A scene we can expect to see a number of times in the next year or so is the re-opening of coal mines in depressed areas of the US.
President Trump will preside, as is only right, and he will get the credit due to him for both improving his country’s energy security and providing (through good policy) many genuine, non-subsidised jobs for his countrymen.
The real bonus, though, will be seeing the despair on the faces of the green-left fanatics as their fantasy-fuelled project to impoverish the world crumbles into dust.
What’s happened to Ian MacDougall? It’s not like him to leave such a monstrous assault on the saintly science of CAGW unchallenged. I do hope he is alright. Perhaps he just considers it beneath himself to respond to such outrageous blasphemy.
Thanks very much for your concern, Bill. I am on the road at the moment, doing my best with an unfamilar pad device. But trying to follow this online discourse.
I am not buying any of the guff that says the election of Trump begins the dawn of a new era of rewritig of the laws of physics and chemistry. And I still maintain that sea level, not the endlessly disputable readings of millions of scattered thermometers, gives us the best information on what the planet we all call home is doing. And the best information I can find is that the world’s ocean is rising, which means, Trump or no Trump, the planet is warming. That is, W-A-R-M-I-N-G. I cannot make it simpler, and though I frankly wish and hope that the denialostriches turn out to be right, I am not prepared to bet my grandchilderns’ future on it. But the whole thing has the inertia of a supertanker underway, and with an operator like Trump at the helm in the US, Nature will definitely not be diving down some womabat hole.
And as always and ever, Nature bats last.
More lies in The non-Australian today about Trump and Obamacare. Will they ever get over it?
“Declare American energy dominance a strategic economic and foreign policy goal of the United States.”
This is problematic for Australia, unless we makes serious plans to remain competitive into the future. Which we won’t, we’ll go backwards, so this is problematic for Australia.
Time to get cracking on developing a nuclear power industry in Australia,I cannot believe we bought our only working reactor from Argentina,not that I want to infer that an Argentinian reactor is inferior to a reactor from France ,just we should be getting on with it.
Yes to all of this. There were some reports that one of Trump’s putative advisers on climate/energy policies, scientific acumen for models and empiricism, and all the hard-headed applied science we have so yearned for, could be a Dr Roy Spence. Spence talks some sense here and there is a nice irony – Spence was a high-ranking NASA scientist in its’ climate division but he refused to flip over to then Vice-President Al Gore’s circus tent activism, so Gore forced him out.
On this topic, I hold my breath for the Don.
I’ve developed a theory in recent weeks (and I hope I’m not repeating myself); the hysteria over Trump and the fury, fear and bile poured in his direction showed me that the Left is governed primarily by emotion. Ergo, it’s an easy segway for them to become hysterical and to catastrophize about climate change. It’s their default position, but it seems a large swathe of people aren’t buying that hysteria and unbridled emotionalism any more. The Left needs to develop and cool head for reason and logic if it is ever to prosecute a case for AGW – something I’m probably not going to see in my lifetime.
Jody, I’ve been thinking along the same lines for a while now when it comes to this creeping emotionalism: as Nick Cater (who gets my vote for Quadrant editor after John and Keith’s tenure has has expired) once wrote in “The Australian”, the success of policy is increasingly less measured based on outcome and more on the a amount of “compassion” invested: as Nick writes: “how can it be bad if it feels this good”
… and I should add that such an approach also requires a “short memory” (to borrow from the Midnight Oil song title) as to the inevitable chaotic consequences of this type of short-shortsightedness (Labor’s asylum-seeker policy to comes to mind here)
Speaking of this policy and of such memory lapses, when I once mentioned to a woman its disastrous after-effects as a good example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, her response was (and perhaps I should have taken her having mentioned that she was a professional astrologer as a warning sign) “yes, that’s what some red-necks think”
Which reminded me of Einstein’s comment on human stupidity …
Ironic for somebody from the Left to be calling another person a “red” neck. Next time, tell her it’s merely one of her own projections.
I didn’t tackle her comment, since some-one so obviously shallow wouldn’t have been capable of the required level of argumentation, : considering, at the time, we were sitting in a cafe in eastern Sydney, it seemed unsurprising that such an attitude should arise on in a privileged part of a prosperous city in a safe and peaceful country …
100,000,000 times I have been licensed for, charged for, and been paid, to apply the laws of absorption of electromagnetic radiation [UV – VISIBLE LIGHT – INFRA RED] to measure the concentration [amount] of molecules [chemicals]. To me these things are just a rule of thumb. Carbon dioxide is an old friend which I probably measured 1,000,000 times.
Now there is a certain useful range of concentration of a chemical, over which absorption changes. Once the concentration goes over this range no further practical absorption occurs. To my mind the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has passed the level where we need to worry about any further increases.
I am not a climate scientist, whatever that is, but their MODELS are plainly wrong, and they have been caught lying.
To argue from authority rather than experience, I did discover a molecule that made the Scientific Breakthrough of the Year for 1996.
“Now there is a certain useful range of concentration of a chemical, over which absorption changes. Once the concentration goes over this range no further practical absorption occurs.”
Most interesting, Doctor.
Now tell me, once a CO2 molecule has absorbed that energy (as em radiation) what happens to that energy from then onwards? For example, does said CO2 molecule stay energised, for ever and ever amen, till Kingdom Come and beyond? Does the energy just disappear, never to be heard of again, except perhaps over rattling coffee cups at the odd scientific conference or review of fundamentals? Or does said energy get passed to other molecules one way or the other, with the original CO2 molecule reverting to its original, unenergised state, and ready to go through the whole business again?
Or perhaps something else entirely?
I will be genuinely interested in your answer to this question. (I am not a climate scientist either.)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument/
Should perchance anyone turn up here pushing the notion that “oceans are dangerously warming because of anthropogenic CO2 emissions – this must be true because satellite altimetry shows dangerously rising sea levels, never mind temperatures …”, the Argo buoys have been in operation since 2005. These instruments (3000 of them to date) were designed and deployed for the exact reason of measuring ocean temperatures down to 2000m depth to capture any obvious trends.
Since operational, the abyssal-to-surface ocean temperature change as measured by Argo and its’ Astronauts is 0.1C. This is almost the error bar of the buoys, so in short, no trend evidenced in over 15 years (in itself, that period is 50% of the period accepted by “climate-scientists” for noticeable change in climate). So climate scientists (and I agree with [email protected], there is no sensible description of “climate scientist”) have now reverted to ship buckets – not kidding – to manipulate this metric. The ship bucket method, used for about a century, was deliberately discarded for the Argo technology because of the impossibility of controlling bucket error bars. Now we have a retrograde measurement method because the Argo answers are discomfiting the AGW activists.
There are many destructive directions to this Noble Cause Corruption. One of the many end results of blind acceptance of untestable hypotheses was demonstrated in South Australia some weeks ago. The Victorian Govt is following suit, with the Q’ld Govt making similar silly noises. Baird (NSW) wants to but isn’t quite game enough yet to say so out loud. Waffle just effetely stamps his feet and asks the ABC: “How high, please ?” Our MSM remain resolutely toxic and irredeemably illiterate/innumerate. Our large corporations jumped on the gravy train because of the tax-funded subsidies and are now aghast at what Trump may do.
On this topic, I hold my breath for the Don.
But you (conveniently?) overlooked, left out and chose to ignore http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ . NB: This rise is not immediately dangerous: not even to those with coastal property in Vietnam. But it does tell us what is going on.
‘ianl’
.
‘Should perchance anyone turn up here pushing the notion that “oceans are dangerously warming because of anthropogenic CO2 emissions – this must be true because satellite altimetry shows dangerously rising sea levels, never mind temperatures……”’
That little exercise, and its embedded quote, appear to me to be completely a work of your feebrile (febrile/ fevered/ feeble… ?) imagination. Otherwise, please cite your source, and with your maximum possible accuracy.
Quote:….led by Vice-President John Kerry..”.
Oh!
But you (conveniently?) overlooked, left out and chose to ignore http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ . NB: This rise is not immediately dangerous: not even to those with coastal property in Vietnam. But it does tell us what is going on.