Writing at Axios, energy writer Amy Harder says “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning — in speed, scale and scope.” Harder quotes oil historian and S&P Global vice-chairman Dan Yergin as saying, “There’s no handwaving about how ‘We want to cooperate on climate.’ It’s, ‘We’re slamming the door on that issue.’ We’ve gone from over-indexing it to zero-indexing it.”
Polling has never shown climate change as being an issue of primary concern to American voters. Americans have consistently been more worried about issues that impact their daily lives today than about warnings from modern-day P.T. Barnums like U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres about some nebulous “highway to hell” and “the age of global boiling. The issue had been slowly losing its effectiveness during the Biden years even as that administration tried to memorialize the movement’s objectives in policy.
Even Democrat politicians have quit talking about the so-called “climate emergency” which used to be a central plank in their talking points list. When was the last time you heard New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, co-author with Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of the “Green New Deal” introduced in 2019, talk about the supposed need to force ordinary citizens to give up their cars, flying, and vacations and spend trillions on a nationwide network of high-speed rails to save the planet? When was the last time you heard any Democrat utter the phrase “Green New Deal,” for that matter? It simply doesn’t happen anymore.
One of the motivators for the political abandonment of the climate scam by Democrats came from a pre-election analysis from the center-left Searchlight Institute last November. That memo advised Democrat candidates to avoid using the term “climate change” entirely, and to focus on the supposed cost savings to be obtained by switching to green energy solutions. Never mind that such cost savings are a myth: The truth doesn’t matter. What matters is the ability to influence voters with the message.
Therein lies the central existential threat to the movement’s survival in the coming years.
For decades, liberal politicians and climate advocates were able to advance the climate alarm agenda by creating, well, alarm among the public that the world is going to end if we don’t stop putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Always the messaging had a deadline claiming, “We only have X number of years to stop burning fossil fuels before it’s too late!” Over the past 40 years, that deadline to act has given the term “moving the goalposts” a new green meaning.
AOC claimed the drop-dead date was only 12 years in the future as she rolled out her ambition to control everyone’s daily lives in the name of climate alarm in 2019. But the very next year, in 2020, child activist Greta Thunberg moved the goalposts to a mere five years. But wait: Just a year later, Joe Biden read a script from his teleprompter that set the deadline at 10 years. It’s all so darn confusing.
No doubt, these politicians and activists wish they could erase their past claims from everyone’s memory. Their trouble is, the Internet is forever.
Advocates were even successful in convincing Barack Obama’s EPA to dummy up an Endangerment Finding declaring that carbon dioxide is in fact a “pollutant” that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act in order to save the planet. Never mind that CO2, otherwise known as plant food, the foundational basis for all life on Planet Earth: The truth doesn’t matter.
Now, it appears that the movement is inheriting the wages of decades of deception with a sudden and stunning fall from grace. It could not happen to a more deserving bunch of people.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
President Trump has certainly shaken up, if not severely damaged, the climate hoax and Green New Scam in just 10 short months. Here’s a list of his 10 top climate-related accomplishments for which we should all be thankful this holiday season:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed to end the government’s “scientific” basis for the climate hoax by rescinding the Obama EPA’s 2009 illegal and incorrect determination that emissions of greenhouse gases endanger the public welfare. As part of this effort, the Department of Energy issued a report by top climate scientists concluding that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will have no detectable effect on global climate change.
President Trump, again, pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, an unconstitutional effort by Presidents Obama and Biden to adopt a United Nations treaty without ratification by the Senate.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act terminated hundreds of billions of dollars of the climate-related “Green New Scam” spending of the (so-called) Inflation Reduction Act, including all subsidies for electric vehicle purchases.
President Trump has directed his administration to reduce Green New Scam spending that survived the One Big Beautiful Bill by means of bureaucratic review, red tape and delay. The rent-seeking and piratical thieves who want to steal from taxpayers played hardball to save some of their ill-gotten gains. The President is now showing, rather impressively, that he can play hardball right back.
President Trump signed into law a bill terminating California’s electric vehicle mandate. Greens had tried to mandate EVs in California to force carmakers to only make EVs for the entire nation. Thanks to the President, that will not happen in the foreseeable future.
The EPA scored an appellate court victory in its effort to reclaim $20 billion in Biden EPA Green New Scam panic spending made infamous by the Project Veritas video, “We’re Throwing Gold Bars Off the Titanic.”
President Trump halted a number of offshore wind projects and cut funding for many others. There are other projects that deserve to be terminated, such as the largest U.S. offshore wind farm being built by Virginia’s Dominion Energy, but a great start has been made so far.
Stunningly, President Trump stopped cold a U.N. treaty to implement a global tax on shipping emissions by threatening would-be signatories with tariffs. This treaty would have been the first global climate tax.
President Trump boycotted and sent no delegation to the United Nations climate conference (COP-30) in Brazil, rendering the annual meeting even more confused and meaningless than it usually is.
President Trump delivered a blistering speech to the United Nations blasting the climate hoax for about 15 minutes or so. The President summed up his views on climate in this one memorable sentence: “The carbon footprint is a hoax, made up by people with evil intentions and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.”
That’s quite a list. But much is left to be done. Some of the big items are as follows:
The EPA must finalize its rescission of the endangerment finding and then successfully defend the rescission in the Supreme Court.
All the Green New Scam spending must be terminated as soon as possible. Every dollar spent is a dollar stolen from taxpayers and invested in making us more energy dependent on Communist China.
It is not enough to withdraw only from the Paris Climate Accord. President Trump must withdraw the United States from the 1992 parent treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
And it would be really awesome if President Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the bogus treaty allegedly addressing the imaginary “ozone hole.” That treaty, the follow-on Kigali Amendment ratified during the Biden administration, and language in the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020 signed by President Trump, has only been used to make refrigeration and air conditioning pointlessly more expensive.
I heard Al Gore tell a group of conservatives in January 2006 that the real purpose of the Montreal Protocol was to demonstrate that a global environmental treaty could be implemented. That “success” was then subsequently used as precedent for the UNFCCC and its spinoff climate treaties, the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Climate Accord. The ozone hole hoax paved the way for the climate hoax and Green New Scam. It’s all been a multi-trillion-dollar fraud on American consumers and taxpayers.
America became great before these pointless environmental treaties. It has been greatly harmed and dangerously hamstrung by them since their ratification. If MAGA means anything, it means exiting international efforts to cripple the U.S. with junk science-based environmental treaties. And it would make a great Christmas present to the nation. Just a suggestion.
The Environmental Protection Agency officially proposed to terminate what President Trump has long called the “climate hoax.” If successful, the federal government will be out of the climate regulation business with no hope of returning to it without congressional authorization.
The Trump EPA proposed to rescind a 2009 Obama EPA rule called the “endangerment finding.” In that rulemaking, the Obama EPA determined that emissions of greenhouse gases threatened human health and welfare by causing global warming. Simultaneously with the EPA proposal, the Trump Department of Energy issued a scientific report summarizing why emissions are actually a good thing and threaten nothing.
The scientific findings, however, are superfluous since EPA never had express authority from Congress to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act in the first place. Controversy and litigation about EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases resulted in the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. In that case, the Court determined in a 5-4 holding that EPA could, but did not have to, regulate emissions.
But the decision was controversial. Clean Air Act co-author and famed Democrat Congressman, the late John Dingell, afterwards stated: “I think the Supreme Court came up with a very much erroneous decision on whether the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse gases. I was present when we wrote that legislation and we thought it was clear enough that it did not, and we didn’t clarify it thinking that even the Supreme Court was not stupid enough to make that finding.”
Following the decision, the Bush EPA decided that it would not regulate emissions. When the Obama administration came into power in 2009, it reversed the Bush EPA’s decision and began using the endangerment finding as the basis for regulation of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases.
Although many questioned the scientific basis of the Obama EPA’s decision, it was impossible to get a judicial hearing on the science. Federal judges informally decided decades ago that they would defer to regulatory agency decisions on questions of science.
With the endangerment finding apparently firmly in place, the Obama administration, and later the Biden administration, proceeded to regulate tailpipe and power plant emissions of greenhouse gases.
Cracks in the ability of EPA to use the endangerment finding soon began to appear. In 2014, the Supreme Court determined that the Clean Air Act did not authorize EPA to use the endangerment finding to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial smokestacks. In 2022, the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA nullified an effort to regulate emission from power plants, holding that EPA could not launch major regulatory programs without express congressional authorization.
Today, all that remains of EPA’s endangerment finding-based rules are tailpipe regulations in the form of the Biden EPA’s de facto EV mandate, a rule that the Trump administration is in the process of reversing.
Since the Obama EPA made the endangerment finding, electricity prices have soared. Gas prices and inflation soared during the Biden administration. Tens of thousands of high-paying coal miner jobs have been destroyed and their communities devastated.
Our electricity grid has been made less reliable by the advent of existentially subsidized wind and solar power. Periods of peak electricity demand like summer heat waves and winter cold spells now routinely result in blackout/brownout warnings. This problem will get worse before it gets better with the ongoing electricity demand from AI data centers and the re-industrialization of America.
Blue states and their climate activist allies will no doubt sue the Trump EPA to stop the rescission of the endangerment finding. But all this will accomplish is the Supreme Court almost certainly reversing its original sin committed in Massachusetts v. EPA. Some of us can’t wait.
Steve Milloy is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, a biostatistician, and lawyer, who publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
During World War II, the civilians of the Axis nations suffered greatly. Their daily lives were disrupted by bombing. Severe food shortages were common. Families were separated. An estimated 2 million civilians died in Japan alone.
Yet the Allied powers would have thought it preposterous to provide humanitarian aid. These countries had attacked us and were committed to achieving world domination. Our only hope to save civilization was to force their surrender. Instead of sending relief packages, we dropped atomic bombs on them.
You know how it worked out. America and the Allies prevailed and proved to be unusually benevolent victors. Germany, Italy, and Japan eventually became functioning, prosperous nations.
During the war, the Allies, like combatants throughout history, realized it was lunacy to work against your own war aims by subsidizing your enemy. Yet that is precisely what America is forcing on Israel in the Gaza War with our persistent calls for ceasefires, which give the beleaguered Hamas forces the opportunity to regroup and resupply.
Anthony Blinken alone has made at least three trips pressuring Israel to give their enemy a fighting chance by providing humanitarian aid. President Netanyahu is widely criticized for not going along.
The American far left, which exerts an outsized influence on foreign policy in Democratic circles, holds large rallies calling for a complete ceasefire. For them, Israel’s only way to avoid international censure is to admit defeat and accept subjugation to their savage foe, an unthinkable option.
Netanyahu’s response to the unprovoked, horrific massacre orchestrated by Hamas on October 6 was transparent. Decades of seeking accommodation with them through negotiations had come to naught. Hamas, among the Islamist terrorist groups sponsored by Iran, has fighters who since birth have been taught to hate all Jews.
The only strategic goal of any interest to Hamas is the complete annihilation of the Jewish state. They put Israel into a position where it had to permanently destroy Hamas to have any hope for a safe, peaceful future.
America seemed to initially understand the Israeli position. Israel is a small, mostly Jewish state of 10 million residents surrounded by 24 hostile countries with 500 million Muslims, most of whom ascribe to an ideology that demands eradicating Judaism. Every day, Israeli Jews must defend their right to exist.
America’s initial support of Israel’s response to a massive act of war melted under pressure from the pro-Muslim left to end the collateral damage of civilian death and suffering. The Israeli military is considered one of the most careful anywhere, sometimes amending battle plans to avoid civilian casualties.
Hamas, on the other hand, uses civilians as human shields, often housing them in the same building as military targets. Hamas celebrates their deaths as public relations coups.
Wartime hostages are always a difficult issue. Few loved ones anywhere would act differently than those piteously begging now for the return of their family members.
Yet the cruel calculus of war is that ransoming hostages, especially in lopsided transactions, inevitably means more will be taken in the future. Only a policy of remorselessly attacking hostage takers can prevent future potential kidnappings.
At this point, it is clear that the Biden administration, once Israel’s ally, is now siding with Hamas. Biden publicly criticizes Netanyahu for not agreeing to an immediate ceasefire. He is planning to build a large port into Gaza to accommodate bounteous food shipments.
We seem not to know or care that this is handing victory to Israel’s enemy. If Hamas can escape consequences for the October 6 debacle and live to fight another day, their greatest dreams will be achieved.
America has not only been an inconstant friend to Israel, we did much to enable this Gaza war in the first place. Obama and Biden rescued Iran when it faced a serious domestic uprising. They also provided the subsidies for Iran to fund its proxies, which are now enthusiastically killing Americans. The dynamic duo has virtually assured that Iran will soon be nuclear armed.
At a time when the world order is changing and new alliances are being formed, America does itself great harm by proving such a weak and indecisive ally. Make no mistake, the world is watching.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
The Iranian mullahs must be thrilled at the progress they are making on obtaining nuclear capability. It represents the realization of their millennia-old ambition to turn the world into an Islamic caliphate. The world should be thoroughly alarmed.
The West seemingly insists on not paying much attention, but observant Muslims, which is most of them, make no bones about it. It is a tenet of the faith that eventually all non-Muslims will convert, die, or live in subjugation to Muslims. It is the duty of all faithful Muslims to devote their life to jihad, i.e. striving to bring about that day when sharia law rules the world.
Islam’s lack of success so far is mostly because they lack the infrastructure necessary to support such a sustained, massive effort. Like the Soviet communists, their ideology creates the economic conditions which make it difficult to advance their cause. The mullahs blame us, chanting “Death to America” and meaning it.
Until now, nations that have attained nuclear capability, starting with the United States, have at least to some degree recognized the awesome responsibility of having weapons so massively destructive that their deployment could set off a conflagration ending civilization as we know it. The greatest threat ever may be that fanatical Muslims, who have no respect for human life or even their own people, and who despise the values of Western civilization, will obtain nuclear capability.
So, faced with such obvious mortal danger, America’s leaders are doing everything they can to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, right? Almost unbelievably, President Biden is still working to relax enforcement of sanctions and to provide enabling funds to Iran.
This glaring error goes back to 2015 and Barack Obama’s belief that a policy of appeasement, rather than confrontation, was the best way to make an ally of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. For Obama and his advisors, negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the “nuclear deal”) was also the way to right our past injustices to Iran.
“I do think you have to have the capacity to put yourself occasionally in their shoes,” Obama said, always willing to stick up for Muslims while deeming America just another nation with nothing especially remarkable about it.
Obama’s plan to produce an equilibrium of forces and thus stability in the Middle East by increasing Iran’s access to resources and its standing in the Middle East was an unqualified failure. Lifting sanctions, terminating Justice Department operations against Iran, and requiring the Defense Department to work cooperatively with a sworn enemy craving nuclear capability predictably produced the opposite – more terrorism, more nuclear development, and more hostility to the U.S.
Still, the American Left offered yet more support for Iran despite the fact that under the nuclear deal we moved ever closer to facing a belligerent, nuclear armed, and irrational enemy. Reversing Trump was all that mattered.
In 2022, Iran faced severe internal disruption due to its brutal treatment of women under sharia law. But instead of supporting the uprising or even letting it play out, the White House offered sanctions relief to prop up Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and slipped a note to Iran’s government to assure them we still supported the nuclear deal.
In 2023, the Obama/Biden team stubbornly continued to do about everything possible to subsidize Iran’s nuclear ambitions including:
releasing $20 billion from the International Monetary Fund.
using a sanctions waiver to allow Iran to move $10 billion out of Iraq.
ending sanctions on oil sales which produce $30 million of annual revenue for Iran.
releasing $6 billion in oil revenue from South Korea.
Even the October 7 massacre and over 100 continued attacks on American military installations didn’t stop Biden from allowing the UN missile embargo on Iran to expire. Plus, just to show there were no hard feelings apparently about attacking our ships in the Red Sea, we granted a waiver to allow Iran to access $10 billion more from Iraq.
Why do our leaders insist on enabling Iran’s nuclear dreams and subsidizing terror? Do they honestly believe we can achieve peace through weakness?
This isn’t partisan bickering. Our bumbler-in-chief has put America in a very dangerous position.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
