President Trump wants a climate science review where he might take center stage as host in front of a prime-time television audience, a former adviser said yesterday.
Trump is also interested in bringing back a hostile review of climate science if he wins reelection, but he’s concerned that it would affect him in the general election, according to William Happer, a former senior director in the National Security Council. The emeritus Princeton University professor worked for months to promote a hostile review of climate science.
Happer told E&E News he’s interested in a purely academic challenge to the National Climate Assessment, while Trump wants a televised event.
“The biggest audience, which is the average American public, has to be informed, and he thinks he’s better at doing that than I am. I’m sure he’s right,” Happer said. “He would prefer it be on prime time, maybe with he himself participating, who knows, but it’s impossible to make much of an impact on the scientific community that way.”
Happer said Trump was already familiar with his view of climate science, which holds that the world needs more carbon dioxide, before they met in the Oval Office with former national security adviser John Bolton and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. In those early days of his White House tenure, in the fall of 2018, the climate science review seemed a certainty. Happer said Trump was receptive to his scientific claims but that the president already had his own ideas about climate.
Happer, who left the White House last September, said he stressed to the president that there was no urgency to address climate change.
“I don’t think I told him anything that he didn’t really know. I continually stressed that he’s not really dealing with so much with science as with a popular movement,” he said.
Happer said that in subsequent meetings, Trump would engage with the idea of the review but was largely focused on his political fortunes.
“When you talk to him, he is interested, but his main focus is politics, how’s the next election going,” he said. “It’s hard to distract him too long from his main focus. I don’t think I was with him, I think ever, when at some point in the conversation, some political issue would come up, how’s the latest hearing, how is such and such Democratic candidate looking in the polls.”
We are now witnessing the dissolving of democracy Peter Lilley predicted; the deciding of key political, strategic questions by activist judges and green campaigners.
In 2008, during the parliamentary debate about the Climate Change Act Peter Lilley MP warned the then Secretary of State that legally binding climate targets will give judges the final say about the country’s policy and economy
Yesterday’s ruling in the Court of Appeal has seemingly resolved the decades-long wrangling over the future of Heathrow’s third runway. The court decided that the government had failed to take into consideration its own commitments to the 2015 Paris Agreement, and that therefore its Heathrow plans are ‘unlawful’. Transport minister Grant Shapps plunged the runway into more doom, by announcing on Twitter that the government will not appeal the decision. Heathrow’s operator, however, has said it will appeal.
But the realisation that has brought many down to Earth with a bump is that courts now seem to be making decisions that had hitherto been made by government. Yesterday’s events are very significant in terms of what they tell us about the threat posed by environmentalism to democracy and progress.
That a court has made a decision that overrides the wishes of elected politicians is not at all a trivial point. This isn’t just about the need to expand airport capacity – the court’s decision also puts a question mark over every future infrastructure project. As the BBC’s green correspondent reported shortly after the decision:
New roads face Heathrow-style court action threat.’
In short, well-funded campaigning organisations can use the nebulous Paris Agreement on climate change to close down anything they don’t like. With climate change being a theory of everything, everything from the planning of the economy to the planning of roads seems to fall under the remit of the Paris Agreement. And yet, while the Paris Agreement is a seemingly ‘global’ agreement that compels UK courts to obstruct the UK government’s strategic decisions, it places no such obligation on other signatories, many of which are expanding airport capacity. Why? Because it calls on governments to determine their own contributions to emissions reduction. So for governments, like ours, that have ‘ambitious’ climate-change policies, the agreement is an economic suicide pact.
Capturing the broader concern with what happened yesterday, former Conservative-turned-UKIP MP Douglas Carswell asked: ‘How did we end up in a situation where unelected judges decide airport policy?’ The answer to this question requires a long memory.
The first aggressive emissions-reduction targets were set by the 2008 Climate Change Act. The Climate Change Bill had originally been drafted in 2005 by Friends of the Earth. It received broad, cross-party support, but it was interrupted by that year’s General Election. The bill was then reintroduced in the next parliamentary session, amid what can only be described as a climate-change arms race: the main parties were all competing with each other to appear as the most committed warriors against climate change.
‘This bill’, said the then Labour government’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, ‘will constrain every future UK government to ensure its carbon emissions do not exceed the level of budgets that are agreed by a carbon committee made up of independent people and government itself’. He continued: ‘We need the choices that individuals make about electricity, about heat and about transport also to respect environmental limits and to ensure that we live within our means environmentally.’
It should have struck anyone listening to government ministers at that time – or, indeed, to their opposite numbers in parliament – that what was being proposed was a clean break from democratic politics; a departure from the UK constitution itself. And yet less than one per cent of MPs objected to the bill at any stage of its progress through the House of Commons.
One of the few who did object was the then Conservative MP, Peter Lilley. He observed that, ‘The sole effect of enshrining the targets in statute will be that the government’s policies will be open to judicial review. Judges will be asked to assess whether measures introduced will be likely to be effective in ensuring that targets are met. I do not have a great deal of faith in the ability of ministers of this government, or perhaps any government, to meet the targets, but the idea that judges should decide on policies costing billions of pounds, without being accountable to the electorate for the billions that they might decide need to be incurred, fills me with foreboding.’
Lilley reiterated this point in debates inside and outside of parliament. All these years later, his foresight has been proved entirely correct: courtesy of climate-change acts and agreements, the government has lost control of its core function – strategic planning. And it has ceded control of it to an activist judiciary and a degenerate network of unaccountable NGOs, backed by shadowy billionaires.
A key problem is the inexplicable desire of UK politicians to ‘lead’ the world in draconian climate policy. Back in 2008, the Climate Change Act was rushed through parliament partly in order to equip the government with what its ministers believed would be an impressive bargaining position at that year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference. Then, as now, politicians believed that their legislative acts of self-sacrifice somehow elevated the UK on the global stage, boosting our moral standing in the ‘international community’.
The Court of Appeal’s decision came on the day that the government launched its finance strategy for this year’s UN climate-change summit, which will be held in Scotland. It was launched at an event in London featuring an all-star line-up: voice-over artist David Attenborough; loathed technocrat, Bank of England governor and this year’s summit president, Mark Carney; and convicted criminal and president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde.
You demanded action, and now it’s time for the financial sector to deliver… We have an enormous opportunity to bring climate change into the heart of every financial decision and our plan will manage the risk for climate change while helping to seize the opportunities from a newer, greener economy.’
But ‘we’ did not demand such action. We the public have never been asked for our views on these fundamental issues. As I have argued on spiked before, the climate agenda has never been tested democratically. And yet it has far-reaching consequences.
Amazing. Sinbad reports on the situation in Iran. He is a commenter here who speaks the language. I can’t confirm this except to say that #Coronavirusupdates Iran looks like everything he is describing. Officially there are only 388 cases and 34 deaths. But on twitter, just like China, censorship and denial and so much more. Mass graves. Corrupt officials. Mass spraying of the streets. But if there is no attempt to stop it spreading (no lockdown like China has done) this will truly run wild. Those poor people. Germany closed flights in January, related to other problems in Iran. In the last week Iraq, Oman, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, UAE, Kuwait all closed borders with Iran. Australia, with lower medical standards imported a case from Iran today instead. – Jo
PS: As Chiefio says: The virus can’t walk…
“How to prevent and stop the spread is easy. But it will not be done.
The virus has no legs nor wings. It can not move from country to country on its own.
Stop international and inter regional travel for 40 days. During that time, test everyone from any region with disease. Those infected go off […]
NYT have just noticed that not all climate activists are PC hippies, though they still seem blind to the possibility that some of their political fellow travellers could be bad.
White Supremacy Goes Green
Why is the Far Right Suddenly Paying Attention to climate change?
By Beth Gardiner
As an environmental journalist, I’ve been covering the frightening acceleration of climate change for more than a decade. As a person who believes in the tenets of liberal democracy, I’ve watched the rise of white-supremacist, anti-immigrant and nationalistic ideologies with similar dread over the past few years.
But I always thought of those two trends “looming ecological dangers and the gathering strength of the far right” as unrelated, parallel crises in a turbulent time. Only recently have I begun to understand that they are deeply interconnected, an ugly pairing of forces drawing power from each other.
From France to Washington to New Zealand, angry voices on the hard right nationalists, populists and others beyond conventional conservatism are picking up old environmental tropes and adapting them to a moment charged with fears for the future. In doing so, they are giving potent new framing to a set of issues more typically associated with the left. Often, they emphasize what they see as the deep ties between a nation’s land and its people to exclude those they believe do not belong. Some twist scientific terms such as invasive species foreign plants or animals that spread unchecked in a new ecosystem to target immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. And here’s what really frightens me: This dynamic is likely to intensify as climate change creates new stresses that could pit nations and groups against one another.
Although the pressures of a warming planet are new, the deployment of environmental language for racist, nativist and nationalistic ends has a long, dark history. Before environmentalism became a mainstream and progressive cause in the 1970s, many American conservationists were also white supremacists, who argued that those they saw as outsiders threatened the nation’s landscape or lacked the values to care for it properly. Such thinking was common in Europe, too. The Nazis embraced notions of a symbiotic connection between the German homeland and its people.
Greens, traditional hippy greens, thought that by creating a fake climate crisis people they would recruit more people to their cause.
But this isn’t what is happening. Frightened believers are turning to whoever is closest, whoever offers the most immediate relief from their fear.
For many of the fearful, traditional greens, with their discredited hippy era economic and social ideas and their dismal multi-decade track record of political failure are not a credible source of comfort. Dangerous demagogues on both the left and the right are starting to displace traditional greens from a political stage they thought would be theirs.
I give NYT reporter Beth Gardiner half marks for this one. She might have noticed that dangerous right wing extremists are starting to hijack the climate movement, but she still seems blind to the crazies in her own political camp.
Iowa Climate Science Education 