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Trump would drain the climate-swamp

Banks, Carbon trading, investment, clean energy, renewables, global warming.

Big bankers are helping to save the poor from nasty storms. Sure…

In the climate debate, not much is bigger than this US election. If Clinton wins, it’s more of the same tax-funded gravy train supporting a trillion dollar industry that aims to change the weather and hold back the tide in a hundred years with special electrons from windmills and solar panels. Historians will giggle and mock us for falling into the grip of the pagan religion that sapped so much of our productive blood, sweat and tears.

Trump is promising to turn off that tap, though this “nuclear-wipe-out-option”  (which is common sense) is barely even noticed about the furious noise of this election. Clinton wont mention it because she knows most voters would like the climate swamp drained too. But the effect could mark the beginning of the end for this particular shade of taxpayer-parasite. The effect on the EU voters of watching Trump pull back and demolish the industry would be electric and infectious as industry, money and jobs fled the EU to the US. Even if Trump doesn’t win, he’s changed politics and made it so much easier for other candidates to stand up and say the bleeding obvious. The emperor is naked.

Spot the virtue signalling conflict

Curiously Trump wants to use the climate funds to help black Americans instead. Strangely the social-justice-eco-worriers are not leaping at this opportunity to show how culturally concerned they are. I mean, renewables is pretty much an old white guy industry, pushed and pumped by large financial houses and corporates like Deutsche BankCitigroupRoyal Dutch ShellGEPanasonic, and large multinational groups. Most renewables are completely dependent on taxpayers, or the investors run away. Money is sucked from people of all colors through tax and electricity bills to feed non-profitable, uncompetitive corporates and a massive bureaucracy. Where are the protests as the money is drained from the poor and fed to largely rich whites?

Poor Joe Romm, it’s doing his head in. Unfunding the climate apostles is unthinkable:

Trump just proposed ending all federal clean energy development

He’d end all research on solar, wind, efficiency, batteries, clean cars, and climate science, too.

Romm clearly doesn’t think this is really going to happen or he would be apoplectic. Instead he analyzes the claims as if it’s just another unfunded, badly thought out bubble.  After machinations over many paragraphs, he discovers that there really is spending close to $100 billion over 8 years that Trump could axe.

If we take the 2014 “climate” budget request of $11.7 billion as the baseline going forward to determine possible budget savings in a Trump administration, then team Trump would have to eliminate everything in it just to save $93.6 billion over eight years.

 The unthinkable option:

In reality, the only way Trump can keep this promise is to zero out all clean energy research and development (along with all climate science and support for international efforts), which would shut the door on the below-2°C path just as the rest of the world was working together to pry that door open.

As if. The Paris climate accord allows almost all the big emitters to double, triple, whatever, their emissions. There is no reason to think 2 degrees is coming (it’s more like 0.2), but there is no reason to think we could stop it with the Paris-puffery if it were.

You may consider it unlikely Trump would follow through, but I was at the U.S. Department of Energy working on clean energy when the GOP took back the House in 1995, led by Newt Gingrich. The House GOP had pledged to zero out all clean energy development and deployment programs — and they succeeded in slashing the budget for all the deployment programs.

The only thing that stopped them from gutting clean energy research and development was a huge push-back by the administration of President Clinton. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Blame Bill Clinton then for twenty years of lost opportunity and wasted billions.

As an added bonus I note that quietly, the Paris Agreement has probably “come into force” 4 days before US election. “Force” though, means nothing. But as a PR exercise it has been a master success. Oddly no one is cheering about this much — possibly because they know it won’t help Hillary if the voters talk about big-climate (and climate-money).

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