Our friend Steven Hayward, late of the great Power Line blog, university professor and incisive thinker, wrote a compelling essay last week about “The Nadir of the Climate Change Movement.” [emphasis, links added]
If anyone should know about the state of global warming hysteria, it would be Hayward. Here’s how he begins his argument:
The prevailing winds are blowing not toward more windmills but toward common sense on energy.
It is possible that the Trump administration is going to deal the death blows to the long-running climate change hysteria and government hostility to fossil fuels, not just in the United States but around the globe.
The Trump administration has moved well beyond merely supporting increased oil and natural gas production.
It has also launched steps to dismantle the foundations of anti-energy climate policy, in particular, a proposed reversal of the so-called ‘endangerment finding’ that gave the EPA jurisdiction to regulate greenhouse gases, which were never explicitly included in any of the various Clean Air Acts passed over the last 50 years.
Trump’s EPA is also proposing to revise the EPA’s flawed ‘social cost of carbon’ analysis, which is used to justify costly green energy schemes.
Is this the moment we’ve been looking for for nearly three decades? Is climate virtue signaling finally wearing out?
Are the activists who have blocked traffic, shut down international airports, vandalized priceless artworks, slashed tires, set fires, clashed with police, nagged, ranted, and harassed going to fade into the background, maybe even do something productive rather than destructive?
Is the litigation slowing? Are politicians looking for another grift instead? Will the media drop its constant harping and screeching? Can we expect some honesty from researchers?
Hayward doubts “the climatistas know what’s about to hit them” as “the new Trump team” goes “straight at the heart of the entire climate change framework.”
He points out the “economic flimflam” of the social cost of carbon and reminds us that “fossil fuels are responsible for launching” modern medicine, telecommunications, air and rail travel, and automobiles, innovations that are critical to the functioning of an advanced existence.
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