Clinton v Trump on “Climate Change”

The New Left, around 1970, cried with one voice:  Yes, capitalism! We knew it! Okay, we were wrong that capitalism causes wars, and wrong that it impoverishes the masses, but, yes! It is screwing up the climate, dooming us all. It was the philosopher Ayn Rand who first, with incredible prescience, and luminous insight, identified this as the Left’s next attempt to destroy capitalism.

I recently published a personal manifesto on the controversial question—a.k.a. adult pillow fight—of global warming/climate change. The weather used to be a safe topic of conversation, avoiding politics and religion, but now epitomizes the type of divisive political question that scuttles family reunions. Critics of “Big Climate Alarmism,” and I am one, compare it point for point with religious dogma. In reply, advocates of the view that CO₂ generated by man’s activities is heating up the Earth’s atmosphere, with potentially calamitous consequences, assert that anyone who fails to see the Big Truth is like those wackos who deny that the WWII Nazi-extermination-camp Holocaust ever occurred. Who would have thought that discussing the weather conditions of not tomorrow but in 2050 could end lifelong friendships?

I am not going to debate global warming/climate change, here. I have another agenda.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, which at present demands our breathless attention to personal health issues, Clinton’s email servers, Trump’s admiration of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, Trump’s Obama “birther” obsession, and Clinton’s supposed deceptions, there nevertheless are remarkably—even startlingly—clear differences between the candidates that bear upon the future of the Great Republic and the world.

One example is the candidates’ positions on global warming/climate change. True, through the angry noise of the campaign, amplified in the echo chambers of the media, I barely discern any substantive issue. And yet, five minutes of Googling reveals a stark and (yes!) well-articulated, black-and-white difference between the candidates.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, which at present demands our breathless attention to personal health issues, Clinton’s email servers, Trump’s admiration of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, Trump’s Obama “birther” obsession, and Clinton’s supposed deceptions, there nevertheless are remarkably—even startlingly—clear differences between the candidates that bear upon the future of the Great Republic and the world.

Here is the “League of Conservation Voters,” with admirable neutrality, presenting the candidates in their own words on climate change, updated through August 2016. Trump in an interview with the Miami Herald on August 11 of this year:

“I’m not a big believer in manmade climate change. There could be some impact, but I don’t believe it’s a devastating impact. I would say that it goes up, it goes down, and I think it’s very much like this over the years. We’ll see what happens…

“But certainly, climate has changed. You know, they used to call it global warming. They’ve had many different names…they call it extreme weather. They always change the name to encapsulate everything.

“The problem we have is our businesses are suffering. Our businesses are unable to compete in this country because other countries aren’t being forced to do what our businesses are being forced to do and it makes us noncompetitive, which is something that I feel very strongly about. And I feel that it puts us at a great economic disadvantage for jobs…”

This is an amazingly succinct summary of the “climate change” issue and its implications, especially considering this is just an answer to one interview question along the campaign trail.

All right, and here is Clinton’s campaign website quoting her own words:

“Climate change is an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time. It threatens our economy, our national security, and our children’s health and futures…

“Hillary’s plan will deliver on the pledge President Obama made at the Paris climate conference—without relying on climate deniers in Congress to pass new legislation. She will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 30 percent in 2025 relative to 2005 levels and put the country on a path to cut emissions more than 80 percent by 2050.”

I said something nice about Trump’s remarks so, to maintain balance, I should say something nice about Clinton’s, right? Damned if I can think of anything. The hypothesis of a dangerous global warming trend has been called “a busted flush.” Yes, there was a warming trend, a total of about 0.7 of one degree Celsius, from 1880 to 1998. This is remarkably brief in climate history. Think of the coming and going of ice ages and interglacial periods every 10,000 years or so for millions of years. The 118-year trend meant little unless you could point to some new, decisive factor entering the picture. The New Left, around 1970, cried with one voice:  Yes, capitalism! We knew it! Okay, we were wrong that capitalism causes wars, and wrong that it impoverishes the masses, but, yes! It is screwing up the climate, dooming us all. It was the philosopher Ayn Rand who first, with incredible prescience, and luminous insight, identified this as the Left’s next attempt to destroy capitalism.

But in 1998, the hottest year since 1880, global warming went on vacation. Depending upon who is measuring it, that vacation lasted 16 years (agreed by both sides) or is still going (dissenters). This busted the flush. Some one hundred computer models (“General Climate Models”), created at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to taxpayers to predict the extent of global warming 50 to 100 years from now, failed to predict what happened in any year after 1998. For the long years of no global warming, the theory was used by politicians to enact regulations costing hundreds of billions of dollars, raising the costs of energy for everyone, and to subsidize pre-Industrial Revolution sources of energy: wind and the sun.

Okay, here is Trump, again, to the North Dakota Petroleum Council on May 26, 2016:

“President Obama entered the United States into the Paris Climate Accords unilaterally, and without the permission of Congress. This agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use right here in America. These actions have denied millions of Americans access to the energy wealth sitting under our feet.”

He is referring to the new methods of drilling for oil and new innovations in capturing natural gas that woke the world suddenly by thrusting the United States into first place among oil producers, promising for the first time independence from Middle Eastern oil that has transferred literally generations of wealth from United States, Western Europe, and Japan to Middle Eastern nations such as Saudi Arabia that use their wealth to subsidize the worldwide promulgation of radical Islam, including ISIS. Almost immediately, U.S. President Barrack Obama and his then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, attacked this new industry with regulations and special taxes. They pledged at the Paris Conference in 2015 to shut down the fossil fuel industry in favor of wind and solar power. I can’t help saying, “Wow, congratulations, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. You have great partners in the United States.”

And to give Clinton the last word from the Washington Post, April 14, 2016, quoting her at a Brooklyn campaign debate:

“Let’s talk about the global environmental crisis. Starting in 2009 as your Secretary of State, I worked with President Obama to bring China and India to the table for the very first time, to get a commitment out of them that they would begin to address their own greenhouse gas emissions.

“I continued to work on that throughout the four years as Secretary of State, and I was very proud that President Obama and America led the way to the agreement that was finally reached in Paris with 195 nations committing to take steps to actually make a difference in climate change.”

Now, here we enjoy what once was called “a choice, not an echo.”

How serious a choice? If that means getting into the debate over climate change/global warming, I’m not going there. I refer you to my statement, “Why I Deny Big Climate Alarmism,” reached after extensive research, thought, and debate. You can read daily in the mainstream press reports of the devastation supposedly attributable to man-made temperature change. For the dissent, I recommend Climate Change: The Facts, published in a revised edition in 2015. Developed by Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia, it brings together in one statement the world’s leading scientists, economists, journalists, public policy analysts, and politicians on the “I deny” side the debate.

What I would state, here, given the clear policy differences expounded by the two candidates, is what is at stake.

One of the world’s leading proponents of the global warming theory and its urgent importance is William McKibben. In the August 15 issue of The New Republic, in an article emblazed across many pages, he argued that the threat of global warming/climate change has reached crisis proportions comparable to the militant rise of national socialist (Nazi) Germany in the late 1930’s. The article begins with the breathless reportorial description of an invasion of the United States and other parts of the world. Territory has been lost, the death toll is soaring, and key targets have been bombed out. The invader is global warming and it is winning.

Within a few years, virtually all of America’s fundamental energy industry must be mothballed; every economic resource and means directed, by government dictate, to building hundreds of huge solar energy and wind energy complexes. This is a call for the command economy of economic dictatorship beyond anything America has imagined let alone experienced.

The required response is a governmental command economy that mobilizes the American economy on a scale, and with an urgency and scope, greater even than the heroic mobilization of U.S. industry to meet the challenge of WWII. Read it. Within a few years, virtually all of America’s fundamental energy industry must be mothballed; every economic resource and means directed, by government dictate, to building hundreds of huge solar energy and wind energy complexes. This is a call for the command economy of economic dictatorship beyond anything America has imagined let alone experienced. Arguably in the most reputable journal of policy opinion in America.

Well, McKibben can ring the tocsin from parish to parish all across America, but does it cost us anything?

It does. The impact of what Clinton versus Trump proposes will translate in real life, real time, into laws enacted and regulations, rules, and requirements promulgated to implement those laws. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported that “During the eight years of the Obama administration alone, regulators have laid down 600 major rules (rules that the agencies themselves estimate will cost more than $100 million each, per year, for compliance). That breaks down to 81 major rules per year or approximately one new $100-million rule every three days the government is open.”

What area of federal government’s dictation to U.S. businesses requires this barrage of rules? Quite naturally, it is the area that Clinton characterizes as putting the future of life on Earth and of our children at risk. Focusing in a bit more closely, there also are billion-dollar-plus compliance rules. Between 2000 and 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency promulgated 20 such rules at a compliance cost of $101 billion dollars. All other federal agencies combined, during the same period, promulgated 14 major rules at a compliance cost of $22.9 billion.

Well, today, our government is reckoned in trillions of dollars. What is the harm? The Chamber of Commerce report offers examples. Here is one.

“Meanwhile, the Clean Power Plan, or CPP, upends the entire U.S. energy sector by requiring states to drastically cut emissions from traditional power plants. CPP would increase average electricity prices in 40 states, costing households up to $79 billion. In a sense, EPA’s new power plant rule forces an industry to do something that’s technologically impossible. Thankfully, the Supreme Court stayed, or blocked, the rule from implementation until pending lawsuits play out in the judicial system.”

Yes, something is at stake when the chattering classes, including our candidates for president in 2016, have a difference of opinion over “Big Climate Alarmism.”

What characterizes Hillary Clinton is pride in what the Obama administration has accomplished in the McKibben “war of the worlds” scenario. Her position is that more must done, building on these policies, and must be done urgently.

They [the bureaucrats] promulgate, say, 3,000 new regulations a year, including dozens each year, each with $100-million compliance costs for the economy as a whole. The more regulations, the larger their domain, the greater their power. The next president will appoint the leadership of every department and agencies, give them marching orders, and oversee their compliance with her or his vision.

Donald Trump is a “global warming denier.” To me, that begins to sound like an honorable designation. He seems to understand in an easy, commonsensical way that the climate changes; he understands that theories of climate change evolve; and he understands that one live scenario—advanced by solar scientists, now in disrepute for contradicting Big Climate alarmism—is that we face a coming ice age. And that to devote all resources on the basis of a national emergency to mothballing fossil fuel energy, and to erecting a worldwide structure of wind and solar power, would leave humanity utterly naked and unprepared for a new ice age Victims of the fatally wrong decision for humankind, promoted by the scientists it had come to trust, who really only wanted to be accepted by their peers and make a good living.

But Trump does not buy either scenario. He says, as quoted, “Let’s see.” But, for now, he says, do not make the American economy and jobs hostage to weather forecasting 50 or 100 years into the future. I urge you to check out my links to both Trump statements and the Clinton statements. You wouldn’t know from the media, even this late in the campaign, that both have made substantive statements on this issue dozens of times even in the last month.

Whoever becomes the next President will exercise direct control in this area. Recent decades have seen a shift of law-making out of Congress and into the Executive. Yes, “laws” are enacted by Congress—let’s say, 150 a year—but drafting and promulgating regulations, rules, and requirements to implement those laws has been handed over to bureaucrats in the departments and agencies of the Executive. They promulgate, say, 3,000 new regulations a year, including dozens each year, each with $100-million compliance costs for the economy as a whole. The more regulations, the larger their domain, the greater their power.

The next president will appoint the leadership of every department and agencies, give them marching orders, and oversee their compliance with her or his vision. Trump could choose appointees and give directives to bridle the EPA and the other agencies that energetically dictate to America the demands of Big Climate alarmists. At a minimum, and immediately, he could purge the nation’s top bureaucracy of those who carry water for organizations like Greenpeace.

You will make up your own mind, of course; that is your responsibility and privilege as a voter in America. My point is that what you decide will make a big difference. This is an important election. Who would have thought?

Related Posts:

1. The First American Climate Panic (circa 1778)
2. Libertarian Party Candidate Vinay Kolhatkar Cook Campaign Video
3. Objectivist Standards for Rating Presidential Candidates

   

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.