Lawrence Solomon: It’s ‘game over’ for global warming activists

Environmentalists’ faint hope that they can get international action on climate change gets fainter each day. Now america Supreme Court put into their despair by kiboshing President Obama’s pledge, at December’s climate talks in Paris, to lead the world on climate change. “This may be the proverbial string which in turn causes Paris to unravel,” The brand new York Times reported.

At the heart of Obama’s Paris pledge was his Clean Power Plan, an executive order hyped as “the first-ever carbon pollution standards for existing power plants.” The plan, presented with much fanfare before the Paris meetings to create a feeling of momentum, was designed to turn off America’s number of coal-powered generating plants. The White House boasted its plan would help reduce CO2 emissions by 32 percent by 2030 and lead to 30 percent more renewable energy generation in 2030.

Except it was a clear boast according to an unconstitutional plan, said 29 states assuring agencies, which successfully argued the Obama plan needed congressional approval to proceed. The final Court agreed to an immediate halt of Obama’s plan, sending it to some lower court and all but guaranteeing that, when Obama leaves office in 2017, the plan will remain in frost nova.

India, China and other countries that were cajoled into making carbon-cutting commitments at Paris are now under no pressure to cut emissions either. As one adviser to China’s Paris delegation put it, “Look, the United States doesn’t keep its word. Why make a lot of demands upon us?” U.S. environmental groups concur. “If the U.S. isn’t moving on climate action, it makes it truly difficult to go back to other countries and say, ‘Do more, we’re delivering,'” admits natural Resources Defense Council.

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Not that any of the carbon reduction demands were binding, or even meaningful. The Paris talks succeeded only in continuing the pretense the countries around the globe were morally committed to action on climate change. Now even that pretense is vanishing. Seven years after Obama asserted that, under his transformative presidency, the oceans would stop rising, it’s dawning on environmentalists that his entire contribution towards the debate comes down to a maximum of lofty rhetoric. Obama’s global warming legacy will be remembered for 2 relation to hope without change.

The presidential election season can only add to the environmentalists’ funk

Environmentalists this past year had greater than a transformative president opting for them – they had El Nino, the Pacific Ocean phenomenon that periodically brings unusually the sunshine to all of us, and opportunities for propaganda to climatic change enthusiasts. The public yawned at the claims that the Earth was experiencing its hottest year in record – individuals have fed up with this mantra, as polling consistently shows. And environmentalists must know that, if they can not be persuasive in an El Nino year, what are their chances in subsequent years, during which La Nina typically brings unusually cold weather?



The presidential election season are only able to increase the environmentalists’ funk. With the Democrats fielding either an unpopular Hillary Clinton or an unelectable, socialist Bernie Sanders, the Republicans are widely thought to be favoured to win, landing a deathblow to climate change activism. With both Republican front-runners, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, considering climatic change states be outright shams, funding for the global warming industry will dry out. Cruz offers to defund the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the earth’s premier climatic change lobbyist, together with almost every other program promoting global warming alarmism. Trump likely would, too, given his thought that climatic change policies hurt American business.

Even if your Democrat should win the presidency, the weather change industry doesn’t have expect a comeback. Republicans will still contain the purse strings through their control within the legislature – that’s why Obama resorted to an executive to impose his Clean Power Plan, in a faint hope of their own he could further the agenda he so passionately believes in.

So much hope in that fount seven years ago; so little left today. For all those environmentalists still clinging to global warming beliefs, hope doesn’t spring eternal.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.