Trump cuts climate madness – in a bitter cold snap – Andrew Kenny - Biznews

Andrew Kenny

President Trump’s inaugural speech on Monday was not all good, but most of it was. So were most but not all of his flurry of executive orders.

Despite his blustering style, his best points were just simple common sense, just a return to normality from madness. For indeed there has been a lot of madness in the Western world, often led by the USA – on transgenderism, on mandatory Covid vaccination and, above all, on anti-science climate hysteria.

Trump has ordered practical measures to end this, and so will save a lot of lives and benefit the people and the planet. I want to deal in some detail with Trump’s wonderful decision to withdraw from the idiotic, destructive, anti-science Paris Climate Accord of 2016. But first, I’d just like to touch on some of the silly things he said and the one truly dangerous thing he said.

He wants to change “The Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America”. What a stupid proposal! It’s like changing “The Irish Sea” to “The English Sea”. It neither makes geographical sense nor is it poetic. “The Gulf of Mexico” has a romantic ring, which I like. Taking over the Panama Canal is even worse. The USA annexing Greenland? I don’t know whether the people of Greenland (area: over two million square km; population: just over fifty thousand) want to remain a Danish colony, or become an independent nation, or to be part of the USA. But surely they should be asked first, and there should be negotiations with them, Denmark and the USA before any alarming public pronouncements are made?

By far Trump’s most frightening remarks are over tariffs. Trump, unlike me, does not believe in free-wheeling capitalism and pure free trade. Make America Great Again (MAGA) is disturbingly nationalist and protectionist.

The terrible Great Depression (about 1929 to 1939) was caused not by the USA stock-market crash of 1929 but by governments’ protectionist policies in reaction to it. The crash was just a big bubble bursting. If governments had done nothing, there would have been a lot of immediate pain. Weak, badly-run companies would have been flushed out of the system, but strong, well-run ones would have recovered in a year or so; and the world economy would have become stronger than ever. Instead, the USA government imposed draconian tariffs on imports, especially with the wretched Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930. The result was a decade-long world depression and the Second World War. Trump is making loud menacing noises about retaliatory tariffs. With Trump you never know how much to believe.

“Carries a twig”

Ronald Reagan liked to “speak softly and carry a big stick”. Trump, some commentator suggested, “speaks loudly and carries a twig”. He certainly has a big stick available to him, but he has never used it. His loud threats do seem to have got results, though. Maybe he won’t actually implement big USA tariffs, but by frightening talk of them he can persuade other countries to drop their tariffs against American goods. I hope so. My father suffered through the Great Depression and had to risk his life on the Atlantic fighting against its logical outcome: Adolf Hitler.

In an executive order, Trump announced, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” This is just acknowledging an ancient biological truth. Sex evolved about 1,500 million years ago and there have only ever been two sexes, male and female. There certainly are some individuals who are attracted to the same sex and some who are unsure about their sex but there are only two sexes. (Unfortunately, Trump spoke of “two genders” in his inaugural speech. “Sex” is a biological term, “gender” a grammatical one. There are four genders: male, female, neuter and common).

In the USA and Britain, there are some evil perverts who prey upon sexually confused and lonely little children, persuading them that they are born into the wrong body and must take hormone blockers to stop their sexual development, and then maybe later on have their testicles, penises or breasts chopped off. This is wicked nonsense. The best path is to explain to these children that their confusion is perfectly normal and they mustn’t worry about it. As they grow up normally, all but a tiny fraction will realise they are in the right body but might have different sexual preferences, which is just another form of normality. The few who really feel after maturing that they are in the wrong body, could take the surgery as adults. All of this is just common sense.

My biggest cheer for Trump was on energy and the environment. Germany and Britain are suffering huge economic and environmental damage by their mad rush into wind and solar for grid electricity. Their economies are stultifying and their industries shrinking. For useful electricity (electricity whenever you want it), wind and solar are staggeringly expensive and require vast amounts of materials, some of which are toxic and remain so for millions of years. California is being crippled by this “green energy”.

Crude but unambiguous

Trump has ordered a return to coal, oil and gas, all of which are cheap, reliable and plentiful. “Drill, baby, drill!” was Trump’s rather crude but unambiguous phrase. Coal is dirty but gas is clean, and the USA has got vast quantities of it, opened up by fracking. The USA economy will surge ahead by using these fuels. They are, after all, what lifted most of the world from poverty two hundred years ago, and doubled human lifetimes.

The worst madness in the Western world today is climate alarm. This is the belief that rising CO2 is causing dangerous climate change. It isn’t. Indeed over the last half a billion years, there is no evidence that CO2 above 150ppm has caused any climate change at all.

Climate change is natural, caused by other factors, notably clouds, and not by CO2 at all. A thousand years ago, global temperatures were higher than now while CO2 was lower than now. Last year there was an upward blip in temperatures, but they were still far lower than those predicted by climate models twenty years ago. The terrible wildfires in California now, which have killed at least five people, destroyed over a thousand dwellings and laid waste vast areas of bush and forest, have been blamed by the mainstream media (MSM) and the rest of the woke establishment on climate change.

Pure nonsense. The fires had nothing to do with climate change. Nature visited two usually wet years on  California, which encouraged plant growth. This year brought very strong dry winds. But it was humans, and in particular California politicians, led by the ghastly Governor Gavin Newsom and the Mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass, who were the real causes of the disaster. The bush and trees of California, like those of the Western Cape, with a similar climate and similar flora, need fire from time to time to re-seed certain species. The Native Americans, living there thousands of years before the white people came, knew all about this and managed the bush well, controlling the fires, keeping them under control.

White men such as Gavin Newsom were as stupid and irresponsible as the natives were wise and responsible. They stopped logging in most California forests and cut off the roads the loggers used. So there was an enormous pile of unused wood fuel, a mountain of tinder, and no way to get to it if it caught fire – as it was bound to do. Newsom closed dams and water supply, so that when the fires came, there wasn’t enough water and the fire fighters were hamstrung. Mayor Bass withdrew a lot of money from the fire department. When the fires broke out around Los Angeles, the mayor decided to visit Ghana 12,000 km away, instead of visiting the devastation on her doorstep. She returned from a jolly holiday in Africa utterly unrepentant, and refusing to answer questions.

Awful winters

Both Britain and America have had awful winters, with record cold and record snow. Usually when there is unusual cold, the climate alarm establishment, which had been predicting unusual warmth, says that the snow and ice is exactly what you’d expect from global warming and anyone who says otherwise is a denier, stooge of big oil, lunatic and so on. This time they didn’t. Because of the cold, Trump’s inaugural had to be held indoors, for the first time in 40 years. He then proceeded to issue orders to roll back the mad measures of climate idiocy, the demented rush for “net zero”. The one I liked best was his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord of 2016.

The Paris Accord was the ultimate political cop-out. 196 parties of the United Nations Climate Change Conference negotiated it. They were looking for some sort of international mandate for limiting global warming. Since they believe that rising CO2 causes warming (it doesn’t), the obvious measure would be to ask countries to reduce their CO2 emissions by so much by a certain date. But, of course, they knew few countries would agree to this. So instead, using nonsensical science but shrewd politics, they asked all the nations to reduce their emissions in such a way that global temperatures did not rise more than 1.5 deg C about their “pre-industrial” levels. This farcical agreement was a huge international success politically, believed blindly by the MSM, the political establishment, the greens and the captured scientific establishment. Let me explain, which Trump didn’t, why it is nonsense.

For a start, the Paris Accord is extremely vague. It doesn’t say why temperatures rising above 1.5 deg C should be bad. Humans evolved in east Africa in temperatures higher than most of them experience now. What does it mean by “industrial” era and “pre-industrial” era? It doesn’t define them. I shall. I’ll say that the industrial era began in 1700, just after Thomas Savery invented the first industrial steam engine. But there were industrial inventions throughout the 17th Century, and William Lee invented the knitting machine in 1589, when Shakespeare was 15 years old. The pre-industrial era must be that time between when civilisation began and the start of industrialisation.

The last age ended finally about 10,000 years ago. Shortly after, agriculture began in the Middle East, and civilisation was born of agriculture. So the pre-industrial era was between 8,000 BC and 1,700 AD, a span of 9,700 years. In that time global temperatures were on average much higher than now. I can show this in a large number of scientific studies, including the excellent Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP).

Biggest exception

So we have not only succeeded in keeping temperature rise to below that of 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial levels, but our temperatures are now lower than they were in most pre-industrial times. The biggest exception was the Little Ice Age (LIA), from about 1300 to 1850 AD, the coldest sustained period of the last 10,000 years. During this period, there was very little solar electromagnetic activity, which would have increased cloud cover and reduced temperatures.

2024 was the warmest year on record. We are told this over and over again, in the MSM, with the BBC leading the way. By this they mean temperatures recorded by instruments, by thermometers. They do not mean temperatures measured by other means, which show conclusively that 2024 was cooler than most years over the last 10,000 years. Thermometers were invented in the 18th century and only came into widespread use in the 19th. So instrumental temperature measurements only cover a tiny period, and that period begins in the cold temperatures of the LIA! It’s hardly surprising that recent temperatures are higher than that.

My overwhelming feeling about Trump’s return is a feeling of relief that at last common sense is replacing madness. But this is unfortunately only for the USA. While President Trump in the USA was announcing measures to make the American economy boom, President Ramaphosa in South Africa was announcing measures to collapse the South African economy. The NHI, the R100 Billion Transformation Fund and now Ramaphosa’s signing into law expropriation without compensation are all acts of suicide – suicide for South Africa but not, of course, for Ramaphosa’s tiny band of super-rich, corrupt cronies, comrades and cadres.

Any international investor should now forget about investing in South Africa and invest in the USA instead, and all skilled, enterprising South Africans should start applying for Green Cards.

Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal

https://www.biznews.com/thought-leaders/2025/01/26/trump-declares-war-on-climate-hysteria-andrew-kenny

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.