Trent Lott after retiring from the Senate became a lobbyist for Russia’s Gazprombank, a Russian majority-state-owned bank sanctioned for fomenting pro-Russian unrest in the Ukraine in 2014. He also leads a pro-carbon-tax lobby group.
Summer heat waves predictably bring out swarms of insects, global warming enthusiasts, and their Russian allies. They are now being joined by Republican advocates for a carbon tax. The Green Republicans are marching counter to a major deregulatory move by the Trump administration: “The Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Department released a plan…to ax the Obama administration’s car-emissions standards, saving consumers $500 billion. Dollarwise, it may be the biggest deregulation ever,” Kimberly Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal.
Pro-carbon-tax Republicans include former Senators Trent Lott and John Breaux; former Secretaries of State James Baker III and George Shultz; and Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw, who served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush, and advised both the 2008 and 2012 Mitt Romney campaigns for president. Wall Street Journal opinion-page columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has also come out for a carbon tax, despite recognizing that “A carbon tax remains a red cape to many conservatives” — the Journal‘s readership base.
The US, which President Trump took out of the Paris Agreement, has made the largest reduction in carbon emissions. Countries like China which have pledged support for the Paris Agreement, have the worst record for increasing carbon emissions.
Attempts by Democrats and Greens environmentalists to curtail fossil-fuel use in the US are unpopular with a majority of the US population. The case for a carbon tax is hardly helped by the fact that the US, with no such tax, has the best record for reducing CO2 emissions, whereas Green energy hypocrite China has the worst emissions record and the Paris Agreement fanatics of the EU are not far behind China. But don’t expect the Democrats and Green groups in the US to celebrate…especially given the fact that expanded natural gas production is the main driver of the US CO2 reduction.
The pro-carbon-tax Republicans advocacy of a carbon tax would be a great idea if anthropogenic CO2 were a mortal peril to the planet and the tax they propose would be inexpensive and effective. None of these, however, are true. Natural explanations of climate change come closer to fitting the available empirical evidence than the theory the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The various seemingly competing non-AGW theories (pdf download) rather than being incompatible are likely overlapping at different time scales or interacting with each other, e.g., solar wind / cosmic ray theories with oceanic oscillation theories, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Putin and Co.’s role
But the Greens, Democrats, and pro-carbon-tax Republicans have not just hitched their wagon to bad science — no matter how much it is applauded by the NY Times, EU, and China. They’re also dupes of Putin’s state-owned oil-and-gas sector, which has been funding US environmentalism to hobble its most important economic and strategic competitor. We provide below a subset of the supporting evidence:
- American Spectator on House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Report, March 2018;
- The Committee’s press release;
- Earlier Senate report (PDF file will be downloaded);
- Names of the Green groups on the take from the Russians;
- How offshore shell organizations funded the Green groups;
- How the Russians used social media to target the US energy industry.
Summers bring heat waves. What makes them bearable is the air conditioning made possible by a robust, mostly fossil-fuel-based energy grid, not financed by Russian energy companies.
Click here to go to the previous Founders Broadsheet (“US-EU “deal” — a quick fix but no long-term clarity”)
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