(Editor's Note: The second article in Graham Noble's two-part series on President Trump's fight with the climate change movement)
As anti-Trump demonstrations continue across America, environmentalism and climate change stand out as common themes. The radical environmentalists of the progressive movement understand that one of their signature issues – and, perhaps, their most powerful weapon – is in danger of unraveling before their eyes.
Tuesday evening in San Diego, a protest by environmentalists was expected to attract well over two thousand people, according to a report in the San Diego Union-Tribune. A group calling itself the San Diego Climate Mobilization Coalition was organizing the event. The climate change movement’s fears were summed up by the Environmental Health Coalition’s Executive Director, Diane Takvorian. Founder of the Environmental Health Coalition and appointed as an advisor by both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Takvorian told the Union-Tribune “It seems like his (Trump’s) mission is to undo all the progress that we’ve made over the last fifty years.”
Only a few hundred turned out for the event, but numerous protests such as these are anticipated in the coming months.
Last weekend saw a demonstration in Boston, Massachusetts, which was widely billed as a precursor to much larger protests planned for Earth Day, April 22. Centered around a rally in the nation’s capitol, March For Science is developing numerous concurrent demonstrations across the country and in cities across the world -- and the fundraising for these is already underway.
Pointing out that the environmentalist movement is far more about political power than saving the planet is like pointing out that water is wet. Practically all left-leaning groups and individuals support the cause, whilst relatively few on the right do so. Climate change and global warming have become the central issues precisely because they are issues that can be promoted as a threat that can be mitigated only by a global shift in the nature of every human activity. Anthropomorphic climate change is an all-encompassing cause that, despite all the studies and statistics, cannot possibly be conclusively proven beyond any question.
Conversely; real environmental issues, such as the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest or the pollution of the world’s oceans, have been relegated to the minor league of causes because – sadly – they did not provide the left with the same level of universal traction; reforestation projects and the application of safer industrial processes can solve these problems (as real and serious as they are) but climate change is a much larger doom that can be forever used as a weapon against capitalism, as a whole; no matter how many measures are put in place to mitigate the supposed threat, the left will always be able to argue that the threat still exists. They have largely abandoned the rain forest, the whales and all other real human threats to our natural world because those threats do not have the power to end capitalism and could – with enough effort and willpower – be ended.
The specter of man-caused climate change is all-encompassing and immortal; the greatest weapon the left could possibly have in its fight to bring an end to capitalism, which is its greatest ideological threat.
Alternative, ‘clean’ energy remains an elusive and prohibitively expensive solution and, until very significant technological advances produce a way to make it universal, efficient and affordable, the developed world must rely on traditional energy sources to grow the economy.
President Trump has committed himself to removing the barriers to energy exploration and production. Such measures will drive forward our free-market capitalist way of life; the progressives and socialists of the world understand that the more successful private business and enterprise becomes, the less relevant their ideology becomes.
Trump will not kill Planet Earth, but he may just kill the progressive movement – at least for a generation or two.
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