Free at Last, Free at Last, Free of Climate and Energy Insanity at Last

 

This is what winning looks like!

In the past two weeks, first in the private sector, then in the public sector, climate and energy reality has begun to dawn on large institutions and the elites who run them.

A few weeks ago, every major bank in the United States withdrew from the UN-sponsored Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA). The NZBA was a transglobal cabal of big banks attempting to control peoples’ freedom by controlling their access to banking services, capital, and by limiting loans only to projects that satisfied progressive climate fetishes. The banks had already been under pressure in various states with lawsuits claiming that by imposing climate preferences and politics on average people and private businesses, banks were violating anti-trust laws. The Heartland Institute discussed the dangers of the overlapping international climate banking organizations in our 2023 report “ESG Is a Threat to Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and the U.S. Economy.” It seems the world finally got clued into the truth of our message – certainly President Donald Trump understands it.

With Trump’s stated hostility to climate policies that place America at a competitive disadvantage while benefitting transglobal elites and technocrats, the bankers saw the writing on the wall. Wanting to play nice with Trump, within the space of a few weeks, days before Trump’s inauguration, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs withdrew from the NZBA.

To be clear, they have yet to eschew their individual net zero goals as stated in various public statements online, but that might be coming. Otherwise, the banks may be in for a bumpy ride for the next four years. In the end, the banks are on the wrong side of climate science, there is no climate crisis, and the wrong side of economics.

Climate policy is bad for everyone except politically connected business grifters, and their days of subsidies and access seem to be coming to an end.

The private banks are not alone, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) withdrew from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), days before Trump’s inauguration. The Fed said it was pulling out of the NGFS because its work has increasingly broadened in scope, covering a wider range of issues that are outside of the Board’s statutory mandate. The NGFS is a transnational organization of central banks colluding to shape the world’s economy in ways that benefit the wealthy and powerful by directing development and financing funds to programs and projects that meet the elites’ standards of sustainability based on their supposed climate impact. Any country or major development project that didn’t subscribe to the climate concerns of the central banks was shut out.

In truth, the Federal Reserve should never have joined the NGFS because fighting climate change is not within its charter. With Trump now in office, the Fed is out of the global climate cabal and none too soon. 

Canadian bankers, it seems, got the message of the impending collapse of net zero mandates as well. In Canada, soon to be ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the biggest pusher of climate alarmism, imposing harmful climate policies on often resistant provincial governments and their people. Working with Canadian’s for Sensible Climate Policy and Friends of Science, I co-authored a publication, “Energy and Climate at a Glance: Canadian Edition,” which demonstrated the dangers from international net zero goals, developed with and embraced by Trudeau and his cronies. With Trudeau in retreat, and the dangers of climate mandates becoming ever more apparent to the public, five of Canada’s biggest banks, BMO, National Bank, TD Bank Group, CIBC, and Scotiabank, have announced a strategic withdrawal from the NZBA in the past two weeks.

Then there is the United States, where Trump is firmly at the helm once again. In lighting quick succession, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders (EO) signifying that any net zero pipedreams still held by the elites at the UN and Davos are effectively dead.

Trump’s EOs end climate lockdowns and unjustified, harmful mandates restricting personal freedom and consumer choice and imposing energy subservience to international bureaucrats, green-energy profiteers, power-hungry elites, and the Chinese Communist Party.

The first EO Trump signed rescinded 78 EOs, directives, and memorandums his predecessor, President Joe Biden, had enacted. The reversals included EOs wasting money and resources on “tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad” (his signature order initiating his “all-of-government approach” to climate change, making climate considerations a primary concern in every Cabinet agency and department); ending the climate change support offices and directives for climate financial risks and climate justice; halting Biden’s clean car initiative, which served as a justification for the Biden EPA’s EV mandate; ending restrictions on federal infrastructure, buildings, and repairs to ensure “sustainability” (which made cost and effectiveness secondary considerations) in contracting for projects, to boost the fortune of purportedly “green” developers and contractors; and reversing Biden’s offshore oil ban.

Trump also issued an EO blocking permits and consideration of new offshore wind industrial facilities. Trump calls them ugly. More importantly, they are expensive, unnecessary, and harm marine mammals, the commercial fishing industry, and tourism. There is no climate justification for offshore wind farms.

Trump’s National Energy Emergency EO may prove to be the most consequential order of all in the long term. Under national emergency orders, the president can waive many rules, regulations, studies, analyses, hearings, and public comment periods to expedite critical infrastructure. This allows Trump to hasten construction of pipelines and railways, avoiding the copious delays such projects typically face because of lawsuits by environmental groups. Trump specifically mentioned oil, gas, coal, uranium, and critical minerals, all things we have in abundance and can produce, develop, and use right here. Trump left off the list anything to do with wind and solar power because they are expensive and unreliable and China controls the market for the key elements that go into them.

 Trump also withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement (for the second time) on his first day in office.

 The Paris agreement has done, and in fact can do, nothing to prevent or slow climate change. As Trump rightly recognized, it put the United States at an economic and geopolitical disadvantage to China by throttling U.S. fossil fuel use, the lifeblood of the economy, while China increased its use of coal, oil, and natural gas.

 “We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said at his inauguration. Trump’s moves, combined with the other actions this month by banks and Trudeau’s fall in Canada, have put net zero and misanthropic global climate diktats firmly in retreat. Let’s hope the climate cult can’t revive this patient.