Climate Zealots React to U.S. Election Results
AP Images
Al Gore
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Left-leaning people across the United States, and indeed the world, are reacting with despair and fear over the election of Donald Trump on November 5. Perhaps no other group is more aghast than the global climate movement. The climate cult, which insists that mankind’s emissions from the use of fossil fuels are leading to out-of-control global warming, has reacted to Trump’s victory as if it is the ultimate nightmare scenario for mankind.

During his first term, Trump downplayed climate concerns to the point of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. In remarks the day after his electoral victory, Trump signaled upcoming changes to U.S. policies on fossil fuels when he referred to U.S. reserves of oil as “liquid gold.”

“Dark Days” Ahead

Trump’s victory comes in advance of the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, slated to begin next week. Some representatives have already expressed worries that a Trump-led America won’t be so climate-friendly as the Biden administration has been.

“I expect countries, including China, to reaffirm their commitment to the Paris Agreement at the start of COP 29,” said Li Shuo of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Unlike 2016, the global community is prepared for this. I am confident we will weather … the immediate impact, but I am worried about the long-term impact of this election.”

Climate zealots are concerned that not only will Trump initiate increased U.S. oil production, but also that he will make good on his pledge to once again remove the United States from the Paris Climate Accord.

Carbon-credit salesman Al Gore lamented “dark days” ahead for the climate movement that has made him so wealthy over the years.

“In a moment such as this, it is important to remember that all major reform efforts, from civil rights to the climate movement, suffer dark days. And this is surely one,” Gore said in an e-mail to his Climate Reality Project on Wednesday.

“We can mourn a loss, but we can’t linger in despair,” Gore added. “Our planet doesn’t have time for that.”

American “Petrostate”

Perhaps no other climate zealot typifies the angst of the movement more than hockey-stick graph creator Michael Mann, who referred to America in the wake of Trump’s election as a “failed Democratic state.” In a diatribe published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mann proclaimed “the reelection of Donald Trump, a candidate who has flaunted his desire for autocracy — aided and abetted by a Republican-controlled Congress that will not constrain him with guardrails — the United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests. It is now, in short, a petrostate.”

“It seems likely that the United States will, in short order, join an alliance of petrostate bad actors, including Russia and Saudi Arabia,” Mann declared. Mann claimed that the United States will join Russia and Saudi Arabia in an effort “to block meaningful progress in the COP process including, but not limited to, a commitment to phase out fossil fuels on the timeframe of the next decade or two that is required to avert a catastrophic 1.5-2 degrees Celsius (3-4 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the planet.

In Mann’s version of reality, America has freely chosen freely to live in a dystopian dictatorship led by fossil-fuel companies who are only concerned with profits. In actual reality, the U.S. electorate has chosen a near future in which he and his cronies in the climate-disaster movement are rightfully ignored and their predictions of climate disaster are dismissed.