Trump vs. the Climate Industrial Complex

Donald Trump as saviour not just of American democracy but global freedom? One can imagine tall foreheads exploding everywhere at such a thought. Although he doesn’t express it quite that strongly, this is one inevitable conclusion from Rupert Darwall’s tremendous new book, Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex. That’s because Trump, by abandoning the Paris climate agreement, and reversing his predecessor’s attempts to bypass Congress on environmental matters, has heaved a mighty wrench into the European-based thrust to impose global bureaucratic “governance” under the pretext of saving the world from climate catastrophe.

Beyond all the blather about Trump’s presidency representing the triumph of redneck ignorance and deplorable racism — and whatever Trump’s personal shortcomings — Darwall notes that one of the main reasons for his victory was that the American left had abandoned working people in pursuit of identity politics and radical environmentalism. “From being the voice of working people,” writes Darwall, “the Democratic Party has become the political arm of the Climate Industrial Complex,” an unholy alliance of bureaucrats, NGOs, green corporate rent-seekers and Silicon Valley “oligarchs.” With additional funding (as they like to say on PBS) from a raft of mega-billion-dollar foundations built on capitalist success but seemingly dedicated to destroying capitalism.

Darwall wrote Green Tyranny as a sequel to his similarly incisive 2013 book, The Age of Global Warming, specifically to expand on the critical roots of environmental ideology and power-seeking in Europe — in particular Sweden and Germany. He also records how the issues of acid rain and “nuclear winter” were in many ways political trial runs for the great assault on freedom in the name of saving the world from climate change. In each case, a critical factor was the corruption of science by politicized scientists.

The contributions of Sweden and Germany are complex but fascinating, since they originated in seemingly incompatible thrusts. “The politics of global warming originated in Sweden as a tool to promote nuclear power. Using