Trump to Europe: "Your countries are going to hell"

On the slow death of climatism in Europe.

On 25 September 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered his first speech before the United Nations General Assembly. At one point he warned Germany about its plans for Nord Stream 2, which he said would make the country “totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) and Permanent U.N. Representative Christoph Heusgen laughed in his face.

These clowns thought they had it all figured out back then. We would build a lot of wind turbines and install a lot of photovoltaic panels and make up the difference with Russian natural gas. It would be cheap, it would keep the climatists happy and also too a lot of special interests could profit.

Nobody is laughing anymore. The entire strategy has collapsed, because without Russian gas the energy transition is hopeless. It can never succeed, it will never go anywhere and the only question is how long we will persist in destroying our economy for no reason. The highly intelligent, extremely mature and deeply far-sighted adults of the German political establishment are facing a slow-burning economic and political emergency, and they are utterly unprepared even to acknowledge it, let alone do anything about it.

This would be why, when Trump returned last week to deliver a second speech to the U.N. General Assembly, nobody laughed. With an eye towards Europe, Trump said that “Your countries are going to hell,” before deploring particularly what he called the “double-tailed monster” of mass migration and climatism. He said all of this while standing directly in front of the President of the General Assembly, who just happens to be the arch-Green environmentalist bimbo Annalena Baerbock.

I have transcribed his most important statements on climatism and the energy transition:

Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before.

We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. … You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can’t put them out without massive subsidies. And most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they’re very few wind farms. So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them? You know what? They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind, but they sure as hell like selling the windmills.

In 1982, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe. He said that it will be irreversible as any nuclear holocaust would be. This is what they said at the United Nations. What happened? Here we are. Another UN official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming. Not happening. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people …

I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail. … I’m the President of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe. I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer. You’re doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct and you’re destroying your heritage.

They must take control strongly and immediately of the unmitigated immigration disaster and the fake energy catastrophe before it’s too late. The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions and they’re heading down a path of total destruction. …

Europe reduced its own carbon footprint by 37%. Think of that. Congratulations Europe. Great job. You cost yourself a lot of jobs, a lot of factories closed, but you reduced the carbon footprint by 37%. However, for all of that sacrifice and much more, it’s been totally wiped out and then some by a global increase of 54%, much of it coming from China and other countries that are thriving around China, which now produces more CO2 than all the other developed nations in the world. So all of these countries are working so hard on the carbon footprint, which is nonsense by the way. It’s nonsense …

The whole thing is crazy. The primary effect of these brutal green energy policies has not been to help the environment, but to redistribute manufacturing and industrial activity from developed countries that follow the insane rules that are put down, to polluting countries that break the rules and are making a fortune. They’re making a fortune.

European electricity bills are now four to five times more expensive than those in China, and two to three times higher than the United States … The entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected immediately, and it must be immediate. …

A day after these devastating remarks, Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union climate commissioner, betook himself to the New York Times to assure progressive Americans that “the world isn’t slowing on climate.” That is only true on a very superficial level. Ideologically, climatism is finished. All of its grassroots support is gone, and it persists only because of institutional inertia, as a complex array of technocratic grifting operations. The German Greens have bled almost all their support beyond their terminally committed base of clueless urbanite dead-enders. They are on the verge of disappearing from the state parliaments of East Germany entirely, and in the West they’re also taking a powerful beating. The voters in Nordrhein-Westfalen have just sent most of the Green mayors of major municipalities packing. Across the Federal Republic, leftist energy has moved to the hardcore socialists of Die Linke.

Four days after Trump’s speech, the German climatoids of Fridays for Future held a nationwide “climate strike” of the kind they once conducted every Friday afternoon in 2019. These events used to bring hundreds of thousands of naive university women, befuddled bureaucratic Gutmenschen and school children to the streets. Now the protests are only nominally a strike; they had to move their big event to a Saturday, because nobody wants to waste working hours on this shit anymore.

At Apollo News, Marius Marx writes of “The Quiet Downfall of the Climate Movement”:

The images from the weekend speak volumes: In Berlin, even according to the organisers’ own figures, only 4,300 people turned up, while the police counted just 3,000.

In Hamburg, there were around 2,500 demonstrators, in Munich around 1,500. And in Potsdam, where celebrities Luisa Neubauer and climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf were pressent, there were only a few hundred. Nationwide, fewer than 50,000 people took part … By way of comparison, in 2019, when the demonstrations initiated by Greta Thunberg took place every Friday, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Berlin alone.

What was once a widely courted and naively idealised mass movement with broad social impact … has become a small splinter group ideologically walled up in its own worldview: The climate movement has long since shrunk to a core of radical dreamers. Even Greta Thunberg, the former climate icon, has moved on to newer, more current concerns.

The slogans on the banners alone show how far the movement has strayed from its original cause.

That’s Luisa Neubauer herself, marching with a smattering of leftist activists in Potsdam. The banner behind her reads “For climate justice. Do you get it?” Since the war in Gaza we hear a lot more about “climate justice” than we do about “climate change,” because the climatoids are no longer leading the eternal leftist protest. Anticolonialism is more important; CO2 only matters to the extent it represents a Western injustice imposed upon brown people somewhere. In fact, on the left, climatism is taking a back seat to all kinds of other concerns. This would be why our climatoids have pasted their logo onto the trans flag and why they have to march alongside activists carrying banners complaining about “the rich” and taking potshots at “Nazis.” The whole movement is devolving into the standard leftoid grievance gruel.

The weekend has shown that Fridays for Future has lost its mass base, and that climate as a political issue has lost its mobilising potential. While the general public is discussing a return to climate-friendly nuclear power, the home heating policies, electricity prices and mobility, the German climate movement is marching through city centres with placards whose messages clearly have nothing to do with the everyday lives of most citizens. For this reason, and because some of the 2019 protesters have probably come to understand that Fridays for Future may say climate protection, but in reality means degrowth, deindustrialisation and deliberate destruction of prosperity, the movement is now on the verge of insignificance.

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Climatism always had two parts.

The first part was a hysterical narrative about how industrialisation is destroying the atmosphere via carbon emissions, how the coral reefs are dying, the polar ice caps are melting and the oceans are rising.

The second part was the energy transition – a package of ominous policies that together spell deindustrialisation for any nation that dares to implement them seriously, but that have no hope of ameliorating even the slightest bit of the panic narrative from the first part.

If you were to reduce this nonsense to a Venn diagramme, you would see two non-intersecting circles. The activist left hyped the hysteria panic narrative of the first part while supporting the catastrophically destructive policies of the second part (if occasionally complaining that these policies did not go far enough). The technocracy hyped the catastrophically destructive policies of the second part and supported (if often tacitly) the hysteria of the first part.

This deviously incoherent ideological system is entirely broken. The activists are pushing a whole myriad of grievances about global injustice that have very little to do with technocratic policies, and the technocrats continue to deindustrialise Germany in the absence of any ideological support or justification from the left – and sometimes even in opposition to a traditional and resurging leftist anti-elitism. (Few ideologies, after all, embody elite concerns as clearly and with as little regard for the economically disadvantaged as climatism.) It is the beginning of a general climatist disintegration.

While the Eurocrats presently pursuing climatism are well-insulated from shifts in the popular mood, they cannot ignore these indefinitely. The policies at the centre of climatism of course have a deeper purpose that is largely distinct from the panic narrative sold by the activists. If the Eurocrats continue to pursue these policies, they will have to come up with new stories about why the economic destruction they are wreaking is necessary. Thus far, they show no interest in that kind of ideological invention. The stories they are telling right now are of an entirely different flavour. They are about foreign threats and domestic wreckers, about the grave dangers posed by the Russians abroad and the fascists at home. In retrospect, I think climatism was an ideology crafted for a world bereft of concrete villains – a world where industrial processes and gases were the only conceivable enemies. We’re not in that world anymore, and that is why climatism is finished.