If you think Donald Trump’s victory is hard enough on Kamala Harris’s campaign staff, spare a thought for the world’s climate activists and their assorted luvvie hangers-on. Just Stop Oil lost no time in spraying the US embassy in Battersea, claiming that democracy has been ‘hijacked by corporate interests and billionaires’. Billy Porter, an actor presenting the Prince of Wales’s Earthshot Prize, said he had been ‘crying all day’ over the result.
The activists and lobbyists heading for the Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku over the next few days shouldn’t worry too much – contrary to popular imagination, US carbon emissions per capita continued to fall over the course of Trump’s first presidency, from 16.1 tonnes per person in 2016 to 14.9 tonnes per person in 2021 – in part thanks to coal being displaced by cleaner gas, much of it shale gas. If you want to see more electric cars on American roads, Trump is unlikely to be standing in the way of that, given his closeness to Elon Musk.
But what Trump’s election does do is to put Britain, and Ed Miliband, even further out on a limb with our dogmatic and inflexible net-zero targets.
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