Yes, Donald Trump met with Al Gore. But on Friday, according to the Trump transition team, the president-elect also met with William Happer, a Princeton professor of physics who has been a prominent voice in questioning whether we should be concerned about human-caused climate change. In 2015 Senate testimony, Happer argued that the “benefits that more [carbon dioxide] brings from increased agricultural yields and modest warming far outweigh any harm.” Happer is an eminent physicist [and a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council] who held prominent positions at the Department of Energy, as well as at his university, and has 200 scientific publications to his name. –Chris Mooney, The Washington Post, 13 January 2017
“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. This contemporary “climate crusade” has much in common with the medieval crusades Mackay describes, with true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types, and even children’s crusades. –William Happer: The Truth about Greenhouse Gases, Global Warming Policy Foundation
Donald Trump has often ridiculed global warming and promised to withdraw the U.S. from the global accord signed in Paris in 2015. Yet despite the change of political weather in Washington, the captains of business and finance gathered in Davos this week will spend a lot of time talking about climate change — and how to make money from it. The World Economic Forum is devoting 15 sessions of its 2017 annual meeting to climate change, and nine more to clean energy — the most ever on the issues. With money-making opportunities rising, traditional climate change advocates — Al Gore and Greenpeace executive director Jennifer Morgan — will mingle in panel discussions with executives such as HSBC Holdings Plc Chairman Stuart Gulliver and Patrick Yu, president of Cofco Corp., the largest food company in China. They will discuss the nexus between the fight against global warming and business — both how to stop climate change and how to profit from it. —Bloomberg News, 15 January 2017
A supposedly ‘green’ power plant has been blamed for killing more than 1,000 fish on one of Britain’s best-loved salmon and trout rivers. Officials are investigating if a fault caused hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic waste to be discharged from an anaerobic digester and into the picturesque River Teifi in West Wales, killing every single fish along an eight-mile stretch. Two weeks ago The Mail on Sunday highlighted the growing risk to the environment posed by the ‘green guzzlers’, which convert slurry from dairy herds into methane. They have been responsible for 12 serious pollution incidents since 2015, but the contamination of the River Teifi just before Christmas could be the worst yet, according to anglers and environmentalists. –Nic North, Mail on Sunday, 15 January 2017
Global investments in renewable power dropped the most on record in 2016 as demand in China and Japan faltered. Worldwide spending on clean energy fell 18 percent from 2015’s record high to $287.5 billion, according to a report Thursday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. It was the first decline since 2013 and comes as environmental policies face pressure from populist movements that have fuelled the rise of Donald Trump, the UK Independence Party and others. –Joe Ryan, The Independent, 13 January 2017
The 2017 Edelman TRUST BAROMETER the largest-ever drop in trust across the institutions of government, business, media and NGOs. Trust in media fell precipitously and is at all-time lows in 17 countries, while trust levels in government dropped in 14 markets and is the least trusted institution in half of the 28 countries surveyed. The cycle of distrust is magnified by the emergence of a media echo chamber that reinforces personal beliefs while shutting out opposing points of view. Respondents favor search engines over human editors and are nearly four times more likely to ignore information that supports a position they do not believe in. —Edelman, 15 January 2017
