Pirate's Cove

There were many Big Losers in 2016. The media. Obama. Democrats. And, let’s face it, American Conservatism. The Washington Times’ Stephen Moore claims that Big Green was the biggest loser of 2016

The day after the presidential elections the executive director of the Sierra Club glumly called the Donald Trump victory “deeply disturbing for the nation and the planet.” Well, yes, if you’re a climate change alarmist who hates fossil fuels, you’re in for a bad four and maybe eight years.

Greenpeace executive director Annie Leonard was even more apocalyptic saying: “I never thought I’d have to write this. The election of Donald Trump as president has been devastating There’s no question, Donald Trump’s climate denial is staggering. He wants to shut down the EPA, cancel the Paris Climate Agreement, stop funding clean energy research and drill baby drill.” Ah, but if this is so crazy, why did he win?

The short answer is that Americans went to the polls and rejected environmental extremism among other things. The biggest loser on election night was the Big Green movement in America dedicated to the anti-prosperity proposition that to save the planet from extinction we have deindustrialize the U.S. and throw millions and millions of our fellow citizens out of their jobs. Voters turned thumbs down on the climate change lobby and rightly so. (snip)

In so many ways climate change was one of the primary issues that allowed Donald Trump to crash through the blue wall of the industrial Midwest. The Democrats’ preposterous opposition to building the Keystone XL pipeline which could create as many as 10,000 high-paying construction, welding, pipefitting, electrician jobs is emblematic of how the party that is supposed to represent union workers turned their backs on their own members and their families.

Climate change was a rather silent issue, being barely discussed during election season by the politicians. It didn’t make the news that much. Yet, people thought about it, and what the policies of Democrats had been and would be. Job killing, economy damaging, cost of living increasing, and governmental power increasing. And they voted against that in the places that mattered. If all those extra Hillary voters in California and Oregon and Washington want those policies, let them pass them and live under them.

The surprise of this election is that Democrats were surprised by the mass voter rejection of the radical climate change agenda. Every poll for the last five years at least has shown that climate change barely registers as a leading concern of American voters. Jobs and the economy were always issues number one and two, and global warming was usually close to last on the list. A 2015 Fox News poll found that only 3 percent of Americans believed that climate change was “the most important issue facing America today.” That means 97 percent disagreed with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernard Sanders and Tom Steyer that global warming was the greatest threat to America. This didn’t stop Hillary Clinton from telling West Virginians that she would put every coal miner out of a job. Then she wonders why she got crushed in this unionized historically reliable Democratic state.

Moore goes on to note that the Democrats will only rise when they get rid of the climate change extremists in their party and start listening to the working Americans again. But that’s not who Democrats are anymore. They are elitists whose every policy is about increasing the size and dominance of Government, about spreading the tendrils of government into the lives of citizens. They do not want to give up that power.