Article by Tim Blair, courtesy of The Daily Telegraph
17.02.2026
As he so often does, Donald Trump last week accomplished something brilliant and hilarious.
The US President swept aside a legal ruling that framed so-called greenhouse gases as “endangerments” to human life.
Under that Obama-era ruling, introduced during a time of peak climate panic, the US government was able to impose all sorts of restrictions on vehicles, manufacturing, construction and progress in general.
This was a brilliant move by Trump because it directly called out the climate madness and made clear the costs borne by innocent consumers.
“In 2009 Barack Hussein Obama, his Environmental Protection Agency, designated fossil fuels such as oil, gas and other things that actually make factories rock and roll … as a threat to health and human welfare,” Trump said. “This determination had no basis in fact.”
Side note: this is the best use of the term “rock and roll” in presidential history. Trump additionally made clear that the endangerment ruling hurt people beyond the US – just as they’d earlier been helped by traditional energy sources.
“Over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world,“ Trump said.
“And yet this radical rule became the legal foundation for the green new scam, one of the greatest scams in history.”
A few conservative Australian politicians, and even a couple of Labor ones, sometimes say the same things – usually late at night, off the record, and after a few drinks.
But Trump, a lifelong non-drinker, says it loud and proud from the White House. And then he makes it official. The man is peerless.
The hilarious part, of course, was when Trump’s opponents reacted with horrified religiously-fuelled death chants.
Future Democrat presidential candidate Gavin Newsom claimed the change would “lead to more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts”.
Former failed Democrat candidate John Kerry said that dropping the endangerment law “invites enormous damage to people and property around the world”.
“Without it, we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change,” said two-term Democrat president Obama, who is now so historically diminished that he very much risks becoming a US version of Malcolm Turnbull.
More hilariously still, frumpy New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was offended by Trump’s response to an activist journalist.
Dowd wrote: “When President Donald Trump vitiated scientific facts on Thursday, helping fossil fuel fat cats by eliminating the government’s ability to regulate treacherous gases, a reporter asked what he says to people worried about the very real hazards of a hotter planet. ‘I tell them don’t worry about it,’ he shot back.”
Perfect answer.
Credit to Dowd, though, for “treacherous gases”.
That’s some spectacular fear-mongery from someone who’s talking about plant food.
Another side note: have you ever noticed that when big-city media types cry about climate change, they never consider they that may be part of the alleged problem?
Instead, they clearly see themselves as subsistence-level woodland hobbyists, gently extracting only enough of the earth’s vanishing resources to provide that day’s copy for other pocket-forest elves.
Except they live in New York or equivalent global cities, travel all over the place in jets and are dependent in every possible way on centuries of fossil fuel-derived technology.
So all the old-timers were infuriated by Trump’s climate denial, which includes rejecting electric car mandates. But where were the protests from younger folk? Where were all the spontaneous worldwide urban uprisings from the Greta Thunberg generation, whose futures have again been stolen?
There weren’t any – not here, not in the US, and not even in Europe, where Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio lately hit a Munich audience with some hard truths: “To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else.”
Trump and his government are moving away from the climate cult, as should Australia’s Coalition parties.
But the climate cult is also moving away. Priorities are moving. Aims being revised. The young and politically active are shifting focus.
Judging by recurrent street turnouts in Australia and elsewhere, our caring, thoughtful and educated leftists now agree that saving the planet from climate change is nowhere near as important as destroying Israel and killing Jews.