Remember how the first incarnation of a Trump presidency was supposed to be pretty well curtains for Planet Earth? Well, don’t worry: we are all going to be just fine this time around. Why? Because Al Gore assures us so. ‘The global sustainability revolution is unstoppable,’ he declared in a statement following Trump’s speech. ‘Now is the time for governors, mayors, business leaders and investors, and activists, to put their heads down and do the work that will advance the climate solutions that our nation and the world so urgently need.’
In other words, don’t worry about Trump. The US president is going to be an irrelevance because all the nice people in the world have decided that they are going to go green. Few will want to take up Trump’s invitation to ‘drill, baby drill’. The smart money will be going into wind farms and the like regardless.
There are just a few problems reconciling Gore’s fantasy world with reality. While it is true, as Gore says, that investment in renewables is rising – and that Trump’s first presidency did not stop, for example, wind energy capacity in the US rising by a third between 2017 and 2021 – there is no great global switch from investment in fossil fuels to investment in renewables.
There is growing investment in both. According to the International Energy Agency, investment in renewables rose from $470 billion in 2021 to $771 billion last year, but global investment in fossil fuel also rose substantially, from $963 billion to $1.16 trillion over the same period.
Whatever platitudes world leaders might like to utter at the kind of international conferences where Gore thrives, most countries with fossil fuels are already pursuing the approach described by Trump’s new energy secretary Chris Wright, who has said: ‘I don’t care where energy comes from, so long as it is secure, reliable, affordable and betters human lives.’
Even the ‘good guys’, President Lula da Silva of Brazil and Justin Trudeau of Canada, have been doing as Trump preaches: they have been drilling, baby drilling. Brazil has increased its oil production by a third in the past decade, Canada by around a quarter. Only Britain and a handful of other European countries stand as outliers, voluntarily leaving their fossil fuels in the ground.
Much as Al Gore might like to think otherwise, the US under Biden was also increasing its oil and gas output – while cutting back coal production. You might, in fact, turn Gore’s assertion on its head and say that Biden’s election made little difference to US energy policy, for all the plaudits he won from environmentalists when he rejoined the Paris agreement. The US continued to follow the unashamed policy of energy self-sufficiency that has been going on for the past two decades, whoever has been in the White House. Even anti-fracking Kamala Harris had to change her mind.
It is a policy that has contributed to the fact that domestic gas prices in the US are less than half what they are in Britain and electricity prices a third. The election of Trump reaffirms that this is not going to change. Indeed, the disparity between costs is only likely to grow as Ed Miliband attempts to construct a grid powered mostly by intermittent renewables. It isn’t the US whose energy policy is going to be rejected by a bewildered rest of the world; it is Britain’s.
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Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better.

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