Steamer selling out the UK at cop 29...

The imposition of sanctions on supplies of cheap Russian energy imports in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which boomeranged on Europe, effectively put paid to Europe’s climate leadership. Its farmers have revolted. Its working and middle classes, owing no allegiance to the luxury beliefs of Brussel bureaucrats and political elites in Berlin, Paris and London, have begun to support the populist right as a force in the European political order. 


But the seismic change brought on by the election of Donald “drill baby drill” Trump on Tuesday as U.S. president-elect – an avowed ‘climate denier’ and whose campaign has already promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement a second time – must leave the West’s faithful devotees of the Church of Climate aghast. A second Trump presidency together with a Republican senate majority will bring about what finance and energy consultant Doomberg calls a “whirlwind that is about to befall the progressive environmental Left [that] will reverberate for decades”. 


Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the president of the COP28 climate summit and CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, said in an interview: “You’re asking for a phase-out of fossil fuels… Please, help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Al Jaber’s remarks were amplified by Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman who told Bloomberg that the world’s biggest oil exporter would not agree with Western demands to phase out fossil fuels. “Absolutely not,” he said in an interview in Riyadh. “And I assure you not a single person – I’m talking about governments – believes in that… If they believe that this is the highest moral ground issue, fantastic. Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”