Climate Pact Pullout Rewards the Few and Powerful
They came from Exxon, Apple, Unilever. Titans of industry. They begged. They pleaded. They cajoled and threatened: Elon Musk said he would quit advising the president. As late as Wednesday night, Ivanka and Jared’s friends were still laying out a Hail Mary pass scenario in which the president would stay in the Paris climate pact at the last minute, and give all the credit for persuasion to the first son-in-law, thereby perhaps placating the investigatory hounds from hell on the young man’s trail.
In the end, the titan’s pleas, Ivanka and Jared’s social future in Manhattan and the future of the planet mattered far, far less than Trump’s base. His real base. Not the coal miners or oil drilling roughnecks or even the evangelicals, who think if the world is melting, well, God Will Sort It Out.
-snip-
Casual Trump watchers still believe that he’s pulling out of the climate pact because he shares with those low-information groups the notion that climate science is a Chinese hoax, and/or that he doesn’t really believe that but is cannily playing to the blue-collar, black-fingernailed coal mining and resource extractor roughneck community that supposedly helped put him in office.
-snip-
What the Great Paris Pullout actually reveals is Trump’s true base. They are known colloquially as “The Yacht People,” and they are very unlike the men and women who show up at Trump rallies. They don the red hat only for laughs.
Billionaires like Carl Icahn and the Koch Brothers (who supposedly loathe Trump but are getting exactly what they have been working at for decades) and their Russian oligarch analogs can’t wait for the administration to gut climate and pollution regulations at home and abandon international sanctions abroad so they can get back to the business of drilling and selling crude oil and other fossil fuels unfettered by the “losers” in the bureaucracy.
Joining that core of powerful influencers are their myriad millionaire Mini-Me’s who own smaller, independent oil and gas extraction concerns in places like Texas and Oklahoma, the latter the home state of the climate-change-denying, “Environmental Protection” Agency director, Scott Pruitt.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/climate-pact-pullout-rewards-the-few-and-powerful/ar-BBBNixu?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=edgsp
