Hence his withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement, the evisceration of the country’s environmental protection regulation to boost American fossil fuel production by at least another 3m barrels a day, and Friday’s suspension of Biden’s $5bn electric vehicle (EV) charging programme.
Rachel Reeves, not to be outflanked by the right, declares that any tensions between commitments to act on climate change and measures to boost economic growth and secure financial credibility should be resolved in favour of the latter – hence her backing a third runway at Heathrow.
Thus the cost of solar panels has fallen by more than 90% in the past decade as China has scaled up production in every component, innovatively transforming the underlying technology; the resulting energy is so cheap that in the Gulf, where there is plentiful sun, solar-produced electricity is regarded as free.
It is not regulation, high taxes and eco-fanaticism that has laid the European car industry so low, as Trump and co like to argue; it is that Europeans did not grasp the growth possibilities of beating the climate crisis fast and aggressively enough.
On Radio 4’s Today programme, the premise for Friday’s interview with the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, was that tackling climate change necessarily meant less growth – a syllogism he failed to recognise.
