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Climate change alarmists are rending their garments over President-elect Trump’s calls to return America to energy independence, warning he wants to turn the U.S. into a “pariah petrostate.”

Donald Trump has put together a team “that will ramp up fossil fuel production in a country that is already pumping out more crude oil than any nation in history,” laments Marianne Lavelle, writing for Inside Climate News.

The fossil fuel industry’s influence “is bound to be amplified under Trump,” Lavelle writes, “who does not view climate change as a serious problem and who describes ‘energy dominance’ as a policy imperative.”

Lavelle cites the woke eco-activist Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program, who, in her own words, is “dedicated to fighting the climate emergency by advancing a just, renewable, and anti-racist energy future and ending the historical energy violence inflicted on communities of color and the planet.”

Ms. Su has been particularly critical of Trump’s choice of Chris Wright, CEO of the Denver-based Liberty Energy, to lead the Department of Energy.

“Picking someone like Chris Wright is a clear sign that Trump wants to turn the U.S. into a pariah petrostate,” Su said. “He’s damning frontline communities and our planet to climate hell just to pad the already bloated pockets of fossil fuel tycoons.”

Su’s words echo those of Michael Mann, inventor of the infamous “Hockey Stick” climate graph, who offered a similar appraisal of America’s energy future.

“The United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests,” Mann wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “It is now, in short, a petrostate.”

The Collins English Dictionary defines a petrostate as a derogatory term referring to “a small, oil-rich country in which institutions are weak and wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few.”

Examples of petrostates include Bahrain, Brunei, Equatorial Guinea, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar.

Aware of the absurdity of the comparison, other critics have taken a small step back from the analogy, without abandoning it altogether.

“The United States is acting a bit like, I wouldn’t necessarily say a petrostate, but like a state in which the hydrocarbon industry is a huge domestic constituency and source of employment and private sector revenues and now exports,” said Cullen Hendrix, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, cited by Lavelle.

Curiously, Lavelle goes on to criticize how much money energy companies pay in taxes.

“Wyoming gets 59 percent of its state budget from fossil fuel revenue,” she writes, “North Dakota, 29 percent; and Alaska, 21 percent.”

Other states “take in staggering sums, led by Texas, at $14.6 billion annually; California, $7.8 billion; and Pennsylvania, $4.4 billion,” she states.

During Trump’s first term as president, the United States surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production and became a net exporter of energy for the first time in more than 60 years, Lavelle writes.

The 2024 election “has driven home to many how fossil fuel abundance has made the road to climate action harder in the United States,” she says, which many readers may just think is a good thing. A very good thing.

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https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2024/12/01/climate-alarmists-trump-wants-to-turn-america-into-pariah-petrostate/

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