Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Greens are inventing elaborate fantasies of shadowy right wing conspiracies to explain President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Treaty – but still refuse to consider the possibility they are wrong about global warming.

Trump’s Paris exit: climate science denial industry has just had its greatest victory

Graham Readfearn

Trump’s confirmed withdrawal from the United Nation’s Paris climate deal shows it’s time to get to grips with the climate science denial industry.

Moments before the US president, Donald Trump, strode into the Rose Garden, TV cameras pictured his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, shaking hands and looking generally pleased with himself.

Bannon once called global warming a “manufactured crisis”.

Bannon, with Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, were among the loudest and most forceful voices in Trump’s ear, imploring the president to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement.

During his speech, Trump claimed the Paris deal was bad for America. The themes were economic, but the speech was laced with jingoistic protectionism.

“Our withdrawal represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty,” he said.

The foundation for Trump’s dismissal of the Paris deal – and for the people who pushed him the hardest to do it – is the rejection of the science linking fossil-fuel burning to dangerous climate change.

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So what comes next? Hopefully, one realisation will be this.

Now is the time to learn about the methods, the tactics, the personnel, the structure and the reach of the global climate science denial industry.

They just convinced the leader of the United States to pull the plug on a historic deal signed by almost 200 countries, and instead join Nicaragua and Syria as the only countries not signed up.

It is time to take that climate science denial industry seriously.