Marc Morano, climate skeptic and ClimateDepot.com founder, reveals the UN’s 2015 Paris Agreement as a "fraud" after admitting its goals were unattainable by late 2018, slashing targets from 2°C to 1.5°C. Trump’s withdrawal and pro-energy policies—like Arctic drilling and fracking—boosted U.S. oil production by 20% and created 200,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, while Canada’s oil sands stalled under activist pressure. Morano warns Democrats’ Green New Deal could undo progress, alienating industrial states where unemployment for minorities hit record lows under Trump. Grassroots resistance, from France’s yellow vests to Saudi Arabia’s defiance, signals the UN’s climate narrative is crumbling, offering hope for energy policies rooted in reality over hysteria. [Automatically generated summary]
Year-In-Review: Climate Pot Boss Interview00:02:31
Tonight, we talked to the boss of climatepot.com who's been in this business so long.
Well, by now, the earth was supposed to have already burned up.
It's December 26th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Welcome back.
Well, as you know, over the Christmas break, we are bringing you long-form interviews, semi-biographical in nature, with some of our favorite newsmakers, pundits, or other fan favorites at The Rebel.
And I'm delighted to bring you this interview with Mark Moreno.
He's the leader of climatepot.com, and we recorded this when he was at the Katowice conference that the United Nations were having to battle climate change.
Mark, great to see you.
Thanks for joining us for this year-end interview.
Thank you, Ezra.
Happy to be here.
Well, we're recording this a little bit earlier in the year than we're playing this, so you were still in Poland at the UN conference.
I'd like to talk a little bit about that and the year-in review and what you make of the big trends, because there was a while there when Barack Obama was in the White House and when Justin Trudeau had just been elected in Canada and Emmanuel Macron in Paris, where the world seemed to be going full speed towards the Al Gore model.
Cap and trade, carbon taxes, banning coal, banning fracking.
Guys like you and me were on the retreat.
Here we are three years later.
I think the pendulum is swinging back.
What do you think?
What a difference this year makes.
That's all I can say.
I mean, when you look back at what's happened here, you had, let's go back to 2015, December within the UN-Paris Agreement.
All they talked about was how we've saved the world.
This is the greatest achievement.
Humanities come together.
Al Gore praised it.
John Kerry brought his granddaughter to the signing ceremony at the United Nations building because of the importance of it.
Now, fast forward to 2018, as the year comes to a close.
Paris Agreement Hype00:14:26
What do we find?
The United Nations is admitting that the goals set forth by the UN-Paris Agreement are woefully inadequate, not even close to meeting the demands of their own scientists, which are creating this alarm.
So the UN admits that Paris was a fraud, was a joke, and did not solve anything as they had originally claimed.
That's point one.
Point two is they come up with a new goal from the two degrees Celsius.
They now ratcheted it down in 2018 by the IPCC report of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
And they announced that no one's on track to meet it.
And at the 2018 UN climate summit in Poland, the UN chief, Chief Gutierrez, actually said it is immoral and suicidal not to follow and to ramp up our efforts on climate change.
So we went from we've solved the problem to we are great, humanity came together, to now we are committing suicide and we're being immoral because we're nowhere near meeting the goals and the UN Paris Agreement was pathetic.
That is where we are.
It is profound.
It is shocking.
And it exposes the UN as a very poor, partisan lobbying group, self-interested, but not even good at what they do.
Yeah.
You know, sometimes it's frustrating because when you look at the media, or as I call it, the media party, because on certain issues, they act like a political party pushing a certain agenda.
They're not true reporters.
And I think global warming and carbon taxes is one of those issues.
All they do are cover professional protesters, whether it's Greenpeace or the various Canadian manifestations of Tides Money or Rockefeller Brothers Fund Money.
They talk to big ticket donors like Tom Steyer of California and Al Gore.
And they have this whole Potemkin village, as it could be called, all these actors, all of whom are paid.
And if all you see is that scripted actors, really, you think, well, the whole world believes in this.
Am I the only madman?
Everyone else thinks this is normal.
And then something shocking happened.
And it really is shocking.
The anti-carbon tax riots in France.
And by the way, I don't believe in violence, obviously, and I know you don't either.
But for it to get that bad, where grassroots people don't feel that they have a manifestation of their views in the political system, in the media system, in the legal system, in the diplomatic system, they feel that they're pushed to violence.
That is a shocking proof of the disconnect between the elites.
And you're right there.
We're having this interview.
You're at the UN convention right now.
The fancy elites jet-setting blazing lights from carbon fuels because they're important people, but the little people have to endure energy poverty, have to turn down their thermostat in the winter.
Those carbon riots undo the entire propaganda lie in my mind.
They prove that no one believes this Al Gore cult.
That's my thesis.
What do you think of that?
Yes, I mean, you're absolutely right.
2018, everything I said before, the number one thing that we remember to is the yellow vest climate tax rebellion in Paris, in France, which has then spread across Europe.
And I believe it's going to come to Poland.
We actually have the yellow vests on here.
We've worn it.
We've had them around Poland.
And I think what this shows is that if you actually take what the United Nations wants to do seriously, I'm not even talking about current UN projections.
I'm talking about three years ago, which the UN says now is woefully inadequate.
If you just go with that, you will face a rebellion of your own people.
Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, is the face of the UN climate tax failure.
And there's no other way 2018 can be looked at without that stark reality.
Even the mainstream media gets it.
Now, the spin on that is going to be very similar to the spin about the Eastern Bloc, Soviet states.
Well, yeah, socialism didn't actually fail.
It wasn't done correctly.
So now you have the liberal media, particularly in the Washington and America, saying, well, President Macron didn't go about it correctly.
He should have phased it in.
He should have made sure the poor, they should have transferred wealth differently.
What they're going to do is try to say the climate taxes weren't imposed correctly.
And they're going to then say, they're going to then look at longer time scales, more redistribution schemes, and they're going to come up with all kinds of ways to try to mitigate it.
But the bottom line is this.
The public ain't buying it.
France can't save the world by taxing truck drivers or taxing the poor, the middle class on fuel.
It's not going to happen.
And you know why I can say that?
Because even though you don't have to be a skeptic, just listen to the United Nations.
They now admit their goals were completely wrong, unattainable.
And the key country that's announcing our withdrawal, the United States, is doing better than all the European signatories, which are looking their noses down at the United States for not being in the Paris Agreement.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there was one very memorable moment because it had a little bit of alliteration, but also it was just, it perfectly summed up Donald Trump on climate.
And I'm going to play a very short clip here.
It's when Trump announced that he was withdrawing the United States, at least serving notice of withdrawing the United States from this UN global warming scheme.
And he made the announcement in Pennsylvania, which of course is a coal state, but increasingly it's a fracking state for oil and especially natural gas.
200,000 new jobs in Pennsylvania from fracking.
Average household pays $1,000 a year less for energy than they did before fracking.
Like it's just a win-win-win.
Cheaper energy, lots of jobs.
And of course, when you're talking about the United States, now it's energy independent.
Here's a very quick clip of Trump making that announcement.
I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.
Mark, I love that, that I represent Pittsburgh, not Paris.
We're doing this interview a little bit a few days before we're airing it when you're still at the UN conference.
How many people at that conference you're at could say, I represent Korea, not the UN?
I represent, you know, Finland, not the UN.
Like when you are at that UN, it's like something changes in your mind and you forget where you're from and you forget your responsibility to your people.
You don't.
I'm not talking about you, but most of the delegates there, they think they're citizens of the world, that they're unfettered by any democratic accountability.
People there have forgotten that they represent their cities, towns, and countries.
They think they're part of this new Star Trek-like international federation or something.
Interestingly enough, the developing poor nations are there to represent their countries, but they're there for the climate cash that's been promised to them.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, the climate fund, and they're going to use that money for re-election to build monuments, ensure the re-election.
And they'll get more money, the more they keep their people down.
But you're absolutely right.
The other countries, something happens to them.
You get zombified when you come here because you start having, you realize in your mind, the media, the UN delegates, the bureaucrats all expect me to pay lip service to this climate crisis.
But we're seeing a lot of resistance this year.
As I mentioned, Saudi Arabia, you have Brazil, you have Poland even resisting with that.
So I think where leadership comes in, eventually China, Russia, and a lot of other adversaries of the United States are going to say, why are we playing this game with the United Nations when the U.S. is stumbling their nose?
And that's part of Donald Trump's negotiating strategy to break apart this process.
Basically saying, we're not going to abide.
You have fun dealing with the UN bureaucrats.
How long are Russia and all these other countries going to do it?
We're already seeing the break this year, and it's a wonderful thing to see.
And hopefully countries will start getting more and more of their self-interest and their nationalist pride back and rejecting this UN agenda.
You know, when I wrote my book, Ethical Oil, almost 10 years ago, I made the case for Canada's oil sands.
And I wasn't that aware of the fracking revolution in the United States.
In fact, it really hadn't kicked in to high gear.
And when I wrote that book, Mark, I thought, well, the United States is always going to need some oil imports, but Mexico is declining and the North Sea is declining.
So the oil sands are the obvious answer.
And that was absolutely true when I wrote the book, but because of environmental activists and Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau, the oil sands expansion has been slowed to a crawl.
But America didn't wait for Canada to get its act together.
America went full tilt on the fracking.
And now that Obama's gone, Donald Trump opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil, opened up oil exporting opportunities.
I saw a headline for the first time this week.
Mark, that the United States for one week in November was a net oil exporter.
America is now a net energy exporter.
Yeah.
But a net oil exporter.
It actually sold more oil to foreigners, including Canada, than it bought from foreigners.
I never thought that would be possible, but it's not possible.
It's happened now.
Now keep in mind, even when we had George W. Bush, he tried to be pro-energy, but he could never get that like on, he could never get Arctic drilling.
He could never get a lot of this stuff passed.
But because even now in many states in Colorado, other places, Democratic governors realize this importance of American energy in the national, and you have Donald Trump worried about trade deficits.
So this is all going with Donald Trump's philosophy to export more than you import.
And I think America is becoming just more and more dominant with energy.
And I think it can only get higher because what Donald Trump's done, not just regulatorily, it's a mindset.
It's a goal.
No longer are we demonizing that energy at the highest levels of government.
We're praising it and coming to a UN conference, praising carbon-based energy, oil, gas, coal.
And it's just wonderful to see that has a residual effect.
And I think that's why we're seeing countries like Saudi Arabia now saying, I'm not signing on to this UN report.
Get away from me.
How long is it going to be before other countries start joining them?
They're not going to want their rear ends kicked by the United States.
Yeah.
You know, it is so incredible.
And, you know, Venezuela, the largest oil reserves in the world, even larger than Saudi Arabia.
Most people don't know that, but Venezuela actually has more proven reserves than the Saudis.
And yet last month, the little state of North Dakota, population 800,000, produced more oil than Venezuela.
And that is a combination of ingenuity and technology, fracking, and freedom, and a pro-energy president.
And of course, it was still doing well before Trump, but it's never been higher.
And there's something amazing that America has increased its oil in 20%.
And I'm not just praising America, because I know Canada could do that too.
What scares me, Mark, and I know this is less important from the global scheme of things, but I'm a Canadian.
I love Canada.
I'm from Alberta originally, the oil province of our country.
And as you and I talk about America's great energy successes and how coal is coming back and Arctic drilling and fracking and exporting, I'm thrilled for the world.
I'm thrilled for America.
But I'm also sad that maybe we missed our moment.
Now we can have a good future.
But I feel like this should be us.
This should be us celebrating record oil production.
This should be us looking at oil getting on tanker ships in Vancouver, selling it to India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan to displace OPEC conflict oil.
I feel like maybe Canada missed the moment, and I say that with great sorrow.
Well, maybe as an American, I'd love to see Ford come in and replace Justin Trudeau.
What are the odds of that happening?
Could you have a Canadian Trump someday come in and join forces with the United States in this great pro-energy, pro-freedom revolution?
Well, I mean, in Canada, we have the situation in Quebec.
You have to pretty much be able to speak French to be the prime minister.
I don't think Doug Ford knows any French at all.
But yeah, I love Doug Ford, and he's pro-pipeline.
Who knows?
Anyway, that was sort of a personal musing because watching America become energy independent, in my mind, and in my book, Ethical Oil, the dream was the oil sands displaces OPEC.
But in reality, Texas, North Dakota, and other American states have displaced OPEC.
And that's wonderful for Americans, and we love America.
And it's wonderful for America's political independence because when you're over a barrel that the Saudis control, they control much more than economics.
They control your politics.
Let me ask you about the permanence of this, because you and I are both Trump fans.
Trump might not be reelected in 2020.
I hope he is.
Trump just lost control of the Congress, the House of Representatives, and they'll be sworn in next in a couple weeks.
Is the best over?
Is the Trump success now pretty much set and the Democrats will try to erode it?
What can we look at for the next two years and for the 2020 presidential election?
Will energy policy stay where it is?
Trump's Legacy: Setting the Stage00:06:47
Well, you know, I think we should end on a high note.
I don't want to answer that.
So good night, everyone.
Good night.
It's a tough one.
You're kind of depressing me now, but here's the bottom line.
President Trump is now going to face a hostile Congress.
And what that means is the media is going to even ramp up more.
There's talk of a new global warming climate panel.
There's going to be all sorts of symbolic legislation to reverse a lot of the stuff Trump's done, put pressure on EPA to re-regulate climate regulations, to repeal Arctic drilling.
And there's also going to be talk of this Green New Deal, which is actually, and I'm actually going to have a special report on this soon.
It is about 80% non-environment and climate related or energy related.
It's all about healthcare, college education, all sorts of the socialist agenda wrapped into one with mentions of energy and environmental regulation.
That's what we're going to hear about for the next two years.
I don't think they can undo anything Donald Trump's done in two years, but it does mean that Donald Trump has probably done 80% of what or 90% of what he can do in the first two years.
And the next two years are going to be a state of the course.
I expect a lot of more ambitious rollbacks or changes.
Only he can really do is executive order at this point on these issues.
So it really comes down to the 2020 election.
And you use the word permanence, which is why I wanted to end on a high note and almost said goodbye here.
But the problem is if a Democrat were to be elected, I'm not going to lie, about a year, a year and a half, everything Donald Trump could be done could be almost undone because what Obama did was through executive order.
What Trump did was backstraw executive order.
And there'll be, you know, we'd need some legislative things to have to happen, but it could very easily be undone.
And we could be right back on that path where we were when Obama, President Obama left office.
So to answer your question, it remains to be seen.
It's an open question how permanent.
But let's enjoy it while it lasts.
It's Christmas.
It's the holiday season.
Who wants to think about that?
Come on.
This is failure.
Let's celebrate the failure of the United Nations.
Well, let me play one more clip for you.
And it'll bring back nightmares.
It'll bring back bad memories.
But it'll also allow us to realize the bullet we all dodged when 60 plus million of your countrymen voted for Trump instead of for this lady who was talking about putting coal miners out of work.
Here's Hillary Clinton at a town hall meeting running for president in 2016.
This was when she had yet to secure the Democratic nomination.
And she was asked about working class men in Pennsylvania or West Virginia.
And she said, sorry, they're going to be out of work.
So here's a quick clip from that.
I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country.
Because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.
Mark, that's a reminder of why Hillary Clinton lost the Rust Belt.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia.
I mean, West Virginia is the most pro-Trump state.
That was never in question.
But a lot of those Midwest states, they didn't want to roll over and die yet.
They didn't want to say, well, steel is gone, autos are gone.
They said, well, let's give this Trump guy a chance.
My question for you is, and I'm asking you to use your prediction, your crystal ball.
So I know this is just guesswork here, but maybe you can indulge me.
Given the blue-collar success of Trump, which is digging up turf that has voted Democrat for a generation, do you think that the 2020 Democrat candidate, whoever he or she is, will make that same calculation that Hillary Clinton has, that Tom Steyer of California has, that Al Gore has, which is I want to go for the hip urban woke voter,
the Alexandria Cortez voter, you know, activist, grievance studies voter, and to heck with working men and women.
Do you think they'll make the same calculation that Hillary Clinton did and run against in the industrial heartland?
Because you and I talked about the ease of revoking the legislative successes of Trump.
Fine.
But once you do that, do these Democrats have the chutzpah to say, we're actually going to shut down coal mines.
We're actually going to shut down oil rigs.
We're actually going to shut down this energy boom, not just a piece of paper, but we're going to tell hundreds of thousands of American black women, you have to lose your jobs because of my ideology.
Will they do that again?
It's a very good question.
It's a schism of the Democratic Party.
First of all, just to refresh, black unemployment, Hispanic unemployment, and American overall unemployment at record lows since the records really reliable records of the 1960s.
That's what this has done.
I mean, it is unleashed in America that no one's seen since records began in among black and Hispanics.
So the question is, where does the Democratic Party go?
That's the larger question.
Do they go the socialist Bernie Sanders, Cortez, Octavia-Cortez route, or do they go, you know, a Beto O'Rourke from Texas who tries to be more moderate?
And he comes from an energy state.
They'd probably be more effective going with a Beto O'Rourke, but I don't know that they're going to be able to.
I think they're going to do what Hillary did and maybe a step beyond by not even trying to smooth over the socialist edges.
Because the Democratic Party, in large part, is energized now by this avowed socialist movement.
It used to be socialism was a bad word even in Democrat circles, not anymore.
So I can't imagine this message playing well in Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio, all these key states where Trump did very well last time.
But it's a question of you don't know who the nominee is yet.
And the only other negative I'd say for Donald Trump is he probably, as we get closer to the election, should tone it down a little bit because you don't want to energize the other side, but he needs to keep his base active.
It was okay to do that for a midterm.
But for the general election, I think he needs to make an overt outreach to African Americans.
He had Kanye West and the NFL legend Jim Brown in the White House.
He needs to build upon that.
We had an NBA star, what's his name, who likes the North Korean dictator, Dennis Rodman, actually wearing a Trump hat at one point.
12 Years Of Tipping Points00:03:16
This is a big deal when you couple that.
So I think Donald Trump in the next year and a half has to have a strategy to court African Americans.
And I think it could be quite successful if he does.
I got one last question for you.
I saw a headline the other day in the CBC that made me laugh.
They said that we have 12 years to save the planet.
And it was very precise.
It wasn't 11 years.
It wasn't 13 years.
It was 12 years.
And I just thought, well, that's a pretty precise calculation.
But we've heard that sort of warning endlessly.
We have 20 years.
We have till the year 2000.
We have the year till the year 2010.
And a good doomsday message is far enough into the future that you're not going to be held accountable, but close enough that it sounds urgent.
Like a you huckster knows you're not going to say the earth is going to end next week because the moment of truth comes too quickly.
You don't want to say the world's going to end in a thousand years because no one cares.
So they've chosen 12 years.
And I just love the precision of that.
But the problem is they've been saying 12 years now for many years.
I mean, I forget the exact year that Al Gore's movie came out.
It was probably about 12 years ago.
So my question is for young people, millennials, the most skeptical generation, the most cynical generation, the most media savvy generation, into trolling, into memes, into irony.
Do they believe these boomers, like Tom Steyer and Al Gore with their billions or hundreds of millions jet setting around?
You and I of a certain vintage, I think we're in our 40s, late 40s.
Do you think high school kids, college kids, millennials, Generation Y or Z, do they believe this show and tell, this we're all going to die in 12 years?
Or do they say, you're just lying to me, just shut up?
Are they believers like the boomers or are they skeptics?
Unfortunately, I think a lot of them are believers because this is the first generation from kindergarten through college has been indoctrinated.
Now, they might reject the hysteria, the tipping points, but I don't think they challenge the premise.
I think they just think, oh, yeah, all scientists agree and it's bad.
The good news is they generally don't vote that much and they're not that politically active, which I think is good because we don't want that kind of ignorance voting necessarily.
But I've noticed even talking to college crowds, we have a collegiate division.
And over the last five years, the crowds have become just more brainwashed is the word I would use on this climate narrative.
It doesn't mean they're more active.
It just means they're like, oh, yeah, it must be true because that's all I've ever heard.
But it's funny you mentioned the tipping points.
That 12-year figure is directly out of the new UN report from October that the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kuwait have rejected and not accepted this time around.
They just, Tom Steyer's been touting it all over for this.
Mark, we had a bit of a hiccup there in our Skype connection.
The Climate Tax Rebellion00:02:01
I'm so grateful to you for joining us for this year in review, though.
And it was more of like five years in review and five years ahead.
Last word to you.
End on a hopeful note.
I mean, we talked about Hillary and Tom Steyer and the Democrats and millennial brainwashing.
But if there was one thing you wanted to leave our viewers with over the Christmas break, one reason that we should be optimistic, give us that now.
The best reason is what happened in France.
The climate tax rebellion gives hope to humanity that a politician can't tell its people, we will double, triple your fuel prices in order to, quote, save the world, unquote, and make the world safe for your great-grandchildren 100 years from now based on the United Nations science.
People aren't buying it.
People don't care.
That gives me great hope for humanity.
If France can turn against it and the rebellion spreads, that's fantastic.
I'm optimistic by the number of countries now willing to stand up to the United Nations.
And so that is huge from where we were two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago.
No one ever questioned the UN, not Republican presidents.
No other leaders have done it.
So it's now an open season on the United Nations Climate Panel, and that needs to continue.
And I see that continuing into 2019.
And there's no better reason to ring in the new year with the decline of the United Nations climate claims.
Outstanding.
Mark Morano, thanks so much for joining us today at some length, and as you do so often throughout the year.
And I'm so grateful that this year you were there at the Climate Change Conference with our own Sheila Gunread.
And I look forward to a great 2019 with you.
Thanks very much and all the best to you, my friend.
Thanks, Chris.
Thank you, Ezra.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Well, that's our friend Mark Morano from climatepot.com.
We recorded that a little bit earlier this year, as you could see.