The UN Climate Hydra Gets a Second Life From the Democrat Landslide

From Tikak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

Trump’s landslide victory in 2024 derailed the climate juggernaut. But last week’s midterms blue wave showed there’s life in the UN green hydra yet

By April last year it had taken President Trump’s energy dominance agenda less than 60 days to put the entire climate juggernaut, more than 30 years in the making, at risk of collapse. Bloomberg was then lamenting that “years of climate action” were being “demolished in days”, and sceptics were permitted a little schadenfreude. For a second term US President working to seal his legacy, nothing can be taken for granted until the midterm elections. Last Tuesday, those elections arrived, and American voters handed the Democrats both the House and the Senate. Liberal tears have turned to champagne. The UN climate hydra, with energy-policy tentacles reaching into every ministry, central bank and development agency on the planet, has been spared what looked like an extinction-level event.

For almost two years, the Trumpian counter-revolution cut off the beast’s heads one after another. America’s second exit from the Paris Agreement took effect on January 27th 2026. Washington then withdrew from 66 international organisations, the UNFCCC and the IPCC among them, after the President had told the UN General Assembly that climate change was the “greatest con job” ever perpetrated on the world. In February, the EPA rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal keystone of federal greenhouse gas regulation. Now the climate industrial complex, from Turtle Bay to Brussels to the NGO war rooms of Washington, is breathing a great collective sigh of relief. A lame-duck President without the power of the purse is one whose agenda can be slowed, harassed and litigated. What the relief is not, however, is a mandate.

A cost-of-living revolt rebranded as a climate victory

Exit polls had Trump’s approval at 38%, historically low for a president at the midterms, and 89% of voters told CBS that the cost of living was a major or crucial factor in their vote. Nor were voters enamoured of the victors: the Democratic Party, which stands at 29% approval in the latest NBC poll, below even than the 38% for the Republican Party. The Associated Press named the drivers of the blue wave as high prices, the Iran war and concerns over Government corruption. As Charles Rotter noted at Watts Up With That, divided government “may slow some of Trump’s energy rollbacks, but it is just not a climate referendum”.

That has not stopped the green press from treating it as one. Climate Home News, in its COP31 briefing, declared that the mood ahead of the Antalya talks had been “sweetened somewhat by Lula’s surprise re-election in Brazil and American voters delivering a thumbs down to climate change-sceptic Donald Trump”. Grist announced that the sweep “will have profound consequences for climate action”. Scientific American handed its headline to the Union of Concerned Scientists: “It’s a new day in Washington.” The League of Conservation Voters, whose Victory Fund boasts of pouring over $125 million into the campaign, called Trump’s energy agenda “a political disaster for Republicans”. The Sierra Club hailed a “clear rejection” of the Republican “war on affordable clean energy”. And the Sunrise Movement, celebrating the election of its co-founder William Lawrence in Michigan, tweeted “Green New Deal, here we come.”

The less invested corners of the mainstream media tell a different story. Axios ran the headline ‘Democrats’ blue wave leaves climate behind’. Time magazine reported that Texas’s Democratic Senator-elect James Talarico has promised to protect oil-and-gas jobs, that Kansas’s Adam Hamilton campaigned on “all-of-the-above” energy, and that South Carolina’s Annie Andrews called for suspending the federal gas tax. These are not the policies of a party elected to shut down the fossil fuel economy. As Sterling Burnett put it on the Climate Realism Show, quoted by Charles Rotter, Grist is “whistling past the graveyard”: “people didn’t vote for climate change [policy].”

The irony is thick. Voters punished the party in power for living costs driven in large part by the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Around 20 million barrels a day – about a fifth of world petroleum liquids consumption – and a fifth of global LNG supplies normally pass through that strait. When it closed, nobody reached for a wind turbine. Governments reached for strategic reserves and alternative crude and LNG cargoes. The crisis showed that the world still runs on fossil fuels, and the Hormuz blockade showed that the real threat to Europe was always Neptune, God of the Sea, not Gaia, Goddess of Earth. That the green lobby now claims the electoral fallout of a fossil fuel supply shock as a vote for less fossil fuel use is a feat of political alchemy worthy of the Church of Climate.

The power of the purse and the politics of lawfare

The President retains his veto, and as the MIT Technology Review points out, neither chamber is anywhere close to the two-thirds majority needed to override it. The green subsidies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, largely gutted by the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cannot be restored by statute while Trump sits in the Oval Office.

None of this means that the Democrats’ victory is toothless. The House controls the money, and money is the oxygen of the green subsidy machine. Democrats will now write the must-pass appropriations bills. Chellie Pingree, the top Democrat overseeing EPA and Interior funding on the House Appropriations Committee, told Grist: “If you’re not going to spend the money, we have the power to withhold other funding.” Expect every spending deal to come laden with riders forcing the administration to disburse frozen climate grants – and shutdown brinkmanship whenever it refuses.

Then there is the lawfare. Within hours of the results, Robert Garcia, in line to chair the House Oversight Committee, posted a two-word message on X: “LAWYER UP.” His committee is readying investigations into the Trump family’s business dealings, immigration enforcement and much else. Hakeem Jeffries, the presumptive Speaker, told ABC on Sunday that he was a “hard yes” on impeaching Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. On energy, Politico reported in October that Democrats were plotting a post-midterm reckoning for EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, with document demands, testimony, subpoenas and even impeachment on the table. It was Zeldin who promised last year to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion”. The high priests of Green have not forgotten.

And the President himself? Trump told House Republicans in January that if they lost the midterms, “they’ll find a reason to impeach me”. Jeffries says only that Democrats “haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out”, but prediction markets more than doubled the odds of impeachment by the end of 2027 overnight. Conviction needs 67 Senate votes, which the Democrats do not have. Removal is not the point. The point is to bog the administration down in hearings, subpoenas and court fights, so that the officials who dismantled the climate apparatus spend the next two years defending themselves instead of finishing the job. Victor Davis Hanson has long warned that such opponents do not fight by the ‘Marquess of Queensberry’ rules. The next two years will prove him right.

Antalya’s Hormuz narrative

The timing could not be better for the green ideologues gathering in Antalya for COP31, from November 9th to the 20th. There is talk that the green NGOs and EU climate zealots will be strutting around the meeting rooms with the message that the Trump dalliance with the fossil fuel industry has proved its failure. They will link the cost-of-living crisis perceived by voters directly to Trump’s energy and climate policies. There is little logic in the perceived link. The Hormuz crisis actually showed the world the importance of access to fossil fuels. Renewables are no substitute for the needs of modern industry, especially now with the voracious appetite for baseload power of AI data centres, which could double their share of US electricity by 2030.

But logic has never been the strong suit of the COP circuit. As I wrote last week, the climate establishment has already settled on its storyline, what the World Resources Institute’s David Waskow calls “heat and Hormuz”, referring to the warmer-than-usual summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the blockade of the Persian Gulf strait. Together they have given rise to the European narrative that the only rational route for the West – given the ‘climate crisis’ as signified by last summer’s ‘heat’ – is to turn to ‘renewable energy’. Renewables, the argument goes, do not depend on the whims of “petrostates and dictators”, as Ed Miliband, then Energy Secretary and now Foreign Secretary in Andy Burnham’s Government, righteously proclaimed. UN climate chief Simon Stiell says fossil fuel dependency is “ripping away national security and sovereignty”.

When Hormuz closed, ‘Mad Ed’ vowed to “double down not back down” on Net Zero, an economic illiteracy I dissected in these pages. The imperatives of “climate justice” and the “energy transition” out of fossil fuels, in their view, call for a complete repudiation of the Trumpian legacy in his ‘energy dominance’ policies. To “heat and Hormuz”, the green NGOs and EU delegations will now add a third exhibit: the voters of Ohio, Texas and South Carolina, supposedly having repudiated “drill, baby, drill”.

The COP31 hosts themselves give the game away. Turkey still generates a third of its electricity from coal. Its Energy Minister spent the weeks before the summit pitching the port of Ceyhan as a “global energy hub” for Iraqi oil and Qatari gas, an alternative to Hormuz. Meanwhile UNEP’s latest Emissions Gap Report concedes that 1.5°C is out of reach, and UN chief António Guterres now asks only that any overshoot be “as small and as short as possible”.

On the matter that really animates these gatherings – money – the cupboard is bare. An internal EU document seen by Reuters says there is “no scope” for new climate finance commitments. Europe is busy rearming, and money spent on the military cannot also be spent on solar farms in Africa. A Democratic House cannot reverse that. Nor can it bring the United States back into the UNFCCC. As I argued after last year’s COP30 in Belém, Brazil, America’s walkout from the UN climate club marked an Eisenhower-at-Suez moment for Europe’s pretensions to global climate leadership. That verdict stands.

The real contest is 2028

What the midterms have produced, then, is a stalemate, and the next two years will be contentious. Lame duck Trump will not be able to push through policies via his Energy, Interior and EPA cabinet members with as much vigour, each department now facing a hostile committee chair with subpoena power. But the Democrats will not be able to push their own versions of the energy and climate policies they back either. They can obstruct, investigate and attach riders, but they cannot legislate their way back to the Obama-Biden green agenda while the veto pen remains in the White House. Until January 2029, the US President’s executive authority remains to ensure that America’s energy dominance agenda remains broadly in place.

The danger lies further out. Nothing in the Trumpian counter-revolution is irreversible, and the institutional machinery of the climate consensus remains in place. Given the Leftward lurch in the Democrat party, there is much pork that Democrat politicians can promise their green constituencies. The surge in DSA candidates has been across the board. By the ADL’s count, 106 candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America won last Tuesday, eight of them to the House. Socialists took the mayoralties of Washington, DC and Providence, and won the largest bloc of socialist state legislators ever to sit in Albany, a year after Zohran Mamdani’s election as Mayor of New York. Nithya Raman, backed by the DSA, also won the Los Angeles mayoralty. Yet for the next two years, their wins will have limited impact at the federal policy level.

The longer game is another matter. The broad Leftist alliance of Green and pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel factions within the party, drawn from a mainly young demographic, proved its insurgent strength last Tuesday. It may well emerge as the key dynamic in the 2028 Presidential election. In that case, not only will the Republican party be sunk, but there might be a full reversion to the anti-fossil fuel, pro-Net Zero green policies reminiscent of the Obama and Biden administrations, at precisely the moment when the Hormuz shock should have taught the world the value of secure, affordable hydrocarbons.

The Democrats won by running on affordability, often against the very data centres and utility bills that green mandates negatively impact. If they read their victory as a licence to raise energy costs in the name of the climate, they will discover in 2028 what the Republicans discovered last Tuesday: voters usually punish those who make their lives more expensive and onerous. The hydra has a second life. It need not have a third.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/11/12/the-un-climate-hydra-gets-a-second-life-from-the-democrat-landslide/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.