Trump Should Not Have Walked Away from Paris Accord -- He Should Have Run Away

In the midst of hysterics and hyperbole Trump turning away from this “climate deal” was not a political maneuver; it was common sense.

This week the media went into meltdown mode when Donald Trump announced that the US would be pulling out of the Paris Accord On Climate Change. According to most media reports it was proof he does not care about the environment, and the Republican party wants to doom the entire planet. CNN had a delightfully understated chyron following Trump’s decision:

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Based on this evidence it stands as definitive proof Donald Trump IS The Silver Surfer! What all this teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling coverage fails to grasp is that if they were even approaching the truth on the matter then Trump would have at his disposal the easiest method of becoming beloved. If the planet is truly in the balance then if Trump were to sign onto the accord he’d be hailed as the man who saved the entire planet! (Yes I know, the media would never demean themselves in that manner.)

During the furor details are easily bypassed. For instance, as European leaders hurl  condemnation at Trump/US for wanting to “kill the planet”, these ecological elitists had their greenhouse gas output increase. But those are mere details.

The joke in all of this is the so-called Paris Accord does nothing even approaching a workable solution to curbing global warming. I’m not referring to the debate surrounding the cause of warming here (the anthropogenic accusation). I mean the actual contents of the agreement itself do not address the very problems it lays out.

In a New York Times synopsis of the agreement we get the insights from the framers, and they show how unfocused the whole enterprise is in regards to planetary resolutions. While “goals” and “targets” are frequently mentioned throughout, how to attain these lofty projections is rather ethereal. As one of the Times’  reporters describes:

This agreement adopts a more ambitious target for limiting global warming than in the past by mentioning 1.5 degrees Celsius as part of the concrete goal to stay well below 2 degrees. If that were to be actually achieved, it would likely ward off some of the most severe effects of climate change. For example, although we don’t know the exact temperature, there is a trigger point at which the whole Greenland ice sheet and the West Antarctic ice sheet will melt. There is a chance that staying below 2 degrees Celsius would avoid that trigger point, and an even better chance if we stay below 1.5 degrees.

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Now just try untangling all that supposition. The accords states “IF” it were achieved it would “LIKELY” ward off “SOME” effects, giving a “CHANCE” to stay below an unknown trigger temperature. Rather amazing to have so much ambition attached to such an unfocused resolution. We have no idea where we are going, but floor it, and we’ll make good time!

All the targeting concerns the end of this century, with a projected decrease of only 0.2 degrees, according to MIT researchers. Now, MIT has tried to massage this stat, declaring, “The 0.2 degree-figure used in the talking point reflects the incremental impact of the Paris Agreement compared with the earlier Copenhagen agreement. If you instead compare the impact of the Paris Agreement to no climate policy, then the temperature reduction is much larger, on the order of 1 degree Celsius.” This itself is misleading. There is a climate policy – the Copenhagen agreement. Therefore the 0.2% in effect IS the net benefit of the Paris Accord.

Even then, this is only achieved with the most lofty of projections. The crux of the Paris Accord is that any and all progress is essentially voluntary. While critics of The President love to say “197 countries have signed on!”, what they don’t say is that there is no enforcement in the plan. It is a non-binding agreement. Any and all greenhouse improvements are promises taken on faith.

Since actual environmental achievement is not the goal, then what is the purpose? Simply put – wealth transfer. While Trump and the US are demonized as having just ruined the planet the Accord is centered on something else entirely – cash. A precursor to Paris was the Bonn climate talks, two years ago. The crux of the talks in Bonn and Paris had been on the issue of “climate finance”. This is the issue of developing nations being granted hundreds of billions anually to create green energy infrastructure and curb their elevated emissions.

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The developed western nations of Europe, and the US, are expected to pay trillions into the funding as a form of “ecological reparations”. These countries on the receiving end have been rather vocal in what is owed to them:

  • That row has galvanized the G77 and China group of countries, a body representing more than 130 nations in the negotiations, and accounting for around 80% of the world’s population.

Note that inclusion. China, the economic powerhouse and largest creator of energy on the planet, is considered a “developing nation” in the Paris Accord. So the country that is the second-largest economy and produces the most greenhouse pollution would have been poised to collect billions, as the US is paying a penalty for producing half as much greenhouse gases.

Further, China’s output of those gases will only be increasing. As the country’s leaders talk of pledging to cap their emissions, that “promise” is based off a projected peak — in 2030. And like all other non-existent attributed details in the plan, China does not state at what levels that peak will be reached. So as the Chi Coms are pocketing development cash they will be ramping up their emissions, to unmeasurable levels…in the name of lowering global temperatures, in a non-binding agreement.

Hundreds of billions would be paid out for a plan that has no measurable effect on the environment, as the globe’s worse polluters would be rewarded for unenforceable emission standards. For all of this the US was poised to be hamstrung economically.

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We should be thanking Donald Trump for extricating us from this bureaucratic fiasco

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