Climate alarmists are having trouble deciding which actions by Donald Trump will bring the end of everything first and worst. But for at least some of them, it’s getting the U.S. out of the “Paris Agreement” again. The New York Times complained that “The United States will be one of only four countries outside the Paris Agreement, which is designed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.” The piece called it an “about-face” because Trump had done it before, though it was surely Biden promptly rejoining that was the “about-face”. But the main point is, it wouldn’t matter if the Paris Agreement were designed to make us all tall, young, smart and sexy. It’s that Paris is now a clapped-out relic that didn’t achieve anything it was designed to do.
Heatmap tries to lighten the mood with “Solar Was the Biggest Non-Loser of Trump’s First Day”. But it’s not much consolation, is it? Nor is Climate Home News engaging in, dare we call it denial, by saying Trump:
“confirmed that the US will exit the Paris Agreement, doubled down on fossil fuels and pushed back against electric vehicles and wind power. It’s worth remembering, however, that though Trump’s team may assert that sending a letter saying it’s left the Paris climate pact means the US is out, it actually isn’t (and the letter appears not to have landed yet). The process takes a year, and as legal expert and former lead US negotiator Sue Biniaz points out, ignoring that is inconsistent with international law.”
Yeah, international law. We don’t think he gives a hoot. Nor does it change anything, not even the mood.
The U.S. is out of a treaty that wasn’t working anyway. And it’s out of gas or lack of it. Indeed, under the heading (second item here) “On Day 1, Trump Allies America with Climate Disaster”, David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times complains that while it’s the second go-round, the first “helped kick off a remarkable period of worldwide solidaristic backlash” of a good kind, “the global climate equivalent of the liberal ‘resistance’” that worked so well that uh never mind. But this time:
“there are not obvious signs of anything like that on the horizon now – no large-scale protest movements adding adherents and gaining steam, few major global leaders treating the climate crisis in existential terms or pushing policy that would make decarbonization a core goal of economic development, and a rapidly dwindling number of corporate leaders even paying lip service to climate urgency.”
More like a pell-mell flight from GFANZ, come to think of it.
The Wikipedia entry on Paris is typically absurd, saying:
“Many of the exact provisions of the Paris Agreement have yet to be straightened out, so that it may be too early to judge effectiveness. According to the 2020 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with the current climate commitments of the Paris Agreement, global mean temperatures will likely rise by more than 3°C by the end of the 21st century.”
So a treaty signed a decade ago to meet a supposedly urgent, existential crisis still contains key provisions “yet to be straightened out”, raising questions of whether they know what “exact” means among many other things. But obviously that projection, to the extent that it’s worth anything, shows that Paris is not doing anything. As does the fact that estimates of annual human greenhouse gas emissions show no downturn after it was signed and pseudo-implemented.
Likewise a piece in Grist quoted the president of the World Resources Institute that:
“It simply makes no sense for the United States to voluntarily give up political influence and pass up opportunities to shape the exploding green energy market”.
Which piles one fantasy on another. What political influence due to being in Paris? What “exploding green energy market” (unless he means lithium-ion batteries)?
At the risk of seeming all reality-based, maybe it’s because that giant movement led by a little girl didn’t accomplish much of anything, and its promises were revealed as hollow. It could matter, out here in the world. In which, Wallace-Wells adds as if it were an afterthought:
“Only four countries in the world are now not party to the Paris agreement: Iran, Libya, Yemen and the United States. This is ugly company, but it no longer feels so exceptional that the United States has abandoned the principle of climate cooperation; other countries have taken advantage of the voluntary, enforcement-free framework to simply drag their feet.”
Aka it didn’t work. And why exactly is it so bad to have the bad orange man abandon something that wasn’t working anyway? Necessarily implying that it would be so good to stay with a failed policy.
Somehow the symbolism seems to matter more than the substance. Thus a fundraising email from the Guardian howled that “Trump’s first day was a chilling precursor of the threat to come” because:
“He’s started as he means to go on. Even in his first few hours back in office, Donald Trump showed the United States and the world what lies in store for the next four years. He pulled the US out of the Paris climate accords – again – and gave the green light for increased drilling for fossil fuels, proudly declaring that the US has ‘the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it’. He prepared the ground for mass deportations, as he fired the top judges of the US immigration court. And he all but declared war on a loyal US ally, announcing that he wants the Panama Canal – ‘and we’re taking it back’.”
And even those who are not big fans of Trump’s overall approach to governing, which we are not, might in contemplating that list decide not to put Paris first.
Of course one is nostalgic for one’s youth, and if it involved the romance of Paris before the barbarians invaded so much the more poignant, as for Wallace-Wells:
“The agreement was in many ways the culmination of a decades-long effort, beginning in 1992, to organize a cooperative, positive-sum approach to a maddening challenge of global governance – a throwback tribute to the liberal international order, if one often honored in the breach. Today that whole project appears in tatters – not just because of Trump, though his return to the most powerful office in the land confirms the trend.”
No. Because Paris couldn’t work, only a fool would have expected a “voluntary, enforcement-free framework” to usher in a golden liberal New World Order, and if Paris had achieved its targets they would have done nothing to stop “climate change” according to the very models that supposedly made it urgent. (Incredibly, the UN calls it “a legally binding international treaty on climate change”. But it only binds nations to do whatever they feel like.)
When Trump’s the one facing reality and you’re not, you’re in a heap of trouble.
The biggest CO2 emissions "offenders" who are part of the Paris Agreement have no intention of reducing their emissions,even if they pledge to do so.
"Global governance"! Who really said this? Klaus Schwab?! The real agenda peaks out from under the mask, and it's still ugly!
The Climate Intelligence (Clintel) organization has issued a very specific world climate declaration: “There is no climate emergency”, backed by a very large and impressive group of signatories. Check it out at clintel.org. In particular, their November 2024 conference produced a series of declarations, of which items 1 and 7 are very much to the point:
1. The modest increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide that has taken place since the end of the Little Ice Age has been net-beneficial to humanity.
7. Global warming will likely continue to be slow, small, harmless and net-beneficial.
Naturally this has caused the climate catastrophists to go into full meltdown mode as they see their whole raison d’être go up in smoke.
As far as the US is concerned it's not even a treaty as it was never ratified by Congress. Since the US is not bound by this non-treaty they really don't have to wait a year to ignore it completely and to keep their money.