1) As many liberal commentators have eagerly pointed out, coal is a dying industry, and it makes no sense to prop up a dying industry. The issue, however, isn’t whether Trump’s pulling out of the Paris Agreement is propping it up so much as refusing to kill the industry prematurely. About a third of America’s power still comes from coal, and well over half comes from fossil fuel sources. If there’s a winding down here, it would be best that this happens naturally rather than abruptly via federal imperatives, as we don’t have a meaningful plan to replace traditional energy sources. Trump’s affection for coal miners, who are also broadly a stand-in for the some of the most economically vulnerable Americans, is obviously a political ploy to some degree, but it’s good politics for a guy whose path to the White House ran through coal country.
Democrats and environmental activists seem to be speaking out of both sides of their mouth here. On one side, it’s imperative that we kill off coal as fast as possible to stave off global warming. On the other, 2016 has them scared that further alienating coal country voters—who had traditionally been union Democrats—is a threat to wielding the political power they need to kill off coal. Quite the conundrum.
2) Yes, solar jobs/solar capacity and other green energy technologies are rapidly growing and may overtake fossil fuel sources. This is a great thing, but it’s not an argument for staying in the agreement. This underscores the point that the EPA secretary Scott Pruitt made yesterday—we should innovate our way out of this problem as much as humanly possible.
Now riddle me this: If global warming is such an existential threat that we need need to get as much clean energy online as quickly as possible, why did the Obama administration put steep tariffs on Chinese solar panels? Yes, that happened, and Angela Merkel will no doubt be pleased to know the company at the center of the Federal Trade Commission complaint resulting in the tariffs was a German-owned solar panel maker in Hillsboro, Oregon that spent a lot of cash lobbying during Obama’s reelection. (Oh and lest we forget, Solyndra was a solar company.)
So when Trump makes the case, as he did yesterday, that Paris was also about jockeying for international competitive advantages on trade and other issues related to economic growth, well, he’s not wrong.
3) People keep trying to have it both ways. Either the Paris Treaty was largely symbolic—composed of voluntary benchmarks, etc.—so staying in the agreement is no big deal, or it’s super-duper important symbolism, so pulling out of it is catastrophic if not literally eschatological.
The truth is it was consequential enough, because the Paris Agreement didn’t exist in a vacuum. The Obama administration planned on enforcing it through the Clean Power Plan, which was the Obama EPA’s signature accomplishment. The Clean Power Plan was premised on the idea that greenhouse gases should be regulated as pollutants by the EPA even though they don’t pose an immediate public health threat.
In other words, if the Obama plan went through, federal bureaucrats at the EPA would have authority to control production capacity/energy consumption for basically all industries in the United States. That’s bonkers and plainly unconstitutional even though courts are finding alarmingly creative interpretations these days. (It’s worth noting the Supreme Court issued a stay against enforcing the Clean Power Plan in February, which, as Jonathan Adler notes, is pretty unusual. Even liberal legal scholars such as Laurence Tribe questioned whether the EPA could make such a power grab based on a reading of the Clean Air Act.)
So the Trump administration had some legitimate concern that the Paris Accord would be cited in lawsuits pursuant to their abandoning the Clean Power Plan, so they thought it best to undo them at roughly the same time. Oddly, there was comparatively little public outcry about his executive order killing the Clean Power Plan in March, even though it was an actually consequential law for reducing emissions. Disastrous and stupid, but actually consequential, unlike Paris.
4) Related to the point above, why do supporters insist an international agreement that the previous president had no intention of sending to the Senate to be legally ratified is the only way to accomplish their goals? Why not try to win the political argument about global warming? Explain exactly what laws you want to pass to deal with the problem, what benefits you expect them to have, and also explain what sacrifices in terms of jobs and economic growth they are going to require. Then get popular support to pass those laws in Congress.
This is about literally saving the planet, right? Do Democrats really believe that they can’t start with a base of half the country and build support from there? That this is an unwinnable public debate?
Increasingly, those on the left seem to just ignore politics altogether. Why do what the people want—or even bother persuading them of what is in their own interest—when the administrative state can regulate them, regardless of democratic accountability?
5) This is an actual tweet from a department chair of American Studies department at Harvard:
The USA, created by int’l community in Treaty of Paris in 1783, betrays int’l community by withdrawing from #parisclimateagreement today
— Joyce E. Chaplin (@JoyceChaplin1) June 1, 2017
The United States was created by the international community? There was a literal Declaration of Independence, and the only two signers of the Treaty of Paris were the United States and the United Kingdom. That’s not exactly a broad cross-sampling of the international community.
A related and oft-repeated canard yesterday was that the only two countries that didn’t enter into the agreement are Syria and Nicaragua. (Here’s former DNC head Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz saying it.) The implication is the United States has, by backing out of Paris, reduced itself to the moral authority of a genocidal regime and a war-torn Central American backwater. But by that reasoning, is the fact that plenty of dictatorships and kleptocracies such as North Korea, Somalia, and Equatorial Guinea signed on a sign of the agreement’s validity?
There seems to be a real political disconnect in this country over international agreements and increased globalization, and this should have been a clear lesson from Trump’s election. If support for global free trade is waning in America—and that’s a policy that has mathematically quantifiable benefits—what makes anyone yelling “but what about the international community!” regarding an economically punitive climate agreement think that’s a helpful argument? In fact, it’s yet another way of sidestepping the act of making an argument that this is in the interest of the American people. And it’s certainly not politically helpful at a time when many see international consensus as an automatic reason for suspicion—there’s a reason why Trump was incorporating the names of swing state towns into his speech yesterday like he had Tourette’s.
But as we can see from the Harvard professor’s tweet, internationalism is now so baked into the liberal cake that this is really about virtue signaling, and little else. (Speaking of virtue signaling, what virtue was Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer signaling when called Trump pulling out of Paris a “traitorous act of war“?)
6) Regarding our dishonest debate on economic trade-offs involved in regulations needed to fight global warming, I refer you to C.S. Lewis, who once said, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
But for those readers still concerned about dire consequences Americans may suffer as a result of inaction on climate change, I instead refer you to H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
