Paris Agreement architect Christiana Figueres is struggling for relevancy after the United States announced this month that it would be dropping out of the climate change pact.
In an article published by the journal Nature, Figueres and other climate “thinkers” warned that the planet could face unsafe and irreversible temperature increases if greenhouse gas emissions don’t begin to fall by 2020 — which, coincidentally, is the same year that the US is legally able to withdraw from the agreement.
Climate scientists have somehow determined that if emissions continue to rise or even stay flat after 2020, the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 will become unachievable. To avoid such a failure, Figueres and her colleagues hope to stir millennial allies into a climate revolution by using end-of-the-world scare tactics.
Without the U.S. government behind the agreement, other national governments will feel less pressure to honor their own commitments. As such, authors of the Nature piece argue that most climate change action will occur beyond national governments, and applaud municipal governments for promising to take their own action. Ironically, the piece prescribes a 30 percent global shift to renewable energy by 2020 and asks leaders to stop approving new coal-fired power plants — policy moves that would require some form of federal or state government action.
Eager to please her EU groupies and progressive constituency in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel noted Thursday that “since the decision of the United States to leave the Paris agreement, [the European Union is] more determined than ever to make it a success.” Merkel will inevitably use the Nature article as a call to action for her global peers and as a means to slap President Trump for dropping out of the climate pact when Germany hosts the G20 summit in the coming weeks.
The article is nothing more than a desperate call to action for millennials — particularly American millennials — who still hold faith in climate science. A 2015 Harvard study found that 55 percent of American millennials believe that global warming is a “proven fact” and is mostly caused by humans. This stronghold doesn’t seem to be diminishing any time soon.
Because climate change issues deal in long-term projections, Millennials are key to climate activists’ objectives. Millennials will be running the world in a few short years and according to one estimate, they will comprise more than one third of the American workforce by 2020 and 75 percent of the workforce by 2025.
In the past, climate scientists have used financial threats to sound the alarm on millennials. Back in August, the think tank Demos and liberal advocacy group Next Gen released an analysis finding that climate change will apparently cost the millennial generation $8.8 trillion in lost income, adding to the burdens of student debt and underemployment.
Climate change activists will go to whatever lengths necessary to advance their agenda through scare tactics and pseudo-science, and despite the many times they have cried wolf on climate change, millennials continue to buy into their sky-is-falling predictions. Whether or not the world starts falling apart in 2020, one thing is certain: we will have plenty of other dire climate predictions in the years leading up.
