When President Donald Trump announced his plan to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, he unleashed Armageddon – if you believe the left-leaning press.
In reality, the Paris agreement was nothing more than a pinky-promise by President Obama and other world leaders to cut carbon emissions. Each country chose their own reduction targets, and each would enforce them.
This thing was entirely unenforceable. Do you trust China to reduce its carbon emissions? How about India? We were supposed to pay about 20 percent of the bill, and now that we’re not there to shoulder a disproportionate amount of the financial burden, China and India aren’t happy.
Even if those major polluters cut their emissions, there’s no guarantee that the Earth would cool down. Predicting that requires a knowledge of the sun’s 1500 year cycle which this writer doesn’t have (and neither do the people who wrote the agreement). Paris only aimed to reduce overall temperature by two degrees Celsius. If the powers that be calculate this based on averages, more extreme hot and cold temperatures could actually make it seem like, on average, we’re cooling off.
Economic costs, too, were steep. President Trump explained, “[The Paris Agreement is] very unfair at the highest level to the United States,” he said. “The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income, and in many cases much worse than that.”
Paris has a noble goal of getting to worldwide zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The path to net zero is this:
2015: Decide to start planning
2020: Everybody write your own plan
2020-2050: ????? Revise goals every 5 years. Everybody enforces their own rules. We hope.
2050: No more greenhouse gas emissions
Somehow, everybody is supposed to shoulder their share of the burden. However, just like with the funding for this endeavor, America got stuck with a disproportionate share of requirements relative to other countries. (China, for its part, already planned to increase emissions until 2030.)
To claim that the U.S. is withdrawing from something is to assume that we were already in it. Then-President Obama signed on to the Paris Accord, but a president’s signature does not commit the country to an international agreement. That can only be done by ratification by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Congress never approved it as a treaty, not because they were being obstructionist jerks, but because Obama never sent it to them for a vote.
France, Germany, and Italy condemned our departure. France, Germany, and Italy don’t make the rules for us. So, our media picked up where they left off. Huffington Post shared apocalyptic imagery when Trump made the announcement. Weather.com had wall-to-wall coverage predicting crises as a result of our departure. D.C. saw marchers take to the streets to oppose the withdrawal.
Paris would have cost the country billions, cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs, and forced the U.S. to take on an unfair share of the climate fight. Clean energy innovation isn’t any slower today than it was yesterday. When it comes to global warming, those who pinned all their hopes on Paris need to just chill out.
