I&I Editorial
It’s still unclear if Donald Trump will remain in the White House come Jan. 21, 2021. But if he doesn’t, at least he pulled America out of the United Nations’ Paris Climate Agreement. It’s an international con, far more harmful than helpful.
The day after the election, the U.S. formally withdrew from the 2015 pact that was sold to the world as a means to shut down global warming. In September 2016, when this country officially joined the agreement, President Barack Obama said it “will ultimately prove to be a turning point for our planet,” and called it an “enduring framework,” the “full implementation” of which “will help delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change, and pave the way for more progress in the coming years.”
Meaningless words, but a fine opportunity for virtue signaling. And a great moment for the climate alarmists who, as we’ve said before, are more interested in controlling “every aspect of our lives than they are preventing slight planetary warming.”
The timing of America’s withdrawal virtually coincided with a finding of science that showed just how hollow the agreement is. Recent research by physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden has “determined that the present levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor are almost completely saturated,” the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow reported in late October.
“In plain language this means that from now on our emissions from burning fossil fuels could have little or no further impact on global warming,” David Wojick, a civil engineer who has a doctorate in the philosophy of science and mathematical logic, wrote for CFACT.
“There would be no climate emergency. No threat at all. We could emit as much CO2 as we like; with no effect.”
While the Paris agreement has had, and will have, zero effect on the climate, the same can’t be said about how it shapes the economy. A Heritage Foundation report published in 2016 said the pact would eventually cause the loss of nearly 400,000 jobs in the U.S., more than half of them in the manufacturing sector; lead to “a total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four”; eventually cost our economy more than $2.5 trillion; and force the average household to spend between 13% and 20% more on their power bills.
The U.N. and a host of left-wing organizations of course want us to believe that the Paris agreement would actually create jobs and boost economies. But this is nonsense. What economy has ever grown by becoming part of an international pact that actually places limits on economic activity? If the provisions of the agreement created economic expansion, markets would adopt them without having to be told to.
Of course Joe Biden will jump right back into the Paris agreement if Trump’s challenges fail. He tweeted on Election Day that “in exactly 77 days, a Biden administration will rejoin it.” It’s a perfect example that shows just how useless – on the occasions he wasn’t being destructive – Biden has been in nearly a half century as an elected official. Between 2005 and 2017, the first full year of the country’s participation in the Paris agreement, U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions fell 13% while the economy grew more than 19%. Why commit to an international agreement when the targets it set are being met or even exceeded without it?
And why join an international agreement when it’s a drop-dead certainty that one of its signatories, China, the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, is not going to comply with the rules? Anyone who isn’t aware, or refuses to acknowledge, that China is a wholesale cheater should be doing something else – hide in his basement? – rather than occupy the White House.
The Paris agreement isn’t a treaty, so Biden can pledge to re-enter the pact without Senate approval, as Obama did. And he’ll likely do so his first day in office – another reason to hope that the election will be sorted out legally and ethically in Trump’s favor.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
The U.S. has reduced it’s GH omissions without the Paris, Kyoto or Rio B.S. All that will change when Harris goes all in with these loony, One World dicta.
What a horrendous pack of lies.
Some progressive ideas capture the perfervid imagination with alacrity, especially if those who believe in the flights of fancy do not pay the bill, and gain velocity with every news cycle on the left. As the liberal echo chamber magnifies the idea, it becomes decorated with drama, festooned with fear for the planet, with global shadows, with the darkness and assurance of doom. Global warming, aka climate change, is one of them, a very expensive one for taxpayers, and it has an added benefit for true-believers in that rejoining the Paris Accord will aid in redistribution of American wealth to all poor people everywhere because, well, isn’t that the proper thing to do?
What Bidenites want is utmost control – of climate, healthcare, immigration, economy -substituting the heavy dull gray blanket of top-down control, the policy of government-mandated equal outcomes rather than government-mandated equal opportunity, for the wisdom, ingenuity and individualism that used to characterize America, the combination that has achieved such success in a free enterprise system.
Instead, climate bedwetters issue cataracts of critical comment if you so much as question the catechism of climate change, this from a coterie of callow clowns or unintentionally comic characters who swallow the canards totus porcus (whole hog). I suspect that we realists may be in hot water (sorry).
May I quote you? Your eloquence is wonderful. Not just fancy words. So true to the narrative!
We were never legally in the Paris Accords – that requires Senate confirmation, which they never gave. Trump simply made our non-participation his official agreement.
I just got the book the Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change by Marc Morano has some reay god Chapters in it including how Director James Careron who made the movie AVATAR wanted to challenge all climate change skeptics including the Author and Cameron got Cold Feet and canciled it all