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Day 2: Dump The Paris Climate Agreement

During Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign, he promised to pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. He was unable to do so until the day after the 2020 election he lost, and the reprieve lasted only a little more than two months because Joe Biden rejoined the pact the day he was inaugurated. It’s another one of the many of Biden’s messes that Trump has to clean up.

The U.S. should have never been a part of the Paris Agreement. Committing our country to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which means reductions in fossil fuel use, is foolish. Reaching the made-from-thin-air global temperature target: requires government mandates, restrictions and increased spending on politically trendy but expensive and unreliable renewable energy; stunts economic growth; limits our choices, leaving many of them to be made by globalist elites; and is an abdication of our national sovereignty.

It is simultaneously meaningless and dishonest, a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

“The Paris Agreement has always been an expensive farce, a symbolic gesture masquerading as a global solution,” writes Charles Rotter in the Watts Up With That? blog. “Its main purpose? To transfer wealth from productive nations to the politically corrupt under the guise of ‘climate justice.’ Of course, China — the world’s largest emitter — sits pretty with vague promises and no actual obligations. Trump’s exit from this scam is as much common sense as it is a necessity.”

Trump couldn’t withdraw the first time from the Paris deal until November 2020, because he was handcuffed by the previous administration, which wanted to fundamentally transform this country and saw the agreement as an instrument of destruction.

“President Obama’s negotiators wanted to ensure that it would take time for the U.S. to get out if there was a change in leadership,” the BBC explained. So “no country could give notice to leave the agreement until three years had passed from the date of ratification,” and then it had to provide a 12-month notice to the United Nations. Trump served that notice on Nov. 4, 2019, signaling that the U.S. would formally withdraw on Nov. 4, 2020.

But this time he will not have to wait three years. In fact, if he wants to issue the 12-moth notice the U.S. is pulling out on the first day of his next term rather than second day, we’d be fine with that, especially if he timed the withdrawal with Argentina’s. It’s the sort of liberating solidarity a world beleaguered by hard-left politics could use.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.

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  • Interesting information about the time lines for gettingoutoftheagreement. I didn’t know why Trump had to wait to get us out. The whole point of the climate agenda is global control. Every piece of it serves that agenda. I appreciate any reporting that understands that and makes a point to say it.

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