NEW REPORT LAYS OUT HOW TRUMP COULD WITHDRAW THE U.S. FROM PARIS AGREEMENT
A new congressional report lays out the various ways President Trump could withdraw the U.S. from a United Nations agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) found Trump may “unilaterally withdraw” from the so-called Paris agreement “without seeking approval from the legislative branch. Then-President Barack Obama signed the agreement in 2016, pledging to cut U.S. emissions 26 to 28 percent.
The Paris agreement went into force last year, and it commits countries to keeping future global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. There are doubts if Paris would actually be able to accomplish that goal, and some experts say it could cost $12.1 trillion.
Trump is expected to withdraw from the agreement, but it’s unclear how exactly he would do it.
1. Wait Two Years
The Paris agreement does not allow parties to withdraw until three years after it goes into force. CRS notes the “agreement entered into force in November 2016, the right of withdrawal would not be available until November 2019.”
The Obama administration considered the Paris agreement to be an “executive agreement” that did not need Senate approval. Trump could unilaterally withdraw from the treaty should he decide to wait.
2. Repeal Obama-Era Regulations
Trump doesn’t need to formally withdraw from the Paris agreement, he can just undo Obama’s so-called “Climate Action Plan” — the key policies Obama crafted to meet his U.N. emissions pledge.
CRS notes that “[b]ecause the emissions targets themselves are not binding under this interpretation, it may be possible to repeal or revise the domestic regulations that the Obama Administration sought to utilize to meet its emission reduction targets in the United States’ NDC without withdrawing from or violating a legal obligation in the Paris Agreement.”
Trump already plans on eliminating the “Climate Action Plan,” and has issued an executive order that federal agencies repeal two regulations for every new one issued. So, until Trump makes a formal decision on Paris, he’ll likely continue down this path.
3. Burn The Whole House Down
If Trump doesn’t want to wait until 2019 to formally withdraw from the Paris agreement, he can try and pull out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — Paris’s parent treaty.
“If the Executive sought to pursue such a course of action and effectuate such a withdrawal, it would need to …
What Consensus?! Boston Globe: ‘Many meteorologists question climate change science’
…BOSTON METEOROLOGIST FIRED FOR HAVING SKEPTICAL VIEW OF ‘GLOBAL WARMING’
Mish Michaels, a U.S. meteorologist, lost her job as a science reporter at WGBH’s show “Greater Boston” last week after colleagues raised concerns about her views on vaccines and climate change.
Mish Michaels, U.S. meteorologist and science reporter
They observe changes in the atmosphere like astronomers study the stars, analyzing everything from air pressure to water vapor and poring over computer models to arrive at a forecast.
But for all their scrutiny of weather data, many meteorologists part ways with their colleagues — climate scientists who study longer atmospheric trends — in one crucial respect: whether human activity is causing climate change.
Meteorologists are more skeptical than climate scientists, and that division was underscored by the recent departure of Mish Michaels from WGBH News.
Michaels, a former meteorologist at WBZ-TV, lost her job as a science reporter at WGBH’s show “Greater Boston” last week after colleagues raised concerns about her views on vaccines and climate change. She had previously questioned the safety of vaccines and the evidence that human activity was causing global warming, both widely held views in the scientific community.
A national survey last year by researchers at George Mason University in Virginia found that just 46 percent of broadcast meteorologists said they believed that climate change over the past 50 years has been “primarily or entirely” the result of human activity. By contrast, surveys of climate scientists have found that 97 percent attribute warming to human activity.
“Weather forecasters are people, too, and their political ideology plays a role in their views,” said Ed Maibach, who directs the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason and oversaw the study. “So conservative forecasters tend to be more skeptical than liberal forecasters.”
Among those skeptics is Tim Kelley, who has issued weather forecasts on New England Cable News since 1992. He describes himself as a “student of climate change,” but says his experience with the variability of computer models has made him skeptical that anyone can predict how greenhouse gases will change the environment in the coming decades.
“How can their computer models be better than ours?” he said. “We look at computer projections all the time, and we know how off they can be.”
Kelley acknowledges the climate is changing, but like many skeptics he questions whether rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are the reason. He believes most …
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: ‘Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant’
Via: http://www.scotusmap.com/posts/2
Justice Samuel Alito’s remarks at the Claremont Institute, 2/11/2017
On February 11th, 2017, Justice Samuel Alito received the Statesmanship Award and delivered the keynote speech at the Claremont Institute’s 2017 annual dinner in honor of Sir Winston S. Churchill. Diane Lenning has posted video clips of the speech to her YouTube page.
Alito speech excerpt:
Here’s another example: regulation of the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Now, Americans are, obviously, of two minds about the regulation of greenhouse gases and the question of climate change. But one thing that I think is beyond dispute is that whatever our country does about this matter is important. It will have a profound effect on the environment, or the economy, or on both. In a healthy republic, this issue would be publicly debated, and the basic policy choices would be made by the elected representatives of the people. That is the system prescribed by our Constitution. But that is not what has happened.
The Clean Air Act was enacted by Congress way back in 1970, and it regulates the emission of “pollutants” – that’s the term in the statute. Now, what is a pollutant? A pollutant is a subject that is harmful to human beings or to animals or to plants. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants. It’s actually needed for plant growth. All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now. So, if it’s a pollutant, we’re all polluting.
When Congress authorized the regulation of pollutants, what it had in mind were substances like sulfur dioxide, or particulate matter—basically, soot or smoke in the air. Congress was not thinking about carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. Yet in an important case decided by the Supreme Court in 2007, called Massachusetts v. EPA, a bare majority of the Court held that the Clean Air Act authorizes EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Armed with that statutory authority, the EPA has issued detailed regulations for power plants, for factories, for motor vehicles.
The economic effects of these regulations are said to be enormous. I am not a scientist or an economist, and it is not my place to say whether these regulations represent good or bad public policy. But I will say that a policy of this importance should have been decided …