IBD COMMENTARY
Memo To Trump: Run, Don’t Walk, From The Destructive Paris Climate Treaty
- TERRY JONES
- 7:01 PM ET
Donald Trump met with advisors and Cabinet members Tuesday to decide whether to take the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Treaty — a deal that was sold to the public based on the idea it would lessen the threat of global warming. In fact, it’s really nothing more than an attempt by other, less-well-to-do nations to shame the U.S. into dismantling its economy and its standard of living.
Walking away from the sham treaty shouldn’t be a hard decision.
Trump promised several times to exit the Paris treaty during his presidential campaign. He should keep his promise.
It was a bad idea from the beginning, a bogus climate deal intended to take billions of dollars from wealthy nations and give them to developing nations, many of which lack even basic political or human rights.
President Obama agreed to the deal, but never presented it as a treaty to the Senate for ratification, as the law requires. Instead, in 2016 he pretended it wasn’t a treaty and started using executive orders to put the agreement into effect unilaterally.
This wasn’t just some political maneuver. It was a brazen attempt by Obama to put the U.S. economy under the control of other nations without the input of U.S. citizens and their representatives in Congress — a clear violation of our Constitution.
The U.S. should walk away — quickly, and without hesitation — from this awful climate deal, which would sock Americans with hundreds of billions of dollars in lost output and millions of lost jobs in exchange for minuscule, impossible-to-measure cuts in carbon-dioxide output.
No doubt, Trump will get an earful from climate-change zealots about being a science “denier.” But those who say such foolish things are not speaking in the interest of science; they’re mainly media types and hyper-politicized scientists who are hooked on government funding for their global warming crusade.
The 184-nation Paris deal was ridiculous from the very beginning.
Instead of CO2 cuts that would lead to a 2-degree-centigrade rise in expected temperatures from preindustrial levels during this century, radical environmental groups pushed the assembled politicians to agree to a target of just 1.5 degrees Celsius in warming for this century.
Based on their own numbers, this would require a massive increase in energy prices for the U.S. and other developed nations, destroying millions of jobs, killing whole sectors of the economy and leading to lower standards of living for all.
Even worse, the deal calls for “climate reparations” of at least $100 billion to be paid to less-developed nations so they can better prepare for climate change.
Even so, as Walter Russell Mead of the American Interest web magazine recently pointed out, very little of that money has been committed by the nations that promised to do so. Politicians always promise a lot, but deliver very little. Call it climate fraud.
As we said above, Trump will be called a climate change denier by the left, a rhetorical charge that perversely equates climate change with the Holocaust.
Even James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and perhaps the leading scientific advocate for harsh measures to avoid climate change, called the deal “a fraud, really, a fake. … There’s no action — just promises.”
A letter signed by more than 300 prominent scientists, led by MIT physicist and climatologist Richard Lindzen, on Tuesday encouraged Trump to walk away from the Paris deal. He should take their advice, and not look back.