Trump Vindicated on Paris Climate Accord Pullout

When President Trump announced the U.S. pullout from the Paris Climate Accord last year, the left howled.

Here’s what the top bureaucrats at the United Nations had to say at the time:

[United Nations spokesman Stephane] Dujarric reiterated [U.N. secretary-general Antonio] Guterres’ June 1 statement calling the U.S. decision to withdraw “a major disappointment for global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote global security.”

“It is crucial that the United States remains a leader on climate and sustainable development,” Dujarric said.  “Climate change is impacting now.  He looks forward to engaging with the American government and all other actors in the United States and around the world to build the sustainable future for our children and future generations.”

It was all such horse hockey.

Latest news from the International Energy Agency is that Paris Climate Accord nations, which is pretty much all of them, reported not a decline in greenhouse gases, but a 1.7% spike.  Here is what New York magazine reported:

This week, the International Energy Agency announced that carbon emissions grew 1.7 percent in 2017 after an ambiguous couple of years optimists hoped represented a leveling off, or peak; instead, we’re climbing again.  Even before the new spike, not a single major industrial nation was on track to fulfill the commitments it made in the Paris treaty.  To keep the planet under two degrees of warming – a level that was, not all that long ago, defined as the threshold of climate catastrophe – all signatory nations have to match or better those commitments.  There are 195 signatories, of which only the following are considered even “in range” of their Paris targets: Morocco, Gambia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines.

The headline suggests that the whole idea of lowering emissions through an international, Europe-based bureaucracy is increasingly becoming “a fantasy.”

Greenhouse gas emissions go up, not down under this hideous accord, and not just because it gives a pass too rapidly growing third-world countries – pretty much all of them – to pollute away and let cutting emissions be America’s burden.

There is also the phenomenon of how the more a place goes “green,” the more fossil fuels it uses.  Like those electrical cars?  They run on clean, green electricity all right – from plants that burn coal.

Downstream, going green is very, very carbon-intensive, and it should surprise no one that sanctimonious western Europe, with all its green pontificating, is the very worst violator of them all.  How proudly green they are, and how very, very greenhouse-y they go to get there.

The New York magazine article also reports that were nations to really adhere to the Paris accord, it would require land use the size of India and a sacrifice of about 250 million people – roughly a Great Leap Forward’s worth, again, courtesy of central planning.

The United Nations echoed that finding late last year in a report described here, so it’s not an anomalous forecast.  Sound attractive?

What’s efficient is nuclear energy and fossil fuels, something else the left screams about.  Don’t expect the greenhouse gas crowd in Europe to pay attention to this; they are too busy trying to get their Priuses started so they can save the lebensraum, or whoops, the Earth.

What it does amount to is vindication for President Trump, who wanted to get us out of that hellish pact, the work of petty bureaucrats.  The U.S., in fact, is the least bad offender compared to Europe, China, and India, and for the obvious reason that the U.S. abhors central planning.

German automakers are all in on greenhouse gas reduction, but they say companies must find ways to do this on their own, not as a function of one-size-fits-all central planning diktats.  The free market can trump anything the central planners claim they can correct.

It’s supremely ironic that the Paris Accord is now synonymous with higher emissions and more greenhouse gases.  But that’s central planning for you.

It’s not at all different from the initial claims about Obamacare as it was being sold to the public: that it would make health insurance more affordable, not less.  Funny how such results happen every time you give central planning a try.

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