One of President Trump’s most controversial moves on the world stage was his withdrawal of the USA from the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Coincidentally, the US’s departure from the agreement fell the day after the US presidential election, which at the time of writing is inconclusive. Challenger candidate Joe Biden has promised to take the US back into Paris.
Whatever the results of the US election, the fact of a close race reveals the unstable and anti-democratic basis on which global climate politics has been advanced.
Paris required countries to commit to greenhouse gas emissions reduction. But as treaties go, it was a fudge which let countries to determine their own level of reductions – it was an agreement to agree, intended mostly to save the face of the hosting diplomats and the ailing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process.
The next UNFCCC meeting, known as COP26 (Committee of Parties) was due to take place in Glasgow this year, but it was postponed until 2021, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
British officials and diplomats have been working hard to secure a successor agreement that will bind countries to deeper levels of commitment, aiming towards the UK’s flagship ‘Net Zero’ target.
The US withdrawal had thrown a spanner in the works, as the process is based on mutual commitments of self-sacrifice to overcome the ‘free rider’ problem that haunts global agreements to protect the environment.
The costs and consequences of radical emissions-reduction policies that UNFCCC agreements require have yet to be calculated fully, but there can be no doubt that they are far-reaching, and involve costs in the order of many trillions of pounds in Britain alone.
Travel of all kinds is likely to become prohibitively expensive, with poorer people priced out of international travel and private transport.
Legislation will require homes to be expensively ‘retrofitted’ to meet energy efficiency standards, costing owners of even the smallest properties tens of thousands of pounds.
The price of electricity will multiply. The gas network that supplies the majority of British homes with heat will be shut down, prohibited to new buildings, and subject to increasingly punitive tariffs that will push more homes into energy poverty.
Yet, despite this, governments, the UK included, have not sought to check their commitments to global agreements with their voters who will bear the economic consequences.
Trump was one of the few political leaders who recognized that the UNFCCC process lacks democratic legitimacy, and was prepared to depart from the global political consensus. (Another was Australian PM, Scott Morrison, who won the 2019 federal election, which the Labor opposition had called a ‘climate election’, though Morrison has not mirrored Trump’s radical withdrawal.)
In reply to Trump’s characteristic recalcitrance to lofty, global, eco-virtue-signaling imperatives, politicians all across the world who champion the climate agenda, including Biden, have promised vast budgets of investment, the creation of millions of jobs, and booming ‘green’ economies.
Despite decades of climate policymaking, evidence that those promises can ever be made real is still lacking, whereas evidence that green policies cost vast sums of money, jobs, incomes, and freedoms is growing.
False promises are, of course, politicians’ stock-in-trade. But publics are – in theory, at least – able to hold politicians to account for lies, hubris, and incompetence by voting for alternatives.
But there are two clear obstacles to the public gaining democratic control over politics. First is the increasing tendency to form cross-party consensuses on issues like climate change, and second is the growth of global agreements to put these policy areas out of the reach of national democracies.
In Britain, for example, the legacy Westminster parties formed a cross-party consensus on climate policy in the mid-2000s.
In other words, MPs agreed to deny the public a choice on the most fundamental political questions – on the management of the economy and the role of government in everyday life.
For the time being, this creates the risk – which Trump has exposed as a possibility – of an outsider party or politician making political capital out of establishment intransigence.
Global agreements, such as Paris and its successor, put such a challenge further out of reach.
The consequences of reneging on commitments to the ‘international community’ are intended to discipline against any future expression of democratic will.
Trump may yet lose the contest. But even a successful Biden would have to face the consequences of managing a vast country very much split on the question of globalism, as well as the particular commitments that it demands.
Where the dismantling of democracy is more advanced, such as in Europe and the UK, the inevitable consequences of illegitimate ‘agreements’ are simply kicked down the road.
Politicians putting their political ambitions before the voters’ interests will always create crises. And these can only be deferred for so long.
Paris will fall, and any deal struck at Glasgow next year will fall too, causing the spotlight to fall on to the hosts, the deal-brokers, the signatories, and their shenanigans.
The Paris ‘agreement’, in which no ordinary voter anywhere in the world has had a say, may survive Trump for now. But the policies it implies are unlikely to survive contact with the public after long.
France was crippled by a year of violent protests when a carbon tax was foisted on an already overburdened population.
Subdued for the time being by a range of factors, including the pandemic, those gilets jaunes protests have diminished. But many of the problems of Paris remain and look set to deepen and spread across the world.
The only solution to these problems is for the legitimacy of Paris and its successor ‘agreements’ to be tested democratically. Don’t hold your breath.
Read more at Spiked-Online
CO2 is the basic ingredient of life on earth. It provides the backbone for nearly every organic molecule in all life forms on earth. Without CO2 all life dies. And CO2 has been naturally declining from levels more than ten times that of today for the entire period of multicellular evolution – nearly 600 million years – to within 30ppm of lethal lows. More CO2 is ALWAYS BETTER. Tell Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel to shove their fake climate crisis where the sun doesn’t shine. It’s made Europe kill more people every year than the weather/climate kills in the entire world! Climate naturally moves in cycles. And we’re well within the historical measures of all of them. Climate hysteria is a fraud. All it’s doing is scaring the crap out of schoolchildren – for nothing.
And don’t forget it makes a lot of people very rich. These are the ones who will continue to push it until our economies are destroyed.
You are an idiot, Barry.
If I understand things correctly, Glasgow will not only aim for deeper cuts in emissions but the goal is to be a top down agreement. This is where the UN tells countries how much they must reduce their emissions and such reductions are mandatory. This has been a goal way back to the Kyoto Treaty but not even leaders like Obama have been willing to sign up for mandatory reductions imposed by the UN.
From the very beginning of the global warming movement activists understood that democracy was an obstacle to their goals. This was demonstrated in the US 2018 when the climate change movement sought to by pass the legislators and go directly to the people. All but one minor issue failed at the ballot box. This was true even in deep blue states such as Washington.
It should be pointed out that under President Trump without trying to follow the Paris Treaty reduced US emission more than most industrial nations. The news media has carefully censored this out. This success does not make the climate change movement happy because it was done without more taxes, artificially high energy prices, and bigger government.
I will also comment about the article’s statement that “the poorer people priced out of international travel and private transport.” Private transport is the means that people get to work, school, and shopping for groceries. This is done with privately owned car, usually gas powered. There is now a goal to quit making them and also make it prohibitively expensive to drive existing gasoline cars. Electric cars would the only alternative.
Today the only way the poor and lower middle class can afford a car is to buy a used one. Gasoline cars can run a very long time. They will require more repairs as they get older but these are usually affordable and often people can repair their own cars. It is very different with electric cars in that the batteries have a limited life. Replacing the batteries cost more than many used cars that are purchased today and is beyond the means of many families.
This puts many rural families in an impossible situation. They can’t drive a car and there is no public transportation that serves their area. I am remote enough that we will never have pubic transport here. Due to the cost of housing many who can’t afford an electric car also can’t afford to move into the suburbs where public transport is available. People who want to eliminate gas powered cars probably don’t know and if they do don’t care about the fate of lower income rural citizens.
Even if pubic transport is available often the extra time to use it is a big problem. When in college my daughter drove half the way to the University Of Washington in Seattle, initially parked at a park and ride, and took the bus the rest of the way to avoid the cost of on campus parking. Using public transportation for half of the way took so much time that she ended up driving the entire distance.
There is a lot comment on in this article. It acknowledges reducing emissions is a “self-sacrifice” and when large nations do not do so there a “‘free rider’ problem.” For the real drivers of the climate change movement this is not a problem. The real motivations for the climate change movement include an excuse for new taxes, bigger more intrusive government especially the UN, socialism, and transferring the wealth of industrial nations to the developing nations. Less known motivations by some are forcing the middle class into an inferior life style, forced de-industrialization by making energy scarce and expensive, and organizations such as the Extinction Rebellion that want to use climate change to punish society. The fact that a nation such as China is getting a “free ride” has nothing to do with these goals. What is more difficult is to use climate change as an excuse for action when China is getting a “free ride” and it is made worse if this also includes the US, for the first and second biggest emitters.
I look forward to COP26 in U.K.Even the BBC will be unable to hide from the public the mob of 20,000 weird looking maniacal freeloading FOREIGNERS arriving by jet to Glasgow where it will be snowing. The conference will FAIL in a mass of backbiting arguments as usual. god I’m glad I’m not the chap whose been detailed off to chair it. He must really be sweating already. Meanwhile CO2 will continue to rise harmlessly and the newspapers will be full of the Ls Niña induced fall in global temperature.