On Tuesday, Townhall posted an article listing the reasons America should not be part of the Paris Climate Treaty. While we are hearing the hysterics from the political left, I would like to remind everyone that the reason the Paris Climate Treaty was called an ‘accord’ in America is that the politicians in Washington did not want to vote for it. Former President Obama knew that as a treaty it could not get through Congress. On some level, all Washington politicians understood the damage the treaty would do to the American economy, and there was always the danger that the voters would hold those politicians who voted for the treaty accountable. So all of the current hysteria is somewhat unconvincing.
The article reports the reasons that being part of the agreement was a really bad idea:
1) Warming over the last 50 years or so has averaged only about half of what computerized climate models can explain. Yet, those models are the basis for the Paris Agreement.
2) It is not obvious that recent warming is entirely the fault of our CO2 emissions. It is very possible that temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were just as warm as today. Natural climate change exists. If we didn’t cause it, we can’t fix it.
3) Even if future warming increases to match the models, and all nations abide by the Paris commitments, we will avert only 0.3 deg. F warming by the year 2100. That’s less than 0.04 deg. F per decade, which is unmeasurable by current global temperature monitoring networks (satellites, surface thermometers, and weather balloons).
4) The cost of this unmeasurable impact on future global temperatures is variously estimated to be around $1 Trillion per year, primarily spent by the U.S. and a few other countries which drive global prosperity. As usual, the poor will be the hardest hit. That money could have been spent on clean water and providing electricity to the 1+ billion humans who still don’t have electricity.
5) China and India, which are burning coal like there is no tomorrow, don’t really have to do anything under the Agreement until 2030. It’s mainly up to the U.S. to cut our emissions, and send our wealth to poor countries where dictators will continue to enrich themselves.
6) Increasing CO2 levels have benefits, such as increased crop productivity and ‘global greening’. Life on Earth requires CO2, and over the last 60 years we have been monitoring its levels in the atmosphere, Mother Nature has been gobbling up 50% of what we emit to create even more life.
There are also other reasons to reject the treaty.
In February of this year, I posted an article that included the following:
Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
So what is the goal of environmental policy?
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
It’s not about the climate–it’s about greed. The treaty does not require any action by China, one of the world’s worst polluters, or India, who runs a close second. It allows third world tyrants to gain access to the coffers of the United States. Those coffers, incidentally, will be sparse due to the restrictions placed on the American economy.
One of the major keys to the economic success of a nation is private property rights. I posted an article about this in 2010. The Paris Climate Treaty is an example of countries whose leaders do not allow private property rights attempting to gain prosperity at the expense of countries who are prosperous and allow private property rights. This treaty was a move toward global governance and worldwide communism. In viewing the uproar over President Trump’s actions, we need to remember that the biggest obstacle to the globalists around the world are the financial success of America and the freedom of Americans. This treaty would have undermined both of those.