Trump Rescues America from the “Paris” Global-Grifter Great Climate Con

In taking a big step toward fulfilling a core campaign promise to improve American business competitiveness and the jobs that flow from that, President Donald Trump last week withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement.  Despite frequent and widespread intentionally-misleading references to that accord as a “treaty,” it is nothing of the sort as it was never affirmed by the Senate as a treaty but rather was simply Obama’s personal commitment.  Donald Trump is a different president with different commitments. 

The whole tale of this Paris accord serves as an especially emblematic example of the underhanded way foreign governments have been taking advantage of the United States, retarding its competitiveness while sucking up American money, supported by the American Democrat Party.  The United States has been the Europe’s cash cow for 70 years, effectively subsidizing their welfare state while they ignore their NATO financial obligations.

The supposed purpose of the accord is to address global warming.  To start with, I remain unconvinced that man-caused global warming is real.  Earth’s climate is always changing.  Not long ago in geologic terms we have had a Little Ice Age, and in fact some observers believe that the earth is coming out of a long-term relatively cool period.  The important, bottom line is that science means skepticism and requires hypotheses to be proven with methodology and data honestly obtained, shared, and reproduced.  However, many global warming believers have not behaved like scientists but rather like religious fanatics, shouting down skeptics, at best ostracizing them and at worst threatening to imprison them for climate change “denialism” (e.g., Robert Kennedy Jr.).  As to climate “facts,” there is evidence of widespread fraud and dishonesty in the climate “science” community regarding measuring and reporting data.  And finally, the elitists who preach the global warming gospel themselves do not behave as if they really believe it (e.g.:  global warming high-priest Al Gore’s Saudi oil-money mega-million dollar payoff for opposing cheap American fossil fuel energy; his many mansions with the energy footprint of mid-sized American towns; and his international jet-setting in private planes with other rich, preening climate hypocrites like Leonardo DiCaprio).     

Now to the Paris climate accord.  The best summary of the issue that I have seen comes from Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute, who made the following key points via twitter [the emphases in italics are mine]: 

• The accord failed a year before Paris, in 2014 in Lima, when the world abandoned the pretense of reaching a firm climate agreement.  Instead, [the revised accord] established a new process where each country chooses whatever voluntary commitment it wants, [and] all are automatically accepted.
• The Paris conference itself was largely a collation and stapling exercise.  Of course they reached an "agreement."
• But this agreement came at the expense of acknowledging or addressing the actual tradeoff at the heart of climate policy: Developing countries need to build a lot of fossil-fuel infrastructure to develop as quickly as possible; doing so locks in emissions.  If you don't want them to build fossil-fuel infrastructure, you have to tell them to develop more slowly.  They're not interested in that.
• Unsurprisingly, these developing countries made Paris commitments to continue with business as usual. And then everyone applauded.
• But the individual commitments made in Paris, and thus their sum, do not depart from the trajectory the world was already on.  Strangely, climate activists seemed enthusiastic – almost as if they cared more about the optics of agreements than climate action.
• Further, President Obama, did make an aggressive commitment on behalf of the United States. This created a terrible dynamic.  Reviewing progress each year, countries with weak commitments would be applauded for "success," [but the United States would] be chastised for falling behind.
• This is now happening: "China, India to Reach Climate Goals Years Early, as U.S. Likely to Fall Far Short"
• Why would the United States remain party to such an agreement?  There has been little argument that we should do it for "the climate."  Instead, the [argument for the “agreement”] seems to be that if a debating society exists, one must attend.  Weak pledges and noncompliance are OK, just not honesty.

The important take-away from this overview is that to the insider globalist bureaucrats the Paris accord really isn’t about the climate.  As the saying goes, follow the money.

On June 1, Trump announced his decision to withdraw from Obama’s commitment; from the Wall Street Journal (link):  

Mr. Trump, framing his decision mostly in economic and political terms, pointed to the agreement’s lesser requirements for the world’s other leading carbon emitters, China and India.  He voiced his concern for protecting the environment and eschewed any reiteration of his past claims that climate change isn’t real, but he said his decision is rooted in protecting the country’s interests.  “This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage” over the U.S., the GOP president said.

After Trump announced that he was not renewing Obama’s personal pledge (again, personal since the US commitment was never a treaty), the reaction from the left wing, both foreign and domestic, was fast and furious.  Even some weak-kneed, dopey nominal Republicans like Mitt Romney had a harsh word.  Many accord supporters referred to it as a “treaty” (e.g.: Bill Clinton; some American national news organizations) that the United States “cannot just get out of” (European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker).  But they lie.  They know full well that it is not a binding treaty and that all they had was an Obama personal pledge and nothing more.

So what’s going on?  Why the vehemence?  Well, we must ask cui bono? – who stood to benefit from Obama’s “aggressive” pledge to the Paris accord, and just what did that pledge consist of?  For one thing, it consisted of an Obama promise to shovel, for starters, $3 billion in American taxpayer money to some international climate group to promote renewable energy in the world.  The New York Times reports that Obama has already transferred $1 billion to the United Nations “Green Climate Fund.”  (And the three biggest global polluters – China, India, and Russia – have so far contributed nothing.)  Who controls and disburses all that money – unelected globalist elitists, no doubt, with gargantuan expense accounts.  And who would stand to make mega-bucks from all that additional spending on alternative energy projects – none other, for example, than big-time Democrat donor and Obama pal Tom Steyer, who’s made a fortune in alternative energy off government contracts funneled to him by Democrats.  Steyer, seeing this gravy train cut off, unsurprisingly did not take Trump’s withdrawal very well, calling it “a traitorous act of war against the American people." 

Moreover, the Paris accord contained restraints on manufacturing that impeded American competitiveness.  One European auto executive lamented that if his American manufacturing competitors were not held back in their energy use by this accord then he would need his government to compensate for the heightened American competitiveness.  Here’s what the Paris Accord has meant for American business, from a horse’s mouth (link):

"The regrettable announcement by the USA makes it inevitable that Europe must facilitate a cost efficient and economically feasible climate policy to remain internationally competitive," Matthias Wissmann, president of the German auto industry lobby group VDA, said in a statement on Friday [June 2].

"The preservation of our competitive position is the precondition for successful climate protection.  This correlation is often underestimated," Wissmann said, adding that the decision by the United States was disappointing.  The VDA said electricity and energy prices are already higher in Germany than in the United States, putting Germany at a disadvantage.  [Emphasis mine]

Another European bureaucrat worries that without all the American money to support the accord, presumably meaning, in no small part, money for the high salaries, swanky hotels, and fancy meals for bureaucrats like himself, he is “unsure about its future.”  And so it goes.

Every reasonable person wants to do all that is necessary to sensibly and efficaciously promote and maintain the cleanest environment possible somewhere short of having all humans commit suicide.  Clean air and clean water are essential and must be responsibly protected.  But ginning up global warming hysteria based on fudged data and biased models – whose implications and predictions have repeatedly failed to materialize – is a con, driven partly by faith-based neo-religious frenzy, partly by hypocritical moral preening, and partly by nefarious profiteering.

This Paris climate accord is part of that big con, as globalists seek to reduce American competitiveness while grabbing a mountain of American cash for themselves, all in the name of addressing the global warming hysteria they themselves have created.  In this hustle they are aided and abetted by many American Democrats who see themselves less a part of America than as part of a global elite entitled to live the high life off the backs of the tax-paying, hard-working benighted rubes in the country whose traditional values they disdain.     

R Balsamo

Commentaries by Oren Cass on this subject:

The most recent:  We’ll Never Have Paris: The climate change agreement was designed as a feel-good, do-nothing program – https://www.city-journal.org/html/well-never-have-paris-15231.html?platform=hootsuite

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/leading-nowhere-futility-and-farce-global-climate-negotiations-7816.html

Prison for Non-Liberals on Global Warming?

Much of what passes as modern "liberalism," a set of political values that represent the opposite of the true meaning of the term ever since the progressive, authoritarian left stole it, is really a new-age religion.  It has its dogmas and its rituals.  It also has the urge to burn heretics.  A new poll says over 25% of Democrats would like to see those who do not believe in anthropogenic global warming to be prosecuted under the law and imprisoned.  Prosecuted under exactly what law, one might ask; the law against having any belief liberals don't like -- that law.  And no doubt imprisoned until the non-believer recants in a public show trial and suffers through a long "course of study" at a reeducation camp.  Link

The term "liberal fascism" describes these impulses very well.

R Balsamo

What a Week That Was

Coming across the transom recently:

Where’s that heat just when we need it?  The fiddling with temperature data to make today look warm is the biggest science scandal ever (link; link).  More on the global warming religious movement (link).

Now just what was so bad again?  Ed Driscoll on the liberal media coming to the defense of the Brian Williams's lying at NBC News (link).

As Mark Steyn says, the future belongs to those who show up:  Italian birth rate lowest in 150 years (link).

Don’t let facts get in the way of a good hit piece:  the New York Times publishes a hit piece on Wisconsin governor Scott Walker saying he's responsible for budget cuts that occurred before he was governor (link).

So what else is new?:  Some British-hating Brits condemn their own country for the bombing of the German city of Dresden in WWII, one saying Brits were worse than the Nazis, while ignoring the massive and lengthy German bombing of Britain, to say nothing of the death camps where many millions were killed (link).

Irony Alert:  a painter of "Coexist" signs in public places was beaten by some Muslims, who apparently do not wish to coexist (link). 

Obama chokes on saying “Muslim terrorist”:  Even though the Muslim terrorists who attacked the Jewish deli in Paris said they did so because it was Jewish, Obama and his people refuse to admit that Jews were specifically targeted in the attack (link).

She chose her friends ...... poorly:  Omitted from almost all news reports is the inconvenient truth that the American girl kidnapped by the Islamic state, who was then sold as a sex slave and who later died in captivity, was a pro-Hamas-terrorist, anti-Jewish, pro-Palestinian activist whose boyfriend was Palestinian (link).   

Not a moment to lose:  David Goldman argues that Europe needs to address the Islamic terrorist swamp by making Muslims fear the state more than they fear the radicals among them (link):

Update from the Dark Ages:  The Islamic State beheads 21 Egyptian Christians specifically because they were Christian (link), yet the American President Obama of the Democrats, once a Muslim himself, calls the victims “innocents” but doesn’t mention they were killed for being Christian.  He probably thinks of it as "workplace violence," which is what he called the Ft Hood mass killing by a Muslim who had a long history of radical Islamic hate and who shouted “God is Great” in Arabic as he was shooting.

Can’t We Still Pretend It Doesn't Exist?:  A post (link) from the great Mark Steyn on the Muslim jihad in Denmark and the usual weak European response.

You can't say that!:  Roger Kimball (link) on how Swedes deny the Muslim rape culture in their country by legally suppressing any acknowledgment of it.  “George Orwell once observed that the only way to challenge totalitarianism was by having the courage to call things by their real names.  Political correctness is so dangerous because it is based on a lie and it promulgates itself by enforcing a lie on the rest of us.”  

Climate Change Hypesters Reject "Two-Sided Debate"

Who says liberalism is not a religion? 

As evidence mounts to undermine human-caused global warming fanaticism and as well to reveal widespread fraudulent manipulation of data (see, for example, the now infamous "hockey stick" chart and also the "hide the decline" emails from the British climate hypesters), the need to quash the truth grows ever more urgent for the fanatics.  With medieval religious zeal, they seek ever more to silence the non-believers (link): 

[A] petition ... by the League of Conservation Voters ... is aimed at executive producers of nightly news programs for major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — who the groups say don’t focus enough news coverage on climate change issues and, when they do cover the issue, portray the issue as a “two-sided debate” by featuring climate skeptics.

A "two-sided debate".  How blasphemous!

I am a strong supporter of responsible, evidence-based environmentalism, but faked data, grossly exaggerated claims, fear-mongering for profit, and repression of debate is not good for anyone, the environment included, because, weary of all the lies and hype, we may actually be slow to respond to real dangers and true opportunities.

JM Greco

Why the Left Loves Global Warming, or, What’s It All About, Alfie?

Why? What’s it all about? It seems to be about power -- the real end game of the global warming hype. The surest way to expand the power of government is to have a crisis that seemingly needs a bigger government. If global warming didn’t exist, the left would have to invent it (as it seems they have) or something like it. Some gigantic crisis only a world government run by elites can tackle, for the betterment of a united, and controlled, mankind. A green utopia run by enlightened elites, with the power to end poverty, strife (but only for a while at best), and, while they're at it, perhaps pollution (line from Evita, sung by dictator Peron: “why not [actually] do some of the things you promised to”). And, I think, the power to end liberty.

Posted by Jude at HughHewitt.com (link):

What is it about global warming and environmentalism that has so many leaders falling over themselves to be declared the most saintly and swift in response, even before the facts are in and agreed upon? Maybe, since the fall of Communism - and before that the utopian Marxist ideal - the world's political class, along with the many citizens who root for the elite political class as a matter of principle or to curry favor, have been searching for such a unifying concept to build the Super-State around.... It is all about power.

From Mark Steyn at National Review Online (link):

Beginning with FDR, wily statists justified the massive expansion of federal power under ever more elastic definitions of the commerce clause. For Obama-era control freaks, the environment and health care are the commerce clause supersized. They establish the pretext for the regulation of everything: If the government is obligated to cure you of illness, it has an interest in preventing you from getting ill in the first place — by regulating what you eat, how you live, the choices you make from the moment you get up in the morning. Likewise, if everything you do impacts “the environment,” then the environment is an all-purpose umbrella for regulating everything you do. It’s the most convenient and romantic justification for … “soft despotism.”

John M Greco

Climategate Shows Global Warming Alarmism Is a Faith-Based Initiative

The “Climategate” scandal, or hoax, has seriously damaged the standing of academic scientists and peer-reviewed science in general, as we have seen how a large group of prominent “scientists” actively engaged in a conspiracy, de facto if not de jure, to deceive the world via faked “data” that purported to demonstrate global warming in the first place and its human origin in the second place.

What we do know: the earth’s temperatures are not static, they are constantly changing, sometimes getting warmer and sometimes getting cooler. At times, the earth has been a relative hothouse and at times it has been a relative icebox. Even recently, relatively speaking, England and Chicago have been under ice, but, on the other hand, Greenland was warm enough to settle on and be named “Greenland” rather than ice-land. All this before man began burning oil and coal in a big way.

We certainly must be as environmentally responsible as possible, consistent with actual science. But we should not destroy our economies and way of life based on fear instigated by fraudsters who stand to gain financially, from scoring big research grants to selling books, films, and “carbon credits.”

And we also know this: some of the big hypesters of anthropogenic global warming don’t behave in a way they themselves describe as environmentally responsible. To wit -- Al Gore’s gigantic and wasteful carbon footprint has been well documented, and the attendees at the upcoming Copenhagen world climate conference will generate a larger carbon footprint in a few days than some countries do in a year. All this makes normal people believe that the leaders of the movement don’t really believe what they’re preaching, appearing to be modern-day Elmer Gantrys.

Will any of this mounting evidence of fraud deter the global warming acolytes? I doubt it, since their faith was never founded in true science, which is properly infused with skepticism and based on open inquiry and reproducibility of results. Rather, they are true believers, for whom faith in man-caused global warming has taken the place of organized religion, bringing a sense of purpose and meaning. True believers are not dissuaded by absence of science, let alone proof of fraud.

In response to “Climategate,” global warming advocates must rely on the “fake but accurate defense” – there may be some fraud, but is should not distract us from acting urgently on global warming, since the so-called scientists were only faking data to demonstrate the man-caused global warming we all know is happening. It’s wasted effort to argue with true believers that it's largely from faked and uncertain "science" in the first place that we “know” that global warming is happening and that it is man-caused.

Given the scope of what the alarmists want the people of the world to do, what they advocate is, to borrow a phrase from the Bush II years, the ultimate faith-based initiative.


John M Greco