Pirate's Cove

The things the NY Times wastes time on. Things that tend to be at the bottom in polls of issues that Americans care about

Mr. Trump, the Climate Change Loner

President Emmanuel Macron of France tried this week during President Trump’s visit to Paris to get him to reverse his decision to take America out of the landmark global agreement on climate change, struck in December 2015 and since ratified by 153 nations. It was a futile exercise, as he must have known it would be.

At one point, Mr. Trump seemed to leave the door open for some unspecified compromise. But nobody knows what that would be. And in any case it is likely to be meaningless, because there is zero chance that he would reaffirm President Barack Obama’s commitment to make meaningful reductions in America’s greenhouse gas emissions, or seek to re-establish the leadership role that Mr. Obama occupied and that Mr. Trump has now abdicated.

And it’s wonderful how all those leaders run around the world using vast amounts of fossil fuels, isn’t it? And, yes, this does matter. If these leaders of a movement that polls low are unwilling to make changes in their own lives, why should we think this is anything but political?

What changes has the NY Times made? Over all these years of reading the primary talking points organization of the Democrats I’ve yet to see one article or opinion piece stating that the Times has made changes to reduce their own carbon footprint, especially in regards to the vast amounts of fossil fuels to distribute its dead tree editions.

In short, despite Mr. Macron’s efforts, the gap between Mr. Trump and the rest of the world on climate remains as wide and unbridgeable as it was at the Group of 20 summit meeting the week before, when the final communiqué contained a robust commitment from 19 of the world’s leading economic powers to fight climate change and one pathetic little sentence in which the United States said it would “endeavor” to “use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently.” Mr. Trump had apparently hoped for some support from other big fossil fuel producers, like Russia and Saudi Arabia. This was not forthcoming, heartening those who feared (and still fear) that Mr. Trump’s betrayal of America’s commitments would cause other countries to backslide as well.

It was not America’s commitments: it was Obama’s commitment. We didn’t approve the agreement: it was never put in front of the duly elected legislative branch. And Obama is running around the world using vast amounts of fossil fuels, a continuation of what happened while he was in office.

The unanswered question is whether the goals set in the Paris accord can be reached without United States participation. To recap briefly, the accord sought to limit the rise in atmospheric temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and 1.5 degrees if possible. To that end, Mr. Obama pledged to reduce America’s greenhouse gases by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, largely through greater fuel efficiency for cars and light trucks, limits on methane emissions from oil and gas wells, and new rules governing emissions from new and old coal-fired power plants.

Yet, not in his own life, where he’s hanging on yachts and traveling around the world on fossil fueled private jets. He’s fine with forcing the rest of us to make changes in our own lives, but not in his own.

It makes one wonder what could conceivably change Mr. Trump’s mind. He seems impervious to the broadly accepted science of global warming, and wholly unimpressed by evidence that the jobs he has promised his followers lie not in dying industries like coal mining but in renewables like wind and solar. Perhaps the giant iceberg that broke free of Antarctica will ring a little bell. The calving might or might not be related to climate change, and it will not by itself raise sea levels, since the shelf was already sitting in the water. But shelves hold back land-based glaciers, and when the shelves go, the glaciers tend to follow. In any case, nature has sent a message.

So much anti-science from the Times, which refuses to practice what they preach. Personally, I’m going to blame the iceberg on the carbon footprint from the production and distribution of newspapers from the NY Times. According to Warmist dogma, I don’t have to prove I’m right: they have to prove me wrong.