Funny, when Mr. Obama was traveling all over the nation constantly, and the world, in fossil fueled airplanes, taking constant vacations and seemingly heading to the west coast for fundraisers every other week, when his family, and even the dog, traveled in separate airplanes, the planet was fine. Now, though, the NY Times editorial board, featuring confirmed racist Sarah Jeong, is Very Upset
It’s hard to believe but it was only three years ago this month — just after 7 p.m., Paris time, Dec. 12, to be precise — that delegates from more than 190 nations, clapping and cheering, whooping and weeping, rose to celebrate the Paris Agreement — the first genuinely collective response to the mounting threat of global warming. It was a largely aspirational document, without strong legal teeth and achieved only after contentious and exhausting negotiations. But for the first time in climate talks stretching back to 1992, it set forth specific, numerical pledges from each country to reduce emissions so that together they could keep atmospheric temperatures from barreling past a point of no return.
Two weeks ago, delegates met at a follow-up conference in Katowice, Poland, to address procedural questions left unsettled in Paris, including common accounting mechanisms and greater transparency in how countries report their emissions. In this the delegates largely succeeded, giving rise to the hope, as Brad Plumer put it in The Times, that “new rules would help build a virtuous cycle of trust and cooperation among countries, at a time when global politics seems increasingly fractured.â€
But otherwise it was a hugely dispiriting event and a fitting coda to one of the most discouraging years in recent memory for anyone who cares about the health of the planet — a year marked by President Trump’s destructive, retrograde policies, by backsliding among big nations, by fresh data showing that carbon dioxide emissions are still going up, by ever more ominous signs (devastating wildfires and floods, frightening scientific reports) of what a future of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions is likely to bring. (snip)
Wells Griffith, Mr. Trump’s international energy and climate adviser, managed in one quote to summarize the dismissiveness of the American delegation and its fealty to the president’s apparently unshakable conviction that anything that helps the environment must inevitably hurt the economy. “The United States has an abundance of natural resources and is not going to keep them in the ground,â€Â he said. “We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice their economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability.†The administration is full of zero-sum philosophers like Mr. Griffith. The idea that sustainability may be a necessary condition of future economic growth appears never to have crossed their minds.
The NY Times, which uses vast amounts of fossil fuels to gather and disseminate the news, seems a bit upset.
Further depressing the proceedings were recent defections and political troubles in countries that, along with the United States, had been expected to lead the way to a low-carbon energy future. Germany, which long ago walked away from carbon-free nuclear power, is having a hard time cutting back on coal because of political opposition. In Australia, a prime minister was kicked out of office because he wanted to reduce the use of coal, which Australia produces in abundance. China, despite admirably aggressive investments in wind and solar power, has yet to get a firm grip on its emissions from coal-fired plants. The new president-elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, not only named an outspoken climate-change denier as his foreign minister but also, reversing his predecessors’ policy, pledged to open up the Amazon to mining and farming. This will threaten biodiversity in one of the world’s great rain forests while crippling its ability to act as a sink for carbon emissions.
In other words, nations are realizing that we can’t just wish away the use of reliable, low cost coal and other fossil fuels for the pie in the sky “green energy” sources. When will the Times get all its power from solar and wind?
No country’s backsliding, of course, compares with Mr. Trump’s. Determined to demolish President Barack Obama’s entire climate strategy, Mr. Trump has in the past year replaced Mr. Obama’s clean-power plan, which was aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, with an essentially useless substitute that would emit 12 times the pollution envisaged by the Obama plan. He has proposed weakening a major Obama regulation requiring automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by 2025. (This rollback, The Times reported this month, came after a lot of whining by oil interests, not, as one might suspect, from the auto companies, which had accepted the challenge.) And the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department have taken multiple steps to roll back Obama-era efforts to control emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide. These three programs formed the basis of Mr. Obama’s pledge at the 2015 Paris meeting to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Mr. Obama’s pledge, not the pledge of the United States of America, as it was never meant to be anything that the duly elected lawmakers would vote on. Don’t forget, Obama’s Clean Power Plan was still stuck in court, and was never implemented.
The bottom line, according to the Global Carbon Project, is that after three years in which emissions remained largely flat, global levels of carbon dioxide increased by 1.6 percent in 2017 and are on pace to jump by 2.7 percent this year. Some scientists have likened the increase in emissions to a “speeding freight train.â€Â That has a lot to do with economic growth. It also has a lot to do with not moving much faster to less carbon-intensive ways of powering that growth. Or in Mr. Trump’s case, moving in the opposite direction.
See? We’re doomed! Except, of course, that America’s carbon footprint has actually gone down, while a goodly chunk of the nations which are still in the Paris Climate Agreement are seeing their own CO2 output go up up up. But, hey, Trump lives rent free in the head of every Warmist.
The planet will be just fine.
The Times article said:
and:
Of course, while noting all of those other countries over which Donald Trump does not reign, the author still assigns most of the blame to our President:
What the lovely Miss Jeong is combitching about is that the people are having a voice in all of this. The people elected Donald John Trump to be President of the United States, not Hillary Rodham Clinton, who would most certainly have continued the Obysmal Administration policies, which would have done exactly as has happened in other countries: failed to yield the promised results.
The real difference? President Trump did something really radical and told the truth, saying that these goals were ridiculous and would never be met. The other oh-so-developed nations have continued to lie about what their countries would, or could, do, and have failed to meet the commitments they’ve made.
The 2015 Paris agreement was structured as it was because President Obama knew, as did everyone else, that it would never be ratified by the Senate as a treaty, or even by simple majorities of both Houses of Congress as executive/legislative agreements. He just wasted jet fuel going to Paris to sign something meaningless.
The real problem for the warmunists? They claim that using technology to go carbon free will result in an economic boom, but they are lying through their scummy teeth, and everyone knows it. The policies they have advocated will make people, in general, poorer, because they will have to pay much more for everything, and see no greater returns for it. They will have to live poorer today in order to possibly, but possibly not, achieve a degree or two in less increase in global warmth a hundred years from now.
The peasants are revolting! (At this point our esteemed host should embed the cartoon!)
The most simple, logical, economical, affordable and most environmentally friendly source of power is Nuclear yet the left continues to ignore this elephant in the room. If I were elected president I would begin an initiative to build one new nuclear power plant in each state over the next four years. Cut the ridiculous and superfluous regulations which have nothing to do with standards and safety, cut through the red tape and build us some power plants! Do it for the children. Do it so the poor can afford energy. Do it to save the planet. Do it for Islam. Do it for the oppressed transgendered, crippled immigrants. Do it for whatever reason floats your boat but for heaven’s sake do it before we have a total collapse of our energy grid. 20 million electric cars can’t be charging 23 hours a day on wind mills. Energy and electric power are too important to the economy, security and future of America to leave it to the hands of leftist ideologues more interested in wealth redistribution than heating our homes.
“Trump imperials the planet…â€. Meanwhile, US emissions are down. These people are beyond stupid