Multiple sources including Fox News and CBS News are reporting that President Trump has decided to withdraw from the job-killing Paris climate accord. Apparently the execution of the withdrawal is being planned out by a small team including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Axios.com who has been on top of this story all along explains
They’re deciding on whether to initiate a full, formal withdrawal — which could take 3 years — or exit the underlying United Nations climate change treaty, which would be faster but more extreme.
This is a case where former president Obama’s nasty habit of ignoring the constitutional seperation of powers by going around congress coming back to bite him in the arse. He treated the Paris deal as a presidential agreement rather than a treaty which would need to be approved by 2/3 of the Senate (which may or may not have been approved). But once a treaty is approved by the Senate a president can’t pull out of it on his own.
The President’s decision is a good one. Even if one subscribes the climate change hypothesis, if they look at the Paris Agreement rationally they will understand the Paris deal hurts the national economy without making a dent in CO2 levels:
UN climate agreement that is totally meaningless when it comes to the climate. University of Pennsylvania Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack has also noted: “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”
NASA’s former lead global warming scientist Dr. James Hansen is not a big fan of the UN Paris accord. See: ‘Fraud, Fake…Worthless Words’: NASA’s James Hansen on UN Paris Pact – Trump should take note –
“[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
Hansen’s rant against the deal is significant as he is such a strong proponent of the climate change hypothesis that when working for NASA, he was caught more than once faking the data to be able to report the Earth was warmer than it actually was.
Other climate experts who have looked at the UN climate agreement think Trump is correct to dismantle it. Danish statistician, author, environmentalist, and professor of political science, Bjorn Lomborg wrote “Trump’s climate plan might not be so bad after all.”‘
Lomborg added that Trump withdrawing from the UN treaty “will will stop the pursuit of an expensive dead-end” because even if you accept the climate claims of the UN, the agreement “will matter very little to temperature rise.”
‘If the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the President Obama’s very ambitious rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.
(…) We will spend at least one hundred trillion dollars in order to reduce the temperature by the end of the century by a grand total of three tenths of one degree…the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years…Again, that is using the UN’s own climate prediction model.’
‘But here is the biggest problem: These minuscule benefits do not come free — quite the contrary. The cost of the UN Paris climate pact is likely to run 1 to 2 trillion dollars every year.’
If the reports are true you will hear the global warming enthusiasts whine that President Trump is destroying the environment, but the truth is that at best the Paris Climate deal may carve a fraction of a degree off world-wide temperatures, will cost over a trillion dollars a year and per Bjorn Lomborg.
“U.S. promises alone — to cut greenhouse gas emissions 26%-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 — would reduce gross domestic product more than $150 billion annually.”
As of April 11, the measured global values continue to decline as do the computed values for April 18. The time-delayed post El Niño cooling is now showing up in the UAH and RSS satellite data.
