President Trump just announced that the U.S. will “withdraw” out of the Paris Climate Accord. But “begin negotiations to re-enter”.
Trump said:
“We will cease honoring all non-binding agreements”, and “will stop contributing to the green climate fund”.
“I can not in good conscience support a deal that harms the United States”.
“The bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair to the United States”.
“This agreement is less about climate and more about other countries getting a financial advantage over the United States”.
“The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.”
“Fourteen days of carbon emissions alone would totally wipe out the U.S. contribution to reduction by 2030”
“Compliance with the terms of the Paris accord… could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025.”
“India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid.”
“We need all forms of available American energy or our country will be at grave risk of brown-outs and black-outs.”
“Withdrawing is in economic interest and won’t matter much to the climate.”
“We will be environmentally friendly, but we’re not going to put our businesses out of work… We’re going to grow rapidly.”
“No responsible leader can put the workers and the people of their country at this debilitating and tremendous disadvantage.”
“The same nations asking us to stay in the agreement are the countries that have collectively cost America trillions.”
“My job as President is to do everything within my power to give America a level playing field.”
“The same nations asking us to stay in the agreement are the countries that have collectively cost America trillions.”
“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
“Foreign leaders in Europe, Asia, & across the world should not have more to say w/ respect to the US economy than our own citizens.”
“Our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty.”
“It is time to exit the Paris Accord and time to pursue a new deal which protects the environment, our companies, our citizens.”
Scott Pruitt: “America finally has a leader who answers only to the people.” “This is an historic restoration of American economic independence.”
The Paris Accord is a BAD deal for Americans, and the President’s action today is keeping his campaign promise to put American workers first. The Accord was negotiated poorly by the Obama Administration and signed out of desperation. It frontloads costs on the American people to the detriment of our economy and job growth while extracting meaningless commitments from the world’s top global emitters, like China. The U.S. is already leading the world in energy production and doesn’t need a bad deal that will harm American workers.
UNDERMINES U.S. Competitiveness and Jobs
- According to a study by NERA Consulting, meeting the Obama Administration’s requirements in the Paris Accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several
- By 2040, our economy would lose 6.5 million industrial sector jobs – including 3.1 million manufacturing sector jobs
- It would effectively decapitate our coal industry, which now supplies about one-third of our electric power
The deal was negotiated BADLY, and extracts meaningless commitments from the world’s top polluters
- The Obama-negotiated Accord imposes unrealistic targets on the U.S. for reducing our carbon emissions, while giving countries like China a free pass for years to
- Under the Accord, China will actually increase emissions until 2030
The U.S. is ALREADY a Clean Energy and Oil & Gas Energy Leader; we can reduce our emissions and continue to produce American energy without the Paris Accord
- America has already reduced its carbon-dioxide emissions
- Since 2006, CO2 emissions have declined by 12 percent, and are expected to continue to
- According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the U.S. is the leader in oil & gas
The agreement funds a UN Climate Slush Fund underwritten by American taxpayers
- President Obama committed $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund – which is about 30 percent of the initial funding – without authorization from Congress
- With $20 trillion in debt, the U.S. taxpayers should not be paying to subsidize other countries’ energy
The deal also accomplishes LITTLE for the climate
- According to researchers at MIT, if all member nations met their obligations, the impact on the climate would be The impacts have been estimated to be likely to reduce global temperature rise by less than .2 degrees Celsius in 2100.
Why are key words missing from the end of so many of the bullet points at the end of this article? Please fix?
Thank you, Anthony, for all you have done for more than ten years to make this possible. You deserve to feel very good right now. Oh, and I’m hitting the tip jar.
Finally, a global leader with the “cojones” to say that Paris Accord type policy is a massive waste of money for no measurable good. As someone said: the most expensive and inefficient refrigerator ever proposed. Antony and all moderators, posters at WUWT, and other skeptic voices are due a massive thank you from us all, because you have provided the scientific arguments and the voice of reason on this. Watch other leaders follow suit, once a bit of leadership has been shown. (this from a Scot in Spain – just to further demonstrate the international range of the audience here).
John Bolton’s puts it better than anyone I’ve ever heard –
Your go to guy for a supporting view is the neocon that helped push the US into the Iraq war. That makes him the poster child of who NOT to listen to.
The Treaty with Kuwait dragged the US into the Iraq war. You fail history and government with that comment.
The news coverage this morning irritates me so much that I need some place to regurgitate this nonsense.
1) The news seems more concerned with answering the big question — “Does Donald Trump still consider Climate Change to be a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese?” Despite every attempt to distract from this big question by talking about whether the Paris deal was good for America or effective (which, I guess are minor questions), the news anchors needed to get to the bottom of this big question.
2) The news keeps getting the economics backwards. They pound the table and say that employment in the coal industry peaked right after WWII and now stands at “only 160,000 people”. What they are missing is the number of jobs created due to inexpensive fossil fuels. It’s not about the number of jobs in the coal industry — it is about the value of each job to the economy. If it takes 1,600,000 people in renewable energy fields to create the same amount of energy as 160,000 people in the coal industry, then the value of each job is reduced by a factor of 10.
3) They pound the table and point to how CEOs, including oil companies, are supporting the Paris deal, ignoring the fact that they blame these same people for funding “deniers”. They also forget that corporations are terrible economists — they care about profits, not economics. The easiest profits are tax breaks.
4) In the same way, they forget that nations don’t care about our economics. The news only seems to care about whether we are in lockstep with other nations of the world. Other nations only care about exploiting America for either political gains or our economic wealth.
5) The most irritating part is that the news doesn’t care about their own biases. They have a token representative for Trump so that the rest of the panel can belittle and mock that perspective. Not one person seems interested in the cost of the Paris agreement relative to the merits. It’s not even a question they seem capable of addressing.
I take off my hat to you (Trump-supporting) Americans for voting in this President.
Congratulations also to Anthony and his team for helping to make possible this historic event. I am beginning to feel that progress in our fight against the repression of the Green Monster is, at long last, making headway.
Anthony: Thank you so much. You have saved America Billions and as a whistleblower: you deserve part of that. I’ve been here from the start, was online when FOIA informed you of the tranche dump of CRU emails. Corrected Steve McIntyre once and was part of a 4-way with yourself, Piers Corbyn (Its the Sun) and Leif (it’s not the Sun). And today — VE Day. Now I know what it’s like to play a tiny part in winning a giant War. But, you are my hero. Thank you !!!!
Sincere thanks for your kind words.
If only you hadn’t been screaming the basic pseudo-science of AGW is real all these years just imagine how much less science would have been damaged.
Stocks closed at new highs, but TSLA again was down.
“New deal” “renegotiate”
In WW2 here in the US there were a number of posters encouraging people to conserve gas for the war effort, to deal with a real threat. A common phrase on those posters was “Is this trip necessary?”.
I sure hope any “renegotiation” insist on a concrete answer to “Are these reductions necessary?”.
And no computer generated “concrete” or wooden nickles allowed.
MIT have released a statement saying Trump misinterpreted their research on the 0.17°C decrease in temps by 2100.
http://news.mit.edu/2017/mit-issues-statement-research-paris-agreement-0602#.WTG_V5gpjSE.twitter
They say it’s the net effect of the Paris COP21 pledges over and above Copenhagen pledges. If however, you have no climate pledges/agreement (neither Copenhagen nor Paris additions) the difference between action (all pledges) and no action is 0.6 to 1.1°C. But no agreement at all for the whole world for the entire 21st century is simply right of the table, a complete straw man. It’s useful as a benchmark to see how all pledges are shaping up in comparison with doing nothing, but Trump was simply citing the obvious additional pledges stated for Paris and their effect in 2100. That’s surely the only sensible way to talk about the practicalities of the situation. That’s even the case if the US exits all agreements (though it makes his citing of the MIT 0.17°C a little hollower, I’ll admit- see below).
If we forget just for a moment about the US withdrawal. On the day they agreed the Paris Agreement in 2015, the possibility of having no agreement in place was surely not even worthy of a passing thought. Copenhagen pledges would have been assumed to continue on past the 2020 expiry. At least in large part. That’s still the case for the 195 remaining countries and so the *additional* Paris Agreement pledges and their effect on SAT reduction in 2100 is all that matters in the numbers game. That means, on the face of it, that Trump correctly cited the 0.2°C (actually 0.17°C) in the correct context of the additional Paris pledges. The 0.17°C was in the MIT October 2015 Outlook publication.
Where Trump may come a little unstuck on this is if he is genuinely happy for the US to scrap both the additional Paris pledges *and* abandon Copenhagen commitments when they expire in 2020. i.e. the US would really have no climate agreement. In this case, the correct citing of the 0.2°C reduction by 2100 would still apply for the rest of the world because, as stated above, the rest of the world never had any intention of scrapping the Copenhagen level of commitments. So only the Paris additions are at issue and by extension only the 0.2°C reduction is at issue (not the 0.6 to 1.1°C).
However, there would be a small adjustment to the 0.2°C if the US pulled out and it’s also a bit off to be referring to the rest-of-world pledges over and above Copenhagen whilst saying you’re going to abandon all pledges. Despite this, the 0.2°C citation would even then still be almost completely true.
If Trump is thinking of maintaining the Copenhagen pledge levels then his citation of the 0.2°C is entirely correct. However, I believe the Clean Coal plan was a large part of the Copenhagen pledges and he’s scrapping them.
MIT is already dancing on a pin head as things stand. If Trump is maintaining the Copenhagen pledges but abandoning Paris pledges then the whole world is sticking to Copenhagen and additional Paris pledges are the only issue. If that’s the case, 0.2°C is the only issue, not MIT’s 0.6 to 1.1°C, and therefore Trump *did* cite the 0.2°C correctly.
Those bigger reductions are compared with *no agreement at all for the entire globe*- a complete straw man. That’s why MIT are dancing on a pin head. They should be knocked off but it would be somewhat easier if we knew how much of Copenhagen pledges are being kept by the US.