Donald Trump campaigned and was elected as an agent of radical change. He promised to roll back the policies on big government at home and transnational cooperation abroad that both parties have endorsed for years. His campaign rhetoric about the “useless UN” and the “unfair” Paris Climate Accords suggested he understood that such organizations and treaties fleece Americans while handing over national sovereignty to other countries eager to gain leverage over us.
But Trump’s recent comments about renegotiating the Paris agreement and reforming the UN imply an acceptance of the assumptions on which both are built: that multilateral cooperation is better able to serve the interests and security of the United States. If this is so, then Trump is buying into the flaws of those assumptions that need to be utterly discredited in order to enact meaningful change.
Trump’s rejection of the Paris Climate agreement was correct not just because it is a bad deal for our economy. Nor is withdrawal called for because, like previous meetings–– in Berlin, Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn, The Hague, Marrakech, New Delhi, Milan, Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, Doha, Warsaw, Lima, and now Paris––the results of these international gabfests have done nothing to reduce CO2 and mitigate the alleged apocalyptic consequences of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. But they’ve done plenty to enrich some countries at the expense of others, while profiting the “green energy” industries and hustlers like Al Gore.
So even if one believes in anthropogenic global warming, the Paris accord is a bad deal. The US would commit to a 30% reduction in carbon emissions, at the cost of an overall average of 400,000 fewer jobs, 200,000 fewer manufacturing jobs, a $20,000 loss in income for a family of four, an aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion, and increases in household electricity spending between 13% and 20%. And for what would the average American pay? According to the Heritage Foundation,
Using the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change developed by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, even if all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States were effectively eliminated, there would be less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius reduction in global temperatures. In fact, the entire industrialized world could cut carbon emissions down to zero, and the climate impact would still be less than four-tenths of a degree Celsius in terms of averted warming by the year 2100.
Worse yet, history teaches us that such an agreement is made to be broken, or sacrificed to national interests, or manipulated to benefit cronyism and rent-seeking. So while the US has reduced emissions by 12.2% since their peak in 2007, and 2.5% between 2014 and 2015, the EU, despite spending $1.2 trillion supporting green energy, saw an almost one percent increase in emissions over that same period. Nor have the US reductions been caused by government policies and regulations. The development of hydraulic fracturing extraction techniques––banned in the EU and hindered by Obama’s environmental policies–– has increased the amount of cleaner natural gas available to replace coal as an energy source.
Thus the US––in the teeth of Democrat-supporting environmental and green energy lobbies, and Obama’s multiple regulations targeting energy production–– has seen the market more effectively reduce emissions; while the EU has regulated and subsidized into existence electricity costs that are 2.5 times more expensive than in America. At the same time, an economic and geopolitical rival like China, responsible for 28% of total emissions in 2015, will continue to increase its emissions until 2030, when it promises to start reducing them.
