https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/21/trump-takes-on-the-climatecrats/
Donald Trump has pulled America out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement for the second time. The new US president signed an executive order following his inauguration yesterday, reversing the decision of his predecessor, Joe Biden, to drag the US back into the agreement in 2021. Bizarrely, like some dodgy insurance scam, the rules of the climatocracy say it takes a year to withdraw from the deal, so not until next winter will America be free of its obligations to reduce its emissions.
In truth, those ‘obligations’ are more like empty promises. The scandalous, nonsensical truth about the Paris Agreement is that it obliges literally nothing. It requires governments to, every five years, submit pieces of paper called ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ (INDCs), which can consist of saying you plan to go on doing what you are doing to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Or even to do less than you were doing before. Most countries can then ignore the INDCs and do whatever they feel like anyway. There is almost no monitoring involved, let alone reprimanding, indicting or punishing. Only Britain has made its INDCs legally binding.
India’s latest Paris promise, made in 2023, consists of slightly relaxing, rather than tightening, its previous target for decarbonising. China has promised to continue to increase its emissions until 2030. Even if all the INDCs made under the Paris Agreement were kept to, climate economist Bjorn Lomborg has calculated that the global impact would be to reduce temperatures by less than 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2100. That is so minuscule it would be impossible to measure. Can you honestly say that, 75 years hence, your grandchildren could tell the difference between a day that’s 15.21 degrees and one that’s 15.26 degrees?
The Paris Agreement grew out of the chaos of COP15, the UN’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, when the climatecrats decided that empty promises were not enough. They felt they must instead have the power to impose enforceable, mandatory emissions targets for all nations. Again and again, in the years leading up to the Paris meeting, the UN, the EU and US used the words ‘legally binding’ to describe what they planned. Nothing less would do.
At COP17 in Durban, South Africa in 2011, world leaders signed up to a promise to have a legally binding treaty in force by 2020. Greenpeace repeatedly insisted it must be a binding rather than a ‘voluntary approach’. The EU agreed. Ahead of the conference, its spokesman said: ‘The Paris Agreement must be an international legally binding agreement.’ Then French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said that John Kerry, then US secretary of state, was simply ‘confused’ when he worried whether a legally binding treaty was possible.
