RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

In other words, all parties agreed that the next agreement would be worthless if it was toothless, and futile if it was not ambitious. Yet at the COP21 summit in Paris, they all agreed on something that was both completely voluntary and deeply unambitious. Did the EU, the UN, Greenpeace, John Kerry, Leonardo DiCaprio et al savage this pathetic, Potemkin agreement? Nope. They celebrated it as a ‘watershed’, a ‘triumph’. ‘If we follow through on the commitments that this agreement embodies’, said then US president Barack Obama, ‘history may well judge it as a turning point for our planet’.

Those who think climate change is the biggest threat to humanity bar none – and I am not one of them – seem to have totally misunderstood what the Paris Agreement actually does. Indeed, those who most worry about global warming should surely be most disappointed by Paris. It does the square root of sod all to reduce global emissions. It is ‘somewhere between a farce and a fraud’, as political adviser Oren Cass put it in 2018.

The COP29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan last year was such a feast of corruption and contradiction that it may have killed off the whole process altogether. The days when world leaders duly turned up to these events are long gone – UK prime minister Keir Starmer was about the only significant head of government who bothered to go. He had to listen to his host lambast Europeans for simultaneously demanding Azerbaijan sell them more gas, while also chastising Azerbaijan for daring to produce gas in the first place.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement will cause great suffering, but only among climatecrats. They have grown used to travelling business class across the world, sampling room service in four-star hotels and talking to each other late into the night over single malts, mostly at taxpayers’ expense. The number of private jets that flew into Baku around the time of last year’s conference was double the usual amount. If this entire ridiculous circus comes to an end, there might, ironically, be some emissions savings worth celebrating.