A year on from his bold decision to quit the UN Paris Accord, President Trump has been praised for having “broken the spell of climate change mania.”
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore hails Trump’s exit from Paris as the moment when the “global warmists” lost “the levers of control”.
Since Mr Trump walked out, it has been fascinating to watch the decline of media interest in “saving the planet”. There was the most tremendous rumpus when he made his announcement, but the End-Of-The-World-Is-Nigh-Unless feeling that made headlines before Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Paris, and numerous other gatherings, has gone. This feeling was essential to achieve the “Everybody’s doing it, so we must do it” effect the organisers sought.
The media barely noticed the recent Bonn meeting. I doubt if they will get apocalyptic about the next big show, “COP24” in Katowice, Poland, this December. The Poles are among the nations emerging as “climate realists” – people with their own coal and a very strong wish not to depend on the Russians. Climate-change zealotry is looking like CND after the installation of cruise and Pershing missiles in the 1980s – a bit beside the point.
Moore is absolutely right about the symbolic significance of Trump’s decision.
Donald Trump was the lucky winner of a global elite gathering held in Paris today to mark the second anniversary of the useless, pointless and very expensive COP21 U.N. climate summit: he didn’t get an invitation.
British Prime Minister Theresa May was invited – and accepted. (And tweeted this extremely embarrassing thing to remind the world yet again why so many Conservatives expect her government to be overthrown by a bunch of revolutionary socialists at the next election, because hey what difference would it make?)
So too – allegedly – were 50 other “global leaders”, including Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.
But there was no official delegation from the U.S. because that was the real point of the event: so that French President Emmanuel Macron and the rest of the Davos elite could be seen publicly to be punishing President Trump by conspicuously not inviting him.
Instead, the U.S. was represented by the Three Stooges of Eco Loon Bloviation: California Gov. Jerry Brown; former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; and the almost inevitable Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made a fool of himself by mincing around on a silly green bicycle.
Director James Cameron has described Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord as “insanity,” in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“It’s absurd for us to withdraw from Paris. It’s insanity,” the Avatar director said of Trump. “I think it’s actually psychotic to be doing that, or it’s delusional. Possibly both.”
Cameron himself, of course, is famously not psychotic or delusional. As he demonstrates elsewhere in the interview he is a calm, well-balanced guy who is never now tempted to murder his film crews or take drugs to enhance his creativity:
I don’t need to be stoned to be creative, and I don’t need to be mean to get the vision on film.
…
We just had a wonderful morning where I brought in Wade Davis who is one of the world’s top anthropologist ethnobotanist guys. He’s a fellow explorer at National Geographic [Cameron has made a record-breaking deep sea dive] and we spent the first four hours sitting on the floor in a big circle with the entire [Avatar] cast and most of the creative crew and the designers and so on talking about the importance of the ancient wisdom of indigenous cultures and cultural relativism and all that sort of thing. The cast was utterly inspired by the whole thing.
Presumably, they had to be — to avoid having their intestines dragged out through their mouths by any of the notoriously calm, tolerant and not at all difficult action movie directors involved in the project, then fired, then ground down to make organic fertilizer to be donated to some remote Amazonian rainforest collective of indigenous peoples.
…Is because he has a very powerful bullshit detector. We know this thanks to a fascinating and unwittingly revelatory article in the German newspaper Der Spiegel.
The paper reveals how, in the days running up to President Trump’s decision to quit the UN Paris accord, he received a series of deputations from EU leaders urging him to change his mind.
“For me it’s easier to stay in than step out,” Trump told them.
This is perfectly true. Since his momentous Rose Garden speech announcing his plans to pull out of Paris, Trump has taken more flak than a thousand-bomber raid over Berlin in ’44.
He has upset his daughter Ivanka, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his financial advisor Gary Cohn. On top of that, he has given the entire liberal half of the planet, plus sundry conservative squishes, the perfect excuse they needed to dismiss him as a science-denying loon in thrall to Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Evil, etc…
Let’s not get too excited just yet about reports that President Trump has made up his mind to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. We don’t know the terms and conditions. It is entirely possible that what we end up with is a fudge, designed to appease both warring factions in the administration but actually resulting in a muddled cop out which pleases no one.
Still, let’s look at the upside. The greenies are going postal:
The U.S. will be removed from Angela Merkel’s Weihnachtskarte list.
The U.S. may become the victim of further weaponized handshakes and other typically Gallic “your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries” insults from prepubescent Mummy’s little tough boy President Macron of France.
The U.S. presidential administration may become subject to further awkward rifts between those who want a “seat at the table” in Paris – Tillerson; Jared Kushner; Ivanka; Gary Cohn; Rick Perry – and those who want out.
The U.S. may add to “global warming” by 0.3 degrees C, causing the world to boil and melt or, if not that, then at least provoking much bitterness and resentment among all the countries that haven’t yet quit Paris even though they’d all secretly like to.
Quite how Trump will respond to these threats is still anyone’s guess. On the one hand, he has reportedly told various allies that he intends to pull out. On the other, he is known for changing his mind at the last minute.
What we do know is that the climate gravy train is trundling on regardless. And that as far as the U.S. climate negotiators are concerned, the current president might still just as well be Barack Obama.
Should Donald Trump hamstring the U.S. economy, rip off the consumer, despoil the landscape, give succour to America’s enemies and promote junk science – all in order to keep a “seat at the table” with people who despise him and think he’s an idiot?
To some people – including several senior members of the Trump administration – the answer isn’t immediately obvious. Which is why this week both a leading U.S. scientist and a number of top Senate Republicans have had to urge the president to see sense and ignore the siren voices urging him to stay in the UN’s Paris climate agreement.
The 20 top Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have signed a letter warning the president that remaining in Paris “would subject the United States to significant litigation risk that could up-end your administration’s ability to fulfill its goal of rescinding the Clean Power Plan.”
Meanwhile, the distinguished physicist Will Happer – long mooted as a possible Science Advisor in the Trump administration – has argued that staying in Paris will not only be pointless but will be a betrayal of Trump’s election promise to voters that he would pull out.
Climate policy, however, poses a grave threat. Yes, those who engineered the Paris Agreement will be upset if the United States withdraws. Withdrawal will also outrage the many who profit from climate alarmism. But remaining in the Paris Agreement will not sit well with many of those who voted for Mr. Trump in part because of his campaign promises to withdraw from the agreement. These voters rightly perceived that the agreement would benefit a privileged international elite, at the expense of the common people of the United States and of the rest of the world.
You might think that such interventions ought to be unnecessary. President Trump is, after all, an avowed climate skeptic who has already taken several important steps towards tackling the Green Blob, most recently by promising to eliminate “nearly $1.6 billion in international programs aimed at promoting green energy and fighting global warming.”
Among the targets on his hit list: the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund (GCF), which hands out money for programs to adapt or mitigate global warming; the Clean Technology Fund and the Strategic Climate Fund – saving $239 million; and the Global Climate Change Initiative, saving U.S. taxpayers $362 million.
But Trump is still wavering over the Paris climate agreement, which senior members of his administration, including Jared Kushner, daughter Ivanka, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson are urging him not to quit.
Anyone puzzled by the fact that the former CEO of Exxon is supporting an agreement totally opposed to the company’s business model and shareholder interests really needs to read this eye-opening piece by Steve Milloy.
President Trump’s latest moves on the Paris agreement are – depending on your point of view – either a masterstroke of realpolitik by a consummate dealmaker or a shameful fudge: he has decided to kick the can down the road by leaving the decision up to the Senate.
This isn’t, of course, what he promised on the campaign trail.
In May last year in North Dakota he was quite explicit:
We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to UN global warming programs.
What he probably wasn’t banking on, though, when he made that commitment was that it wouldn’t just be the liberals and greenies he’d be battling – but also a significant chunk of his own administration.
Though his EPA chief Scott Pruitt and his advisor Steve Bannon were all for pulling out, everyone else in his inner circle – not just the inevitable Jared Kushner and Ivanka, but also Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and even Energy Secretary Rick Perry – were keen to stay in.
President Trump is definitely going to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, the head of his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team has confirmed.
At a press conference in London – the one where the media delegates’ heads all exploded – Myron Ebell told his appalled audience that Trump would certainly be honouring his campaign promise to pull out of the UN Paris agreement. The fact that incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson disagrees with this is, Ebell suggested, an irrelevance.
An apparent contradiction emerged in recent weeks between Trump’s position and that of his incoming secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who said the US will “remain part” of UN climate discussions. When asked about these contrasting positions, Ebell said it is impossible for him to predict the outcome, but “in a disagreement with the president, who do you think will win?”
More bad news from Nice: we learn from the BBC that local Muslims have been getting the cold shoulder from theirkuffar neighbours. “People who yesterday would embrace me warmly are now cold towards me,” says one.
And all because of the unfortunate and terribly unfair coincidence that the man who mowed down over 100 people in a truck just happened to be called Mohamed, of Tunisian descent, and allegedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” as he went about his murderous spree.
“The worst affected by these attacks are us, the Muslims. We have seen an increase in abuse and threats,” complains local man Ahmed Mohamed.
Another – Abdul Moniem – has some sage things to say about not pointing the finger of blame.
“You have to distinguish between different types of crime. Are these crimes that relate to terrorism? Or are these individual criminal acts? In this case what happened was a terrible crime and shouldn’t be treated as terrorism. The criminal who carried out this attack did not pray or fast…he had social and relationship problems. It was this that led him to hurt people.”
The BBC is very concerned about this outbreak of ‘Islamophobia’. That would be why it sent a reporter – also called Mohamed – to down to investigate.
But I’ve a strange feeling that not many of you reading this – unless, perhaps, your name is Mohammed, or you are LBC’s resident faux-Cockney dhimmi James O’Brien, or you work for the BBC yourself – are going to be shedding bitter tears for Nice’s Muslim community right now. In fact you may well suspect that reports like this are very much part of the problem not the solution.
It’s really not much different from the pieces he wrote after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Paris massacre. But then, barring a few details – innocents mashed with a truck rather than, as at Bataclan, either shot, blown up or tortured by having their testicles cut off or their vaginas stabbed – the situation remains just the same as it ever did: with the chattering classes, the politicians, most of the media, and virtually the entire Umma still in denial of the nightmare problem facing us.
That problem, gloss it how you will, has something to do with Islam.
