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The USA Should End Its Support for Climate Agreements
Raymond Richman, 5/20/2017

Thirty-one U.S. multi-nationals and domestic corporations bought a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal May 12, 2017 addressed to President Trump expressing their “strong support for the United States remaining in the Paris Climate Agreement.” Signers included 3M, Cargill, Cummins, Coca Cola, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Proctor & Gamble, Tesla, and Walt Disney.  What is interesting is how few of America’s leading manufacturers were represented. They do not speak for American industry. This is the “swamp” pretending to be “concerned about keeping the doors open for the global flow of American manufacturing goods at this critical time when our manufacturing sector is starting to grow from our competitive energy advantage.” Where is the evidence of that? Where were they while the U.S. chronic trade deficits decimated American manufactures and caused millions of American manufacturing workers to lose their jobs. Those were real costs. We are not even sure that the costs of global warming exceed its benefits, contrary to what the global warming fanatics have been scaring us with.

The architects of the Paris climate accord deliberately designed it to get the Congress of the U.S. to approve it by pretending it does not bind the U.S. to set emissions targets or to do anything. The authors were mindful of the Kyoto Protocol which was roundly rejected by the United States Congress because it set binding emissions targets for wealthy countries while letting most developing nations, including China, off the hook. But now, as forces within the Trump administration continue to debate whether to leave the Paris agreement, they face a far different calculus. The accord, agreed to in 2015, is alleged to be nonbinding, imposing no serious legal restraints on the United States or any other nation. If so, why have a treaty? Because it does bind the U.S. to make periodic reports of what action it has been taking to reduce CO² emissions.

But the evidence is irrefutable that the U.S. has already spent billions on alternative energy, subsidies to producers of alternative evergy, subsidies to millionaire buyers of expensive electric autos, and subsidies to those who install insulation or heat panels without having any effect at all on global warming. Why continue to waste billion of taxpayer money?

That appearance of it being a non-binding treaty has given ammunition to those urging the Trump administration to stick with Paris, a group that is reported to include Ivanka Trump and diplomats like Secretary of State Rex W.Tillerson, and of course the multi-nationals who are American only because they incorporate in the U.S.  The United States, they argue, can stay within the Paris deal and adjust its domestic plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions however it sees fit. The cost of cutting greenhouse gas emissions far exceeds its benefits. Within the White House, Trump advisers like the chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon have urged the president to follow through on his promise to exit the deal. They argue that staying in the Paris accord could entangle the United States in a series of legal obligations, much as Kyoto did. That is obviously true. Signing the agreement binds us to spend additional billions on reducing man-made-global warming and to give billions to countries totally unaffected by past or present global warming. The Czech president who said the movement to reduce-man-made-global-warming was a hoax was absolutely right as the huge international waste of billions of dollars since then has shown.

We are constantly being bombarded by the costs of global warming by the man-made-global-warming ideologues and the claim that it is a scientific fact. Here is what one scientist Prof. Robert M. Carters of James Cook University in Australia  wrote about it in 2009:

     "Accurate temperature measurements made from weather balloons and satellites since the late 1950s show no atmospheric warming since 1958…. Despite the expenditure of more than US$50 billion dollars looking for it since 1990, no unambiguous anthropogenic (human) signal has been identified in the global temperature pattern… On both annual (1 year) and geological (up to 100,000 year) time scales, changes in atmospheric temperature PRECEDE changes in CO2. Carbon dioxide therefore cannot be the primary forcing agent for temperature increase (though increasing CO2 does cause a diminishingly mild positive temperature feedback)… The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acted as the main scaremonger for the global warming lobby that led to the Kyoto Protocol. Fatally, the IPCC is a political, not scientific, body….The Kyoto Protocol will cost many trillions of dollars and exercises a significant impost those countries that signed it, but will deliver no significant cooling (less than .02^o C by 2050, assuming that all commitments are met)….The Russian Academy of Sciences says that Kyoto has no scientific basis;… The reality is that almost every aspect of climate science is the subject of vigorous debate….  No human-caused warming can yet be detected that is distinct from natural … More than 50% [of global warming] observed during the 20th century can be attributed to solar change(s). … Meteorological experts are agreed that no increase in storms has occurred beyond that associated with natural variation of the climate system."

This devastating criticism has not stopped the environmental fanatics. They continue to s ay that all scientists acknowledge man-made-global warming. But in fact, all scientists acknowledge that there have been many periods of global warming. Moreover, the astronomical costs of government actions taken to date around the world have produced no effects. Worse, they wasted hundreds of  billions to limit man-made emissions and continue to do so without affecting global warming at all. Instead of adapting to global warming and cooling when it occurs, the United Nations has been promoting all sorts of government foolishness. After we were allowed with the overwhelming approval of the people of Afghanistan to enter their country and remove the Taliban, we repeated at the urging of the UN to forbid as the Taliban had done the growing of opium none of which was being sent to the U.S. The Afghan people who had welcomed us then turned against us and welcomed back the Taliban who pledged to approve the growing of opium. We are losing Afghanistan as a result of UN pressure and we should resist the UN’s proposals regarding man-made-global-warming. It will have the same disastrous results