Actor Ed Norton has proposed a brilliant idea to help make residents of New York and California poorer and even more heavily regulated than they are already: they should unilaterally declare independence from President Trump’s climate policies and remain in the UN Paris Agreement.
According to Hollywood Reporter:
Giving a Master class in Lodz, Poland, where Norton was due later Friday to be honored with a “Glocal Hero” award at the closing of the 7th edition of the Transatlantyk Film Festival, Norton said between them, New York and California represent the “third largest economy in the world.” The commitment of those two states, along with a further “40 or 50” mayors and municipalities across the United States, would more than make up for the formal abandonment of the climate change treaty by the U.S. government, he said.
“The truth is that the citizens of the U.S do not need Donald Trump to stay in the Paris Climate Accord,” the actor told an audience of more than 1,000 at a Masterclass hosted by the festival in the Grand Theater in Lodz.
The Sausage Party star is correct on one point. There is absolutely nothing to stop U.S. states or municipalities pretending that they are still in the Paris Climate Accord in order to make some kind of symbolic point about the planet. It’s not, after all, like anyone is going to be able to notice the difference: the agreement was never a binding one.
Other than that, though, very little of what Norton says makes sense.
For example:
Referring to mass protests across Poland over moves to replace the country’s independent judiciary with politically appointed judges, Norton added: “Talking about what is taking place in Poland today, we are at a moment when people are shocked about the apparent deconstruction of democratic principles, but we must remember that with technology and the network effect of the global community, it is much harder now for the political matrix to isolate people and control them.”
Norton, who is the UN’s Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity, added: “Whether it is individuals or cities or states, our capacity to create a shift through lots of determined local personal efforts, is real and it is actually happening.”
But nowhere have the “democratic principles” he admires been more roundly abused than in the field of climate science: activists in league with grant-troughing scientists, shyster politicians, and crony capitalist sharks have circumvented the democratic process by enabling international organizations like the European Union and the United Nations to pass swinging new environmental laws over which the populace of individual nation states have no say.
By quitting the Paris Agreement, President Trump was upholding democratic principles — not deconstructing them.
If California or New York — or anywhere else in the U.S. — wish to pursue more stringent environmental policies, they are free to do so. The only real constraint on their activities will be the tolerance of their voters — whose patience may well be strained once the consequences of such green virtue-signalling begin to take effect: higher energy bills; higher unemployment; reduced economic growth; reduced living standards; etc.
Not that any of this will affect Ed Norton, either way. The Yale-educated child of privilege, whose maternal grandfather James Rouse was a pioneering real estate developer, is worth an estimated $80 million.
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