Right now, President Trump faces a terrible dilemma on climate change and the UN.
Should he:
a) follow the example of his predecessors — the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama — and take the dumb, cowardly, economically damaging, scientifically illiterate and totally wrong decision?
or
b) stay true to his campaign promises and do the right thing by America, by honest science, and by the whole world?
Personally, I would have thought it was a no-brainer.
But not, apparently. The New York Times is urging President Trump to ignore the facts and the evidence, and instead listen to the siren voices of his daughter Ivanka, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the various assorted members of the Climate Industrial Complex who would prefer the U.S. to remain shackled to one of the most stupid and pointless agreements in American history.
They want him to keep the U.S. stuck in the disastrous and ill-advised United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
At least George H.W. Bush, who nodded through the deal at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, had the excuse that he was going with the flow of the popular mood and acting in accordance with the known science of the time.
But that was 25 years ago, when Taylor Swift was three, Justin Bieber was still in the womb, and no one had ever heard of twerking, virtue-signalling, Grand Theft Auto, Breaking Bad, the Second Gulf War, Islamic State or Amy Schumer’s comedy vagina — since when, an awful lot has changed.
One of the big things that has changed with regard to the UNFCCC agreement is that anyone who has done any background reading on the subject now knows that it is based on a pack of lies, junk science and barely concealed left-wing political activism.
The distinguished physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen recently set out the case well in an open letter to the president, signed by more than 300 eminent scientists and other qualified individuals:
We petition the American and other governments to change course on an outdated international agreement that targets minor greenhouse gases, primarily Carbon Dioxide, CO2 for harsh regulation. Since 2009, the US and other governments have undertaken actions with respect to global climate that are not scientifically justified and that already have, and will continue to cause serious social and economic harm—with no environmental benefits. While we support effective, affordable, reasonable and direct controls on conventional environmental pollutants, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison.
Restricting access to fossil fuels has very negative effects upon the wellbeing of people around the world. It condemns over 4 billion people in still underdeveloped countries to continued poverty.
Lindzen could scarcely be clearer — but let’s just spell it out for the dumb kids at the back of the class. [What’s Rex Tillerson doing there? Search me. All I know is that during his tenure at Exxon, he was no friend to free markets, severed all ties with the free market think tanks Exxon used to sponsor and engaged in an orgy of environmental virtue-signalling designed to appease the green movement. I think it’s what’s known as ‘paying Danegeld to the Dane’.]
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant — it is plant food and it is turning the planet greener.
Therefore, a global agreement that binds nation states, at great expense, to treating CO2 as a menace is clearly a bad agreement which deserves to be nixed as quickly as possible.
Worse, it is actively immoral.
As Lindzen notes, the people hit hardest by the UNFCCC agreement are the world’s poorest. Which makes it even odder that socially conscious liberals like Ivanka and the New York Times are trying to defend it.