Delingpole: All Hail Trump’s U.S. – the Only Honest Nation at the U.N.’s Bonn Climate Conference

Yay! Be proud, America and relish your splendid isolation! You are, officially, the only nation among the thousands of air-mile-collecting delegates at this year’s U.N. climate conference in Bonn, Germany which hasn’t signed up to the Paris Climate Accord.

You and I might think that this a good thing: America, Land of the Free – the last bastion of common sense, the final redoubt of Western Civilization in a world all but overwhelmed by the green lunacy of the Climate Industrial Complex.

But there are plenty of enemies within still seeking to undermine U.S. independence.

It doesn’t matter that President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, these quislings are now claiming: individual U.S. cities and states can go ahead and decarbonize their economies, for all the world as if it were that crooked uranium saleswoman sitting in the Oval Office instead of the Donald.

Among the Green Blobbers leading the green insurgency, according to the Washington Examiner, are Michael Bloomberg, Sen. Ed Markey and California Governor Jerry Brown.

Here’s Governor Moonbeam:

“This is a pledge, and it’s a pledge that you cash because it’s real. We’re doing real stuff in California. When cities and states combine together, and then join with powerful corporation, that’s how we get stuff done.”

Here’s Sen. Ed Markey:

“President Trump has called global warming a ‘hoax,’ he has assembled a cabinet of Big Oil all stars, fear is rampant across the federal government in terms of the scientists who work there every day, but on our side we have 100 years of science and nearly 100 percent of the scientists on the planet.”

Here is former New York Mayor Bloomberg:

“It is important for the world to know the American government may have pulled out of the Paris agreement, but the American people are committed to its goals and there is nothing Washington can do to stop it.”

It’s all part of a national campaign called We Are Still In which sounds superficially very impressive, bold and defiant.

There’s just one small problem with this ingenious plan to keep the U.S. – de facto if not de jure – in the Paris Climate Accord: no one is going to lift a finger to act on it.

To put it another way: talk is cheap.

Sure Blue State America abounds with liberal-dominated cities and local governments who’ll make all the right purty-mouth noises about cutting carbon emissions and honoring Paris and saving future generations. But we know darn well they won’t back up their words with action because we’ve been here before.

Earlier this year, my old friend Todd Myers produced this must-read survey for National Review.

It concerned a remarkably similar previous pledge by liberal America’s mayors, this time to reduce their cities carbon emissions in line with the Kyoto Agreement (which, you’ll remember, was another stupid international UN climate treaty that you U.S. refused to ratify).

Their pledges were bold and full of noble intent.

One city mayor – I’ll give you his name in a moment – announced:

“We don’t wait for others to act. We lead by example.”

 

As Myers reports:

More than 1,000 mayors signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. If President George W. Bush wouldn’t follow the Kyoto Protocol, the mayors proclaimed, they surely would.

When Kyoto’s 2012 carbon-reduction deadline arrived, however, virtually all these cities had failed to live up to the pledge their mayors had made, missing the Kyoto targets badly.

 

Oh and that city mayor who promised to lead by example – you may have guessed that his name is Michael Bloomberg.

Here is what became of his promise:

In 2007, Mayor Bloomberg went beyond the Kyoto goals, pledging that by 2030, New York would reduce the city’s CO2 emissions to 30 percent below the 2005 level. Thanks to the economic downturn, NYC got off to a good start. After 2012, however, emissions actually increased. At the current rate, New York will miss Bloomberg’s 2030 target.

Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, made the targets even more unreasonable by promising an 80 percent reduction in emissions by 2050. After just a few years, the city is already more than 4 percent behind and will need to reduce emissions at more than four times the current rate to have any hope of meeting de Blasio’s promised goal.

 

Green bloviators like ex-Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Moonbeam and the rest are, in other words, just a bunch of virtue-signalling charlatans.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the U.S. delegation at Bonn is getting on with the business of doing business…

Some countries attending UN climate talks in Bonn hope a Trump administration fossil fuels presentation will provide an opportunity to strike coal technology deals with the US.

African diplomats told Climate Home News that talks on technology trades were “very possible” on the fringes of the US event on Monday.

The following day, Ukraine is planning to table an initiative to bring energy corporates closer to the UN climate process, which it claims has US backing.

The proposal would slot energy multinationals into an “intermediate layer” between the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and national governments. It has been encouraged by US officials and coal firms, its authors say, and will be raised by Ukraine’s environment minister Ostap Semerak on Tuesday.

Or, short version, #winning.