Delingpole: Quitting the Paris Climate Accord Is Trump’s Most Important Achievement

President Trump has confirmed that the U.S. is definitely going to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Good!

It won’t be the only fine achievement of his inevitable two-term presidency but it may yet prove the most significant of them all.

To understand why, just look at how much the world has changed since he first made his promise to quit Paris in the White House Rose Garden in 2017.

Back then, nobody had ever heard of Greta Thunberg; Extinction Rebellion was but an evil, deranged glint in the mad staring eyes of its founder Roger ‘Climate Charles Manson’ Hallam; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had yet to release the cute dancing video which would transform her into a global political influencer; the Green New Deal had yet to become the defining issue for the Democrats and their base; China still looked like a large, but mostly benign entity whose plans for total world domination existed only the imaginations of paranoid conspiracy theorists; the green scare narrative and its doomsday fake news stories seemed all but played out as more and more evidence emerged that anthropogenic warming theory just didn’t stand up and that the measures being introduced to ‘combat’ it were actually doing more harm than good…

What a difference two years can make!

While the case for man made global warming being a problem continues to get thinner and thinner, the powerful green propaganda machine has got correspondingly shriller, noisier and more aggressive.

Almost every major Western economy has been bludgeoned and bullied and worn down into accepting the propaganda of the Climate Industrial Complex: that only through ‘decarbonisation’ – ie crippling the economy and consumers with green tariffs, regulations and expensive, unreliable, renewable energy – can the planet be saved from disaster.

Only one Western nation has taken a stand against this dangerous nonsense and that is President Trump’s USA.

The person who perhaps best understood the geopolitical significance of Trump’s exit from the Paris accord was my late friend Christopher Booker.

One of Booker’s last projects was a paper he wrote for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

It was titled ‘Global Warming – A Case Study in Groupthink’.

It began:

By any measure, the belief that the earth faces an unprecedented threat from ‘human induced climate change’ has been one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of either science or politics. It has led scientists and politicians to contemplate nothing less than a complete revolution in the way mankind sources the energy required to keep modern industrial civilisation functioning, by phasing out the fossil fuels on which that civilisation has been built.

That ‘complete revolution’ is well under way and already causing tremendous damage to living standards, to personal freedoms – and is undoubtedly hastening the decline of Western Industrial Civilization. (Much, no doubt, to the secret delight of geopolitical rivals such as China).

If it weren’t for the cussed, don’t-give-a-damn insolence of one man, that situation would be a whole lot worse. Booker gives this hero due credit in the chapter titled: ‘President Trump finally calls the groupthink’s bluff’.

Here is what Booker had to say about the significance of Trump’s Rose Garden promise to quit the Paris Climate Accord:

[Trump] was also the first politician to expose what had been the real dirty secret of Paris, buried away in those INDCs, setting out how, by 2030, each country intended to respond to the proposed ‘climate goals’. Herein lay the central fraud of the entire agreement. The ‘developing’ countries, led by China and India, certainly had their eye on that proposed Green Climate Fund, whereby the developed countries would supposedly pay them $100 billion every year to assist them to ‘decarbonise’, above all by going for ‘renewables’. The developing countries had all thus paid lipservice up-front to what was required, and how they planned to expand their ‘renewable’ energy sources: wind, solar and the rest. But hidden in the small print, as Trump highlighted, was the real story. China and India, as the first and third largest carbon dioxide emitting countries in the world, were each planning to build hundreds of new coal-fired power stations, which alone would by 2030 double and treble their emissions. Analysis of the INDCs showed that almost every one of the larger developing nations planned something not dissimilar. As for that Green Climate Fund, as Trump went on to explain, it was also just make-believe. By now, only $1 billion had been pledged, of which almost all, thanks to Obama, had been offered by the US.

Trump’s speech may have been justifiably America-centric, in talking of how the US had been committed by Obama to paying by far the highest economic price in terms of money and lost jobs, for a deal whereby China, India and the rest would take America’s money but carry on emitting carbon dioxide just as before. This was why the President was entirely justified in pulling the US out of a non-binding deal as fraudulent as any major international agreement can ever have been. But just as significant was that none of those now accusing him of ‘betraying the future of the planet’ appeared to be even remotely aware of any of the facts he had been addressing. So lost were they in their bubble that their only response was either just to resort to hysterical abuse or, by some, to claim that Trump’s decision would make little difference to the battle to save the planet. This was because the EU and everyone else would be united in complying with the ‘Accord’, while China would now ‘take the lead’ in renewables and the great ‘low carbon’ revolution.

All this was as perfect an example of the power of groupthink as could be imagined. President Trump, like no politician before him, had finally called the bluff of the make-believe. But so firmly cocooned from reality were the politicians and the media that none of them had even begun to realise it.

Trump is the Boy who pointed out that the Climate Emperor is wearing no clothes.

It’s not, his instincts told him, about saving the planet. It’s a power grab – a two-pronged assault on America’s global hegemony as an independent, fossil-fuel energy superpower

On one side, the attack comes from developing powers like China and India who – under the UN’s generous terms – are free to carry on growing their economies without having to worry about their carbon emissions; on the other, it comes from Europe which wants to hamstring the U.S. economy with expensive, unreliable renewable energy in much the same way Germany has hamstrung its economy with solar and wind power.

Thanks to Trump, the plan has failed. Or, at the very least, the plan has been postponed until such time as a Democrat president comes along and ruins all his good work.