Donald Trump has pulled America out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord for the second time. Bizarrely, like some dodgy insurance scam, the rules of the climatocracy say it takes a year to withdraw, so not till next winter America will be free of its obligations to reduce its own emissions.
Obligations? Empty promises, more like. The scandalous, nonsensical truth about the Paris accords is that they oblige literally nothing. They required governments to submit pieces of paper called “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs), which can consist of saying you plan to go on doing what you are doing to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Or even to do less than you were doing before. You can then ignore them and do what you feel like anyway. There is almost no monitoring, let alone reprimanding, indicting or punishing. Only Britain made its INDC legally binding.
India’s Paris promise, for example, consisted of slightly relaxing, rather than tightening, its previous target for decarbonising. China promised to continue to increase its emissions till 2030. Even if all the INDCs made under the Paris accords are kept to, Bjorn Lomborg has calculated, the climate impact would be to reduce temperatures by 0.048°C by 2100. That is so minuscule it would be impossible to measure. Can you honestly say that 75 years hence your grandchildren could tell the difference between a 15.21C spring day and a 15.26C day?
The Paris agreement grew out of the chaos of the Copenhagen climate conference of 2009 when the climatecrats decided that empty promises were not enough and they must instead have the power to impose enforceable, mandatory emissions targets for all nations. Again and again in the years leading up to the Paris meeting, the UN, the EU and US used the words “legally binding” to describe what they planned: nothing less would do.
In 2011, in South Africa, world leaders signed up to a promise to have a legally binding treaty in force by 2020. Greenpeace insisted it must be a binding rather than a “voluntary approach”. The EU agreed, its spokesman saying: “The Paris agreement must be an international legally binding agreement.” The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said John Kerry, the US secretary of state, was “confused” when he worried whether a legally binding treaty was possible.
In other words, all parties agreed that the 2015 Paris treaty would be worthless if it was toothless and futile if it was not ambitious. Yet at Paris, instead, they all agreed on something that was both completely voluntary and deeply unambitious. Did the EU, the UN, Greenpeace, John Kerry, Leonardo di Caprio and all savage this pathetic, Potemkin agreement? Nope, they celebrated it: a “watershed”, a “triumph”, etc. “If we follow through on the commitments that this agreement embodies,” said Barack Obama, “History may well judge it as a turning point for our planet.”
As I wrote at the time, if I were one of those who thought climate change the biggest threat to humankind bar none, then I would be far more critical of the Paris agreement than I am. Those who most worry about global warming should be most disappointed by Paris. It does the square root of sod all to reduce global emissions. It was somewhere between a farce and a fraud, as Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute put it.
The latest climate summit in Azerbaijan was such a feast of corruption and contradiction that it may have killed off the whole process altogether. The days when world leaders duly turned up to these events have long gone: Keir Starmer was about the only significant head of government who bothered last year to go. He had to listen to his host lambast Europeans for simultaneously demanding less oil and gas be produced but more be supplied to Europe.
Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accords will cause great suffering – but only among climatecrats. They have been used to travelling business class across the world, sampling room service in four-star hotels and talking to each other late into the night over single malts, mostly at taxpayers’ expense. Around 50 private jets flew delegates into Baku for last year’s conference. If the entire ridiculous circus comes to an end, there might, ironically, be some emissions savings worth celebrating.
Matt Ridley, a former member of the British House of Lords, is an acclaimed author who blogs at www.mattridley.co.uk. This article was first published HERE.
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