With history as a guide and two months to prepare for the announcement, there was relatively little wailing and gnashing of teeth when President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement (for the second time; the lamentations were much greater in 2017) on his first day back in office. Despite efforts by politicos and influentials within the United States and internationally to encourage Trump to stay in the Paris agreement, the writing was on the wall.Trump has … [Read more...]
Trump’s Paris Pullout Liberates Third World, Saves U.S. Billions
Donald Trump's withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement is both a geopolitical shift likely to have positive effects abroad and a monetary relief for American taxpayers.The pecuniary implications of Trump’s withdrawal are substantial: The United States has shouldered an outsized share of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat’s budget, contributing approximately 22% of its funding. For the 2024-2025 cycle alone, the secretariat’s operating costs are … [Read more...]
How to Drive a Silver Stake Through the Heart of the Paris Climate Accord
President Trump should present the Paris Climate Accord to the Senate as a treaty---where it would crash and burn, never to suck the blood out of Americans again.Illustration by OpenAI/ChatGPT.Fragile, but off to a good start.That’s my assessment of President Donald J. Trump’s initial actions regarding environment, climate change, and energy.On the first day of his return to the White House, President Trump signed nine executive orders related to the environment, climate change, and energy.He … [Read more...]
Why do Bootleggers and Baptists Love Paris?
Huh? Does it even make sense to ask "Why?" if we don't know "if"? Do bootleggers and Baptists both love Paris? Well, yes---if "Paris" is the Paris climate accord, the "bootleggers" are industrial giants with a lot to gain from policies needed to implement the accord, and the "Baptists" are the environmentalists who support the accord because they think it'll save the planet. As I explained here and here: Corporations that stand to benefit from mandates and subsidies to renewable … [Read more...]
You’re “Still In”? Too Bad for You. We’re Out
Pure symbolism. That's what "We Are Still In" really is. "We Are Still In" is the petulant response of 9 states, 8 Blue (CA, CT, HI, NY, OR, RI, VA, WA) and 1 Red (NC), out of 50, 202 cities and counties (mostly in Blue states) out of 3,144 (cities, counties, and county equivalents), 308 institutions of higher learning out of 4,140, and 1,530 "businesses and investors" out of 18.2 million businesses and about 160 million owners of stocks to President Trump's … [Read more...]
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”—Yogi Berra
In his 1968 book The Population Bomb Paul Ehrlich predicted mass famines in America and lots of other countries around the world before 1980, and that we would run out of lots of minerals by then, too. His predictions turned out false. He remains the idol of environmentalists worldwide. In 2007 Al Gore predicted, "“The North Polar ice cap ... could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.” That would have been 2014. In 2011, he said, “the entire North … [Read more...]
