President Trump is right to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement! The deal isn’t worth the paper it is written on.
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But many politicians and much of the media are horrified. Al Gore called pulling out of the Paris Agreement a “reckless and indefensible decision.” Former President Obama said: “This administration joins a handful of nations that reject the future.” Really? Have they read the agreement? Stossel interviewed one of the few people who did, City Journal Contributing Writer Oren Cass. He describes the agreement as “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” Why so dismissive? Because, as Cass told Stossel, “you don’t even have to mention greenhouse gases in your commitment. You send in any piece of paper you want, we’re going to staple them all together and we’re going to call that the Paris Accord.” What is in these commitments (or not in them) will surprise you. China pledged to “achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030.” That sounds good, except a U.S. government study, done before the Paris Agreement, estimated China would reach peak emissions by 2030. So China pledged to continue doing exactly what it was doing. Yet Cass told Stossel China was one of the better pledges. “India made no pledge to limit their emissions at all. They pledged only to become more efficient…But they proposed to become efficient less quickly than they’re already becoming more efficient. So their pledge was to slow down.” Pakistan’s pledge was even more meaningless, simply pledge to reak a peak emission “much beyond the year 2030.” Cass says only one country took a different approach, the U.S., which set the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels, by 2025. “President Obama took all the zero commitments from everybody else, but threw in a really expensive one for us.” Oren Cass and John Stossel don’t dispute basic climate science. Stossel says yes, the earth is warming. Man may well be increasing that. But the solution isn’t to waste billions by forcing emissions cuts in America while other countries do nothing– while pretending to make cuts. Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty. Most of us didn’t even know how phony it was. But now we do.