Establishment Boasts Its Paris Climate Agreement Now a Done Deal

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The establishment has been celebrating that its Paris climate agreement has supposedly gone into effect on November 4. The pseudo-treaty, designed to regulate so-called greenhouse gas emissions, was negotiated by representatives of 195 countries at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris and adopted by consensus last December 12. At least 55 parties to the UNFCCC, which are responsible for at least 55 percent of the world’s carbon gas emissions, had to ratify the agreement for it to take effect. But the U.S. Senate was never given the opportunity to ratify the deal as required by the Constitution, meaning that, as far as the United States is concerned, Obama’s UN agreement is legally meaningless.

As of November 4, the agreement had been “ratified” by 97 of the 197 UNFCCC parties, held to be responsible for 67.5 percent of emissions, according to France’s environment minister Ségolène Royal, the outgoing president of the UN climate talks. Though the agreement is now supposed to be officially in force, its provisions will not be implemented until 2020.

The Paris Agreement is the first climate deal that purports to bind all the world’s governments, rich and poor, to a commitment to cap “global warming,” which the UN and Obama allege is caused by the burning of coal, oil, and gas.

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A key feature of the agreement is that it will attempt to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution levels, and will to strive for 1.5 C. Of course, this provision presumes that annual global temperatures are determined by human activity and does not take into consideration that temperatures may be the result of natural cycles in the Earth’s climate that have always occurred, long before mankind produced industrial carbon emissions.

The assertion that humans are responsible for global warming was inherent in statements such as one issued jointly by UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa and Moroccan Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar: “Humanity will look back on November 4, 2016, as the day that countries of the world shut the door on inevitable climate disaster.”

“The timetable is pressing because globally, greenhouse gas emissions which drive climate change and its impacts are not falling,” AFP quoted Espinosa and Mezouar as saying.

The AFP report cited figures from the International Energy Agency stating that implementing the agreement’s provisions would require “investments” of $13.5 trillion in low-carbon and energy technology between now and 2030 — making up almost 40 percent of total energy sector spending.

AFP also reported that presidential candidate Donald Trump has threatened to “cancel” Washington’s participation in the agreement if he is elected president on November 8. Secretary of State John Kerry signed the agreement for the United States on April 22.

In an article posted by The New American on October 20, foreign correspondent Alex Newman challenged a statement made by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon asserting that “The Kigali Amendment to the [1987] Montreal Protocol [which the U.S. Senate ratified during the Reagan administration] builds on the strong global momentum for multilateral efforts to address climate change, including the landmark Paris Agreement.”

Newman pointed out that Ban’s statement omitted the fact that the U.S. Senate has not ratified the Paris Agreement. The article noted:

Ironically, despite Ban’s factually challenged boasting, the U.S. government is currently prohibited by law from sending a single taxpayer dollar the UNFCCC. The “Paris Agreement” he mentioned, meanwhile, cannot possibly “enter into force” as it relates to the United States, as the U.S. Senate has not even considered the radical “climate” regime, much less ratified it by a two-thirds majority as required in the Constitution.

A New York Times report noted that the Paris agreement relies on a carbon tax that would force industries to pay for the their carbon emissions, but that the framework for enforcing these penalties has barely started to emerge. The Times reported:

Top energy policy makers and corporate leaders caution that it will be challenging to meet even the deal’s modest goals to reduce planet-warming emissions of greenhouse gases.

Many companies have not even figured out yet how much greenhouse gas they emit, much less made plans to curb these emissions. Rapid technological advances in areas like electric cars are not enough to stop the world’s long climb in oil consumption, let alone reverse it.

There are two separate but important reasons why the United States should not capitulate to UN climate mandates such as the Paris Agreement. The first, most basic reason is simply that any such international control over our economic activities is a violation of our national sovereignty.

Beyond the matter of sovereignty, however, is the fact that the entire agenda aimed at reducing carbon emissions to prevent global warning is based on faulty science. In the above-cited article, Newman noted:

In an August 22 piece ridiculing Obama’s Secretary of State Kerry, scientist Larry Bell, who heads the University of Houston’s graduate program in space architecture, took aim at the entire UN anti-HFC [hydrofluorocarbons] charade. Noting that the satellite data had shown no statistically significant global warming in two decades, Bell said Kerry was exploiting a “manufactured crisis” to push his agenda.

Fortunately, continued Newman:

… the Paris Agreement, UN Agenda 2030, and all of the other recent globalist plots are built on a foundation of quicksand. With no ratification by the U.S. Senate, the UN instruments are legally meaningless in the United States, despite Obama’s rule-by-decree machinations pretending to give them legitimacy. They could be stopped tomorrow using various different strategies. And even if the Senate were to ever ratify the schemes, the federal government cannot grant itself new powers merely by ratifying a treaty, as America’s founders and even the Supreme Court have made clear.

Over the past few years, The New American has published many articles refuting the “global warming” hysteria (see list of related articles below for several of them). Among these is “Earth Is Cooling, Sea Levels Not Rising, Scientists Say.” In that article, we cited statements made by a group of experts in various scientific fields at a three-day conference sponsored by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute in 2010 challenging the theory of alleged global warming caused by man-made emissions.

Among the speakers at the conference was Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University. According to Professor Easterbrook, author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, the Earth is now in the beginning period of a trend of global cooling.

“Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 degree Fahrenheit per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook. The cooling trend, he continued, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell for the next several decades.

Easterbrook’s statements merely confirm what has been observed by scientists for centuries. There has always been climate change, with ice ages occurring during some historic periods, and warming trends during others. These changes have not been the result of human activity, but are rather part of the Earth’s natural cycles.

Therefore, even if the Paris Agreement were not a violation of our sovereignty, its attempt to enforce arbitrary restrictions on UN member nations, including the United States, would be completely unwarranted, because they are based on a false underlying premise.

Photo of Arc of Triumph illuminated in green with the words “Paris Agreement Is Done” in French: AP Images

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