The climate-change lobby is as invested in the results of the 2020 race as everyone else.
The United States is set to leave the infamous Paris Climate Agreement the day after the presidential election. It was President Donald Trump who pulled the country from the accord. The administration claimed that November 4 is the earliest a nation can withdraw, owing to technicalities in the international pact.
America will be the first of the 189 signatory countries to exit the pact, a big deal considering our country’s preeminent world role and the fact that the United States overwhelmingly leads the funding of that and other UN projects. The agreement mandates that countries enact tighter measures to stop the supposedly detrimental emission of carbon. The United States would have been responsible for putting up $3 billion, more than China, which is a bigger polluter.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, however, has vowed to bring the country back into the agreement if he wins the presidency.
Climate alarmists are painting this election as a choice between salvation and apocalypse. Just look at the “reporting” from the left-wing Associated Press:
If America pulls back from Paris and stronger carbon cutting efforts, some nations are less likely to cut back too, so the withdrawal’s impact will be magnified, said scientists and climate negotiators.
Because the world is so close to feared climate tipping points and on a trajectory to pass a temperature limit goal, climate scientists said the U.S. pullout will have noticeable effects.
“Losing most of the world’s coral reefs is something that would be hard to avoid if the U.S. remains out of the Paris process,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, California. “At the margins, we would see a world of more extreme heat waves.”
If the U.S. remains out of the climate pact, today’s children are “going to see big changes that you and I don’t see for ice, coral and weather disasters,” said Stanford University’s Rob Jackson.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, takes a less fear-driven approach to the climate issue.
“Other countries around the world are obsessed with the Paris Climate Accord, which shackles economies and has done nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in an e-mail. “President Trump understands economic growth and environmental protection do not need to conflict.”
“We’ve also done our fair share” to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday in the Maldives. “We stand amongst industrialized nations as a beacon, and we did it not through state-driven, forced rulesets, but rather through creativity and innovation and good governance.”
Despite the triumphant aura surrounding the accord, it never had any teeth. The agreement is non-binding and dependent on the honor system to meet its goals. The agreement did not have treaty status and had no enforcement mechanisms.
Even the people behind the Paris Climate Agreement admit it doesn’t work. “As things stand, even full implementation of current unconditional and conditional Nationally Determined Contributions makes a temperature increase of at least 3 [degrees Celsius] by 2100 very likely — meaning that governments need to deliver much stronger pledges when they are revised in 2020,” a press release from the UN reads.
Biden would certainly be the president the climate-change crowd has been dreaming of. According to his website, he wants to enact the Green New Deal Agenda (without calling it the Green New Deal).
The Biden climate program would spend more than $2 trillion to radically transform America’s energy infrastructure, directly impacting the life of every person in the country and giving vast new authority to government over the private affairs of businesses and individuals.
Among the goals of the Biden plan are making the United States “carbon-free” by 2035, instituting a federal green-energy jobs program, and establishing an Environmental and Climate Justice Division to crack down on polluters.
Getting the country to a 100-percent clean-energy standard within 15 years would undoubtedly have an effect on the coal and natural gas industries, which currently produce 63 percent of all electricity in the country. And abandoning those carbon-based fuels would skyrocket energy costs, much to the detriment of homeowners and businesses.
Too, unless a Biden plan were to use nuclear power to provide electricity for our country (which leftists have been fighting against for decades and is sure to be a non-starter), the science says going green will cost many tens of trillions more dollars than Biden claims. For instance, since there is no cost effective way to store energy for times when the wind stops blowing (which sometimes happens across the nation for days at a time) and the sun isn’t shining (when it’s night, raining, snowing, or just very cloudy), the price to back up a renewable energy grid would be enormous. Engineer Ed Hiserodt determined that to provide backup for our country’s electric needs for one day would take some 3.36 trillion lead car batteries — and like car batteries, each would have to be replaced every three to five years.
The former vice president even wants to create an Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the Department of Justice for cracking down on those who pollute the environment — ignoring the fact that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a cornerstone of life on Earth.
If Joe Biden and the environmental totalitarians get their way, we’ll all be living under their green thumb — not that we’ll have the money to do anything anyway.
