From the left: Bill McKibben, in The New York Times.
People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he’ll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear. The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon’s big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.
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It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces. …
The Paris accord was a high achievement of the diplomatic art, a process much messier than science, and inevitably involving compromise and unseemly concession. Still, after decades of work, the world's negotiators managed to bring along virtually every nation: the Saudis and the low-lying Marshall Islanders, the Chinese and the Indians. One hundred and ninety-five nations negotiated the Paris accord, including the United States.
The dysfunctional American political process had already warped the process, of course. The reason Paris is a series of voluntary agreements and not a real treaty is because the world had long since understood that no binding document would ever get two-thirds of the vote in our oil-soaked Senate. And that’s despite the fact that the agreement asks very little of us: President Barack Obama’s mild shift away from coal-fired power and toward higher-mileage cars would have satisfied our obligations.
Those changes, and similar ones agreed to by other nations, would not have ended global warming. They were too small. But the hope of Paris was that the treaty would send such a strong signal to the world's governments, and its capital markets, that the targets would become a floor and not a ceiling; that shaken into action by the accord, we would start moving much faster toward renewable energy, maybe even fast enough to begin catching up with the physics of global warming. There are signs that this has been happening: The plummeting price of solar energy just this spring persuaded India to forgo a huge planned expansion of coal plants in favor of more solar panel arrays to catch the sun. China is shutting coal mines as fast as it can build wind turbines.
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And that’s precisely the moment President Trump chose to make his move, a bid to undercut our best hope for a workable future in a bizarre attempt to restore the past.
‘It might trigger a search for realistic and workable fixes that don’t involve … an energy diet.’
From the center: Shikha Dalmia, at The Week.
None of Trump’s climate crazy talk justifies the liberal hysteria over America’s imminent withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
This accord was never going to save the planet — and hence, dumping it won’t doom the Earth. If anything, it might trigger a search for realistic and workable fixes that don’t involve putting the entire human race on an energy diet.
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The environmental community was giddy with excitement over the 2015 Paris Agreement because the two major efforts before it — Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009 — went up in flames when the three major polluters (the United States, China, and India) accused each other of not doing enough to slash emissions and walked out.
Paris, however, embraced a different tactic. Instead of imposing emission cuts on nations from the top down, it asked each one to voluntarily put its best foot forward. The hope was that this would spur a race to the top as each country avoided skimping on cuts because it didn't want to look cheap. The other very big advantage of this approach was that because the reductions were voluntary, the agreement was arguably not a treaty. Hence President Obama could consent to it unilaterally without asking the Republican Senate to ratify it, which would never have happened.
But even at the time, British environmental writer Fred Pearce pointed out that Paris was “a victory for diplomacy that should not be confused with a victory for climate.” That’s because even if each nation religiously delivered on its promised cuts, the Earth would still end up 2.7 degrees centigrade hotter by the end of the century — 0.7 degrees more than what enviros believe is necessary to prevent the Earth from turning into a baked Cinnabon.
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This is at least in part because nations used the Paris agreement to commit to watered-down emissions reduction plans.
And remember, there is no guarantee that countries will achieve even these lame reductions. Committing plans to paper does not mean actually fulfilling them. …
To the extent that America meets its emissions reduction targets, it won’t be because of artificial mandates by government regulators, but technologies that organically emerge in energy markets. For example, the fracking revolution — that no bureaucrat saw coming and that the government actively stymied — has allowed America to switch from coal to natural gas for electricity generation. Natural gas emits only half as much carbon dioxide as coal — and it’s also cheaper. That’s why it did not have to be jammed down consumers’ throats through mandates and subsidies.
Global warming cannot and should not be fought by massive international agreements. The battle will only be won when America's technology and energy sectors develop innovative solutions that present consumers with cleaner energy options that are obviously cheaper and better than what exists today. The Paris Agreement is so fixated on blaming and punishing humans because enviros barely care about finding solutions that would meet their needs. Should Trump's withdrawal cause the deal to collapse, it might finally signal to climate change warriors that they have to look for fixes that work with — not against — humans, even if they are to blame for the problem in the first place.
‘This does nothing to permanently either adjust the world balance of power or render America a bystander in world affairs.’
From the right: David French, at The National Review.
Let’s make one thing clear from the outset: There is no such thing as a “moral superpower.” By that I don’t mean that a superpower can’t behave in moral ways, but rather that morality alone can’t make a nation powerful. Specifically, as the term is used today, adherence to leftist norms on climate, immigration, or social-welfare policy does not grant meaningful international authority.
In international relations, power flows through military and economic strength combined with the choice to exert that strength to impose the national will. Leadership is a function of power, and leadership without power isn’t leadership at all.
Keep those realities in mind as you read and ponder hyperbolic analyses in the aftermath of Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. According to some, this was the moment when America abdicated its international leadership. This was the moment when our allies would start to turn their backs on their most powerful international partner.
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No. This is flat-out wrong. The worst impact on international relations may be a series of petty or petulant retaliatory decisions that do precisely nothing to permanently either adjust the world balance of power or render America a bystander in world affairs. The likely impact is little more than a series of tweets and public temper tantrums — much sound and fury, signifying no real change in the international order.
How do I know this? First, America has a long, bipartisan tradition of rejecting international climate pacts without fundamentally altering its role in the world. We’ve seen this movie before. In 1997, President Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, hoping to bind the United States to an agreement to combat climate change. The Senate responded with the bipartisan Byrd-Hagel resolution, rejecting the protocol by a whopping 95–0 margin. In 2001, President Bush announced that the U.S. wouldn’t even voluntarily implement the agreement, breaking with 140 countries that had ratified the pact. America retained its international influence.
I'll believe the Trump administration is truly taking a step back from the world if, say, it withdraws the Second Cavalry Regiment from Germany or the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team from Italy. I'll believe we're abdicating our leadership when we're removing missile-defense batteries from South Korea rather than rushing them into action to meet emerging North Korean threats.
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Indeed, if you want to address a failure in world leadership, let’s discuss the Obama administration. Despite its late-term commitment to join a voluntary, non-binding international climate compact, it took a number of concrete actions that created enormous international power vacuums. It pulled completely out of Iraq, leaving space for ISIS to grow and launch its blitzkrieg across Syria and Iraq. Through inaction, apathy, and error, it stood by as Syria slipped into genocidal chaos and Russia launched a ground invasion of Ukraine. It “led from behind” as the Libyan civil war turned into a deadly battle between competing jihadist militias.
Perhaps the single most positive aspect of the young Trump administration is the extent to which it has so far rejected isolationism in favor of American strength. Rather than doubling down on campaign rhetoric declaring NATO "obsolete," Trump has reaffirmed our national commitment to the alliance. Asking allies to spend more on defense is asking them to strengthen the alliance.
His protectionist impulses are economically dubious, and his public (and private) statements are undisciplined and unnecessarily erratic. But he has not put America in a posture of strategic retreat, and withdrawing from a single voluntary, nonbinding international pact doesn’t change that fact. Pay no attention to the hyperbole. America still leads.
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