Trump Pulls US Out of Global Climate Change Pact

See below how "Live Science" reported Prez Trump's announcement.  They show no interest at all in discussing the scientific issues in the matter but just trot through all the usual Warmist talking points, and make a big deal out of the fact that almost all other nations remain "in" the Paris accord. It's blatant propaganda that shows no interest in the science of the matter whatsoever.  Science goes down the gurgler when Leftists are in charge of it

President Donald Trump is pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a worldwide accord that was developed to curb rising global temperatures and limit climate change in the coming years.

"In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord," Trump said at a news conference today (June 1).

It's unclear how the people working on the departure — a small team that includes Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator — will proceed. They could pursue a formal withdrawal, which could take three to four years to complete, or they could exit the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which describes how countries should set up climate change agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, according to Axios.

The Paris Agreement is designed to slow global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and by stepping up investments in "green" technology. Nearly 200 countries agreed on the deal in December 2015 and signed it in 2016. By working together, nations around the world are trying to keep the planet's average temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above Earth's average temperature during preindustrial times. However, the agreement has an even more ambitious goal: "to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius [2 degrees F]," according to the United Nations.

Earth's average temperature is already fairly close to this cutoff: It's about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than it was during preindustrial times, Peter deMenocal, a paleoclimate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, told Live Science in April.

Each nation participating in the agreement is expected to develop an individual plan to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that contribute to climate change, as well as invest in energy-efficient technology.

Under the previous administration, President Barack Obama said the nation would cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, in addition to giving up to $3 billion in aid to less-developed countries by 2020, according to The New York Times. The United States has given $1 billion of this sum already, The New York Times reported.

However, the Paris Agreement is nonbinding, and there aren't any penalties if countries do not meet their goals. If the United States leaves the agreement, it will join the two other countries that have not ratified the climate pact: Nicaragua and Syria. (Nicaragua has not signed on because its government did not think the agreement did enough to fight climate change, according to Time.)

There is ample evidence from climate scientists, including those at NASA and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, showing that the effects of climate change are already being felt, Katherine Moore Powell, a climate ecologist at The Field Museum in Chicago, said in a statement emailed to Live Science.

"Summer temperatures will ccontinue to break records, and droughts will increase and become more severe," Moore Powell said. "When there is rain, precipitation patterns are becoming characterized by heavier downpours and flooding, causing costly damage to natural and man-made resources. We are also experiencing lower snow packs and melting glaciers and ice sheets, threatening fresh water resources and causing worldwide sea level increases."

She added that "without comprehensive action at a global scale, especially from the largest emitters (the U.S. is number two), climate change effects will continue to accelerate."

Big corporations — including Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks, Monsanto and Google — have advised Trump to stay in the agreement, according to CNN Money. Yesterday (May 31), SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said he will resign from the White House advisory councils if Trump pulls the country out of the agreement, reported Live Science's sister site Space.com.

The United States' departure won't cause the agreement to fall apart, but it will likely weaken it, especially if other countries follow suit. Moreover, countries that remain a part of the agreement might cooperate less with the United States in the future and, in a worst-case scenario, even impose carbon tariffs on the U.S., according to The New York Times.

More than 97 percent of all climate scientists think that climate change is real and that humans are likely to blame, according to a 2016 study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. In addition, 70 percent of people in the United States say they believe climate change is happening, according to a recent survey by Yale University.

The survey also found that 82 percent of participants said the United States should fund research into renewable energy sources, and 75 percent said the country should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, Live Science previously reported.

SOURCE




And the NYT is not much better

No point in reproducing it all but the following paragraph gave me a laugh:

"But he will stick to the withdrawal process laid out in the Paris agreement, which President Barack Obama joined and most of the world has already ratified. That could take nearly four years to complete, meaning a final decision would be up to the American voters in the next presidential election".

That's really clutching at straws.  The only important part of Trump's announcement was:

“As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country,”

Note the words "all" and "today".  U.S. involvement is 100% finished right now. What paperwork is entered into is an unimportant detail.  In fact, Mr Trump needs to do nothing at all.  Mr Obama put his personal signature on the treaty but the Senate has not ratified it.  So America is not "IN" the accord anyway. You can't withdraw from something you are not in.

But finally, just one sample of the completely unbalanced hysteria appearing in the comments on the NYT:

"Trump will go down in history as an environmental criminal, likely responsible for a historically unprecidented amount of property damage and loss of life"

The writer is such a brain that he can't even spell "unprecedented"



Left Overheats, Right Rejoices After Trump Announces U.S. Exit From Paris Climate Deal

Clear evidence that it has long ceased to be a scientific issue and is now just a political issue that the Left are clinging on to

President Donald J. Trump announced Thursday that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord –  a U.N. global warming agreement signed by President Barack Obama  -- and while liberals denounced the decision, many conservatives applauded it.

Yesterday, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, threatened to leave the president's’ various councils on which he had served as an advisor if Trump withdrew from the climate deal.

Shortly after the president’s speech, Musk tweeted: “Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

Astrophysicist and media personality Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted that: “If I and my advisors had never learned what Science is or how & why it works, then I’d consider pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord too.”

The Huffington Post’s front page headline read “Trump To Planet: Drop Dead.”

The host of CNN’s GPS, Fareed Zakaria, said in response to the president’s position, “this is the day that the United States resigned as the leader of the free world."

Tom Steyer, billionaire environmentalist, called President Trump’s decision “a traitorous act of war against the American people.”

Meanwhile, on the right, the reaction was quite different.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) tweeted that “the #ParisAgreement was simply a raw deal for America.”

Conservative radio host Mark Levin shared Ryan’s sentiment and said that, “President Trump's speech respecting our withdrawal from the Paris climate deal was outstanding.”

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said he “commend[s] President Donald J. Trump for putting American jobs first.”

Author Ann Coulter also gave her input, tweeting to her followers, “Trump's decision on Paris accord has lefties everywhere s******g bricks. Now if they could just s**t some rebar, we could build the wall!”

Meanwhile, across the pond, the reaction to the United States pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord was mostly negative. British Prime Minister Theresa May, however, said the U.S. should be able to determine its own destiny.

“It’s up to the president of the United States to decide what position the United States is going to take on this matter.”

SOURCE




Exiting the Mad Hatter’s climate tea party

Trump was 100% right (not just 97%) to show real leadership and walk away from Paris

By climate skeptic Paul Driessen

I can guess why a raven is like a writing-desk, Alice said. “Do you mean you think you can find out the answer?” said the March Hare. “Exactly so,” said Alice. “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice replied. “At least I mean what I say. That's the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say, ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!” “You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!” “It IS the same thing with you,” said the Hatter.

Can you imagine stumbling upon the Mad Hatter’s tea party, watching as the discussions become increasingly absurd – and yet wanting a permanent seat at the table? Could Lewis Carroll have been having nightmares about the Paris climate treaty when he wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

President Trump was 100% correct (not just 97%) when he showed true leadership this week – and walked America away from the madness laid out before him and us on the Paris climate table.

From suggestions that Earth’s climate was balmy and stable until the modern industrial era, to assertions that humans can prevent climate change and extreme weather events by controlling atmospheric carbon dioxide levels – to claims that withdrawing from Paris would “imperil our planet’s very survival” – the entire process has been driven by computer models and hysteria that have no basis in empirical science.

There is no convincing real-world evidence that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide has replaced the powerful natural forces that have driven Earth’s climate from time immemorial. Moreover, even if the United States totally eliminated its fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to climb. China and India are building new coal-fired power plants at a feverish clip. So is Germany. And China is financing or building dozens of additional coal-burning electricity generators in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

Plus, even if alarmists are right about CO2, and every nation met its commitments under Paris, average planetary temperatures in 2100 would be just 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.3 F) lower than if we did nothing.

But “our closest allies” wanted Trump to abide by Obama’s commitment. Some did, because they want America to shackle its economy and drive energy prices into the stratosphere the same way they have. Others dearly want to follow a real leader, and walk away from the mad Paris tea party themselves.

But even poor countries signed the Paris treaty. Yes, they did – because they are under no obligation to reduce their coal, oil or natural gas use or their CO2 emissions. And because they were promised $100 billion a year in cash, plus free state-of-the-art energy technologies, from developed nations that would have become FMCs (formerly rich countries) as they slashed their energy use and de-industrialized.

But the Paris climate treaty was voluntary; the United States wouldn’t have to do all this. Right. Just like it’s voluntary for you to pay your taxes. China, India and poor developing countries don’t have to do anything. But the USA would have been obligated to slash its oil, gas and coal use and carbon dioxide emissions. It could impose tougher restrictions, but it could not weaken them. And make no mistake: our laws, Constitution, legal system, the Treaty on Treaties and endless lawsuits by environmentalist pressure groups before friendly judges would have ensured compliance and ever more punishing restrictions.

But hundreds of companies say we should have remained in Paris. Of course they do. Follow the money.

If we are to avoid a climate cataclysm, “leading experts” say, the world must impose a $4-trillion-per-year global carbon tax, and spend $6.5 trillion a year until 2030 to switch every nation on Earth from fossil fuels to renewable energy. That’s a lot of loot for bankers, bureaucrats and crony corporatists.

But, they assure us, this transition and spending would bring unimaginable job creation and prosperity. If you believe that, you’d feel right at home in Alice’s Wonderland and Looking Glass world.

Who do you suppose would pay those princely sums? Whose jobs would be secure, and whose would be expendable: sacrificed on the altar of climate alarmism? Here’s the Planet Earth reality.

Right now, fossil fuels provide 80% of all the energy consumed in the USA – reliably and affordably, from relatively small land areas. Wind and solar account for 2% of overall energy needs, expensively and intermittently, from facilities across millions of acres. Biofuels provide 3% – mostly from corn grown on nearly 40 million acres. About 3% comes from hydroelectric, 3% from wood and trash, 9% from nuclear.

Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and other states that generate electricity with our abundant coal and natural gas pay 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. California, Connecticut, New York and other states that impose wind, solar and anti-fossil fuel mandates pay 15 to 18 cents. Families in closely allied ultra-green Euro countries pay an average of 26 US cents per kWh, but 36 cents in Germany, 37 cents in Denmark.

EU manufacturers are already warning that these prices could send companies, factories, jobs and CO2 emissions to China and other non-Euro countries. EU electricity prices have skyrocketed 55% since 2005; 40% of UK households are cutting back on food and other essentials, to pay for electricity; a tenth of all EU families now live in green energy poverty. Elderly people are dying because they can’t afford heat!

The Paris treaty would have done the same to the United States, and worse.

The Heritage Foundation says Paris restrictions would cost average US families $30,000 in cumulative higher electricity prices over the next decade. How much of their rent, mortgage, medical, food, clothing, college and retirement budgets would they cut? Paris would eliminate 400,000 high-pay manufacturing, construction and other jobs – and shrink the US economy by $2.5 trillion by 2027. Other analysts put the costs of remaining in Paris much higher than this – again for no climate or environmental benefits.

Big hospitals like Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Comprehensive Cancer Center in Winston-Salem, NC and Inova Fairfax Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Northern Virginia pay about $1.5 million per year at 9 cents/kWh – but $3 million annually at 18 cents … $5 million at 30 cents … and nearly $7 million at 40 cents. How many jobs and medical services would those rate hikes wipe out?

Malls, factories and entire energy-intensive industries would be eliminated. Like families and small businesses, they would also face the new reality of having pricey electricity when it happens to be available, off and on all day, all week, when the wind blows or sun shines, instead of when it’s needed. Drilling and fracking, gasoline and diesel prices, trucking and travel, would also have been hard hit.

Americans are largely prohibited from mining iron, gold, copper, rare earth and other metals in the USA. Paris treaty energy prices and disruptions would have ensured that American workers could not turn metals from anywhere into anything – not even wind turbines, solar panels or ethanol distillation plants.

Most of the “bountiful” renewable energy utopia jobs would have been transporting, installing and maintaining wind turbines and solar panels made in China. Even growing corn and converting it to ethanol would have been made cost-prohibitive. But there would have been jobs for bureaucrats who write and enforce the anti-energy rules – and process millions of new unemployment and welfare checks.

Simply put, the Paris climate treaty was a terrible deal for the United States: all pain, no gain, no jobs, no future for the vast majority of Americans – with benefits flowing only to politicians, bureaucrats and crony capitalists. President Trump refused to ignore the realities of this economic suicide pact, this attempted global government control of lives, livelihoods and living standards of people everywhere.

That is why he formally declared that the United States is withdrawing from the treaty. He could now submit it for advice, consent – and rejection – by the Senate. He could also withdraw the United States from the underlying UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or negotiate that reflects empirical science and is fair to America and its families and workers. But what is really important now is this:

We are out of Paris! President Trump is leading the world back from the climate insanity precipice.

Via email





Trump pulls out of Paris climate accord, puts American power grid first

By Peter Hong

He did it!  After being lobbied by foreign leaders, the Pope, and even members of his own family, President Donald Trump took the courageous step of leading America out from the clutches of the horrendously negotiated Paris climate change accords.

At his June 1 Rose Garden announcement, the President declared: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.  I promised I would exit or renegotiate any deal that doesn’t serve America’s interests.”

As this bold and dramatic step dominates the national and global news, it may soon be sharing the stage with a lesser known issue of potentially greater import: the reliability of our nation’s electricity grid. With the grid at near capacity and public policies diminishing its critical resilience, it wouldn’t take much for our nation to plunge rapidly into a new Dark Ages of systemic instability and a pattern of widespread brownouts for as far as the eye can see (or not see).

As unimaginable as it may seem today, that is exactly the dystopian scenario America would face without a reliable electrical grid. While Thomas Edison is best known as the inventor of the electric light, it was his personal secretary, Samuel Insull, who used his own business acumen to make cheap electricity a reality for most of America.  Since then, we Americans enjoy the benefits of something that most people could not even imagine:  reliable and cheap electric power.

How fortunate are we? In spite of leading the world in energy use per capita, the United States has only suffered two massive blackouts, one in 1965 and the other in 2003. Otherwise, we have been free from persistent, region-wide outages, unlike other nations, like India, with much less reliable grids.

Yet, those days could be coming to an end rapidly — and not due to the reasons one might suspect, such as terrorism or cyberattacks.  The greatest dangers posed to the grid’s reliability arise from misguided public policies — particularly those replacing traditionally dependable sources of energy, like coal and nuclear, with unreliable renewable sources, including wind and solar.

Since the advent of modern power plants, coal has generated more electricity than any other power source — followed at various times by hydroelectricity, natural gas, then nuclear power.  However, since the Obama Administration launched its war on coal, coal as a percentage of net electricity generation has declined from 49 percent in 2007 to 30 percent in 2016 (trailing natural gas at 34 percent), according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA).

But these allocations actually represent a smaller piece of a smaller pie.

According to EIA data, starting in 2007, coal production dropped by 768 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) to 1.23 trillion kWh in 2016.

Nuclear for its part has gone from 19 percent of the grid in 2007 to 19.7 percent today. However the “rise” is only because it’s a relatively greater chunk of a smaller pie. In 2007, nuclear produced 806.4 billion kWh for the year and in 2016 it produced 805.3 billion kWh, according to EIA.

Largely a result of the coal plant closures, overall electricity generation in the U.S. has dropped from 4.005 trillion kWh in 2007 to 3.92 trillion kWh in 2016, while end use has only decreased from 3.89 trillion kWh to just 3.853 trillion kWh.

Consider that, we have not increased electricity production one iota in a decade. No wonder the economy is so flat.

The difference between electricity generation and end use, just 67 billion kWh of spare capacity, has dropped a whopping 42 percent in a single decade — leading to legitimate concerns that our ability to supply enough electricity to keep up with demand could be compromised, making future brownouts a real possibility.

Interestingly, while residential electricity use was increasing the past decade, industrial usage was collapsing, from 1.03 trillion kWh in 2007 to 936 billion kWh in 2016, a drop of 91 billion kWh. Had industrial electrical use remained the same as in 2007, national usage would have exceeded grid production last year.

This predicament is further complicated by the fact that, as of 2016, 451 coal-burning power plants in 37 states were closing or converting simply due to EPA regulations. Among the states hardest hit by these plant closing or conversions include Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

In his statement praising President Trump for exiting the Paris climate accord, Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government reiterated the importance of policies that help, not hurt workers in these states: “Fortunately, President Trump has not forgotten that it was working families — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and across the country in our industrial base — who depend on there being real, good-paying jobs in order to make ends meet.”

While the Obama Administration and its EPA were busy ravaging coal-producing states with overregulation, it simultaneously subsidized its favorite green industries, like wind and solar energy, with corporate tax credits. This corporate favoritism — government picking winners and losers — ignored the fact that neither wind nor solar produces the consistent baseload power needed to sustain our electricity demands.  Indeed, bad public policy presents the greatest threat to the reliability of our electricity grid.

With a new administration in charge, a change in direction could be afoot. In April, Energy Department (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry ordered a study evaluating to what extent regulatory burdens, subsidies, and tax policies “are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants.”

Perry’s order noted that grid experts “have expressed concerns about the erosion of critical baseload resources” and “that regulatory burdens introduced by previous administrations that were designed to decrease coal-fired power generation have destroyed jobs and economic growth, and threaten to undercut the performance of the grid well into the future.” The Secretary also asked whether wholesale energy markets adequately compensate some of the attributes that coal and nuclear plants bring to the table strengthening grid resilience.

The study, scheduled for completion by mid-June, is likely to reveal what many of us already know: America’s electricity needs and the stability of the grid cannot be met by unreliable renewable energy sources and must be delivered by traditionally dependable sources of fossil fuels.  Now that we no longer have Paris, keep your eyes peeled on the stability of the grid.  Nothing less than the future of our nation’s energy security is at stake.

SOURCE

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