U.S. Begins Formal Withdrawal from Paris Agreement

The Trump administration formally notified the United Nations on Monday that the U.S. will begin its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, a process that will be completed over one year.

“Today the United States began the process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement. “Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States submitted formal notification of its withdrawal to the United Nations. The withdrawal will take effect one year from delivery of the notification.”

“We will continue to work with our global partners to enhance resilience to the impacts of climate change and prepare for and respond to natural disasters,” Pompeo added.

Trump has criticized the non-binding agreement, which 195 countries signed in 2015, saying other countries benefit from the climate accord at the expense of America. Wealthier countries such as the U.S. had pledged to assist financially struggling countries meet their greenhouse-gas emissions-reduction goals.

“What we won’t do is punish the American people while enriching foreign polluters,” Mr. Trump said last month during an appearance in Pittsburgh. “I can say it right now and I’m proud to say it: it’s called America First, finally.”

“My job is to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not the people of Paris,” Trump added, recalling his 2017 remark.

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The president first announced in June, 2017 that the U.S. would withdraw, making good on his campaign promise to do so, but the earliest the Trump administration is permitted to exit the agreement is November 4, 2020, one day after the next presidential election.

The goal of the climate accord was to keep global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius over this century. For its part, the U.S. had pledged to lower greenhouse-gas emissions by approximately a quarter by 2025, using 2005 levels as a benchmark.

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Former NSC Director Says Climate Change Is ‘Imaginary Threat’ Brainwashing Our Youth

A notorious climate change science skeptic, Happer, 80, recently left the Trump administration after the White House killed his plan to create a panel to challenge government assessments of global warming.

But Happer remains undeterred, confident that President Trump, the most vocal climate change skeptic to occupy the White House, is naturally inclined to come around to the idea.

“Hard things often take a long time,” Happer told the Washington Examiner in his first interview since leaving the administration in September. “I hope it’s in my lifetime.”

Happer is as eager as ever to challenge the climate science consensus, calling it a “completely imaginary threat that doesn’t exist. People are afraid to stand up and say that.”

He compared his crusade to the experience of the protagonist in an 1882 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, which tells the story of a man who speaks an “unpalatable truth” and is punished for it.

Happer drew outrage in 2014 for declaring in an interview that “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

Happer said the statement “was not meant to be in any way anti-Semitic” but that he was sorry he said it.

Nevertheless, he stood by the comparison, invoking his father’s service in the Scottish military in World War II to say that he feels strongly about opposing “fanaticism.”

In keeping up the fight against the mainstream of climate science, Happer faces opposition among an increasing number of Republicans who fear that the party will not be viable if it does not change to appeal to climate-conscious voters, especially young people.

He said he’s held his views on climate change since the early 1990s when he served as director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science in the George H.W. Bush administration.

“I feel bad about the younger generation,” said Happer, who has six grandchildren ranging from middle school- to college-age. “They have been brainwashed. The people who think this is a winning election issue are wrong.”

After leaving his post as a National Security Council senior director, Happer has returned to Princeton, where he is an emeritus physics professor.

He’s also rejoined the CO2 Coalition, an advocacy group he founded that claims rising levels of carbon will benefit the world.

He’s working on a research paper that questions whether methane contributes to climate change. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a more powerful warming pollutant than carbon dioxide, although it stays in the atmosphere for less time.

Former national security adviser John Bolton hired Happer in September 2018 to work on “emerging technology” issues involving classified military projects.

He helped Trump issue an executive order on bolstering the power grid to withstand electromagnetic pulse attacks.

Happer, however, said he only took the job under the condition the White House let him pursue his side project to scrutinize climate science.

Happer said it’s a coincidence he left the job shortly after Bolton resigned, insisting he always planned to stay for a year.

“They let me push this issue as far as I can,” Happer said of Trump and Bolton. “I was very pleased they kept their word.”

Happer’s goal was to recruit a panel of scientists through the White House National Security Council to scrutinize the science underlying the 2017 National Climate Assessment, in which researchers across 13 federal agencies concluded that climate change is already affecting the country and is caused by humans.

It would then have used the findings of the science review and applied them to national security policy.

The national security and intelligence communities within the U.S. government have established that climate change threatens national security and puts military bases at risk from extreme weather.

Happer insists there were “lots of scientists who would have been delighted to help” question climate science and how it informs national security policy.

However, Judith Curry, a scientist who was considering participating in the panel if it conducted a “serious assessment,” said it appeared Happer was not pursuing a good-faith effort.

“I’m not at all sure that this is what the White House had in mind,” Curry, the former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, told the Washington Examiner, declaring it “a politicized assessment.”

The idea also faced significant opposition within the government from a slew of senior officials, including Kelvin Droegemeier, Trump’s top science adviser, as well as the Pentagon and agencies that work on climate science, such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Naturally, there were people in defense who supported climate alarmism, as there were in many other agencies,” Happer said. “That was no surprise to me. “

Happer contended the national security community’s findings of climate change rely on flawed science generated by “insular and paranoid” like-minded scientists. He said he believes greenhouse gases “have some warming effect, but it’s not very big.”

“The climate change community always has the benefit of being a judge for its own cause,” Happer said. “That’s never been very healthy.”

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Former California Governor Jerry Brown Stokes His Climate-Change Backfire

Jerry Brown has been on the quiet side since he left office, but raging fires across the state have smoked out the hereditary, recurring governor. As he told Politico, this was “only a taste of the horror and terror that will occur in decades,” in “America, in Africa, in Canada.” For Brown, a three-time presidential loser, it was not a new theme.

“I would point to the fact that it took Roosevelt many, many years to get America willing to go into World War II and fight the Nazis,” Brown said on “Meet the Press” on December 30. “Well, we have an enemy, though different, but perhaps, very much devastating in a similar way. And we’ve got to fight climate change. And the president’s got to lead on that.”

Brown said Trump had the right to his own opinions, “but he doesn’t have a right to his own facts.” Yet Brown, a lawyer and former seminarian with no formal background in science, has not advanced reproducible climate data in support of his position. In his final two terms, he oraculated about climate change while neglecting California’s volatile tax system, pension debt, regulatory reform, and unelected bodies such as the Coastal Commission that override voters and trample property rights.

Brown gave way to the current governor, Gavin Newsom, whose grandfather was awarded the concession for the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics by Jerry Brown’s father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. In a similar style, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed William Newsom, Gavin’s father, to a judgeship in Placer County and later the state court of appeals. Gov. Jerry Brown was occasionally an effective goalie, but protégé Newsom has signed 69 bills that Brown vetoed, including AB 61, about petitioning judges to take away a person’s firearms. As Katy Grimes notes in California Globe, as the fires rage, Newson been ramping up the rhetoric.

“As it relates to PG&E, it’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change,” the governor said. “It’s about corporate greed meeting climate change. It’s about decades of mismanagement.” As Grimes recalls, Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown is “responsible for implementing the majority of the climate change and environmental restrictions on water, natural gas and nuclear power, and impositions of 33%, then 50% and finally 100% renewable energy mandates on the utilities.”

None of that seems to be quelling the fires and accompanying blackouts. So there’s more to it than the climate change-capitalism axis. If current conditions persist, the last person leaving the state will have no need to turn out the lights.

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How the EPA Makes Wildfires More Likely

Wildfires are claiming lives and destroying property across California. As they flee the deadly blazes, Californians should be aware that federal bureaucrats make such fires more likely to occur. Consider the case of U.S. Navy veteran Joe Robertson in Jefferson County, Montana.

Robertson’s property was vulnerable to fires, so he built small protection ponds and dug a ditch, one foot wide and one foot deep, to supply firefighters in the event of an outbreak. The federal Environmental Protection Agency charged that under the Clean Water Act, the ditch was a federally protected commercial waterway and required a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, even though the nearest navigable waterway was 40 miles away. The federal government criminally prosecuted Robertson, 77, sent him to prison for 18 months and fined him $130,000, all upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Robertson completed his sentence and was still on parole when he died in March 2019, at the age of 80. His wife Carri took up Joe’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate his conviction. On April 15, 2019, the Supreme Court vacated the Ninth Circuit’s ruling and in July the Ninth Circuit vacated the conviction and fine.

As Myron Magnet notes, the Trump administration recently revoked the regulation under which Robertson was convicted. Magnet is a critic of the powerful administrative state that makes such atrocities possible. “Not only do we have bureaucrats making rules like a legislature and interpreting them as a judge,” Magnet writes, “but also the interpretations amount to a further lawmaking power, with no checks or balances whatsoever.”

This is the same EPA that hired “policy advisor” John Beale, who claimed he also worked for the CIA and basically skipped work for nearly 20 years, drawing “retention bonuses” all the while. Beale also kept drawing a government paycheck nearly two years after his retirement. Such an unaccountable agency is hardly worthy of trust.

The Trump administration should continue to cut EPA regulations, particularly those that make it more difficult for citizens to protect their own lives and property.

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Jeremy Corbyn’s Scientist Brother Exposes Climate Fraudsters

Piers Corbyn, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexiteer climate-sceptic elder brother, has lambasted Extinction Rebellion as a Soros-funded, EU- and UN-backed scam to transfer money from ordinary people to corporations.

Speaking to YouTube personality and former UKIP candidate Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin, the physicist, weather forecaster, and former Labour councillor warned viewers that “climate policy is there to control you, not climate”.

“The political origin of [Extinction Rebllion] is the globalist supernationals, the mega-rich. They’re funded by George Soros, among others, he spent 24 million dollars on the group which set up the so-called climate strike,” Corbyn alleged.

“They are orchestrated by the mainstream media and tolerated deliberately by all the governments in the world, just about, bar very few,” he continued.

“If you and I were to have a demonstration about Yemen, the war and arms, and so forth, we would be swept off the street in half an hour, right?” he told Benjamin.

“Or if the miners’ strike had have tried to occupy London like they did, they would have had the horses against them straight away, they’d be swept away — so [Extinction Rebellion] are completely tolerated by the powers that be,” he added.

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