Forget All the Paris Accord Hysteria. It’s a Phony Deal
“No country is required by this agreement to do anything except what that country decided to do for itself.” That’s not some right-wing nut talking. That’s John Kerry, President Obama’s secretary of state, who negotiated the agreement on the CBS Evening News Thursday night (6/1).
Kerry goes on to accuse Donald Trump of “not telling the truth to the American people when he says, ‘we have this huge burden that’s been imposed on us by other nation,’ no. We agreed to what we would do. We designed it. It’s voluntary and the president of the United States could simply have changed that without walking away from the whole agreement.” Read the transcript here.
In other words, this much-hyped agreement is a paper tiger. No country has to do anything. China doesn’t have to reduce emissions unless it wants to. Nor does India, or Vietnam, or anyone else. In a word, the Paris accords aren’t worth the paper they were written on.
That also explains why the U.S. is much farther along than other nations in reducing emissions. We’ve made it a high priority and they haven’t.
No wonder Kerry, Obama and “world leaders” are furious with Trump. Like the boy who exposed the fact the King has no clothes, Trump has exposed the Paris Accords for the sham they are.
If Kerry, Obama and others really wanted to make a meaningful climate global impact, they would have moved to change U.S. law to impose tariffs on goods from countries which don’t meet U.S. environmental standards, just as California adopts its own environmental standards for cars sold in the state.
But it never was about reducing global greenhouse emissions. It was about appearing to reduce greenhouse emissions. As is so often the case, Obama, Kerry and Co. wanted to talk about doing something rather than to actually do it.