With Nod to Sovereignty, Trump Dumps UN “Climate” Regime

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, June 1, 2017. It was written by Alex Newman, a colleague of mine, and is reprinted here with his permission.  

After months of keeping the world in suspense about his intentions, President Donald Trump formally announced that the United States would be withdrawing from the United Nations “Paris Agreement” on alleged man-made global warming. Blasting the non-binding UN scheme as a counterproductive effort to disadvantage America and redistribute U.S. wealth rather than fix the “climate,” Trump portrayed the decision as one that puts “America First.” He also chastised foreign powers and their lobbyists for demanding that the United States continue to handicap its economy under the guise of doing virtually nothing for the climate. The withdrawal, Trump said, represents the “re-assertion of America’s sovereignty” and a fulfillment of his efforts to re-invigorate the American economy. It was also the fulfillment of Trump’s oft-repeated pledge to “cancel” the UN scheme.

However, frustrating some of his supporters and climate realists, Trump also indicated that he was open to either re-negotiating the Paris Agreement or creating a similar international “climate” regime that would be more “fair” to the United States. In fact, the president even offered to work with Democrat Party leaders to create a new global-warming scheme — provided it was more fair and did not impose undue burdens on the United States that did not apply equally to other nations, including the world’s top polluters. Some Trump supporters, though, suggested that the president understands such a “far better” so-called “climate” regime will never materialize. Plus, even if it did, it would stand virtually no chance of being ratified by the Senate, as required by the Constitution — especially since most Americans reject the warming theory to begin with. If no new deal emerges, “that’s fine,” Trump said.

Trump’s speech, though, was widely celebrated as wonderful by his supporters and especially his core base. Despite softening his rhetoric on the man-made global-warming theory, which he repeatedly referred to as a “hoax” over a period of years, Trump’s historic announcement pleased a broad array of his supporters on main street. From supporting workers and domestic energy production to defending the U.S. Constitution and American sovereignty, Trump’s speech hit multiple points that American patriots have been longing to hear from a U.S. president for decades. Indeed, the decision itself was a stunning blow to globalist-swamp schemers, “climate” AstroTurf activists, mega-bankers, UN bureaucrats, Third World dictators, Big Oil, crony capitalists, the pope and the full spectrum of forces lobbying Trump to stay in the imploding UN scheme.

The UN “Paris Agreement,” as the pseudo-treaty is called, was negotiated in Paris, France, in December of 2015 by Obama, the UN, and the UN’s largely autocratic and corrupt member regimes. Under the scheme, Obama purported to commit the United States to draconian economic and energy restrictions, all while pledging to redistribute hundreds of billions of taxpayer money from the middle class in West to Third World regimes and the UN. Because Obama knew it would stand no chance of being ratified by the U.S. Senate as required by the U.S. Constitution, the administration called it an “executive agreement” and claimed ratification was not needed. But as this magazine warned at the time, such a plot meant the foundation of the pseudo-treaty was built on quicksand, all but ensuring its eventual collapse. Indeed, without U.S. participation and tax money, the scheme is essentially dead.

Trump offered many reasons for his decision. He praised the U.S. Constitution, saying it was his “highest honor” to protect it, and that he always would do so. And in an exceedingly rare development for U.S. presidents of recent memory, Trump also touted and defended U.S. sovereignty. “There are serious legal and constitutional issues as well,” Trump said. “Foreign leaders in Europe, Asia and across the world should not have more to say with respect to the U.S. economy than our own citizens and their elected representatives. Thus, our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty.” Perhaps most stunning was the sharp rebuke he gave of the Paris Agreement itself, which he described as essentially a giant scam to rip off the American people to benefit foreign powers and special interests.

“The Paris climate accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States, to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers, who I love, and taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production,” Trump correctly explained. “Thus, as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country. This includes ending the implementation of the nationally determined contribution and, very importantly, the Green Climate Fund, which is costing the United States a vast fortune.”

Trump also broke down the numbers. Among other facts and figures, the president said compliance with the UN scheme and the “onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States” could cost America some 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025, including almost half of a million manufacturing jobs. Citing the National Economic Research Associates, Trump said that by 2040, compliance with the UN scheme would slash paper production by 12 percent, cement by one fourth, iron and steel by 38 percent, coal down by 86 percent, and natural gas down by almost a third. “The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7,000 less income, and in many cases, much worse than that,” Trump added, saying that was unacceptable.

On top of those devastating figures, Trump noted, the “climate” scheme would do virtually nothing for the climate. “Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations it is estimated it would only produce a two tenths of one degree — think of that, this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100,” Trump said, calling it a “tiny, tiny” amount while vowing that the United States would continue to be the cleanest country on Earth. “In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America and this is an incredible statistic — would totally wipe out the gains from America’s expected reductions in the year 2030. After we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories and suffered much higher energy costs for our businesses and for our homes.”

Others who have examined the numbers and the data came to similar conclusions. Indeed, the UN’s own numbers also confirm that the scheme has little to do with “climate.” Danish statistician Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, for example, crunched the numbers using the UN’s own “climate” models. What he found makes a complete mockery of the alarmist cause and the peddlers of the UN’s “climate” regime. “We will spend at least $100 trillion dollars in order to reduce the temperature by the end of the century by a grand total of three tenths of one degree,” he said, noting that was the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years. “Again, that is using the UN’s own climate prediction model.”

Top UN “climate” officials have also practically admitted as much. Christiana Figueres, then the executive director of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), boasted in 2012 that “what is occurring here … in the whole climate change process is a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” Countless other UN bureaucrats and even policymakers around the world have made similarly damning admissions about the real agenda.

In fact, Trump pointed out, the Paris agreement is “less about climate and more about other countries getting an advantage over the United States.” Foreign powers and the rest of the world applauded when the Obama administration signed the pseudo-treaty “simply because it puts out country, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage,” Trump continued, adding that foreign powers wanted America to remain in because they wanted to keep America down while they reaped the benefits. “The fact that the Paris deal hamstrings the United States while empowering some of the world’s top polluting countries should dispel any doubt as to the real reason why foreign lobbyists wished to keep our magnificent country tied up and bound down by this agreement,” he said. “It’s to give their country an economic edge over the United States.”

Trump also noted on several occasions the fact that the UN scheme was aimed largely at redistributing American wealth. Indeed, this reporter was actually at the December, 2015, UN “climate” summit in Paris to report on the proverbial “sausage” being made. And it was truly a spectacle to behold. The first story filed from the UN conference for this magazine involved a list of demands by 134 Third World governments and tyrants, known as the Group of 77 Plus (Communist) China, demanding trillions of dollars from Western taxpayers in exchange for their cooperation with the scheme. Obama and other globalist Western leaders were more than happy to comply, thereby securing the approval of some two thirds of the UN’s member regimes. But now, that pipeline into the wallets of U.S. taxpayers has been shut.

The president portrayed the announcement as an effort to keep his campaign promises —accurately, in this instance, except for the words about possibly rejoining. “One by one, we are keeping the promises I made to the American people during my campaign for president, whether it’s cutting job-killing regulations, appointing and confirming a tremendous Supreme Court justice, putting in place tough new ethics rules, achieving a record reduction in illegal immigration on our southern border, or bringing jobs, plants and factories back into the United States at numbers which no one, until this point, thought even possible,” Trump declared. “And believe me, we’ve just begun. The fruits of our labor will be seen very shortly even more so.”

The day before Trump’s formal announcement, countless establishment media organs — often ridiculed by Trump as the “fake news” media — reported that Trump was planning to follow through on his campaign pledge to “cancel” the UN scheme. However, considering the increasingly fringe “mainstream” media’s track record of constantly being wrong or at the very least deceptive, few climate skeptics or climate realists were ready to pop the champagne and celebrate before the formal announcement was made. But after the speech, Americans all across the country and from all walks of life celebrated the historic victory for national sovereignty and the Constitution.

Of course, America is not out of the woods yet, even on “climate.” Establishment globalists and the discredited “climate” industrial complex, which feeds off more than $1 billion per day in tax money yet has a track record of being wrong on virtually everything, are not going anywhere. Instead, they will re-double their efforts, even as the indisputable evidence debunking their theory continues piling up — including more than two decades and counting with no observed warming. As such, patriotic Americans and climate realists must work harder than ever to protect liberty and sovereignty and put the “climate hoax,” as Trump used to call it, permanently to rest.