Given the hysteria over his decision, you would think he just launched a nuclear war. Instead, he exposed how so much of the left’s agenda is meaningless virtue signaling.
The Paris Accord is a voluntary agreement to which every nation has joined except Syria and Nicaragua. No nation that signed the Paris Accord can be compelled to do anything and, in fact, not a single nation that has signed the accord has done a thing. You read that right. Though every nation except two have signed the agreement, not a single signatory nation has taken any action to comply with the accord. Every action thus far has been an action already begun before the accord was signed.
What’s more, there is little evidence that the actions President Obama proposed prior to leaving office would have caused us to meet the carbon emission goals of the accord. Concurrently, there is plenty of evidence that even without implementing those actions the United States will be in compliance with the accord. The reality is that our national emissions continue to go down and are less than they were a decade ago.
So why the outrage? The left is upset because President Trump has shown the Paris exercise to be meaningless. No country intends to comply with the accord, and most Western nations will meet the emissions goals set in the accord without taking any action. The whole process was an exercise in virtue signaling. By signing the accord, nations were agreeing with each other that climate change is a problem. By not signing, countries are seen as deniers. For an increasingly secular left, the act of signing the Paris Accord is salvific and withdrawing from it could cost us our salvation.
Truth be told, the planet is warming. The science is too consistent to deny that humanity plays some role. We do. But how much of a role do humans actually play? It is telling that when the scientific community believed the world was cooling, they proposed a series of actions to stop it. Those same actions are now proposed to stop global warming. When the problem changes and the solutions remain the same, the public has a right to be skeptical.
In every case, the environmentalist left insists on a highly regulated command and control economy with abortion on demand and other measures to institute population control. Large families are a blight on the planet as is capitalism. There is a reason so much of the environmentalist movement is referred to as a watermelon movement. They are green on the outside, but still red from their days of communist activism on the inside. Much of the modern environmentalist movement derives from Soviet era funded leftwing movements. Western communists turned into environmentalists after the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, instead of seeking to destroy capitalism in the name of equality, they seek to destroy it in the name of the environment. Instead of targeting large Christian families for ideas, they target them for resource consumption.
Even removing the ideology behind the left’s environmentalist hysteria, we should keep in mind that we are now beyond the point at which the models have been predictive. Going back a decade ago, environmentalists were claiming 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011… were each year the last year we could do anything to stop climate change. It is amazing how the goal posts keep moving. Each year environmentalists would show horrifying charts of what the temperature would be a decade hence.
We are not at those future projected points and it turns out the actual temperature does not match the scary scenarios projected a decade ago. Perhaps climate and weather are far more complicated than the earth worshippers realize.
All of us are supposed to be good stewards of our planet. We should conserve our resources and raise our children to appreciate God’s creation. No want wants to see the world uninhabitable. But you’ll have to forgive me for not caring about global warming. I trust the science. I just do not trust the supposed scientists.
To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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