‘Trump Skips Climate Church’

The newspapers have been full of articles bemoaning President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord on climate change. As a matter of fact, one recent edition of The New York Times seemed to have more articles on this topic than on all other topics combined. However, there is more than one point of view on climate change, the causes of it, and man’s ability to alter it.
One of the other points of view was particularly well encapsulated by Holman Jenkins, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, June 3, entitled, “Trump Skips Climate Church.” If you didn’t see it, I’ll quote from and summarize it below. Whether or not you agree with him, he presents an interesting point of view.
“The business case for the Paris agreement has nothing to do with climate change. It goes like this: It is better to be part of any confab than outside of it. Like saluting the flag or bowing your head in church, there is no cost to being insincere, but there is a cost to not going along.”
Jenkins holds that there is no way to get 195 countries to agree to anything that will cost them money, and politicians will only sign it if it allows them to do what they were going to do anyway. The oil-exporting countries will not cut back on production, and countries like India and China will continue to expand consumption just as before.
Cynically he states that the “U.S. and Europe intend to keep subsidizing green energy as long as domestic voters give them permission to do so, because the whole point of being in office is to redirect resources to interest groups best able to reward politicians for doling out the goodies.”
The signees said they would cut emissions in order to keep global temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius. The problem is, there is no clear relationship between the science and the goals, and there are no enforcement provisions.
Incidentally, by the Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change’s estimates, the rest of the 21st Century will possibly bring little warming anyway.
In the last three decades since the media has been on the climate-change issue, it has shown that there is no desire by the public for the energy taxes and prohibitions required that would result in significant carbon dioxide reductions.
Jenkins has observed that the public hysteria is a product of the media whipping them up, and is not based upon an informed analysis by the public.
“Only when technology can meet mankind’s energy demand at competitive cost will low-carbon energy prevail. Governments would be wise to invest in basic energy research rather than throwing money at energy technologies that are viable only as long as the subsidies keep flowing. But the latter is what brings in the political bacon.”
At the end of the day, the remarkable twist is, “… one large national economy has been reporting sizable emissions declines, thanks to fracking. The same economy may soon also be able to take credit for slowing China’s prodigious emissions growth thanks to natural gas exports (brought about by fracking) to displace Chinese coal. That country is the U.S. under the unthinkable monster Donald Trump. Whatever evolution toward a lower-carbon energy system takes place in the future; it will also certainly be driven overwhelmingly by technology and markets, not policy.”