Bill McKibben is eloquent on Trump’s disgusting move.
People say, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. We should be so lucky. President Trump has a hammer, but all he’ll use it for is to smash things that others have built, as the world looks on in wonder and in fear.
That is Trump. He has nothing to offer himself. He’s an empty vessel, his only skill being to market ugly tasteless buildings. All he wants to do is smash things up and piss people off – no doubt to console himself for the fact that intelligent people, no matter how rich and selfish, will not go near him.
The latest, most troubling example is his decision to obliterate the Paris climate accord: After nearly 200 years of scientific inquiry and over 20 years of patient diplomacy that united every nation save Syria and Nicaragua, we had this afternoon’s big game-show Rose Garden reveal: Count us out.
It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.
Trump doesn’t do diplomacy, which requires intelligence, thought, knowledge, experience, the ability to see and understand points of view not one’s own. Trump knows nothing but brute force and insults, because he is that stupid and empty.
The reason Paris is a series of voluntary agreements and not a real treaty is because the world had long since understood that no binding document would ever get two-thirds of the vote in our oil-soaked Senate. And that’s despite the fact that the agreement asks very little of us: President Barack Obama’s mild shift away from coal-fired power and toward higher-mileage cars would have satisfied our obligations.
Those changes, and similar ones agreed to by other nations, would not have ended global warming. They were too small. But the hope of Paris was that the treaty would send such a strong signal to the world’s governments, and its capital markets, that the targets would become a floor and not a ceiling; that shaken into action by the accord, we would start moving much faster toward renewable energy, maybe even fast enough to begin catching up with the physics of global warming. There are signs that this has been happening: The plummeting price of solar energy just this spring persuaded India to forgo a huge planned expansion of coal plants in favor of more solar panel arrays to catch the sun. China is shutting coal mines as fast as it can build wind turbines.
And that’s precisely the moment President Trump chose to make his move, a bid to undercut our best hope for a workable future in a bizarre attempt to restore the past.
The past in which there were more coal mines – as if coal mines were inherently desirable and good things, source of careers as enviable as any other.
And so we will resist. As the federal government reneges on its commitments, the rest of us will double down on ours. Already cities and states are committing to 100 percent renewable energy. Atlanta was the latest to take the step. We will make sure that every leader who hesitates and waffles on climate will be seen as another Donald Trump, and we will make sure that history will judge that name with the contempt it deserves. Not just because he didn’t take climate change seriously, but also because he didn’t take civilization seriously.
I wish Kathy Griffin had waited two days.
Comments
9 responses to “A thorough repudiation of diplomacy and science”
From a comment thread in our media (not mine)…
Completely
Objectionable
Volte
Face
Exterminates
Future
Environment.
It’s worth noting that Nicaragua opted out of the accord not because it was too much, but because it was too little. Syria, of course, has had a few distractions over the last five or six years which may have had a little bit to do with its unwillingness or inability to sign. So the US is really alone in this unforced error.
What do you mean, it was too little? I thought Paris asked countries to make whatever commitments they thought feasible. Some countries are doing a lot, some not so much.
The fact that it was non-binding, especially on the wealthier countries with larger economies, was what prompted Nicaragua to back out according to WaPo.
From the same link, it seems the Nicaraguans (admittedly with the benefit of local geology) are already outpacing the US and many other more industrialised nations on energy production.
Thus Nicaragua’s decision to not back Paris is far, far different than the US’s. The only other non-signatory, Syria, effectively has no centralised government to do the signing in the first place, and is expending too many fossil fuels displacing and murdering its citizens to meet any realistic targets.
The US really is alone in its arrogance, ignorance, and short-sightedness.
King Canute’s legendary bout with the waves of the incoming tide, as set down in the 12th century by Henry of Huntingdon, was an act (often misrepresented) to demonstrate the limits of his own royal power.
Trump on the other hand is proclaiming his own presidential power to revoke natural laws: specifically those of quantum physics which cause carbon dioxide molecules of the air to become internally energised by absorbing photons of radiant heat, and then to pass that energy on through contact with other molecules, thus warming the air overall.
That makes Trump big. Very bigly big. Oh yeah.
Huge.
Paris Agreement? Don’t bug me with that.
I’ve got my tweets to write.
And….
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/02/european-leaders-vow-to-keep-fighting-global-warming-despite-us-withdrawal
Ben,
In short, countries that really needed to step up to the plate (think, U.S.) could set minimal targets and nothing would really change. The EU had already backed down on their promise in Kyoto to increase their reductions to 30% below 1990 levels from the 20% they were already working on because other countries were not meeting their goals (and the US and Australia weren’t even on board with Kyoto), and they couldn’t be competitive in a global market. So during the Copenhagen treaty, which was weak and not legally binding, they decided not to be more virtuous than the rest at a huge cost to their economy.
It looks to me like the Quackeroo has just fired the opening salvo in a trade war between his bit of the US and the EU; in fact between his bit of the US and the rest of the world.
I wonder who will blink first.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Trump has a wrecking-ball.