Bid adieu to Paris

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is finally starting to think globally and act locally in reducing carbon emissions, with plans to examine “the carbon footprint of IPCC activities” themselves at the panel’s upcoming 45th session.

Well, maybe “acting” locally is putting it too strongly. The world’s premiere climate-policy body is planning to “continue studying and mapping out options and alternative models” to its endless conference extravaganza, which — with 20 meetings last year in places as far flung as Australia, Belarus, Kenya and Norway — leave the IPCC with a collective carbon footprint that might rival some developing nations.

They’ve been pondering this issue for more than three years now, since the IPCC first reflected on its carbon hypocrisy at its 37th session in Batumi, Georgia. It’s on the agenda again for its 45th session this month in Guadalajara, Mexico. The panel admits in a pre-conference report, that “little progress has been achieved so far” and “Greening principles are seldom or never included in the list of criteria for selecting a host country and venue.” The higher priority, it says, is the “adequacy of conference facilities.” That often necessitates gathering at five-star hotels in luxurious resort hotspots. It’s what must be done to cool the climate.

The empty posturing of the UN’s climate campaign is well known, but this week might be when it finally gets called out for it by the most powerful leader in the world, President Donald Trump. Or not. No one seems to know if, or when, Trump might finally issue his long-promised executive order to withdraw from the Paris climate deal, the biggest, emptiest gesture yet to sprout from the UN’s globetrotting global-warming roadshow. It’s the treaty Barack Obama ratified just before Trump’s election, while maintaining it didn’t qualify as an actual “treaty,” so he wasn’t bound by the Constitution’s requirement that the Senate provide its two-thirds approval.

Some kind of executive order undoing many of former president Obama’s climate diktats is apparently coming, likely this week. The Washington Post reported Tuesday on Trump’s imminent plans to instruct cabinet to rewrite restrictions on power-plant emissions, open up new coal leases and end the practice requiring federal officials to incorporate climate impacts into their decision-making.

That’s all in keeping with his campaign promises, but since his election Trump’s been unclear about whether he intends to keep his promise to “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs” in his first 100 days. Reportedly, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, who advise the president, think the move too damaging to foreign relations. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson supposedly thinks so, too. Other White House insiders, including strategist Steve Bannon, are fighting to get Trump to keep his vow.

The pressure is mounting internationally, too. Germany’s Angela Merkel is meeting the president this week, and European officials see it “as the first opportunity to lay the groundwork to persuade Trump to keep the U.S. in the landmark Paris climate agreement,” reported Politico this week. Merkel was supposed to be there Tuesday, but there hasn’t been enough global warming in Washington, D.C. lately and, as a blizzard walloped the airport, Merkel postponed until Friday.

Whether the chancellor arrives in time to persuade Trump matters little. The Paris commitments were baloney anyway: Obama had pledged to cut emissions by 26 per cent from 2005 levels, by 2025, but even the Democrats’ pushy policies were projected to only achieve half that much. And those policies are the very ones Trump is rolling back, regardless of his plans for the Paris deal.

A key part of the deal also requires Americans to send US$3 billion in aid to developing countries for clean energy programs and adaptation, but the Republican Congress plans to stop that. Germany has joined with France and Italy to urge Canada, China and several African and Latin American countries to form a coalition of “like-minded” countries to pressure Trump to stick with the climate plan, which the U.S. can clearly never fulfill anyway. Evidently all that worry about Trump telling lies isn’t a problem if it’s a lie that pleases the global climate crusade.

The Paris deal had already been exposed as more pointless posing, criticized even by climate alarmists for modest goals that might only negligibly slow cooling (at gargantuan costs). China had promised only to start reducing emissions in 2030, and with its targets made relative to the size of its economy, actually promised no real cuts at all. India got a similarly sweet deal, but also insisted it needs billions in foreign aid to follow through.

What’s more, no country is in any way bound to its Paris commitment, so the U.S. surely wouldn’t have been the only country to widely miss its targets (including, no doubt, Canada).

Yet, since Trump’s election, Paris’s fiercest defenders have insisted that the U.S. must be forced to abide by the deal, with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy calling for the EU to threaten a carbon tariff on U.S. exports if Trump withdraws, French President Francois Hollande insisting “no one can get out of” this “irreversible” accord, Germany’s environment minister suggesting international law will trump Trump, and officials from Beijing to Moscow warning the White House it will pay a price for withdrawing.

Those could all be yet more hollow words from the climate brigade; pulling out of the Kyoto accord didn’t bring any dire consequences down on Canada, after all. And the U.S. never even ratified Kyoto, because back then, presidents deferred to the Senate for such things. If Paris is such a binding treaty, as its champions seem to think, then Trump should at least insist on the Senate’s approval — which it will deny. And if it isn’t binding, Americans should feel no obligation to go along with yet another meaningless gesture of internationalist climate symbolism.