Where Trump gets climate change totally wrong
Climate policy is the new culture war, driven by nearly theological passions. Or actually theological passions — with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claiming that Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord was a “dishonor to God.”
While God certainly values his creation, he is probably less concerned with the details of implementing the Paris Agreement. Trump claims that a relatively modest, entirely voluntary agreement that essentially maintains the current momentum of reductions in carbon emissions would somehow destroy the American economy. It wouldn’t. Some advocates seem to imply that a relatively modest, entirely voluntary agreement that essentially maintains America’s current momentum of reductions in carbon emissions would somehow save the world. It can’t.
Here is the bottom line: In order to keep the rise in average global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius and thus avoid the worst climate disruption, it will be necessary to keep more than 80 percent of existing coal reserves in the ground, unexploited. The same will be necessary for more than 50 percent of natural gas reserves.
Those who believe this will happen through some global regulatory regime enforced by the United Nations are inhaling not CO2 but nitrous oxide. Developing nations will not accept the argument that developed nations can now pull up the carbon ladder.
The best hope is for non-carbon based alternatives — ones that don’t disappear at night or when the wind doesn’t blow — to cost less. Putting a price (such as a tax) on emissions would help. But the only sufficient, realistic path is technological innovation, producing non-intermittent, non-carbonbased sources of energy that cost less than coal and natural gas.
This technology will develop in the normal course of innovation. But the timelines of innovation and climate degradation are not the same. Every ton of carbon released into the air can have effects for hundreds of years. To avoid the worst disruption, we need to speed up the technological timeline. And this will take massive, urgent, strategic, public and private investment.
Why didn’t Trump propose this rather obvious, market-oriented alternative to the Paris Agreement? A normal president might have said: “Today
I’m announcing an unprecedented project of research into advanced energy sources, matched by investment pledges from the private sector. This is the way America will lead — through the development of climate-saving technologies that can eventually be employed by the entire world.”
But we do not have a normal president, as Trump’s Paris Agreement unsigning statement made clear.
Trump is critiquing not “globalism” but the Atlantic Alliance that prevailed in the Cold War and a Pacific strategy that has deterred aggression and increased mutual prosperity through trade for more than half a century.
“No people can live to itself alone,” said that pernicious globalist Dwight Eisenhower in his second inaugural address. “The economic need of all nations — in mutual dependence — makes isolation an impossibility; not even America’s prosperity could long survive if other nations did not also prosper. No nation can longer be a fortress, lone and strong and safe. And any people, seeking such shelter for themselves, can now build only their own prison.”