Incredibly Shrinking America

In a stunning move with only his re-election in mind, Donald Trump has turned his back on the rest of the world taking another step destined to create hostility with allies and cede world leadership to China. As we have painfully been made
aware, by quitting the Paris climate accord, the remarkable alliance of 195 nations given birth by decades of careful negotiation, we now keep company with only Syria and Nicaragua.

Withdrawal from the climate agreement is the stupidest policy blunder since George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq. It is not even required to believe in global warming to know this. Rejection of a world movement has already triggered ramifications that will erode our leadership position in the world and in turn harm our industries and economy for years. Trump's first retreat was his outright cancellation of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) of 12 nations that Obama had engineered as a counter to China's influence. China immediately stepped into the breach to create its own coalition which will now enable them to set the rules of trade for that half of the globe. And at the NATO summit Trump uniquely refrained from voicing the standard pledge that the United States would come to the defense of any member nation if attacked, which has Europe worried that it cannot rely on the U.S. And now comes this.

In January, 630 businesses and investors — major U.S. corporations — signed an open letter to the president-elect and Congress pressing for lowered carbon policies and continued membership in the Paris alliance. In May, 25 companies including Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, bought full-page ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post urging the U.S. to remain because the agreement will "generate jobs and economic growth" and "U.S. companies are well positioned to lead in these markets". George Schultz, secretary of treasury and state under Nixon and Reagan, co-wrote an op-ed citing the remarkable breadth of the coalition, "industries from oil and gas to retail, mining, utilities, agriculture, chemicals, information and automotive" who see with Shultz that participation will "strengthen American competitiveness, create jobs and ensure American access to global markets". In what was called his first tweet ever, even Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein weighed in with "Today's decision is a setback for the environment and for the U.S.'s leadership position in the world". We might well see retaliation that damages our economy.

A Yale Program on climate change that surveys voters found that 70% of Americans wanted to stay in the Paris accord and only 28% of those who voted for Trump agreed that the U.S. should abandon. More than 6 in 10
Trump voters think the pollution that causes warming should be taxed. Off in his corner is Donald Trump, whose approval rating according to the latest Gallup poll has dropped to 36% with 58% disapproving.

Trump's action in defiance of most of the country has stirred American states, cities and companies to band together to adhere to the Paris pledge on their own. The group, coordinated by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, so far includes 30 mayors, 3 governors, 82 university presidents and more than 100 businesses. The coalition intends to bypass Trump by working directly with European nations. The European Union's commissioner for climate action and energy said, "We will establish a dialogue…with all the players that in the United States support ambitious climate change policies". Angela Merkel responded, "I am so moved that so many states and enterprises in the United States of America want to travel this path with us. We will travel it together".

Making his announcement in the White House Rose Garden, Trump said,

"We're getting out, but we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine".

Trump had listened to no less an authority than Kevin Cramer, public service commissioner of North Dakota for a decade before recent election to Congress, who had been feeding him the nonsense that he could renegotiate a deal, a deal with 195 parties to it. Trump called leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Canada to explain his actions and that he wanted to negotiate a better deal for the United States. A trio of European leaders — Macron of France, Merkel of Germany, and Gentilone of Italy — immediately disabused Trump of the notion that such privileges were available to the United States, saying the accord is "irreversible" and "cannot be renegotiated". Following his dismissive insult to the entire world, Trump thinks that exceptional America has the right to be the exception.

At the NATO summit in Brussels and and the Group of 7 meeting in Italy, Trump's pugnacity had been in full voice, lecturing on climate, picking a fight with Germany for depressing the euro's value to make its goods cheaper, threatening to block import of German autos (unaware that BMW and Mercedes-Benz manufacture here), and hectoring European leaders once again about paying their NATO dues. Back in the U.S., the President of the United States even engaged in a senseless Twitter war with London's mayor.

Press Secretary Sean Spicer meant to reassure, saying, "He'll obviously continue to talk to world leaders" and "exiting Paris does not mean disengagement", but he must have been unaware that leaders in foreign capitals have already disengaged from us, renewing their pledges to reduce emissions without the U.S. After meeting with China in a two-day summit meeting in Brussels, the European Council stated, "Today we are stepping up our cooperation on climate change with China". A spokeswoman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said "China is willing to enhance cooperation with all sides …on details on implementing the Paris agreement". German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Trump "will not deter all of us who feel obliged to protect this Earth". Unlike the thinly educated Trump — an undergraduate degree in real estate — Ms. Merkel was previously a scientist.

Trump has once again fallen under the thrall of the nationalistic destructiveness of Stephen Bannon, who, along with the Oklahoma fossil fuel zealot, Tom Pruitt, whom Trump appointed to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency, persuaded Trump that this would be the perfect stratagem to please his low-information base who think this will bring jobs back to middle America. Unaware that he is now president for all Americans, Trump instead stuck to a reckless promise made only to those who elected him, the rest of the country and our place in the world be damned.

"Our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America's sovereignty", said Trump. Except nothing in the accord does impinge on our sovereignty. The real attitude? Nobody gets to tell the mighty United States what to do. We tell them what to do.

For Trump, everything is a transaction with money at its core. He is particularly vexed by America's contribution to the fund that helps small nations in the path of rising oceans — calling it “billions and billions and billions” of dollars. In fact it is $3 billion, an infinitesimal reparation from the country that until recently was for a century the world's largest emitter, with America's 5% of the world's population spewing 25% of its pollution into the atmosphere. Where is any concern for climate when he says, "The same nations asking us to stay … have collectively cost America trillions of dollars through tough trade practices and in many cases lax contributions to our critical military alliance", a statement that drags in his other money grievances. "This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage", he says.

That is exactly what they will gain by our quitting. We are handing to others dominance in renewable energy, an extraordinary gift especially to China, to which the world will now turn for the latest green technology and manufacture. The Chinese are ecstatic at this development. Once again, we are destined to watch an Asian country take over technologies that America largely pioneered, that which they haven't already. It is a huge market envisioned to be $6 trillion by 2030 for wind, solar, electric cars, and the storage batteries that will level weather and wind intermittancy. "The nations that remain in the Paris agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created", said Obama. Instead, Trump will sacrifice all of that, pandering for the votes of the dying coal industry.

Of all the forecasts of what emission reduction is likely to bring about in the U.S., Trump — no researcher — was apparently handed by Pruitt or Bannon the worst case of a hotly disputed study by an outfit named NERA, an economic research arm of Marsh & McLennan, an insurance brokerage and risk management firm. That led him to cite in his announcement "draconian financial and economic burdens" and "shuttered factories" leading to the loss of 2.7 million jobs by 2025. He cited plunges in industrial production — 12% in paper production, 23% in cement, 38% in iron and steel, for example — as if the economy would grind to a halt. The figures are viewed as greatly exaggerated (and, of course, the country would not blindly go off the cliff if they proved to be true) when one takes note that the U.S. has already reduced emissions 12% below the 2005 Paris benchmark peak; industry is booming, as reflected by all-time record stock market indexes; and the economy, despite Obama's supposedly job-killing regulations, has added 11.3 million in a decade leading to a 4.3% unemployment rate, the lowest in 16 years.

Given its plunging assumptions, the outlier study seems to pay no recognition to the millions of jobs that would be created in a full scale, decades-long transfer to renewable energy. Hundreds of thousands are already employed in wind and solar, more already than work in the coal industry — mining, transportation, and power plants combined. It's already happening, but Trump wants it stopped.

Trump was also hoodwinked by about 40 conservative groups — including the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and the Heritage Foundation — sent a letter to Trump in May urging withdrawal. Doubtless knowing that Trump does not want to read anything longer than a single page, they safely assumed that the president knew nothing of the terms of the Paris accord, so they lied to him. So did 22 Republican senators who wrote to Trump urging withdrawal. Both, along with Tom Pruitt, warned the president that staying in could lead to legal ramifications, as if other signatories to the accord could sue the U.S. for not meeting emission targets.

Trump fell for the lie. There are no legal requirements. All participation is voluntary. Each nation sets a target for reducing emissions and submits reports of how well or poorly it is doing on the path to that goal. That's it.

A smug Journal editorial treats this as a laughable oversight, as if the Paris negotiators could possibly have arrogated to themselves enforcement powers and still hope to bring along virtually every nation on Earth.

The point is, there was no need to drop out of the agreement. Trump could back away from Obama's commitments, fall short of meeting emission reduction targets, yet keep America's place at the table where it can monitor technological developments and progress of other nations and maintain diplomatic relations. Instead, he chose to raise his middle finger and make America an international pariah. His arrogance attempts to foreclose any option of a future American president to resume our membership in the world and combat what science fears will be the ultimate and irreversible upheaval for life on the planet. Trump has stirred such animosity that a coalition of nations should consider invoking sanctions against the U.S.

Against the climate scientists' consensus is a body of skeptics who believe that the rate of change is overblown, pointing out that, when fed past data, none of the models recreate what actually happened. Then there are those at the bottom of the knowledge chain who think climate change is nonexistent, persons such as Donald Trump who has said it is a hoax.

But setting aside the climate question, even the skeptics should want the reduction of pollution that the accord will bring. Returning to Earth from our moon, astronaut Edgar Mitchell looked at the glowing corona around our planet and saw how vulnerable is our "thin film of life". We have but one atmosphere, yet those unconcerned for the lives that follow us in the centuries to come choose not to face up to how dumb it is to go on digging up hydrocarbons, formed and safely buried away over millions of years, and burning them into the atmosphere where their greenhouse gases accumulate and persist for a century or so.

A silver lining is that withdrawal is a four-year process. If we can get rid of Trump, there's the possibility of a last minute reversal.

The United States, represented by Barack Obama, agreed to reduce its carbon pollution by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025. It's ambitious — probably too ambitious — but it depends on the fuel efficiency standards agreed to by the auto industry and the EPA's Clean Power Plan's regulations that require states to devise their own means to bring down emissions to levels that consider each state's circumstances. Trump would roll back all of that, release public lands and offshore waters to drilling for oil and gas, open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, void even regulations aimed at preventing oil rig blowouts such as the disastrous Deepwater Horizon. And to make certain we don't learn that he might be wrong about warming, Trump wants to defund the satellites and ocean bouys that measure warming of the atmosphere and the seas.

Everything he intends has the objective of erasing progress. We are witnessing a nation held hostage by a petty man who wants to destroy the legacy of a black president who he probably still thinks illegitimately gained that office, a man who is using the presidency to revenge Obama for chiding him at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Inept to the end, Trump tried for feeble alliteration with, "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris", except Pittsburgh didn't elect him. They went 80% for Hillary. Moreover, he chose a city that once choked on coal pollution but has become a model for what the Paris accord hopes to achieve. Someone should have told him there's a Paris in Texas.