Trump Withdrew From the Paris Climate Accord. Hallelujah! | Opinion

In an executive order signed just hours after his inauguration, President Donald Trump put an end to the charade known as the Paris climate agreement. Make no mistake: Paris had little if anything to do with climate change. Instead, Paris was designed to stifle the American economy with expensive energy, soak American taxpayers with billions of dollars of required climate reparations, and prop up a socialist-globalist institution using climate change as a Trojan horse to undermine Western democracies and national sovereignty.

On the climate front, Paris was always a one-sided scam. China by far emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation on the planet, yet Paris imposes no restrictions, costs, or penalties on Chinese carbon dioxide emissions. China emits nearly triple the amount of carbon dioxide as America, which is the second-largest emitter. Indeed, China emits more carbon dioxide than the entire Western Hemisphere. China emits more carbon dioxide than the United States and Western Europe combined. China emits more carbon dioxide than the second- through ninth-most emitting nations combined. Yet, Paris allows China to continue increasing its emissions, which it does nearly every year, even while America and Western democracies decrease our own emissions.

China, America, India, Russia, Japan, and Iran are, in that order, the six most-emitting countries in the world. Paris sticks the two Western democracies on the list—America and Japan—with all sorts of energy restrictions and climate-reparations payments, while the four autocracies are free to keep increasing their emissions all they want.

Paris not only exempted most of the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitters from any restrictions, but it also required “developed” nations—which combined do not emit as much carbon dioxide as China does by itself—to pay at least $100 billion each year to China and other autocratic governments as climate reparations. That is crazy and ignores the fact that China is the country most responsible for carbon dioxide emissions.

Since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the United Nations has boosted that annual extortion to $300 billion per year, with a stated goal of increasing it to $1.35 trillion per year by 2035. There is no climate change rationale for this, only the extortion of American taxpayers to pad the pockets of Third World dictators.

As if the high costs of the Paris charade were not bad enough, America’s self-imposed climate policies are economic suicide in and of themselves. For example, the Congressional Budget Office just released new data showing Joe Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act will increase America’s deficit by $825 billion over the next 10 years. That breaks down to a financial burden of more than $6,000 per household, averaged out among America’s 131 million households. Most of those expenses are for climate change programs, and they are only the tip of the iceberg among a behemoth of additional economically ruinous climate change policies.

American voters elected Donald Trump to put an end to foolish, expensive, and self-harming policies and deals that are designed to win over the affection of nations who hate us. China’s ruling communist party will seek to ruin America no matter how much we pontificate about climate change and no matter how much American taxpayer money we give them.

Donald Trump had the courage to call out the international climate lobby for the scam that they have created, and on Day 1 of his presidency had the integrity to end America’s participation in the Paris climate charade.

Thank you, President Trump!

James Taylor (JTaylor@heartland.org) is President of The Heartland Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.