Trump has revealed the dirty secret of the Paris Accord: it is meaningless

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

Booker on Trump this week:

From the howls of dismay and rage prompted across the world by President Trump’s speech on pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accord, we couldn’t miss that something extraordinary had happened. But it is impossible to grasp its real significance without knowing just how far that Paris agreement has become one of the most dishonestly misrepresented events in recent history.

The reason why the BBC immediately wheeled on someone to describe Trump’s decision as “apocalyptic, paranoid and delusional” was that the President had just stripped away all the spin, pretences and lies that led even that celebrated climate zealot James Hansen to call the agreement at the time a “fake” and a “fraud”.

What was being hoped for in Paris by the world’s climate establishment, led by President Obama, who called it his “legacy”, was a legally binding treaty that would succeed where Kyoto and Copenhagen had so signally failed. It would commit every country to such drastic reductions in its emissions of “polluting” CO2 that this might somehow prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Trump says US to withdraw from Paris climate deal

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To bring on board the developing world, led by two of the top three “polluters”, China and India, a Green Climate Fund was set up, whereby the developed nations would pay them $100 billion every year to “decarbonise” by going for renewable energy.

These people who are now waxing so angry have been looking in the wrong place for what drives the climate all along.

But for reasons I was able to explain here a month before Paris, none of this was going to happen. The reason it is only called the “Paris Accord” is that there was never going to be a legally binding treaty. But the really dirty secret of Paris, as Trump has now been the first world leader to reveal, was contained in a set of documents called “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs). Here, each country set out its own plan for how by 2030 it intended to meet the desired “climate goals”.

Again led by China and India, the developing countries all paid lip service to what was wanted, and how they would be expanding their “renewable” energy sources – wind, solar and the rest. But buried away in the small print, as dug out by the meticulous researcher Paul Homewood on his NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat blog (and reported here), was the devastating real story.

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