Exit From Paris Climate Accord: A Re-Founding Of American Democracy?

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

In an interview with the French liberal newspaper Contrepoints, Belgian philosopher Drieu Godefridi discusses his view that the exit of the Trump Administration from the Paris Agreement is a sensible return to American democracy.

Drieu Godefridi

Interview with Drieu Godefridi, Belgian philosopher, jurist, author of “Le GIEC etMort; Vive le Science” (The IPCC is Dead: Long Live Science) published in English under the title “The IPCC: A Scientific Body?” Godefridi discusses his view that the exit of the Trump Administration from the Paris Agreement is a sensible return to American democracy. Godefridi traces the incremental takeover of public policy by globalists and minority view activists using unelected, unaccountable politically-rife bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the guise of ‘science’ to foist ever-more economically detrimental demands on the West. These groups use contrived morality and guilt to affect a bank hold-up, the trigger-about-to-be-pulled being the ‘climate catastrophe.’

Without arguing the science, President Trump called that bluff as he exited the Paris Agreement.He called it on economic and common-sense grounds, being accountable and representing the interests of Americans as an elected official. This is in stark contrast to the EU where the unelected, unaccountable EU commission has become detached from the people’s needs and entrenched in the ideological fantasy of the day. This translation includes this introduction and clarifying details for North American audiences.

Question: Drieu Godefridi, you qualify the American decision to leave the Paris Agreement as the re-founding act of the American democracy. Could you expand on this surprising point of view, surprising at least, compared to that of most European politicians and analysts?

Reply: You are right, this point of view is undoubtedly in the minority. Globalists are now considered as opposed to nationalists. The Europeans and the American Democrats would be the Globalists. The nationalists are the Republican supporters of “America First”. From this point of view, to the Globalist, everything is simple: the American exit from the Paris Accord is a selfish act of a narrow nationalist who cares about the immediate economic interests of America at the expense of the collective interest and that of the planet.

On the surface, this narrative is very convincing, it has only one fault: it is false.

The Paris Accord marks the apotheosis, not of “globalism,” but of a particular version of globalism, which one should rather qualify as socialist. Indeed, let us recall the actual content of the Paris Agreement! What does it foresee? Essentially, two things: the drastic reduction of CO₂ emissions in the West, right away, with the possibility for states such as China – the world’s largest CO₂ emitter – to continue to increase emissions to 2030, with no requirement whatsoever to reduce emissions. The second essential component of “Paris” is the Green Fund, which provides for the transfer of $ 100 billion a year from the West to the rest of the world. “Paris” is therefore, first and foremost, the triumph of what was called “support for the Third World” in the 70s and 80s, that is to say, a massive and permanent transfer of wealth from the West to the rest of the world.

Question: We can see the socialist component. But what about globalism? How does the Paris Agreement contribute to globalism?

Reply: “Paris” is doubly globalist: first, because the transfer of wealth will be done through a clever network of international institutions, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Green Fund — an institution, with a secretariat, directors, exotic meeting places, etc. —and all the intermediate institutions created by the Paris Agreement.

Secondly, “Paris” is driven by “morality” with the IPCC itself employing the services of moral philosophers to help them make their political case. The founding moral intuition which presides over the Paris Agreement is internationalist socialism. International socialism has always considered that the differential of wealth that benefits the West results from the pillage of the rest of the planet. This is described in terms of imperialism, colonization, exploitation of weaker partners. In that world view, the only “just” solution (aka “climate justice”) to this is the immediate and unconditional transfer of a substantial portion of these wealth to the rest of the world. Thus, the Paris Accord discloses itself clearly as a matter of globalism, but of a very particular vision of it – internationalist socialism.

Question: Even if the Paris Agreement is indeed motivated by a socialist vision, is it not selfish and unjust on the part of the Americans to refuse to share their wealth?

Reply: The founding thesis of universalist socialism is that the wealth of the West is born of the plunder of the rest of the world. This is obviously false, and this has been demonstrated time and time again. The West owes its surplus of wealth to the preference given over five centuries to a particular economic system, capitalism! [1] The West has rejected the alternatives, socialism or subsistence. Moreover, the falsehood about the capitalist West as simple global robber barons is so well entrenched in leftist/socialist/globalists that even the concessions and foreign aid made to date by the West on are never enough to satisfy the transfer of wealth desired by the Third Worldists.

With the Paris Accord, which is not born from nothing, we enter a completely different dimension. This time, it is no longer morality, generosity or compassion (i.e. disaster relief) that requires the transfer of the wealth of the West. It’s science! It is the idea that because the Western industrial world has polluted the world for so many years should mean that the West must transfer its wealth to the rest of the world, which can continue to pollute. Further, this guilt money must be paid into the Green Fund which puts unaccountable, unelected green groups and green rent-seekers an opportunity to exploit this ultimate global subsidy for renewable-intermittent energies! Admire the finesse of the process: it employs the very strength of the West — capitalism — to show that the West has sinned. How naive and amateur are the Third Worldists of the past, with their moral arguments, faced with the omnipotence of the scientific argument!

However, and this should have put the flea in the ear of at least some of the European “leaders”, the results are exactly the same: bleeding the West to the benefit of the rest of the world.