Trump Administration Divided Over Obama’s Paris Climate Deal

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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April 17, 2017 at 08:20PM

CEI Calls On Trump To Keep His Promise And Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal

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

The conservative free-market think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute started an online campaign Tuesday to urge President Trump to keep his campaign promise and withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement.

President Trump: Withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty

The campaign comes as the president’s top advisers assemble Tuesday to decide whether or not to exit from the global accord, even though the White House has repeatedly said it won’t make a decision until the end of May. The campaign also reflects the heightened disagreement between factions of the administration that reject and support leaving the deal on global greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Many scientists blame greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels for driving manmade climate change.

“The Paris climate treaty requires the United States to make drastic cuts in fossil fuel energy use by 2025, which will raise energy prices and slow economic recovery from our decade-long slump,” said Myron Ebell, who leads the free-market group’s environment program.

Ebell was Trump’s former head of transition for the Environmental Protection Agency. In recent weeks, he has criticized Trump for appearing to be giving way to “swamp creatures,” who are urging him not to leave the Paris Agreement.

On Tuesday, White House senior advisers, Cabinet members and their staffs will meet to see if they can form a consensus on whether to pull out of the deal. A cabal within the administration led by senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson favor remaining as signatories to the agreement.

Others, such as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who also will attend the meeting, is pushing the administration to leave the agreement.

Ebell warned that not withdrawing from the Paris accord would undercut Trump’s plans to undo former President Barack Obama’s climate change agenda by making Trump’s plans “vulnerable to legal challenges.” It would give environmental groups a perfect argument before the courts in persuading federal judges, and even the Supreme Court, to rule in favor of the climate rules because they underpin the climate deal, even though it is nonbinding, Ebell has argued.

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

April 17, 2017 at 08:06PM

White House Floats Excuses to Break Trump’s Promise to Cancel Paris Climate Treaty

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

This week, White House senior advisers will meet to discuss the future of U.S. involvement in the Paris Climate Treaty. During campaign speeches, President Trump repeatedly promised the American public that if elected, he would cancel U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments to United Nations global warming programs. Since the agreement was signed in December 2015, CEI has made the constitutional, political, economic, and moral case for why the United States should withdraw from it.

The Paris Climate Treaty casts a long shadow on America’s energy producers and job creators as it keeps in place a framework for promoting a regulatory assault on affordable energy and supporting the EPA as the nation’s unlawful climate legislator.

Withdrawing the United States from this treaty would put a stop to Obama’s attempted end-run around the constitutional treaty process, and ensure that elections, not U.N.-organized, political pressure campaigns, determine the direction of U.S. domestic economic and energy policy. If President Trump fails to do this, domestic and foreign opponents of Trump’s energy policies and possibly activist courts can continue to invoke this “international commitment,” and any future U.S. administration will have free rein to pick up where Obama left off. ​

President Obama negotiated the Paris Climate Agreement to confer a treaty-like status on his domestic climate policies—often called the “war on coal” but effectively a war on affordable energy—without actually going through the treaty process, an acknowledgement that all parties knew would doom such a pact. The ultimate aim of the agreement is to make coal, oil, and natural gas increasingly uneconomical to produce, export, and consume. Remaining a party to the Agreement thus endangers the energy price edge underpinning the U.S. manufacturing renaissance President Trump seeks to launch.

Even when Democrats held the majority in Congress, President Obama knew any proposal to adopt new international climate commitments would be dead on arrival. To avoid the Senate’s constitutional role to “advise and consent” on treaties, Obama simply claimed the agreement was not a treaty. This end run around the constitutional treaty process is unlawful and reason enough to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Failure to reverse this move, as candidate Trump promised, will entrench a constitutionally damaging precedent, encouraging future executives to avoid constitutional review of unpopular treaties just by deeming them to be non-treaties.

Above and beyond the unconstitutional manner of its adoption, the Paris Climate Treaty is inherently toxic to American institutions of self-government. The agreement provides a framework for a global, political pressure machine to exist for decades. The agreement is designed to gin up diplomatic and political “blowback” not once—as would happen if Trump withdraws—but incessantly. The Agreement is designed to organize political protest and diplomatic pressure any time U.S. policymakers fail to keep Obama’s “commitments” to de-carbonize the U.S. economy, pony up billions in “climate aid” for developing countries, and make increasingly “ambitious” emission reduction promises every five years, in perpetuity.

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

April 17, 2017 at 07:44PM

Undeniable Proof: Wind Turbine Noise Causes Serious Adverse Health Effects

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A couple of years back, STT produced a timeline which highlighted how the wind industry and its pet acoustic consultants managed to set up ‘rules’ which have no relevance to the noise impacts experienced by wind farm neighbours and under which wind power outfits could ride roughshod over rural communities with complete impunity. That post […]

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April 17, 2017 at 07:31PM