Piers Akerman: Why I agree with Donald Trump’s decision to exit Paris climate change accord
WHETHER you agree with Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord or not (I applaud it), the clarity of his words set a standard Australia’s leaders fail to meet.
Opinion
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WHETHER you agree with Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Accord or not (I applaud it), the clarity of his words set a standard Australia’s leaders fail to meet.
President Trump didn’t mince words. He announced his decision in a few words and made an argument for that decision using numbers that supported the reason many Americans voted for him — they believed no one in Washington was listening to them.
“Compliance with the terms of the Paris Accord and the onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025 according to the National Economic Research Associates,” he said.
“This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs — not what we need, believe me, this is not what we need — including automobile jobs, and the further decimation of vital American industries on which countless communities rely. They rely for so much, and we would be giving them so little.
“According to this same study, by 2040, compliance with the commitments put into place by the previous administration would cut production for the following sectors: paper down 12 per cent; cement down 23 per cent; iron and steel down 38 per cent; coal — and I happen to love the coal miners — down 86 per cent; natural gas down 31 per cent.
“The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while households would have $7000 less income and, in many cases, much worse than that.”
That was the economic argument but then he addressed the environmentalists.
“Not only does this deal subject our citizens to harsh economic restrictions, it fails to live up to our environmental ideals.
As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States — which is what it does — the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters.”
China, under the Paris agreement, would be able to increase its emissions for “a staggering” 13 years. India, he said, makes its participation contingent on receiving billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries.
“But the bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States.”
Neither Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull nor Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has addressed the damaging cost of the Paris Accord to their constituents — the Australian people — though every householder is paying through the nose for power because of this agreement and jobs are being exported because businesses that have relied on cheap electricity are fleeing offshore.
The sheer stupidity they display in ignoring our greatest natural advantage — cheap energy — is witless, reckless and criminally damaging.
It betrays our children and our grandchildren far more realistically than the virtue signalling achieved by parading ourselves as signatories to the non-binding Paris Accord — a decision taken without being put to the Australian people.
Tellingly, Senator John McCain, a great American patriot and leader, and a climate change supporter, pointed out in Sydney earlier last week that if the out-and-proud environmentalists really wished to do something about global warming and were concerned about the impact of fossil fuel on the environment they would embrace nuclear energy.
But they don’t. Their cause isn’t the environment, their cause is a political agenda, an agenda that through the humungous subsidies paid by Western nations to support alternative energy schemes makes a select few billionaires and sees a massive redistribution of wealth from the Western industrialised nations to the Swiss bank accounts of Third World dictators.
We don’t have plain-speaking representatives and our public servants take their cue from their political masters.
Australians are suffering on every front because of the elites’ love affair with political correctness — be it by their embrace of the extremely dodgy global warming theory or their reluctance to acknowledge Islam as the source of the overwhelming majority of international terrorism.
ASIO boss Duncan Lewis foolishly split hairs when questioned in Senate Estimates about the relationship between refugees and terrorists.
By saying only that he had “absolutely no evidence to suggest there’s a connection between refugees and terrorism”, he was playing to the kumbaya crowd. He couldn’t have timed his remarks more poorly. Not only was each of the terrorists responsible for the three fatal incidents in the past three years committed by an individual who owed his presence in Australia to the refugee program, Lewis dug himself in more deeply when he attempted to clarify his position and had to admit that only one of 12 terrorist attacks thwarted by ASIO and other agencies involved a non-Muslim.
True, the terrorists may not have taken to terrorism because they were refugees but they were terrorists because they were Muslim.
We know what the ASIO head was trying to say, it’s just that he had difficulty disentangling himself from the snares of political correctness.
Surely the government could direct some of the millions it spends on media training to learn a little straight talk?
But his stumblings were insignificant when compared with the inane utterances of the Public Health Association of Australia, which pompously urged the government to disavow the notion there is any inherent link between Islam and terror.
The doctors in the PHA should get a second opinion.
As should the government before it moves away from the people and further along the path of political correctness.
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