Don’t blame Trump for Paris climate deal. Blame Obama

ANGRY at Donald Trump for pulling America out of the Paris climate agreement? Don’t be. Instead, direct your wrath at Barack Obama, writes James Morrow.

ANGRY at Donald Trump for pulling America out of the Paris climate agreement? Don’t be.

Instead, direct all progressive environmentalist wailing and gnashing of teeth care of former President Barack Obama.

Why?

Simple: In seeking to carve out a legacy for himself as saviour of the planet, Trump’s predecessor deliberately avoided submitting the Paris agreement to the democratic scrutiny demanded of international treaties by the US Constitution.

Of course, there’s good reason he didn’t. He wanted to see the thing pass, perhaps to make good on his bizarre declaration, after beating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, that “this was the moment the rise of the oceans began to slow”.

But American legislators — particularly those from manufacturing states — would have laughed the thing right off Capitol Hill. There is no way it would have won the required votes in the US Senate to become law.

Former US President Barack Obama slammed his successor President Donald Trump for pulling out of the Paris climate deal, warning that the move would see the United States "reject the future". (Pic: AFP/ Scott Olson)

Because while the treaty committed America to deep cuts, most of the 186 nations that signed up to the supposedly “historic” agreement in 2015 were not required to do much of anything at all, except perhaps put their hands out for their share of transfer payments from the developed world to help with “mitigation” and “adaptation”.

To take perhaps the most egregious example, China — the world’s biggest emitter of CO2 — only promised to start cutting back pollution from 2030, when they promised their emissions would “peak”. (Economists have pointed out this would have naturally started to happen at that point in the country’s development anyway).

Yet for his part, Obama committed the US economy to cutting American emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2025.

One need not be a master of the art of the deal to see that this was a bad one. Hence Obama’s trickery in invoking an esoteric piece of international law called the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties to get it done.

World leaders and celebrities have publicly condemned Trump for his decision to withdraw America from the Paris climate accord. (Pic: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

But by going that route, Obama also made the Paris agreement low-hanging fruit, easily picked by a president looking for a win with the heartland voters who sent him to the White House.

Even if walking away from Paris does nothing to bring back American manufacturing jobs, neither will it bring about the apocalypse — except perhaps for the vast armies of jetsetting technocrats whose livelihoods were pegged to the “framework”. Those truly concerned about global warming, it has been observed, might be a bit more credible if they spent more time on Skype and less time jetting around to conventions in Bali and Copenhagen.

As with Brexit, complaints that Trump has in six short months trashed decades of post-War American leadership more often than not are just code for concerns that he is unwinding anonymous, technocratic, and undemocratic governance structures that mean citizens have less and less say in the direction their country is going.

What is amazing is that those who in 2015, when the treaty was adopted, could confidently predict sea levels and global temperatures decades down the road never foresaw a pro-industry Republican American president coming to power just two years later.

James Morrow is Opinion Editor of the Daily Telegraph