• A few footnotes on Trump’s manly withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. The best part of the whole thing was not that he decided to withdraw, but how he did it. Trump could have just issued a statement from behind his desk in the Oval Office…
• A few footnotes on Trump’s manly withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. The best part of the whole thing was not that he decided to withdraw, but how he did it. Trump could have just issued a statement from behind his desk in the Oval Office, or had a press spokesperson make the announcement, just as President George W. Bush did in withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol back in 2001. Instead, Trump delivered a high-profile speech about it on the White House lawn, complete with brass band! And the completeness of his attack on the Paris Accord, along with his dash of nationalism (“I was elected to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not Paris”) , suggests he deliberately wanted to maximize the outrage of the climatistas and their media toadies. It’s not enough for Trump to disrespect every respectable institution (including big business) ; he had to talk about how much he loves coal miners, who are the wretched of the earth for gentry liberals. To paraphrase Shakespeare very roughly, nothing in the life of the Paris Accord became it like Trump’s leaving it.
In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, it was impossible to distinguish between the aggrieved activists and the mainstream media “journalists” who parroted every climatista talking point. I watched some of the press conference with EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, and the media gaggle came across like a cross-examination by Greenpeace. I cannot now recall any media skepticism or critical question of Obama’s EPA administrator Gina McCarthy when she rolled out the so-called “Clean Power Plan, ” such as what it would cost, or how the EPA could justify its outrageous discount rate that went into its “social cost of carbon” calculation.
