By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--June 3, 2017
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John Kerry was very good at his job as Barack Obama's Secretary of State, at least if you understand that job to be what Obama wanted it to be: Negotiating awful international deals that are not in the interests of the United States.
And it makes sense that Kerry would be good at this. He detests America, and has demonstrated this ever since he slandered his fellow Vietnam veterans at the Winter Soldier hearings in 1971. John Kerry is an anti-American jerk and a terrible human being.
So it's not surprising that he would get royally pissed off about the voters rejecting his party and electing someone who would rip up one of the terrible deals he negotiated. Add in the fact that the someone ripping up the deal is Donald Trump, and you get a conniption fit like this:
The 195 signatory nations volunteered their own carbon emission-reduction pledges, known as “intended nationally determined contributions,” or INDCs. China and the other developing nations account for 63% of annual global CO 2 emissions, and their share is rising. They submitted INDCs that pledged to peak the carbon status quo “around” 2030, and maybe later, or never, since Paris included no enforcement mechanisms to prevent cheating. Meanwhile, the developed OECD nations—responsible for 55% of world CO 2 as recently as 2000—made unrealistic assurances that even they knew they could not achieve. As central-planning prone as the Obama Administration was, it never identified a tax-and-regulation program that came close to meeting its own emissions pledge of 26% to 28% reductions from 2005 levels by 2025. Paris is thus an exercise in moral and social signaling that is likely to exert little if any influence on atmospheric CO 2 , much less on global temperatures. The Paris target was to limit the surface temperature increase to “well below” two degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial level by 2100. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joint Program conclude that even if every INDC is fulfilled to the letter, the temperature increase will be in the range of 1.9–2.6 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 3.1–5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Such forecasts are highly uncertain, which is inherent when scientists attempt to predict the future behavior of a system as complex as global climate. The best form of climate-change insurance is a large and growing economy so that future generations can afford to adapt to whatever they may confront. A more prosperous society a century or more from now is a more important goal than asking the world to accept a lower standard of living today in exchange for symbolic benefits. Poorer nations in a world where 1.35 billion live without electricity will never accept such a trade in any case, while Mr. Trump is right to decline to lock in U.S. promises that make U.S. industries less competitive.So not only is it a certainty that we would not have met our targets, but we would have done serious damage to our own economic competitiveness trying to. Meanwhile, China and India get to pollute up a storm until at least 2030, because they're "developing" and hey, I guess you have to pollute a lot when you're developing. Kerry has a very strange idea of what constitutes American leadership. Most of us would not think it means you just go along with what the rest of the world wants you to do when it's not in your best interests to do so. That sounds like caving to peer pressure, which is a little different from leadership. But since this is John Kerry we're talking about, he probably defines "leadership" as America screwing itself while not asking anyone else to do the same, for the purpose of some impossible-to-identify global benefit that everyone is supposed to think they're getting.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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