Donald Trump has completely derailed the global warming movement. Its agenda now sleeps with the fishes.
From the beginning, the movement was an exercise in futility. The reason should be clear. There is no international organization that can impose any kind of meaningful negative sanctions on violators of specific codes regarding carbon dioxide emissions. If there is no agency with sanctions, there is no law. That is because law without sanctions is impotent.
The United Nations is impotent. There is no other organization that could successfully have imposed international sanctions against specific violators in specific countries.
All pollution is local. Pollution is the release of undesired waste materials into the public domain: moving water and moving air. The only way to stop pollution is to impose negative sanctions on specific local polluters. There has to be a civil government with jurisdiction that imposes these sanctions. If in any jurisdiction a local government chooses not to impose the sanctions, then the specific pollution will continue for as long as this is profitable for the polluter.
PR STUNTS
All of the global warming agreements since 1992 have been public relations stunts. None of these agreements are backed up by the threat of state sanctions against specific polluters.
The underlying assumption of these public relations stunts is that politicians will be so humiliated personally by having allowed local polluters to violate the nonbinding, nonspecific international agreements that they will persuade other local politicians to vote for laws with real teeth. But local politicians don't want to do this. This is why no President has ever submitted one of these so-called treaties to be ratified by the United States Senate. No President is so stupid as to believe that U.S. Senators are going to impose sanctions on polluters that employ lots of voters in their states, and which make large donations to senatorial political action committees.
By the very nature of carbon dioxide emissions, which are local, and the very nature of international government, which is nonexistent, the global warming movement has been an exercise in public relations and political futility.
I hope that the global warming movement will continue to get lots of support from the Left. Global warming is the most magnificent rabbit trail in the history of modern politics. There is no payoff at the end. There is no way to stop local emissions unless politicians can mobilize political support in their communities, meaning in their electoral districts, to control this. There are communities that will do this, but they don't do it on the basis of global warming. They do it on the basis of specific stenches that are released into the atmosphere by specific companies.
Carbon dioxide has no odor. It usually is not visible. Nobody notices. It is difficult to mobilize a local political campaign against something that nobody notices.
Global warming is the product of global public relations. Today's promoters of global warming back in 1975 were promoting the imminent crisis of civilization due to global cooling. This proved to be a hard sell politically. So, they shifted to global warming in the 1980's. This about-face took almost no effort at all. Global warming also became unsalable in the 1990's, when temperatures did not rise, so the PR experts switched to climate change.
The voters nod their heads in agreement. Climate change is bad, millions agree. But they don't elect anybody to represent them in Congress who wants to impose rigorous controls on local manufacturers. Local voters don't want to lose local jobs and local spending by employees of local companies. There has to be a personally experienced reason for them to vote for such candidates. This reason is not global warming or global climate change. The reason has to be negative effects of specific local pollution. For that, voters will elect a candidate. But it has nothing to do with the emissions of carbon dioxide.
If some local community imposes restrictions on certain kinds of pollution, then a local polluter can decide whether to clean up the pollution or else shut down the factory and move to another community that wants jobs and is not going to impose negative sanctions on certain kinds of pollution. This is called "voting with your feet." Companies can do it, just as individuals can do it.
The only way to stop this is for a larger political jurisdiction to impose negative sanctions. This makes it more expensive to move. Maybe a state government will do it. Then the polluting industry will move to a state that doesn't have such laws. This has been going on for half a century. This is nothing new. Politicians understand that this can be done, and they are hesitant to impose sanctions that do not have widespread support among the voters. They are not going to do it on the basis of helping somebody in Russia or Sub-Sahara Africa avoid nonspecific results of violations of nonbinding political agreements.
A FOUR-YEAR DELAY
Donald Trump has blown the whistle on these people. He has set them back four years. But they have repeatedly said that the world could not afford a four-year setback.
The global warmers have to keep the heat on the true believers. They have to tell the true believers that doom is approaching fast. There is no more time to waste. Trump has now told the world that there is plenty of time to waste. He has imposed a four-year delay. How can the global warmers recover from this?
They are desperately trying to restructure their campaign. They are now saying that Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Accords is irrelevant. Michael Bloomberg, the ex-New York City mayor, has specifically said that Washington doesn't matter. This is one of the most remarkable statements in the history of liberal Republicanism. He says that mayors can abide by the Paris accords.
Which mayor of which large city is going to be in office five years from now or ten years from now? Which mayor is going to risk his political career to shut down businesses locally that are emitting carbon dioxide, all in the name of the Paris Accords? I'll tell you how many: none.
Never forget, the Paris agreements are non-binding. There is nothing specific about them. Are we to believe that local mayors or local governors are going to impose meaningful negative sanctions against major companies that produce carbon dioxide? What is their motivation? How is this going to get them re-elected?
What we have here is a gigantic public relations campaign, and it has been overturned visibly by Donald Trump. It's not that Trump stopped anything that was really going to make a difference. The Paris Accords were never going to make a difference. That's why Trump got away with it. It was a non-binding agreement that was never ratified by the Senate. There were not going to be any negative sanctions. There was not going to be any reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. There was not going to be any reduction in global warming. There was only going to be public relations opportunities for liberals to grandstand.
Never pay any attention to anything that takes place in government or the budget that does not go up. If the budget doesn't change, nothing has changed that is fundamental. Budgets go up, but they don't go up by much. I'm speaking here of discretionary budgets. If a discretionary budget is not rising faster than the previous year, then nothing that is both new and significant is taking place. The other major statistic is the number of people on the payroll. In the case of the Environmental Protection Agency, there are fewer people on the payroll today than there were in 1990. The budget has actually fallen in the last three years. This seems unbelievable, but it is, in fact, the case. You can see it here.
The environmental movement really is a paper tiger. It is in decline. It is losing influence. Yet it is the sacred movement of the Left today.
Once again, we are reminded: sensible people are winning. The reformers are losing. This has almost nothing to do with politics. Politics is almost entirely symbolic today. The nitty-gritty is fought out in the budget wars. Granny is winning the budget wars. Everyone else is on the defensive. This is not going to change. It is going to accelerate.
CONCLUSION
These people have run out of causes that national governments are willing to fund. The Paris Accords are political public relations on the cheap. Trump has just revealed to the world that the Paris Accords are the Wizard of Oz.
The little men behind the curtain are still cranking the gears and shouting into the microphone about the power of the great Oz. But Toto has pulled back the curtain. He has lifted his leg on them all.
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