Climate Clownishness

When it became apparent that either President Biden was likely to lose the 2024 presidential election or the Democrats would never be able to overcome the sluggish economy and keep the White House with a different nominee, John Kerry, President Biden's special envoy for climate-change issues, was on the PBS NewsHour explaining why a future Republican President, whom most people assumed would not be Donald Trump, would honor the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Biden had had the United States rejoin in 2021 after Trump had pulled the U.S. out of it.  Kerry explained that the business sector would advise such a hypothetical Republican President to remain in the climate accord because it was good for business and good for the economy.

Fast forward to 2025.  Trump returned to power, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement ten minutes after taking office to the thunderously vocalized approval of F-150-owning MAGA cultists present, and a good deal of the business sector capitulated to Trump's entire economic agenda.  (And I no longer watch the PBS NewsHour.) This became apparent - no, blatantly obvious - when former Volkswagen of America president Scott Keogh, now heading up Volkswagen's Scout SUV subsidiary, announced that Scout would instead develop gasoline/electric hybrid systems rather than the electric-only vehicles Scout had been created to develop.  And, while only a year ago, clean energy sources like solar power and wind power were the wave of the future, the major energy policy upheaval Trump perpetrated as soon as Biden (and Harris) was gone no envisions a future of more oil and gas - which only satisfies "public" utilities overcharging its customers for electricity and gas, Vladimir Putin, Russian energy oligarchs, American legacy oil and gas companies, and startup oil and gas companies like Phoenix Energy, which just went public and has been insufferably running ads on YouTube - which, thankfully, can be skipped. 

It is in the milieu of this brutal reality that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the EC's new policy toward climate change.

Von Der Leyen announced that the European Commission would focus on controlling and fighting carbon emissions from fossil fuels rather than going after fossil fuels themselves.  This is like conservatives on a local school board who believe that rap is a detriment to America's musical heritage (and it is) deciding to censor rap by banning it from student events and school campuses rather than spending more money on music education.     

When it comes to trying to heal the planet, the Europeans are America's superiors, just as they are in cinema, urban planning, social welfare, and intellectualism, but von der Leyen and her fellow commissioners seem resigned to the idea that anything they attempt to do to combat climate change that is more than what they're  doing right now is going to be canceled out by Trump.  The United States is already the biggest polluter on earth, except when in some years it's China, and Trump's commitment to more carbon pollution - which he took pride in during is incoherently improvised speech to the United Nations this past September - is only going to make that worse.

To be fair, many American companies such as General Motors and Pepsico, along with even a couple of oil companies like Occidental Petroleum, are defying Trump and working with foreign governments and various NGOs to do something about climate change, recognizing, as John Kerry predicted, the positive business opportunities that dealing with climate change offers.  Many of them were active in the COP30 climate change summit in Brazil, as was California governor Gavin Newsom, who as the chief executive of the world's fourth-largest economy, is a de facto world leader. But - and you knew I was coming to a "but" - the mission statement COP30 issued was as substantial as milquetoast. and the participants who vowed vocally to continue the fight against climate change spoke with the roar of a tiger but offered the bite of a kitten. 

And while there are many states other than California who still want to be in the Paris Agreement and commit to its goals, Trump is already working on ways to prevent that, and in, for example, my home state of New Jersey, where Trump canceled federal support for a wind farm designed to reduce energy costs, Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill has her work cut out for her. Given that there is more commitment to the Paris Agreement in more Democratic regions of the United States than in Republican regions, and given that the U.S. is too divided to return to the Paris Agreement if a Democrat ever holds the Presidency again - not that we'll be welcomed back in, given that a future Republican President probably would pull us back out and cause a perpetual whiplash when it comes to American climate policy - well, bearing all that in mind, this is just another perfect argument for breaking up the United States in separate countries.     

The California Republic will join the Paris Agreement and stay in.  So will the United Republic of New England and whatever republic New Jersey ends up in.  The Confederate States will reject the Paris Agreement and keep out. 

Bye bye, Florida.