America Cops Out of Climate Change

The Twenty-Third Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP23)  is meeting this week and next in Bonn, Germany to implement the Paris Agreement on combating global warming.  Fiji is hosting because the Asia-Pacific nations got to chose among themselves to host it, and it's being held in Germany because Fiji doesn't have the facilities. 

Well, I know of one country that has the ability to host the gathering and also the ability to actually do something about climate change, and it happens to be on the Pacific, but unfortunately it is the United States, whose official policy is to deny the existence of climate change and pull out of the Paris Agreement. 

The United States is taking part in this conference, incidentally, because it's still required to remain in the accord until November 3, 2020 (the day of the next presidential election, incidentally), but the Trump Administration's representatives, I have been led to understand, are a skeleton delegation that is expected to advocate the burning of more fossil fuels as a reliable source of energy.

Meanwhile, Syria and Nicaragua have just joined the Paris Agreement, making the United States the only country on the planet getting out of it.

Tell me how proud I should be to be an American . . . I keep forgetting. >:-(

The United States has no legitimate presence at the Bonn meeting.  The official American delegation is like the crazy uncle who showed up for the family reunion because Grandma didn't think he'd take the invitation seriously.  Meanwhile, an unofficial delegation called the We Are Still In Coalition (WASIC), a group of state governors, mayors and business leaders, is opening a pavilion at the conference to show how Americans are fighting climate change in response to a lack of one from the federal government. No one is taking either American delegation seriously - because no one knows which delegation is in the driver's seat.  (Given the American penchant for gas-guzzling automobiles, the term "driver's seat" is an appropriate metaphor.)  Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, sums up the dilemma.  "My view is that the sub-national delegates truly represent the interests of Americans, they are closer to public opinion on this," he says.  "But on the issue of negotiating, though, under our system of government it is the executive branch of the federal government that represents the U.S. in these negotiations."

In other words, WASIC should have just stayed the hell home.

Meyer is still optimistic that the United States ultimately will not leave the Paris Agreement, and so he hopes to talk to WASIC.  "This is an aberration, and whoever takes power after President Trump will restore the U.S. back into the Paris Agreement," he says.

That's news to anyone who's seen official American stonewalling on this issue for, oh, I don't know, the past twenty years?  (Can you say "Kyoto Protocol," boys and girls?)

Am I optimistic that the WASIC can get results despite Trump?  No, I'm not.  I know that Democrats won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, and Phil Murphy and/or Ralph Northam may join Jerry Brown's coalition,  but my feeling is that, as long as Trump is President, state, local and private pledges to stick with the Paris Agreement really don't matter.  Without support or assistance from Washington,  the We Are Still In folks can't do much on the international stage with foreign partners; they don't speak for the entire country like the federal government does.  And when the Trump Administration speaks, it says it's getting out of international agreements of cooperation; it recently announced American withdrawal from UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which globally promotes the virtues of education, science and culture.  It makes sense to me, since we're not capable of speaking for any of them.

In fact, I'm pretty much convinced that we should be expelled from the entire United Nations. The United Nations is committed to a mission of world peace and global stability, and the United States remains equally committed to a foreign policy of promoting neither.  Let the United Nations kick us out - it's what we so richly deserve.  We can find another use for the New York U.N. headquarters.  Just don't let Trump buy it and turn it into a co-op.

For one thing, it wouldn't be powered with renewables.