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 now 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 his 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 stay out. 

Bye bye, Florida. 

We'll Never Have Paris

With Trump set to return to the White House two weeks from Monday,  the United States will likely be out of the Paris Agreement again two weeks from Tuesday.  And this time, to quote former future President Kamala Harris, we're not going back.

A few years ago, President Biden's then-climate envoy John Kerry said that Biden's successor - likely assuming at the time that it wouldn't be Biden's predecessor - would not be able to pull the U.S. out of the climate agreement because it would be bad for American business.  There's money to be made in alternative energy sources and in green-energy-generated electricity, Kerry said, and not even a die-hard Trumpist would want to get in the way of profits for companies dedicated to these new business opportunities, especially when the Chinese are hoping to dominate the green-energy field. 

Anyone who thinks that any of that is going to satisfy Trump must also think that Steve Bannon - who also hates the Paris Agreement - is going to take a bath.  Trump has already received a ton of cash from the fossil-fuel industry, and companies that invest in green energy might very well be asking from trouble with an administration that sees them as a threat to to Big Oil's and Big Coal's hegemony over the energy sector.   Besides, I'm certain that companies investing in electric-vehicle chargers and solar panels have investments in other sectors to fall back on, and they wouldn't want to see those ventures get threatened, would they?

I want to make it clear that my take on why Trump would want to quit the Paris Agreement again is based mostly on conjecture and speculation.  But given Trump's - and the conservative movement's - historically cozy relationships with the fossil-fuel industry, it does make a ton of sense. 

I suppose it's possible that we stay in the climate accord nominally, at least to save face internationally, if only to avoid the appearance of going back and forth on it, which is what I imagine incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio would tell Trump.  But Rex Tillerson made the argument to Trump that it was important to stay in and abide by the Paris Agreement when he was Secretary of State, and he was an oilman - and we know how that turned out.  Also, I'd cite all of the other international agreements the United States has deliberately refused to be party to on the basis of preserving "national sovereignty," but I don't have enough bandwidth for that.

And don't expect Elon Musk (above) to make the case for the Paris accord, either, even though he's Trump's biggest benefactor and best buddy.  He's too busy trying to convince Trump to cancel tax credits for electric-vehicle purchases.  Now why would the owner of the world's largest EV maker advocate for that?

There are quite a few reasons, actually.  The most obvious reason is the plethora of EV startups such as Lucid and Rivian, that are just as scrappy and hungry as Tesla once was and benefit from such tax breaks.  Musk doesn't want the competition.  Also, there's Tesla's long-accrued brand equity.  Tesla has such a strong reputation with a growing sense of history and heritage that people would still buy a Tesla even without the tax credit.  Also, Lucid and Rivian don't have as big an amount of cash reserves to get through periodic slumps in the auto market.  As the world's richest man by a wide margin, Musk can lose tons of money on every vehicle he produces and still have gobs of dough left over.

I was going to say that Musk wants to have EV tax credits discontinued to discourage EV offerings from legacy automakers like Ford and Volkswagen, but that's hardly an issue.  EV sales tanked in 2024 across the board, and Ford even halted production of its F-150 Lightning (above), with the big pickup failing to change the image of EVs as being for latte liberals who live in Montclair, New Jersey or Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Meanwhile, Fisker went bankrupt, and the Vietnamese EV company VinFast has delayed the opening of its North Carolina factory until 2028.  Tesla also saw its sales fall in 2024, but remember, this would hardly affect Elon Musk's bottom line.  (One exception to the EV sales slide is Hyundai's Ioniq cars, which, like Teslas, are cars people actually want.   Hyundai likely hopes that consumers will still want them without the tax credit. And as a brand with a 39-year history in the United States, Hyundai probably has more brand equity than Tesla.)

Some states will continue to pursue environmentally friendly policies such as solar-generated or wind-generated power, and they'll likely strengthen regulations for sustainable construction of houses and buildings.   But at the federal level . . . war's over, the polluters won.  Even if a Democrat somehow gets elected President in 2028 - highly questionable at this point, especially given the possibility of Trump being the only candidate allowed next time - it will look really silly if we re-enter the Paris Agreement a second time, and given American inconsistency on the issue, the rest of the world probably won't want us back.  Not that they're doing any better - the number of countries that made significant cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 can be counted on zero fingers.

If I were still on MySpace, I'd be telling people that I don't want kids.  Because I don't.  Not with the way this planet is going.    

Forget Paris

Remember when the United States signed the Paris Agreement to combat climate change?  Well, now you can forget it.  You can really forget it.

Trump made good on his promise from June 2017 to withdraw the United States from the accord by starting the process of quitting the second he was allowed to do so, this past Monday.  America now stands alone as the one country that officially does not care about the future of the planet.  Once again, I call for the United States to be swiftly and severely punished for its great ecological sins.

And don't start talking about the "WASICs" - the We Are Still In Coalition members of American businesses and governors who plan to implement the Paris Agreement as if we were still in it.  Trump and his stooge Mike Pompeo are likely working overtime on how to stop companies like Ford or governors such as Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo of New York, or Gavin Newsom of California - or even Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis, who recently came to the realization that taking climate change seriously in Trump's newly adopted home state is good for Florida and good for business - from following the rest of the world.  Corporate rights and states' rights don't apply when they contradict Republican administrations.

And don't start saying that we're only 4 percent of the population and the rest of the world can save the planet without us.  The truth is, we're the second-largest carbon emitter after China, and we have - no, had! - the most influence in getting the rest of the world to act in response to a crisis.  The Paris Agreement will go the way of the Kyoto Protocol of twenty years ago - in the dustbin of history, along with several international accords that flopped because American interests were against them.

But remember whom not to vote for when a hurricane hits the Northeast next Columbus Day, as one almanac has predicted.  Oh, that's right - the northeastern states already vote Democratic (except Pennsylvania, which hasn't been hit by a hurricane in over 45 years!), and Sandy Mark Two will be seen by Pat Robertson as divine retribution for people who cross Dr. Sinister in the White House.

Did I happen to mention that the greater New York area could get a big snowstorm next week - in the middle of fall?  More proof that the climate is being disrupted.  But hey, who cares as long as there's a booming stock market?

Oh, well, maybe another hurricane will whack the Carolinas in time for the election.  But the Southeast will probably still vote Republican, especially if the Democratic nominee is Mayor Pete.

And this is why I support a global economic and cultural boycott against the United States to make us change our evil ways, baby.  Economic and cultural boycotts always work.  Look what they did to apartheid in South Africa.

Short of that, though . . . war's over, man.  The Paris Agreement is dead. So is the planet. And where the planet is going, America will get there . . . first!

How ironic.

Regime Change Before Climate Change

The climate change summit in Poland concluded earlier this month with a plan by all of the nations in attendance - except the United States - to implement the Paris Agreement.

What's the plan? How the hell should I know?  Why the hell should I care?  Because as long as the United States plans to withdraw from the climate accord in 2020, nothing the rest of the world does will matter.  The U.S. even joined oil producers such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Russia (now I get why Putin wanted Trump in the White House!) in trying to block at the conference a resolution saying that climate change is a serious problem.

The United States is, last time I checked, the second biggest carbon emitter after China, and we Americans decided a long time ago that if fighting climate change means changing the way we live, we weren't interested.  Even with more Americans willing to do their part to cut carbon emissions, many more still are not.  I can eat poultry hamburgers, rely on natural light, maximize the fuel economy in my five-cylinder Golf (I couldn't get a four), and take public transit and/or walk when possible, but too many people eat steak thrice a week, use electric lights they don't need, and go everywhere in SUVs.  And no matter how many states and companies pledge their allegiance to WASIC (the We Are Still In Coalition, the coalition of Americans honoring the Paris Agreement), it's likely never going to be enough.

Unless Donald Trump is voted out of office in 2020.

And shame on those in the Democratic leadership who attempt to keep a climate hawk from getting the party's 2020 presidential nomination like they did in 2016 (I ain't talkin' about Bernie Sanders!).  If we don't get Trump voted out, we will be the ecological outlaw of the world and we'll deserve to be boycotted - boycotted, like South Africa in the days of apartheid.  And it may already be too late by then.  Sorry to bum you all on Christmas Eve, but the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come is pointing his long, bony finger and showing us a future even scarier than Scrooge's - a world where Florida has fallen into the sea and where California is a burned out desert.  But these are only the shadows of . . . what may be.    

Let's change our administration before the climate changes.

Mr. Macron Goes To Washington

So this Frenchman walks into a joint session of a Republican-majority Congress and starts talking . . .

That's the joke.

But there's nothing funny about the concerns French President Emmanuel Macron voiced in his speech before Congress this past Wednesday.  After some laudatory remarks about the special relationship between France and the United States and the long alliance between the two countries - longer than our alliance with the British, which didn't even take root until the 1870s - Macron stressed the importance of an interdependent relationship between the U.S. and its European allies, urging the United States to avoid a trade war, rejoin the Paris climate agreement, make the transition to a carbon-neutral economy, understand the value of rules and regulations in economics (Macron is a trained economist), and, most important at this particular moment, stay in the Iran deal.  He also vowed that Iran would never get a nuclear weapon.  

Macron's speech got some applause from Republicans, especially his remarks on trade.  But when he touched on all of the other major points, he might as well have been reading a chapter from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," for all of the good that it did to persuade the GOP majority.  Indeed, when he stressed the importance of regulating economies and climate science, neither House Speaker Paul Ryan nor Vice President Mike Pence (who was there as the presiding office of the Senate), sitting behind the French leader,  bothered to acknowledge those comments.

Macron has charmed and flattered Donald Trump to try to reason with him on this state visit, in which the two men have forged an unlikely and peculiar friendship, though their only commonalities are never having held elective office before and marrying women not of their own respective generations.  It got Macron a state dinner.  But he still can't get Trump to admit that the Paris Agreement is a good idea (he didn't try on this trip), trade remains a point of relative disagreement, and it looks more and more like the Iran deal - the last remaining pillar of Barack Obama's "legacy" - is on borrowed time. Oh yeah, those of you still angry with Debbie Wasserman Schultz for promoting Hillary Clinton and thus giving us Donald  Trump and thus threatening the Iran deal, bear in mind that Wasserman Schultz, along with several other Democrats, were skeptical about the deal.  

It is just at sort of cluelessness and duplicity among the Democratic establishment that let Trump get elected President and why Democratic leaders so richly deserve not being invited to the Macron state dinner.

And if Macron wants to change Trump's mind about the Iran deal . . . maybe he can give him a ten-page pamphlet that explains the benefits of the deal in monosyllabic words . . . maybe one that features Babar!                

Yeah, I tick off everyone . . . 

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.   

Climate Change Change?

Hurricane Jose is not going to hit land, but it is still causing enough trouble to warrant a tropical storm watch for several coastal communities along the U.S.'s eastern seaboard before it spins out to sea . . . and then back towards the coast as weaker post-tropical storm.  And then along comes Maria.

Hurricane Maria is headed to the same small islands in the West Indies that got pummeled by Irma, and it may go over Puerto Rico and Hispaniola as a Category 3 or higher.  If it does go there, the mountains on those islands could tear it up a bit.  Beyond that, well, computer projections have had it go everywhere from out to sea to hitting the Carolinas, making landfall on the southern tip of Florida before moving on to the northern Gulf Coast, and there may yet projection showing landfall in New York City by the time you read this.

Maybe the idea another hurricane of any consequence hitting the U.S. mainland or its Caribbean dependencies is what caused the Trump White House to suggest over the weekend that it's willing to re-engage in the Paris Agreement on climate change at a Montreal summit on the issue.  European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Cañete has stated, according to the Wall Street Journal, that the United States "has stated that they will not renegotiate the Paris accord, but they will try to review the terms on which they could be engaged under this agreement,"  hoping to find a solution more favorable to this country.

Here's my solution.  Get Donald Trump out of the White House.  Preferably in a straitjacket.

Trump, meanwhile, denied that he's softening his position on the Paris Agreement to make it look like he's not backtracking.  But dig this. He recently said that he had never seen hurricanes as large and as powerful as Harvey and Irma and didn't even know there was a fifth category for hurricane strength on the Saffir-Simpson scale.  And he probably didn't know there was such a thing as the Saffir-Simpson scale.  But just when you thought he'd come around on climate change and how it's causing these really nasty storms, he backtracked and started talking about similarly powerful storms dating back to before his own time - "the thirties and the forties," and also "the teens" - the 1910s, to be exact.  But that was exact as he got.  Oh, he's right about the thirties - the 1938 Long Island Express hurricane that destroyed Providence, Rhode Island is one example - but he didn't actually offer that particular hurricane - or any other from before his birth in June 1946 - as an example.  Nor did he concede that most of the Atlantic season in decades past had fewer storms, with seasons like the 2017 season being anomalies.  Screw the nineteen-teens anyway -we have to deal with the twenty-teens! We have to deal with the here and now! And that means dealing with  climate change.

Yes, I still think it.  The United States deserves swift and severe punishment for nixing the Paris Agreement.  And God is indeed punishing this country - with Mother Nature, God's bratty kid sister, dishing out the punishment in the form of these hurricanes.  Texas, Florida, the Southeast . . . is the Northeast next?   If not this year, maybe next  . . ..

Total Withdrawal

"Strange to relate, as a result of my travels around the United States the past seven years, I begin to come to the disquieting conclusion that we Americans are these days a wicked people who deserve to be punished. The idea embarrasses me, but I nevertheless stand by it." - James Howard Kunstler, 1996

"No, no, no. Not God bless America - God damn America!!" - Jeremiah Wright, 2003

*

When Donald Trump announced that the United States was beginning a withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, I started hyperventilating.  I began getting chest pains.  I literally felt sick.  I started spitting on the ground - repeatedly.   This agreement - hammered out in a foreign capital, which left many of Trump's supporters in the cultural backwaters of America up in arms - was the best possible agreement to minimize increases in carbon dioxide emissions and incentivize the development of alternative energy sources that could have been reached, and virtually the entire planet was on board with it - but not Trump's base, not Environmental Destruction Agency chief Scott Pruitt, not climate-change-denying Republican morons like James Inhofe, and not Steve Bannon.  Rex Tillerson, yes.  Ivanka Trump, yes.  Bannon, no. 

Trump claims that he's putting America's interests first, but he's really taken us Americans out of the effort to improve the well-being of the planet and taken us out of opportunities to capitalize on new energy technologies and to develop a more profitable and sustainable "green economy."  For Trump, of course, America's biggest interest is getting the coal-mining industry going again to create more jobs.  (He might as well try to being back the buggy whip or phonograph industries, because they ain't coming back either!)  He boasted about putting Pittsburgh ahead of Paris, which would make sense - alliterative names, comparison of a blue-collar city to an effeminate, elitist enclave (I can alliterate, too) where men design clothes and women wear them to the opera - if not for the fact that the Democrats carried Pittsburgh in the 2016 presidential election.  

Some American cities, like Trump's hometown of New York City (another city full of fashion and culture) and Newark (which has neither, but that's another post), and whole states, including New York, California and Washington, are sticking with the Paris Agreement.  And New Jersey might join in if Democrat Phil Murphy is elected governor this November as expected.  But as long as big states like Texas can't be bothered, none of that matters much.  The United States has about only four percent of the world's population but is the second biggest emitter of carbon dioxide.  It is now one of only three countries not in the Paris Agreement, the others being Syria and Nicaragua.  Syria is run by a brutal dictator fighting two enemies at once in two wars at once (the Syrian Civil War and the war against the would-be country founded by the Islamic State), so Bashar al-Assad obviously can't be bothered to save the planet when he can't even save his part of it.  And the only reason the Sandinista government in Nicaragua hasn't signed on to the Paris Agreement is because the Sandinistas think it doesn't go far enough.  And don't think the White House won't try to retard local efforts at living up to Paris on the grounds that state and local governments can't abide by an international agreement not subscribed to by the federal government.

And the Paris Agreement isn't the only one of those international accords we're not part of, let me tell you.

Trump indicated in advance of his announcement that he would offer a mitigating factor to environmentalists.  I'd like to say he threw them a crumb, but it's more insignificant than that.  He said he would re-enter the agreement if he can - you guessed it - renegotiate it.  France, Germany and Italy made it clear that a renegotiation was not going to happen.

While about 70 percent of Americans support the Paris Agreement, though, I wonder - would most Americans support more concrete efforts to combat climate change? Would they live in smaller houses, drive smaller cars, maybe even take mass transit to work?  Would they agree to pay more for more environmentally friendly products?  Would they stop using so many disposable items, like paper plates and plastic utensils?  Would they be willing to give up their barbecues?  Their chemically treated lawns?  Their cheap, petrochemically produced foodstuffs?  Would they pay more taxes to support any environmental initiative??? 

I am thoroughly disgusted by my country and I am ashamed to be an American.  Even if we re-enter the Paris Agreement under a future Democratic President (yeah, right, like we're actually ever going to have another Democratic President!), how will the rest of the world ever trust us again???    

As of 3:30 PM, Thursday, June 1, 2017, when Trump pulled this sorry excuse for a nation out of the Paris Agreement, the United States is now the pond scum on the waters of humanity.  We will most likely be punished by the rest of the world.  Maybe we'll be boycotted.  That means no foreign tourists.  Even if Trump does bring back American manufacturing, foreigners may just decide not to buy our products.  They might not buy our apples and oranges or our corn and soybean products.  How about cultural boycotts?  No more U.S. concert tours from Adele.  She may decide not to release her next album here.  Ditto Ed Sheeran.   No Balkan tennis players at the U.S. Open.  And no Olympics in 2024 for Los Angeles.  The LA bid committee members, who are waiting for the International Olympic Committee to decide on the location for the 2024 Games in September,  might as well turn out the lights and go home, including Athletes Commission Vice Chair Janet Evans (Janet, I love you, but Los Angeles'  2024 bid is toast now - you know it and I know it!).  The 2024 Games will now most likely be awarded to . . . Paris.  As for the Tokyo Games in 2020 or even the 2018 Winter Olympics, we might even be allowed to send a team to them!      

Mark my words.  We will pay.  We are going to be ostracized at any international gatherings we do take part in.  We may be banned from entering other countries.  We may suffer an energy crisis - oh, the irony! - not only if the Saudis stop selling us oil but if the Chinese don't sell us their wind turbines, which they probably got the know-how for from Americans.  We will be the second most miserable people on the face of the earth.

The most miserable people on the face of the earth, of course, will be the Syrians. :-( >:-(     

An Open Letter To Rex Tillerson, U.S. Secretary of State

Dear Secretary Tillerson:

Congratulations!  On your job? No, not that - I'm congratulating you on the fact that you're getting this open letter I'm writing to you, as open letters are a distinction I bestow onto very few people (although I wish I hadn't wasted it on Anthony Weiner).  And I've written this open letter because I actually like you.

I know a lot of people don't like you, Mr. Secretary, but I do, although I can't explain why.  So here's why I feel compelled to write you an open letter today.  You know that Paris thing?  Not the French election, the agreement to do something about climate change, which President Obama helped negotiate and signed back in 2015 and which your boss, Donald J. Trump, wants to pull out of. I hear that you support keeping the United States in the agreement and that you believe that climate change is real.  Yes! Thank you!  You show great genius, Mr. Secretary, because, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, genius is being able to hold two contradictory ideas in one's mind simultaneously.  Or, in your case, you, as Exxon's former CEO, think oil is an essential fuel for the future . . . and you want to do something about climate change!       

So here's the deal, Mr. Secretary.  Your boss, Donald J. Trump, is going to the Group of Seven summit later this month, and I assume you're tagging along. He says we won't decide on an American withdrawal - an "Amexit" - from the Paris Agreement until after he's conferred with the leaders of the other six nations in the group.  You think the agreement is important, you think we should stay in it so we don't become a total pariah on this planet, and you're the Secretary of State.  Here's my simple request:  Make sure you get your boss on board with this deal! 

I know your boss, Donald J. Trump, thinks global warming is a hoax, although he believed it before he didn't, and that he canceled federal programs Barack Obama had started to make us compliant with the agreement, but several states, including California, and many cities and towns are already pursuing climate-change-fighting programs, and so state and local action may compensate for federal action and allow us to remain on the right side of history.  In other words, we can stay in the agreement without your boss, Donald J. Trump, having to do a thing to implement it.  Your boss keeps his promises with his base, we stay in the deal and let folks like Jerry Brown take the lead, and you get to save face with the rest of the world for the sake of international diplomacy.  Everyone's a winner!

Yes, Mr. Secretary, I know my idea is a crazy one, but it just might be crazy enough to work.  So please, whatever you do, keep telling your boss to keep this country in the Paris Agreement, and those of us who believe in climate change, as you do, will take it from there at the state and local level, at least until we get a new President.  Of course, when your boss leaves office, he'll be out of work, and so will you.  But here's the best part - you'll get to spend more time with your grandchildren.  And if you help save the Paris Agreement, you'll know that they will benefit from it the most.

Sincerely,

Steven Maginnis

P.S.  I'm not kidding when I say this Paris Agreement is important for the planet's future.  Don't do what this country did a hundred years ago; it wouldn't participate in another international agreement hammered out in France, the Treaty of Versailles, and so we didn't join the League of Nations, and we all know how that turned out.  Ask anyone in Poland.

No Turning Back

The world is finally doing something about climate change.  It's not much, but it's something.

And what a something it is!  The Paris Agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions has just gone into effect, with 55 nations joining in to ensure that it will go into force in early November.  While it can't exactly - okay, not even remotely - reverse carbon emissions, its efforts to keep mean global temperature increases  below 2 degrees Celsius and push it down to 1.5-degree-Celsius increase is encouraging, if only because it will highlight the necessity to move away from fossil fuels and more toward cleaner and renewable energy.  It's admittedlygoing to be a long process; people aren't going to give up their Chevy Suburbans for Nissan Leafs and VW e-Golfs overnight.

The deal requires any country that wished to get out of it to wait until November 2019 to do so.  So, even if Donald Trump does get elected President, he has to wait two years and ten months into his term to make good on his bad idea.  And lo and behold - November 2019 is a year before the next presidential election, and if President Trump tries to take the United States out of this deal, that just might prove to be politically disadvantageous for him.     

One thing Trump won't do if elected is bring coal back.  The market has spoken; coal is no longer cool.  More and more businesses that use coal in mass quantities, like power-generating companies,  are moving away from the dirty fuel in favor of more clean-burning natural gas.  Public Service Electric & Gas in New Jersey just announced the closing of its last two coal-fired power plants in the state.

Even corporations are committing themselves to a cleaner and greener energy future.  There is indeed no turning back.    

Clearing the Air

The two biggest polluters on this planet we call ours, the United States and China, formally agreed to adopt the Paris Agreement negotiated in late 2015 to keep the increase in the average global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  The United States has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 28 percent below levels of emissions produced in 2005. The deal also hopes to provide $100 billion a year between 2016 and 2020 in financing to help developing countries meet their gas reduction goals.  As soon as the deal takes effect, nations that have ratified it have to wait for at least three years to leave it.

Unfortunately, climate-change denier Donald Trump is gaining in the presidential election polls and a presidential term is four years.  

Despite Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, despite the drought in California and some of the worst flooding in Louisiana in decades, despite the receding beaches in Miami, congressional Republicans still don't believe climate change is real and Trump is happy to please them by promising to commit the country to producing more coal.  President Obama knows this and has framed the deal as an executive agreement rather than as a treaty because he knew the Senate would never ratify it as a treaty.  But if the deal goes into effect before the year is out, that means a President Trump would be able to take the U.S. out of the deal by the end of 2019.  If you thought the United States was the skunk of the world under Ronald Reagan of George Walker Bush, wait'll the Donald takes over; you ain't seen nothing yet!

The one thing that gives me hope is that efforts to combat climate change are going full tilt boogie all over the world, including this country, as more energy producers are turning away from coal and more toward cleaner fuels like natural gas, as well as wind power.  Even if Trump gets into the White House, there's no stopping the tide of history.  And when the tide of the ocean floods his own properties, maybe then the Donald will come around.

On the other hand, maybe he'll eat the loss and build condos in a melted Greenland. :-O :-(