Remember a couple of years ago when members of the Oshkosh Common Council wanted to spend around 20-thousand dollars to have the new City Garage LEED certified? They thought it was sooooo important to have a certificate saying their new building was as “green” as possible. Fortunately, the majority of the Council rejected the waste of taxpayer dollars.
I did a My Two Cents back then comparing the debate to a scene from the movie Searching For Bobby Fischer in which the chess prodigy Max becomes petulant because his teacher won’t give him a Grandmaster Certificate. The teacher then produces hundreds of certificates and throws then all over the table and the floor to prove a point to Max: it’s not the certificate that’s important–it’s actually doing the work that counts. And whether the building was LEED Certified or not–it was still going to be just as “eco-friendly”.
I flashed back to that Two Cents yesterday as I heard the Climate Alarmists expressing their anger and despair after President Trump announced that he is “withdrawing” from the Paris Climate Accord. That announcement yesterday is “ceremonial” at best. You see, the Paris Climate Accord (and it is an “accord” not a treaty because treaties require actual Senate approval here in the US and President Obama knew there was no way such an agreement was ever going to be approved) is strictly voluntary. Each country set its own “goals” for carbon reduction and there was not a “global climate police force” that would be able to enforce it. President Trump could have just as easily “stayed in” the Accord but just announced that the new US goals are going to be zero percent reductions in carbon emissions for the next ten years–and we would still be “in compliance”. Or he could have made no effort to actually meet the reductions that President Obama promised–and again, we would still be one of the “190 countries that belong”.
When they weren’t wiping their tears away or lashing themselves with switches, a number of Mayors and Governors took to social media yesterday to say that they were “still going to abide by the Paris Accord despite what the President says”. And you know what? They have every right to! Unlike enforcement of illegal immigration laws, there is nothing on the books that says cities and states cant’ establish their own carbon emission standards. In his speech yesterday, the President didn’t say that he was going to require state and cities to build coal-fired power plants or drill for oil or buy diesel buses.
Califorinia always brags about how they have the “seventh largest economy in the world”. If their
governor and their mayors all want to keep with renewable energy production goals, they alone should provide a great market for all of the renewable energy firms that now face a loss of substantial government subsidies (which is really all those on the left cared about yesterday). And those cities and states can tax their own residents to subsidize any clean industries that want to locate there.
The United States can still easily abide by the terms of the Paris Climate Accord without actually being a part of the Paris Climate Accord (and paying a billion dollars to the unaccountable “Green Fund”). It’s just a piece of paper–not the actual actions that so many are apparently still willing to take. If those folks need an Accord so bad–maybe they should visit their local Honda dealer and buy one.
