President Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have announced a climate deal after months of secret negotiations. It’s a great deal for China and a terrible deal for the US.
President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that the U.S. has set a new goal to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by between 26 percent and 28 percent over the next 11 years as part of a climate change agreement with China.
That’s a huge reduction, and it will depend on the EPA crashing down hard on US energy production via coal.
The new target is a drastic increase from earlier in Obama’s presidency, when he pledged to cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020. By contrast, Obama’s counterpart, Xi Jinping, did not pledge any reductions by a specific date, but rather set a target for China’s emissions to peak by 2030, or earlier if possible. Xi also pledged to increase the share of energy that China will derive from sources other than fossil fuels. China’s emissions have grown in recent years due to the building of new coal plants.
Anyone who thinks that China, an opaque, non-representative one-party government that is ruthlessly competitive with the US, will abide by even those goals is either naive or a fool. They won’t. There will be no pressure on them to do any of that.
What we have here is a President of the United States making a deal that will harm the US economy by driving energy prices back up, while his deal gives China the guise of caring about the environment, while being required to do nothing to actually curb its own energy use. It’s all intentional on Obama’s part, to hurt this country and build up the Communist country that he and the likes of Tom Friedman and many liberals wish America was more like.
Senate Republicans are already slamming the deal, which for Obama is part of the plan. This bad deal sets up yet another fight with the party that the American people just voted into power — explicitly to stop him from making moves like this one.
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