What is this guy talking about?
President Obama’s statement on the achievement of reaching a climate change agreement yesterday is one of the most bizarre utterances of his presidency.
The president thinks that the deal will allow him to play with his grandkids in a park — hinting that without the deal, there would be no trees or grass in the immediate future.
What matters is that today, we can be more confident that this planet is going to be in better shape for the next generation, and that’s what I care about. I imagine taking my grandkids, if I’m lucky enough to have some, to the park someday and holding their hands and hearing their laughter and watching a quiet sunset, all the while knowing that our work today provided an alternate future that could have been grim, that our work here and now gave future generations cleaner air and cleaner water, and a more sustainable planet. And what could be more important than that? Today, thanks to strong, principled American leadership, that’s the world that we’ll leave to our children. A world that is safer and more secure, more prosperous, and more free. And that is our most important mission in our short time here on this Earth. Thanks.
Not even the most hysterical climate-change advocates believe that the earth will die in the next couple of decades. Obama’s vision of playing with his grandkids in a park would happen with or without the Paris agreement. It’s a bizarre notion — that even if global warming is happening, parks will disappear over the next few years because of it. It’s beyond the hysteria of people like Al Gore. It’s pulling crap out of the air to make a weepy point about saving the kids.
How is this deal going to create a world “that is safer and more secure, more prosperous, and more free”? Beyond the fact that the deal rips trillions of dollars out of our economy over the next few decades, costing jobs, slowing growth, and lowering our standard of living, there is the unproven notion that lowering emissions will stop, slow down, or have any effect whatsoever on what the temperature is going to be 100 years from now. Nor is there any guarantee that the nations will achieve the targeted reductions in emissions, placing the entire enterprise in doubt.
But you knew this was going to happen. A meaningless agreement with no penalties for failing to achieve the promised reductions is toothless. Does anyone believe that Vladimir Putin or the Chinese communists are susceptible to climate shaming? They won’t care what the rest of the world thinks about them failing to reach their emissions targets.
About the only thing that the president’s statement on the wonders of the Paris deal left out was that the agreement would cause the oceans to recede. But then, Obama was going to do that himself, remember?
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