Mon. Mar 18th, 2024

Today President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris Climate Accord signed by his predecessor President Barack Obama less than two years ago. At the time, the agreement was hailed as the single most important policy initiative for countries to curb carbon emissions in an effort to slow the massive and potentially cataclysmic climate changes that have been accelerated by human activity and energy pollution over the last 100 years.

In pulling out of the agreement, Trump fulfilled a campaign pledge based on soliciting the fear of working class Americans that they would suffer economically and stoking their false hopes that doing so would bring back jobs in destructive industries such as coal-fired energy plants.

The truth is coal suffers not merely from the fact that it is pollution heavy, but also from the fact that is costly to retrieve, refine, and burn—so much so that cheap and plentiful natural gas, and not the alleged bogey-man of environmental regulations, was the single largest factor leading to the market decline of coal and, to a lesser extent, oil.

So, pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement will not bring back jobs to those parts of the country that have historically relied on pollution-heavy technologies such as coal (in wide ranging places like West Virginia and Montana), and for that reason is economically inefficient and filled with false hope. What is worse, Trump’s policy change signals to the rest of the world that “American First” means American will no longer lead the world in making smart decisions to leave future generations with a habitable planet and ecology.

In short, Trump just said “Fuck You” to future generations who should be concerned about the lasting effects that relying on polluting technologies now will leave for our children and their children to clean up after we are long gone. Americans are rightly outraged, and we must work to ensure that this disastrous policy change is reversed—yet again!—in 2020.

By Editor