The Patriot Post® · Biden Rejects 'America First,' Embraces Paris Climate Deal
On Friday at the G-7 summit, Joe Biden announced that, in line with his Day One executive order, the U.S. has officially reentered the dubious Paris Agreement. “We can no longer delay or do the bare minimum to address climate change,” he bloviated. “This is a global existential crisis. As of today, the United States is officially once again party to the Paris Agreement, which we helped put together.”
On a brief side note, it took Donald Trump nearly four years to extricate the U.S. from this bogus “climate change” deal, but it took Biden mere weeks to fully reenter. If Democrats were truly all about “equity,” then they should be content with a four-year process to reenter, but we digress.
When Barack Obama first entered the agreement, Senate Republicans correctly argued that, constitutionally, the agreement should have been brought before the Senate for a vote since it sought to hold the weight and authority of a treaty. Obama, knowing that it had no chance of meeting the two-thirds ratification threshold for a binding treaty due to its blatant and unfair handicapping of the U.S. economy, elected to bypass Congress — with the tacit help of a few senators.
While it may have no power as a binding treaty, that won’t stop the Biden administration from treating it as such. Team Biden will appeal to it as cover to justify an economy-damaging agenda that is aggressively anti-fossil fuel. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board notes, “The economic damage will be real. A 2017 analysis of the Obama Paris commitments, by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation, predicted a $250 billion reduction in GDP and some 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025.”
The prospect of significant numbers of Americans losing their jobs seems to be of little concern to Biden, however, as demonstrated by his eliminating 11,000 jobs with his executive order halting construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Furthermore, under cover of the Paris Agreement, Biden will instill even more economy-limiting emissions standards on the U.S., which has already been leading the world in decreasing its emissions. Meanwhile, the deal will do little to decrease global emissions because the ChiComs in Beijing are playing Western globalists like a fiddle. According to the Paris Agreement, China, the world’s largest CO2 emitter (it’s currently more than doubling U.S. emissions), will be free to continue increasing its emissions levels through 2030. Biden is playing right into the ChiComs’ hands.
Even Biden climate czar John Kerry recently admitted, “Ninety percent of all the planet’s global emissions come from outside the U.S. borders. We could go to zero tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved.”
All the Paris Climate Agreement really amounts to is a leftist virtue signal — all symbolism and no substance. Biden is effectively announcing that Trump’s America First foreign policy agenda is being replaced with Obama-style obeisance to global elitists.
Biden, Kerry, and leftist celebrities everywhere lecture Americans about the “climate crisis” while they fly around the globe in their private jets, spewing massive amounts of CO2 in order to tell the world how hard they’re working to “save the planet.” It’s never really been about saving the earth, of course. Rather it’s all about them seeking to further their power and maintaining the status quo.