Environmentalists’ faint hope that they’ll get international action on climate change gets fainter each day. This week america Top court put into their despair by kiboshing President Obama’s pledge, at December’s climate talks in Paris, to lead the planet on climate change. “This could be the proverbial string which causes Paris to unravel,” The brand new York Times reported.
At the heart of Obama’s Paris pledge was his Clean Power Plan, an executive order hyped as “the first-ever carbon pollution standards for existing power plants.” The program, rolled out with much fanfare prior to the Paris meetings to create a feeling of momentum, is built to turn off America’s number of coal-powered generating plants. The White House boasted its plan is needed reduce CO2 emissions by 32 percent by 2030 and result in 30 percent more renewable energy generation in 2030.
Except it had been a clear boast based on an unconstitutional plan, said 29 states and state agencies, which successfully argued that the Obama plan needed congressional approval to proceed. The final Court decided to an immediate halt of Obama’s plan, sending it to a lower court and all but guaranteeing that, when Obama leaves office in 2017, the plan will stay in frost nova.
India, China along with other countries that were cajoled into making carbon-cutting commitments at Paris are now under no pressure to cut emissions either. As one adviser to China’s Paris delegation place it, “Look, america doesn’t keep its word. Why make so many demands on us?” U.S. environmental groups concur. “If the U.S. isn’t moving forward climate action, it makes it truly hard to go back to other countries and say, ‘Do more, we’re delivering,'” admits natural Resources Defense Council.
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Not that any of the carbon reduction demands were binding, or even meaningful. The Paris talks succeeded only in continuing the pretense the countries around the globe were morally dedicated to action on global warming. Now even that pretense is vanishing. Seven years after Obama declared that, under his transformative presidency, the oceans would stop rising, it’s dawning on environmentalists that his entire contribution to the debate amounts to no more than lofty rhetoric. Obama’s global warming legacy is going to be remembered for 2 relation to hope without change.
The presidential election season can only add to the environmentalists’ funk
Environmentalists last year had greater than a transformative president going for them – they had El Nino, the Gulf of mexico phenomenon that periodically brings unusually the sunshine to all of us, and opportunities for propaganda to climatic change enthusiasts. Yet the public yawned at the claims that the Earth was experiencing its hottest year in record – individuals have tired of this mantra, as polling consistently shows. And environmentalists have to know that, if they can not be persuasive within an El Nino year, what are their chances in subsequent years, during which La Nina typically brings unusually cold weather?
The presidential election season can only increase the environmentalists’ funk. With the Democrats fielding either an unpopular Hillary Clinton or an unelectable, socialist Bernie Sanders, the Republicans are widely thought to be favoured to win, landing a deathblow to global warming activism. With both Republican front-runners, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, considering climatic change claims to be outright shams, funding for that climate change industry will dry up. Cruz promises to defund the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Global warming, the earth’s premier global warming lobbyist, together with almost every other program promoting climate change alarmism. Trump likely would, too, given his belief that climatic change policies hurt American business.
Even if a Democrat should win the presidency, the climate change industry has no expect a comeback. Republicans will still hold the purse strings through what they can control over the legislature – that’s why Obama resorted for an executive order to impose his Clean Power Plan, in a faint hope of his own he could further the agenda he so passionately believes in.
So much hope in that fount seven years back; so little left today. For those environmentalists still clinging to global warming beliefs, hope does not spring eternal.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.
