Donald Trump faces a unified government in the Congress – and anything but at the local level.
The bulk of opposition to The Donald at the local level has come from the nation’s sanctuary city mayors, the overwhelming majority of which have vowed to fight his crackdown. Trump signed an executive order just days into his presidency authorizing the federal government to defund sanctuary cities – and there are tens of billions at the line (so hopefully they keep their sanctuary status so they can help fund the border wall).
That’s just one issue where the “resistance” is pushing back. Trump backed out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and liberals are predictably freaking out, despite the fact that the Agreement wasn’t even legally binding. At any time they wish, a nation can announce their goals have changed and released a new, less ambitious plan to reduce emissions. Even if the U.S. were to remain in the Accord, we could simply do nothing and face no consequences for it. Those remaining in the Accord can do the same.
Roughly 15 percent of CO2 emissions come from the U.S., so we’re hardly the main offender (or even the largest – China emits twice as much as we do). The Accord also would put an enormous burden on the U.S. economy with little actual return on investment for the climate. As the Cato Institute noted, the Paris climate treaty is climatically insignificant.
EPA’s models show it would only lower global warming by an inconsequential two-tenths of a degree Celsius by 2100. The cost to the U.S.—in the form of required payments of $100 billion per year from the developed to the developing world—is too great for the inconsequential results.
These very real expenses will consume money that could be used by the private sector to fund innovative new technologies that are economically sound and can power our society with little pollution.
Even James Hansen, the former NASA scientist dubbed the “father of climate change” realized it was a crap deal, and told The Guardian nearly two years ago that ““It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bulls**t for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
So the Agreement is a fraud – but leave it to America’s mayors to band together to oppose Donald Trump for the sole reason that he is Donald Trump.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg submitted a statement to the United Nations on Monday that over 1,000 U.S. governors, mayors, businesses, universities and others will continue to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement abandoned by President Donald Trump last week.
Bloomberg, who is the U.N. Secretary-General’s special envoy for Cities and Climate Change, submitted the “We Are Still In” declaration to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa.
He also launched a process to work with subnational governments and non-state actors to formally quantify the combined – and overlapping – emissions reduction pledges, which will be known as “America’s Pledge,” and submit the report to the United Nations.
Signatories to the new initiative include 13 governors, over 200 mayors, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and small businesses.
H/T: Reuters
Well, good luck to them, I suppose.
With enough effort, they alone may be able to reduce global temperatures by 0.000000001 degrees in the next 500 years.
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