some interesting points here:
www.washingtonpost.com/...
As CNN reports this morning, the deal stipulates that countries can’t withdraw until three years after the deal took hold, plus a one-year notice period, which means even if Trump pulls us out, that won’t take effect until late in 2020. It’s possible that Trump could pull us out in only one year, by withdrawing the United State from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty to combat global warming that provides the Paris deal’s underpinnings. But that would be a truly drastic step — it was signed by former Republican president George H.W. Bush and overwhelmingly ratified by both parties in the Senate. So it’s likely several years will pass before our exit is formal.
but here is the real deal:
This raises an important point: If we do see these consequences, they should be tattooed on Republicans. Because, broadly speaking, what we’re seeing now isn’t just Trump’s doing. It’s also the doing of the GOP. While Trump has been most visibly crazy in his assertions that climate change is a hoax, many Republicans have spent years doing a careful little dance in which they avoided fully conceding the anthropogenic global warming threat in the least-crazy-seeming way possible, by claiming, for instance, that “I’m not a scientist,” so you know, who knows whether it’s something to seriously worry about? It has been forgotten, but in 2015, Mitch McConnell launched a crafty plan to get GOP governors to challenge Obama’s climate policies for the explicit purpose of making it harder for the United Stats to meet its commitments to the Paris deal, thus discouraging other countries from participating.
During last year’s GOP presidential primaries, the GOP candidates kept up the attacks on any and all Obama actions on climate (the GOP posture was to kinda sorta admit climate change is real, while opposing just about any government action to combat it). Meanwhile, many of them carefully avoided weighing in on the Paris deal, and I can’t recall them disagreeing with Trump’s vow to shred it with his strong and manly hands. So isn’t it fair to argue that this outcome is pretty much what Republicans implicitly endorsed all along?
also see this from (long ago….) Greg Sargent:
They’re Not Scientists
These denial devices have become so sophisticated and all-pervasive that a whole journalistic subgenre—a species of climate cryptology—has sprung up to ponder and interpret their inner workings. Lately, the cryptologists have been detecting subtle signs of a GOP evolution on climate. While it’s long been standard for Republican candidates to question, evade, or reject climate science, GOP candidates in last year’s midterm elections began routinely responding to climate questions by throwing up their hands and repeating some variation of, “I’m not a scientist.”
edit:
as noted below, it is now a sure thing…..
so the clock ticks to 2020. time to impeach is now!
as per NY Times, the US is the world’s largest emitter of CO2 in history:
www.nytimes.com/…