Op-Ed by Joey Clark
President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord has thrown the world into a blazing furnace full of weeping and gnashing of teeth—or the political world, at least, has been thrown into a fiery tizzy.
The front page of the New York Daily News reads “TRUMP TO WORLD: DROP DEAD, Decides to hell with science, Earth’s future.”
Former President Barack Obama broke his silence, saying, in part, that with this decision the Trump administration “joins a small handful of nations that reject the future.”
Former Secretary of State John Kerry lambasted Trump’s decision as “an ignorant, cynical appeal to an anti-science, special-interest faction,” as well as saying, “This choice will rightly be remembered as one of the most shameful any president has made.”
And the list goes on and on and on.
To hear these people talk, apparently the human race can only progress into the future and create new industries and technologies if we are flogged into it begrudgingly by our ‘wise’ government and corporate leaders.
Are we really ready to presume what human society will look like several decades from now? Are we seriously expected to believe that government action is the only way to tackle the problem of climate change? If we fail to use the heavy hand of government to brave the future, why should we assume the human race will fail to innovate and adapt to complex challenges on its own?
Imagine, if you will, a world where you cannot turn to governments to solve problems such as climate change.
How would you achieve your righteous ends? Would you simply do nothing if you could not turn to government?
I ask because too often, noble goals serve as a Trojan Horse for political control.
Governments often present us with grand solutions as gifts for our real and perceived problems, but once inside the gates, they proceed to saddle our communities with a slew of regulations, mandates, taxes, diktats, quotas, subsidies, penalties and the like. The cursed gift of government, it seems, is always a central plan that conflates voluntary cooperation, collective action, and even community itself with centralized political control.
But we do not need the trappings of central planning to solve our collective problems. Society can run itself, thank you very much; it needs no single creator or director.
Society already has great gifts for solving complex human issues—individual liberty, initiative, and ingenuity, along with the free and open exchange of goods and ideas—and we need not sacrifice these liberal benefactors of the modern world to dream impossible dreams and fight unbeatable foes. The greatest achievements of the human race have not come from government committees and accords, but from intrepid yet everyday individuals working in concert to tackle the unknown and implacable through innovation and persuasion.
Yet, rather than allowing people to freely choose and coordinate their own plans in our common struggle against nature, too many people first brand other people as the problem. Too many would rather rely on commanding and controlling others to fix humanity’s wicked problems than freely solve the problem themselves. Too many conflate the government’s failure to act as society signaling we are resigned to do nothing—thus, the weeping and gnashing of teeth over Donald Trump’s recent decision.
I find all the hysterics and tears of hubris laughable. This mindset deserves to be mocked for its lack of imagination and obsequious acceptance of corporate cronyism and global governance as the only path to the future; it deserves to be mocked for claiming the singular appearance of “doing something” (without much effect) is better than actually tackling the problem from many different directions; it deserves to be mocked even on environmental activist grounds as a list of empty promises and half-measures, as a perversion of the cause, just as a free trader may mock NAFTA or an anti-war activist may mock Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize; and it deserves to be mocked for how little it respects the ability of average people to change their station and adapt to the changing world on their own without the pretentious prodding of government leaders.
I’m willing to bet the existence of the entire human race that without the Paris Climate Accord, we will rise to meet the challenge of climate change successfully. Further, if we would shrink government generally—i.e. give average people the freedom to think and trade as they wish in the energy sector or any other industry—then by the accord’s own target year of 2100, the market (which is simply free people trading and producing as they wish based on their own enlightenment) will have reduced carbon emissions and given us new technologies beyond the wildest dreams of those now bemoaning the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.
In fact, the U.S. clean energy sector has grown leaps and bounds in only the last few years despite the lack of a robust central plan. Coal is already giving way to cleaner forms of energy and will continue to do so no matter what Donald Trump promises the miners of West Virginia. And the fact that there is this burgeoning clean energy industry does not mean we should engage in crony capitalism and wealth redistribution between nations to “prime the pump.” Picking winners and losers in the clean energy sector is just as bad as doing so in any other sector (including the fossil fuels industry.). Must we really kowtow to corporations and their client states by granting them government privileges and sweetheart deals to create new technologies they already have enough incentive to create anyway?
No, if we wish to solve the climate change problem, I suggest we try, first and foremost, to create products and services that will actually make people’s lives better immediately rather than imposing immense costs upfront with no clear time horizon wherein we reap the benefits. Just as one need not convince people of evolution before they take vaccines or life-saving drugs, there’s no need to convince people of the science of climate change if you can sell them a better, cheaper, cleaner, and more practical way to power their lives. Shaming, lecturing, and trying to control people’s behavior through the political process for unclear results and opaque benefits is not serving this cause well, as sound as the science and as noble as the cause may be.
Ironically enough, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord may very well usher in a new era of initiative absent the federal government. After Trump’s decision, many industry leaders, mayors, and governors pledged to pursue solutions to climate change absent the federal government. As the CEO of General Electric Jeff Immelt tweeted, “Climate change is real. Industry must now lead and not depend on government.”
That’s the spirit, Jeff, but my only question is: what the hell have you been waiting for?
Industry and the people of the United States should have been saying this long ago. It’s time to stop looking to central governments and global committees—whether the issue is climate change or poverty or education or whatever—to make our world a better place.
The time for us to pursue the future ourselves is long overdue, and it would be a shame to sell ourselves and the future short because we’re too busy bickering over political power.
Opinion / Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo
What needs to happen is the end of corporate welfare of oil / resources extracting and guzzling corporations – Exxon, Shell, Alcoa, Boeing, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, etc. THEN we can start discussing the end of learned helplessness of the individual.
What type of car do you drive when you go to the store?
Personal AND commercial transportation combined consumes 20% of the world’s total terawatt-hour (TWh). Industrial users (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction) consume about 37% of the total TW generated. Guess which end of the stick we need to start working on?
Again the question is, “What type of car do you drive?”
A fuel-efficient 4-cylinder one…
This writer assumes climate change is real and he doesn’t factor in the geoengineering question.
Even if it were true anthropogenic climate change is an issue, why would we allow TPTB, who deliberately created the current hyperconsumption globalization fiat debt paradigm, to shove an even more iron fisted system of control that micromanages every single human thought and action? …problem, reaction, solution…
Thanks Joey for your insightful article. blue579 is correct when he asks if the climate change is real and not manufactured by the very same governments and major businesses that are trying to regulate it.
https://politicalvelcraft.org/2010/05/22/architect-of-global-warming-conspiracy-maurice-strong-awol-from-u-n-to-china-after-oil-for-food-scandal/
Gee, I’m sure the climate change crowd will miss that trillion or so the U.S. was supposed to ante up.
Another fake.
Well played President Donald J. Trump, well played.
Yes thank you Donald Trump for preventing the global warming crooks from getting their snouts into the public trough!
Now if Trump would withdraw us from the UN and let the rest of the World take care of themselves, without our trillions of dollars, we could be on our way of regaining the America that was once GREAT…..
“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save
the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the
greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t
even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m
tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous
environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only
thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths.
People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides,
environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the
abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place
to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future
they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened
self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a
lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics,
continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the
magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of
bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal
waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And
we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a
difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going
away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much
of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and
we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another
closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll
shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here
for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself,
it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a
self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth
will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well,
the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the
earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward
plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic
as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth
allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic
for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer
to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
Plastic… asshole.”
―
George Carlin
And so as to clarify that I am not wholly ignorant or apathetic regarding our environment, the following words resonate with me as well.
“We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its
vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to
its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care,
the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot
maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half
despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a
liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew
can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution
depends the survival of us all.”
―
Adlai Stevenson,
Speeches of Adlai Stevenson: With a Foreword
I find my path within the crags of these two vast mountainous ranges of thought on any change human kind has wrought on Earth. I think and believe we being the observing and the observed in the case of what effect or affect we convey cannot ever genuinely seek to ***know*** beyond doubt without objective truth such effects or affects. We lack sufficient data and more importantly betray data with our arrogant subjectivity.
Does that infer I think we need a return to the paleolithic era? No. Does it conversely state I think we need to continue dumping toxic wastes into our waters, airs, soils? No. I think we all need to hold personal and individual responsibility and be accounted by cosmic karma for what we do or lack doing. In between what will be, will be as it has been and always shall. No, that is not defeatist nor a shirking away from the issue/s of such despairing ***possible*** futures. It is simply knowing enough to know there is far too much unknown and beyond the keen of but one alone to be obliged to account for all.
I do what I’m able and best able. None may ask further as I would ask no more of any other. Is that a solution? It might be, or might not. I find it simply a statement of obvious and self evident fact.
Wake the frell up sheeple. The Paris Agreement was NEVER confirmed by the US Senate. All treaties, agreements, etc are to be approved by the US Senate according to the US Constitution
The Climate Agreement all but economically destroys the US and Europe by greatly increasing the cost of energy through massive Carbon Taxes. The money ends up in the hands of the ultra-wealthy. The agreement allows China, the biggest producer of CO2 gases to get off scot free. No Carbon Taxes for them until 2030! Not so coincidentally, this is where many of the super-rich have shipped their factories (and our jobs) to. Could this agreement be any more unfair to the US? Trump is trying to save our economy by getting out unbelievably unfair trade deals such as TPP. He should be celebrated for being the first President in decades to put America first.
I suspect that the massive carbon taxes extorted from us hapless taxpayers are used to finance the genocidal geoengineering/chemtrail spraying programme. The members of the genocidal criminal elites in my opinion need to be taken to court and jailed to provide our children with a safe environment to grow up in.
1) The US is by far the greatest polluter pr capita in the world.
2) TPP unfortunately is still alive and well, mark my words.
1) No, United Arab Emirates is by far the greatest CO2 producer per capita followed by Saudi Arabia.
“Just as one need not convince people of evolution before they take vaccines or life-saving drugs,…”
Are you kidding me? I don’t do drugs or vaccines because I value my health. There is NO WAY I would let some imbecile doctor poison me or any child of mine for profit with some filthy vaccine.
Anyone who researches the topic of vaccination properly is in my opinion bound to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that vaccination is an organised criminal enterprise dressed up as disease prevention by means of junk science.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a05b962c149b1ef405bdecf5e1a4212037c98834ae5871bfb7d499633169c4e0.jpg
They just had another measles vaccination program initiated in South Sudan and 15 kids were “accidentally” killed and dozens others injured from “bad” or non-refrigerated poison. I am totally with you and Bill cooper’s prophetic writings in his book “Behold A Pale Horse” told the plot years ago. Just read the Chapter entitled: Quiet Weapons for Silent Wars.
Correct, vaccinations are a weapon for mass genocide. Bill Gates gave WHO $560m on the off chance all Governments will come out and make them mandatory. That was an investment, not a donation.
As for Global Warming; https://politicalvelcraft.org/2010/05/22/architect-of-global-warming-conspiracy-maurice-strong-awol-from-u-n-to-china-after-oil-for-food-scandal/
What about extremely TOXIC CHEMTRAILS blasting all over the skies!!??!!??