Goodbye to Paris

The sin of being honest.

An unintended consequence of President Trump’s Paris Accord indecision has been exposure of the agreement’s underlying fraud. The activists and G7 leaders beseeching him desperately to remain begged the question: What sort of climate club would want a member who calls its topic a “hoax” and flatly rejects its policy prescriptions? One whose primary purpose is good food and conversation, not a substantive international response to climate change.

Proponents once argued they had built something imposing—“the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis,” as President Obama described it, with “bold” and “ambitious” targets. But the prospect of the queen bee leaving the table prompted assurances that participation is really no inconvenience at all. Please, Mr. Trump, just stay for dessert!

This revised view is closer to the truth. The Accord was doomed before negotiators ever assembled for photographs in December 2015.

Read the entire piece here at Commentary Magazine (paywall)

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Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in Commentary