gracchusdixit

Of all the deplorable things Donald Trump has done in his utterly despicable personal and public life—the incessant lying, the serial marital infidelities, the predatory sexual misbehavior, the bankruptcies and shady business dealings, the hateful rhetoric of his presidential campaign—his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, announced just a few hours ago, is by far the most shameful and consequential.

This decision isolates the United States from the rest of the world and cements the perception that our word, and the word of our president, cannot be trusted.  It surrenders to China and Europe technological and economic leadership in the inevitable effort to combat climate change.  Worse than any of that, it condemns generations of Americans, and many others, to a dark and dismal future—a future of storms and famines, droughts and pestilence, environmental catastrophe and economic collapse.

Trump’s excuses for taking this inexcusable step are three:

First, that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese to disadvantage American industry.

Second, that the Paris Climate Accord is specifically “unfair” to the United States and a “job killer.”

Third, that withdrawal from the accord, as well as rolling back environmental regulations in general, will unfetter American business, unleash our economy, and restore millions of jobs.

None of these contemptible excuses is even remotely close to being true.  The only “hoax” in all of this is Donald Trump pretending that such excuses resemble reality.

Climate change deniers—like Trump himself, Scott Pruitt, his new head of the EPA, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, and countless other cowardly Republican politicians—can splice and dice the facts all they want, but the scientific evidence regarding the causes and dangers of climate change has been incontestably obvious for decades.  When even Exxon Mobile admits to the reality of this evidence, only idiots or fools would continue to deny it.  The Trump administration, however, seems to be populated by plenty of both.

The Paris Accord is in no way “unfair” to the United States.  Its stipulations are voluntary, the targets set by individual countries are up to them, and, under its terms, all nations are completely free, without penalty, to change the targets they have set for themselves.  If there is any “unfairness” in the agreement, it is that the United States of America gets, if not a free, then a heavily discounted ride.  Despite all the progress we have made, we are still the most egregious polluter on the planet.  On a per capita basis, we use more energy than any other nation, our CO2 emissions are second only to Canada’s, and Americans consume more of the planet’s natural resources, by far, than anyone else.   If the Paris Accord actually placed a disproportionate burden on the United States—which it does not—such a burden would, by any reasonable moral calculus, be “fair.”

Finally, the claim that our withdrawal from the Paris Accord will free American business from a Procrustean bed of “job killing” environmental regulations, thereby unleashing a “job creating” economic boom, is ludicrous on its face.  Not only is the accord not a job killer, it is a job creator.  The number of clean-energy jobs in the United States is already five times larger than the number of the jobs in the fossil fuel industry, and that gap would inevitably widen, as it has elsewhere in the world, if we stayed the course.

The Europeans are well ahead of us in developing alternative energy technologies, the Chinese are plunging in, and even the Indians, who, despite their tremendous coal reserves, are belatedly beginning to catch up.  No matter what Trump and his sycophants may say or wish us to believe, the future does not reside in dirty sources of energy that destroy the environment and endanger the planet.  Most of the other nations in the world have chosen another, cleaner course, precisely because any other choice is unsustainable.

We must therefore ask ourselves why Donald Trump, in our name but without our consent, has chosen otherwise.  It is certainly not because of the excuses mentioned earlier, which are plainly bogus.  So, there must be another reason, and to discover that reason, we don’t have to look very far.

Trump’s decision is merely the latest corrupt act by a President whose personal corruption is all but unprecedented in our history.   His  decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord is nothing more than a pay-back to major Republican donors—in particular, to Charles and David Koch and to Trump’s own Secretary of the Treasury, Wilbur Ross, whose enormous personal wealth is tied to coal.

These astonishingly wealthy people, whose influence on Republican politics is limitless, are sitting on assets that will inevitably lose value as the world moves away from fossil fuels.  Although these people are fundamentally evil, they are not stupid.  They can see quite clearly what the future holds.  To extract every last penny of profit from the assets that undergird their wealth, they must stretch the life expectancy of those assets.  Every day a cancer-causing coal mine stays open, every day a planet-polluting oil well continues to pump, is a day people like the Koch brothers and Wilbur Ross get richer.

That is what lies behind Donald Trump’s decision.  It isn’t about making America great or first.  It’s about putting the interests of ordinary Americans last—after the interests of a few, very rich Republicans have been served.