WASHINGTON, June 2, 2017 — Having “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” to quote the Declaration of Independence, President Donald Trump on Thursday declared the causes which impelled him to the separation of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord.
Trump said from the Rose Garden,
“As President, I can put no other consideration before the wellbeing of American citizens. The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving American workers⏤who I love⏤and taxpayers to absorb to the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production.”
And with that, he summarized the true purpose behind the international climate accord: to diminish the liberty of Americans by diminishing the greatest expression of that liberty: their freedom to act.
This has been going on in America for nearly a decade and was perfectly encapsulated in a statement by President Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
Rahm Emanuel.
In 2008, the real estate collapse⏤triggered by government-sanctioned subprime lending⏤left America’s private sector in shambles. The resulting economic crisis served as a pretext for the Obama administration and a Democratically-controlled Congress to pass legislation increasing the government’s power over the economy.
The aftermath has hamstrung the U.S. economy for nearly a decade but left our public sector sitting pretty.
According to the Heritage Foundation, private sector employees earn an average hourly wage of $18.27, while workers in the employ of our federal overlords earn 57 percent more, or $28.64 an hour.
Today, supposed climate change is the new crisis that environmental alarmists do not want to “go to waste.” And to avoid ecological Armageddon, the United States must surrender its political and economic sovereignty to a United Nations bureaucracy.
When President Obama signed the Paris climate accord in April, 2016, his press secretary was asked if the pact would be submitted to the U.S. Senate for ratification. “I think it’s hard to take seriously from some members of Congress who deny the fact that climate change exists, that they should have some opportunity to render judgment about a climate change agreement,” said Josh Earnest.
President Obama meets in Paris with climate oligarchs.
Obama and the international climate-change cabal thought that by labeling what is clearly a treaty an “accord,” they could bypass the Senate’s mandated “advice and consent” role under the U.S. Constitution.
Obama thought he could unilaterally commit the United States to reduce carbon emissions by 28 percent in eight years, further crippling our already struggling industrial and energy base and darkening our employment picture. It would also commit U.S. taxpayers to spend trillions of dollars on “green energy” boondoggle projects in the Third World.
But as Trump proved Thursday, the unilateral pen giveth and the unilateral pen taketh away.
While Obama, Democrats, the media and climate-changers the world over would like nothing better than to mandate, against our democratic will, demands on our economic activity and wallets, Americans who treasure ordered liberty under the U.S. Constitution rejoice.
The Declaration of Independence says, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
The election of Donald Trump as president last November represented just such an abolishment, and a change in political climate.
