U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed his name Thursday to a document that affirms the need for international action against climate change, adding further uncertainty to the direction of climate policy under the Trump administration.Before a bunch of you start up with, "the parties are both the same": (1) I've said that more times than it's worth linking to, and (2) the only thing Trump had going for him was that he was an outsider and he hired a guy like Tillerson who was an outsider - screamed at by the left because he was from Exxon and was supposed to be sane. Some outsiders, huh?
The document, signed by Tillerson and seven foreign ministers from Arctic nations meeting this week in Fairbanks, Alaska, says the participants concluded their meeting “noting the entry into force of the Paris agreement on climate change and its implementation, and reiterating the need for global action to reduce both long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants.”
Called the Fairbanks Declaration, the document says the leaders signed it “recognizing that activities taking place outside the Arctic region, including activities occurring in Arctic states, are the main contributors to climate change effects and pollution in the Arctic, and underlining the need for action at all levels.”
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After vowing that the U.S. would “continue to be vigilant in protecting the fragile environment in the Arctic,” Tillerson said this about current U.S. climate policy:
“In the United States, we are currently reviewing several important policies, including how the Trump administration will approach the issue of climate change. We’re appreciative that each of you has an important point of view and you should know that we are taking the time to understand your concerns. We’re not going to rush to make a decision. We’re going to work to make the right decision,” he added, pausing ever so briefly before ending with the phrase, “for the United States.”
What we see in the Trump administration is what I always thought would happen with a third party president. Both parties and the deep state apparatchiks organize against him and prevent him from doing anything. Yes, he has accomplished several nice things, but they're almost all executive orders, and while I think the fewer of those the better it's looking like the only things he'll get done are by executive orders.
Eric Worral, the author at Watts Up, concludes with:
While the Paris Treaty Agreement was never formally recognised as US Law, the advice of the White House counsel is that it could still impact the decisions of US courts when considering vexatious legal challenges to oil and gas drilling activities brought by environmental activists.
Time will tell. I refuse to allow glitches or the media to turn me against Trump. If he does 50% of what he promised and what I hoped for I will be overjoyed because it will be 50% more than Hillary would have done. I will wait and see. Maybe they will sign on to this scam and maybe this is a head feint. Just keep reversing Obama's policies and nominating conservative judges and I will be happy. Stick your finger in the eye of the press corp and fling poo at the Democrats and that is a bonus. Sooner or later the AGW scam will collapse but Mr president keep your eye on the ball and keep doing the unexpected.
ReplyDeleteBefore you pass judgement, please make sure you read what Tillerson actually said and signed, instead of merely taking the bleatings from the purveyors of Fake News at face value. From what I have seen, he said and signed the truth. No commitment to Climate Quakery whatsoever. But a recognition that the Arctic is important.
ReplyDeletePresident Trump also has not done anything amiss thus far on the climate front. He recognizes that the pact is a treaty, and as such must be approved by 2/3 of the Senate to take effect. If he's smart, he'll send it to them for approval and let them vote it down. By doing that, he doesn't waste any energy that could be better spent thrashing the bureaucracy to within an inch of its life. Of course, he will have to watch out for traitors like Johnny "Songbird" McCain, who just gave the Democrats the vote they needed to keep CRA from overturning Sotero's methane regulations. May he and every one of his family soon burn in hell where they belong.
'Campaign as a reformer, govern as an incumbent', also phrased 'shift to the center after election' is the mainstream, ordinary, normal approach for career success at a high government job. It keeps working for them because voters keep being surprised by it.
ReplyDeleteThe comment by Mark Matis saves the day. Yes, after going to original sources, it seems the media has mis-reported the actual impact of the signing. Ignorance or deception?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I'm delighted Hillary lost and Gorsuch is the reason why. Had Hillary won, there is no doubt the SCOTUS would now be 5-4 liberal.Prog rather that the right way around.
Oh yeah, the Weasel is gone too.
I'd think that it would be pretty obvious why agreements like this make me nervous.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's all weasel words and doesn't require anything, but think of how the Big Green lobby has done business for the last 40 years. They get some group to sue the government to stop something, find a crazy activist judge in some district to hear the case, and then those suggestions and weasel words are turned into black letter law. The Greenies inside the EPA work hand in hand with these groups, and payola flows like beer at a frat party. Or like the payola between the SEIU and Evil Party politicians.
How about shutting off the irrigation to farms in the central valley in California over a smelt, when the scientific community was far from agreement that it had anything to do with the smelt's population?
Then there's the EPA's tendency to jump on whatever horrid junk science is fashionable and claim it as Science! to justify more takeover. Get some activist liberal judge who barely passed any required science classes and let the actors in white coats overwhelm them with BS.
Tillerson being in the same room as this agreement makes me queasy. Once bitten, twice shy and all.
My apologies if I over reacted.
IMHO in the end we are gonna lose. The EPA, title IX, all the many charitable organizations run by liberals and pumping teax exempt money into far left activists groups, the Democrats, the communist/socialist organizations, etc. A long list of free loaders, anti-constitutionalists and anarchists dedicated to looting and destroying our constitutional republic. We are like a flock of lambs in the wilderness constantly under attack by the left wing wolves who pick us off without any resistance. All Trump can do is slow the tide a little. I truly do not see a way out that ends with an intact constitutional USA. And more likely it will end with an uprising or communist style purge. Our years were numbered from the first days of our country; nothing lasts forever. We are in the end days and all Trump can do is stifle them here or divert them over there but he cannot and will not reverse this doomed Titanic. The only thing that can save us is a substantial majority awakening and throwing the far left out in a serious and probably violent way. I just don't see that great awakening coming.
DeleteI tend to agree. It has taken a hundred years to get to this point and the Titanic won't change course easily. Some of the "far left activists groups, the Democrats, the communist/socialist organizations, etc." are frustrated they haven't yet taken over, but the whole western world seems on the verge of collapse.
DeleteCaptain Capitalism has a book out called "Enjoy the Decline". The collapse is coming, you may as well enjoy civilization while it lasts.
I've spent my entire life pushing civilization forward. I cannot enjoy the obvious decline. Hell, with that thinking, I might as well just sit out on the front porch and drink myself senseless every day.
ReplyDeleteI will keep fighting, though I am also a realist: I made a bumper sticker that says "CIVILIZATION! (it was fun while it lasted)".
Hell, with that thinking, I might as well just sit out on the front porch and drink myself senseless every day.
DeleteJudging by some of the illustrations on his books, I'm guessing that's what he (Captain Capitalism) is planning on.
Personally, I'm more like your bumper sticker with a big dose of, "remember: these are the good old days".
I am thinking it's well past time to plan "monasteries" where knowledge can be archived and protected against this next Dark Age. Thumb drives hidden under rocks in the forest? The Great Books encoded into the DNA of some species of cockroach?
ReplyDeleteeBay has 6 axis robot arms with about a two foot reach, for $135 from China. Dubai has ordered flying cars for taxis, electric quadcopters sized for people with a 30 minute run time. It is possible to put a pistol on a quadcopter for $hundreds. How does this evidence speak to the "coming dark age" prediction?
ReplyDeleteOnce upon a time it was possible for Pat Buchanan to punch a cop and receive a proportional, constructive correction. That time is past. The current bureaucratic efficiency at punishing thoughtcrime restrains prudent people from discarding their normal life before they absolutely have to. This compresses the time and space which a reaction has to occur in. Consider the rejection of gun registration by 250,000 in Connecticut in 2014. The government received a sudden, complete, 100% loss of enforcement traction because the would-be victims were "suddenly" willing to go to war. There were no letters to the editor, no speeches in the park, no letter writing campaigns, no candlelit marches, and no number of unsympathetic persons being prosecuted for breaking the new law. Since there was no data point observed on the risetime, it's difficult to tell how fast that risetime was. Did people make that decision in 10 minutes sitting in front of the TV news, thinking "They actually passed it?!?"
It is entirely possible to empty the grocery store shelves with socialism, Venezuela is doing it. It is entirely possible to make healthcare barely affordable and major medical insurance illegal, USA did it. I don't think it is possible to make all 350 million humans hold still for Venezuela-in-North-America. The humans in North America who are religious fanatics mentally ill with self-loathing will receive the results their policies produce. The few remaining adherents to Western enlightenment values, won't.
eBay has 6 axis robot arms with about a two foot reach, for $135 from China. Dubai has ordered flying cars for taxis, electric quadcopters sized for people with a 30 minute run time. It is possible to put a pistol on a quadcopter for $hundreds. How does this evidence speak to the "coming dark age" prediction?
DeleteIt has no bearing on it whatsoever. One of my wife's and my most frequent observations is that we're on the verge of so many important, great things, if society can just hold together.
Put it this way: do you think the company that makes the robot arms or flying cars or anything won't be burned to the ground by Black Lives Matter, Anti-fa, By Any Means Necessary or any of dozens of other groups, if they felt it was striking at privilege or fascism or whatever drivel they're justifying themselves with? That's just one faction aimed at destroying free Western civilization. Another is political Islam, where learning anything other than the Quran is forbidden - the literal translation of Boko Haram is that western books are forbidden.
The groups that follow someone like FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai to his home, or bankers or anyone else they disagree with, so that they can harass them are just one slip from murder. Our cold civil war is getting warmer by the week.
When a college professor is swinging a steel padlock at people's heads, that's assault with a deadly weapon. The flagpoles or pikes that anti-fa is using are the same. Sooner or later people are going to die.
We have tremendous technology, advanced by no more than 2 or 3% of the population who can do the work to thrive in engineering or the few in real sciences. If they can work without being held back, great things are in store. If they get killed for having "white privilege", the companies not being diverse enough, or for backing a conservative, how long can we hold out?
We have generations who use technology but are no more able to design a wooden foot bridge than a silicon chip.
So, yeah, 3% of the population is pulling the other 97% along and the 97% doesn't get it, doesn't understand it and doesn't care. When they're not actively hostile to the 3%. There's a convergence of groups actively trying to bring down Western Civilization. I'm afraid of them getting the upper hand.
do you think the company that makes the robot arms or flying cars or anything won't be burned to the ground by [groups] [for] [reasons]
DeleteIf "burned to the ground" is a metaphor for "regulated into bankruptcy", then yes they're already doing that, but it hasn't completely stopped the robot arms or flying cars. Liberty in these dual use technologies is still advancing. Quickly. Imagine a hidden arms factory where the CNC machines are tended by robot arms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machon_Ayalon
If "burned to the ground" means a literal riot of arsonists approaching something other than a Kodak Riot Site(TM), and it isn't an ethnic grocery store, I think they'll burn the first few. Then, like on the 9/11 airplanes, there will be a viable grassroots response. Instead of rooftop Koreans who are an enforcement target, it might be side street Koreans or pistol quadcopter Koreans, disrupting a mob not serious about taking casualties.
The anti-civilization rioters are only there because they are protected from self-defense by the police. The police in lines on the ground are protected by rooftop police snipers. But nobody protects the police snipers from pistol quadcopters. There are no such quadcopters in the air today because nobody thinks that's a grown-up thing to do right now, not because the police can hold that ground.
The groups that follow someone like FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai to his home, or bankers or anyone else they disagree with, so that they can harass them are just one slip from murder. Our cold civil war is getting warmer by the week.
In 1996 when I watched the original Independence Day movie and the white house got blown up, the audience cheered and didn't look around for confirmation before doing it. If the brownshirts fight the bureaucrats I'll make popcorn.
we're on the verge of so many important, great things, if society can just hold together.
"Society", defined as a peaceful, productive economy of millions of humans living geographically adjacent, is not a single decisionmaking entity which can decide to hold together. Humans are not cells or ants in a larger organism, they are too self-sufficient, have too much autonomy and thinking capability. This factually false biological analogy is named collectivism.
Sooner or later people are going to die.
The stupid statists will escalate, yes. But if the pasty white people in the suburbs ever feel physically threatened, they'll execute the tornado drill. Someone will spray paint "rioters will be shot" on plywood. Burt Gummer will set up a checkpoint. There's not going to be a civil war. The few thousand rioters willing to go to these... demonstrations? which only exist because the rioters are protected by the police from property owners doing self-defense, are outnumbered 1,000:1. None of the 'horde of attackers from the city overwhelming rurals like locusts' scenarios is going to happen, because the hordes don't have the logistics to do it. No army bigger than a street gang can exist without taxpayer support. The horde can't live off the land because just-in-time delivery of gasoline and food means there's little present to seize.
3% of the population is pulling the other 97% along and the 97% doesn't get it, doesn't understand it and doesn't care.
Atlas needs to shrug.
For what it's worth; the laws in Connecticut are still on the books and it would be foolish/naive to think that gun owners will one day be selectively punished using those laws. Do not cite this as a win for the good guys. A win would be a reversal of the law and throwing out the legislators and governor who made these laws happen.
ReplyDeleteI read your comment as 'foolish to NOT think that ...'.
DeleteI cite the present situation as a win for the good guys, a far, far bigger win than repeal and throwing out the legislators would be. The present situation is a thoughtful disrespect and disobedience to the institutions of "law" and "legislators". That immediately produces liberty, despite bad intent of the governor and legislators. Merely replacing the governor or legislator usually won't.
The objection that occurs to me is, but look at the legislative reduction in 2A infringement in the last 20 years. I think politicians run to the head of parades already in progress and pretend they are leading them. Sometimes politicians can herd, but often they can't. The civil rights liberty wins of the 1960's were not caused by JFK arguing for civil rights legislation. It was caused by the Deacons for Defense and Justice stalemating the KKK-flavored LEO. Likewise, I attribute disinfringement of 2A to a reduction in willingness to obey infringement, not enlightenment of politicians. Politicians repeal the untolerated laws in advance of the parade arriving, so they aren't revealed as weak like the politicians in Connecticut were.