The New York Times is once again drumming up a familiar bit of climate agitprop: Everybody run for your lives!
Times global climate correspondent Chico Harlan lamented the globe missing the goal to limit "global warming" to 1.5 degrees Celsius set in the notorious Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. The headline packed a punch:
As the Fight for a Key Climate Goal Falters, Some Begin a Fight for Survival
As global temperature increase shoots past 1.5 degrees Celsius, the vulnerable countries that fought for that Paris Agreement target face a brutal new reality.
Harlan began with the typical leftist climate panic:
The most ambitious part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, only came about because of a campaign by some of the world’s poorest and most defenseless countries.
Caribbean participants tacked up posters saying “1.5 to stay alive,” and the prime minister of Tuvalu said any temperature rise beyond that mark would “spell the total demise” of his and other low-lying island nations. In the final stage of negotiations, some were chanting, “1.5.”
....Amid scant progress from global powers to cut pollution from fossil fuels, vulnerable countries will now spend decades, or perhaps centuries, confronting the very climate scenario they’d once said would be untenable.
So what does Harlan have to say about the fact that developing countries reportedly “contributed 95% of global emissions increases over the last decade,” as the Climate Leadership Council estimated in a June 2024 report? Well, nothing really, which is pretty telling given that a 95 percent figure is not exactly an anomaly. But Harlan used his Global North (bourgeoisie) vs. Global South (proletariat) angle to fling mud at the United States in particular:
The United States, the world’s largest historical emitter, has also withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, as well as from funds meant to help developing countries deal with climate change.
“World’s largest historical emitter,” eh? That’s quite the mouthful to avoid saying anything about how communist China is the undisputed top dog in the pollution game. As Forbes noted in a June 24 item, “China is undeniably the primary driver of the rapid rise in global annual emissions this century, a critical nuance for climate discussions.” Apparently that “nuance” was lost on Harlan, who conveniently didn’t mention the word “China” once in his piece.
The overarching problem, which Harlan clearly pretended didn’t exist, is that this conjecture about maintaining the Paris goal was all moot to begin with. Then-Secretary of State under President Barack Obama John Kerry conceded in 2015 during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) that “If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions – remember what I just said, all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions – it wouldn’t be enough.” Seems pretty significant.
But that’s not all. Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow Bjorn Lomborg also contextualized in a 2021 interview on Fox Business’s Kudlow that “If everyone did everything they promised at Paris, the net impact would be to reduce temperatures by the end of the century by an immeasurable 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit.” That’s a practically negligible net effect, especially in the face of the $2.5 trillion conservative estimate the U.S. was projected to lose in gross domestic product by the year 2035. In laymen’s terms, the benefits did not justify the cost.
“Everybody sort of congregates around Paris as if this was the solution to climate change,” Lomborg insisted. In fact, as Lomborg noted, “the U.N. organizers of the Paris Climate Agreement themselves point out that this will do less than one percent of what politicians actually are promising.” In October 2021, President Joe Biden was pushing for a ridiculous $555 billion in tax dollars to be set aside in new spending to fight climate change, and that’s when consumer inflation was in the middle of skyrocketing at a 5.4 percent clip.
But hey! As long as the narrative can be finagled to dunk on the U.S., anything goes, right Harlan?
