"Joy and pleasure are as real as pain and sorrow and one must learn what they have to teach. . . ." -- Sean Russell, from Gatherer of Clouds

"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." -- Helyn D. Goldenberg

"I love you and I'm not afraid." -- Evanescence, "My Last Breath"

“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Friday, June 02, 2017

America First? Puh-leeze!

Well, he did it -- Trump has decided to pull out of the Paris Accord, but there are a lot of ifs -- it won't take effect until 2020, he wants to renegotiate the accord to get a "better deal," the usual bullshit. Needless to say, that's going nowhere.

One thing, however, that isn't getting much mention is a fairly substantial geo-political aspect of this move: For all his ballyhoo about "America first!", Trump is ceding American leadership of the free world, as we used to call it. China and Europe have already announced that they will work together to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Yep -- under Trump's leadership, America will be first -- in its own little universe.

Sidebar: As a history minor, I ran across instance after instance where old empires died and new ones took their place. I never thought I'd be living through it, but it seems to be the case: if the political/social scene here doesn't change soon, America will cease to be a factor in world politics.

If you're looking for the ultimate take-down of Trump's announcement, you can't do better than Charles P. Pierce:

It was appalling. It was condescending. It was awful content delivered by a dolt who wouldn't know the Paris Accords from a baguette without the shoddy talking points that someone put in front of him. For example, he read off a fanciful list of "consequences" for adhering to the Paris Accords down through the next decades. Afterwards, Ali Velshi, a welcome addition to the MSNBC cast of regulars, pointed out that the president* was reading from a debunked report that presumed in its analysis that the U.S. would fulfill every one of its agreed-upon conditions while no other participating country would fulfill any of theirs. This is not surprising. The president* would have read a commercial for hair-replacement if someone had put it in front of him.

(Via Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

1 comment:

PietB said...

Two things at work here. First, of course, is that he and his party can't stand to deal with anything that black fella did. Second, what is really ironic is that the Paris agreement was essentially written to US specifications, so if there is any benefit it's going to be to us first and then to the rest of the signers (taking a short-sighted view, that is).