Conventional political wisdom is that the issue of climate change rarely, if ever, plays a role in elections. Yet, opposition to President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord on climate change has been so broad and so loud that one has to wonder if Americans aren’t prepared to abandon conventional wisdom. The volume of protest in communities from Pittsburgh (the city Trump twice claimed he was representing when he announced his decision) to Hawaii, which on June 6 became the first U.S. state to pass a law committing to the Paris agreement, has been breathtaking.
Even the conservative press, which has long been championing articles attempting to refute climate change science (“Climate change activists are the real science deniers,” a National Review contributor opined just last month), have pivoted from claiming the Paris agreement was unwarranted to claiming it wasn’t tough enough on countries other than the United States. “The Paris agreement had no teeth,” proclaimed the June 7 headline in The American Conservative. The writer’s complaint? “It was voluntary.”
Horrors. The conservatives want tougher government regulations. Apparently, the right sees greenhouse gas emissions as the new equivalent of undocumented immigrants, and they’re willing to see the appropriate walls erected as long as the U.S. isn’t building the biggest one. Even on FoxNews.com, the debate isn’t about climate but about whether the accord should have been ratified like a treaty. The accord “is being treated by many as a treaty with treaty obligations, but President (Barack) Obama never submitted it to Congress for passage,” wrote Erick Erickson, a Fox News contributor. The argument is a bit like Woody Allen’s joke about two women at a resort: “One of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’”
Trump’s claim in his Rose Garden talk on climate change that research has suggested the Paris agreement would have a modest impact on global temperatures got a quick clarification from the scientists who actually wrote the study he cited. The MIT study from the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change mentioned by Trump, writes John Reilly, the program’s co-director in The Washington Post, actually shows how much the Paris agreement is needed to reduce the average temperature by 1 degree Celsius — which “may not sound like much” but is roughly equivalent to the last century and a half of warming.
Polls show a majority of Americans oppose a Paris withdrawal — the latest, a Reuters-Ipsos survey conducted in the first week of June, found 68 percent of Americans want the U.S. to lead the fight against climate change. Meanwhile, Trump’s poll numbers are hitting an all-time low, a 34 percent approval rating from Quinnipiac University.
In other words, if Republicans aren’t feeling some buyer’s remorse over Trump’s poor decision with the Paris agreement on climate, they should be. Whether the heat will last until November of 2018 or beyond is the only remaining question. Even the White House won’t spell out whether Trump believes in climate change science. His actions say he doesn’t, but his poll numbers suggest he better get on board unless he wants to see his political clout melt away even further.
— The Baltimore Sun
