Category Archives: Paris

PLEASE, Mr. President, Don’t Withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord

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When Barack Obama was President I described our country’s two biggest long range problems as:

  • Massive Debt, now 77% of GDP (for the public part on which we pay interest) and predicted by the CBO to keep steadily getting worse.
  • Slow economic growth, averaging just 2% since the end of the Great Recession in June 2009. This means fewer new jobs are created and lower raises for existing jobs.

Now, under President Trump, I have modified this list to read:

  • Massive Debt, etc.
  • Global Warming, for which the evidence is overwhelming.

All three of these issues are large and urgent problems but President Obama was insufficiently concerned about both debt and economic growth while President Trump is insufficiently concerned about both debt and global warming.
Today’s Wall Street Journal, “Paris Climate Discord” has perhaps the best possible argument for withdrawing from the Paris Accord but it is ultimately unpersuasive.  Even if full implementation of the Paris standards would have only a tiny effect on global temperatures by 2100, and even if other countries aren’t contributing their fair share, Paris represents a big step in the right direction.
Global warming is real and if the U.S. is the world leader which it needs to be, and often purports to be, then it needs to be part of the Paris Accord.  Adjustments to our own domestic energy policies (such as adopting a revenue neutral carbon tax) will enable us to decrease carbon emissions much more efficiently than we are currently doing.

Conclusion. Global warming presents an opportunity for President Trump to show real leadership. I hope he is up to it.

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Does the U.S. Care About Europe?

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“After Paris, Islamic State’s rise and Syria’s agony are shaking a weakened Europe – and the broader international system,” writes the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. “Can the U.S. summon the will to respond?”
Capture“What the U.S. now does or doesn’t do in Syria will affect the future stability of Europe, the strength of trans-Atlantic relations and therefore the well-being of the liberal world order. … Just as in the 1990s, when Europeans could address the crisis in the Balkans only with the U.S. playing the dominant military role, so again America will have to take the lead, provide the troops, supply the bulk of the air power and pull together those willing and able to join the effort.”
Such an effort would require:

  • Establishing a safe zone in Syria to avoid having more refugees flood Europe and provide a place to return for those who have already fled. This would require not only U.S. airpower but also ground forces numbering up to 30,000.
  • An additional 10,000 – 20,000 troops to uproot Islamic state from its havens in Syria and Iraq.
  • An internationally negotiated transition in Syria ushering Mr. Assad from power and establishing a new provisional government to hold nationwide elections.

As Mr. Kagan reminds us the U.S. has taken lots of police actions in the last 70 years since the end of WWII:  Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Kuwait, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq being the big ones.  “Not today.  Americans remain paralyzed by Iraq, Republicans almost as much as Democrats, and Mr. Obama is both the political beneficiary and the living symbol of this paralysis.  He may be the first president since the end of WWII who simply doesn’t care what happens to Europe.”
Mr. Kagan concludes, “Perhaps there are Europeans today wishing that the U.S. will not compound its error of commission in Iraq by making an equally unfortunate error of omission in Syria.  They can certainly hope.”

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