The Paris Agreement withdrawal

John Oliver gives a great summary of why Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement makes absolutely no sense

Or as David Roberts puts it:

An agreement cannot be both nonbinding and draconian (Spoiler: Paris is the former)

Early on in the speech, Trump said: “Thus, as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.”

This made me laugh out loud when I first heard it. I still get a kick out of it.

The Paris climate agreement… is voluntary. Participating countries determine their own targets and their own policies. They can, at any time, revise those targets and policies. They can fail to meet the targets, without penalty. When Trump says “nonbinding” … that’s what nonbinding means. There are no legal bonds…

So how, then, if there are no threatened penalties, and the US is free, within the agreement, to implement whatever policies it wants … can the agreement also “impose … draconian financial and economic burdens”?

The answer: It cannot. That sentence makes no f’ing sense, even internally. The chances that the logical dissonance troubled Trump for even a microsecond seems, however, remote.

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