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The Ongoing
Assault
By Kate Burch
In the midst of pervasive turmoil: the terrorist massacre in San
Bernardino, potential rioting in Baltimore over the Freddie Gray
matter, bomb threats and active shooter situations on the news nearly
every day, it is too easy to neglect attending to last Saturday’s Paris
climate agreement and its potential for extreme economic harm to the
United States.
In fact, looking into it, one has to think that this looks like one
more failure to protect the interests of the United States by those who
are charged with that duty. Or, more darkly, to even think that
this agreement represents willful compliance in a program to decrease
and delimit the wealth, power, and influence of our country.
The Paris agreement was lauded by President Obama as bridging “the old
divides between developed and developing nations that had stymied
global progress for so long.” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon
touted it as “a truly universal agreement on climate change.”
Unfortunately, these statements are not true. The fact is that
the agreement obligates developed nations to progressively ratchet up
their contributions to undeveloped nations, whether or not those
nations do anything. This is new; previous agreements did not
bind parties, as this one does, to “successive nationally determined
contributions (that) will represent a progression beyond the Party’s
then current nationally determined contribution and reflect its highest
possible ambition.” In addition, the agreement contains no
“escape hatches” for developed nations to use in case the economic
damage turns out to be more severe even than expected. The costs
for the United States would be crippling, possibly fatal.
The big question is whether Obama will bypass Congress—again-- and
ratify this agreement which, although it is not called a treaty, meets
the 1969 Vienna Convention definition of a treaty: an “international
agreement concluded between states in written form and governed by
international law.” Ratification by executive decree would be in
violation of Article Two of the U.S. Constitution, which constrains the
president by requiring the advice and consent of two-thirds of the
Senators to ratify a treaty. He will at least be sorely tempted
to take such action, and the history of his contempt for the
Constitution does not console. A Republican president
installed in 2017 would surely reverse the agreement but, should
Hillary Clinton be elected, all bets would be off.
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