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June 2, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
20:14
Ep. 311 - At Least We Won't Have Paris
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In 2013, the left went nuts over a rodeo clown.
The rodeo clown was performing at the Missouri State Fair.
He had the awful temerity to wear a mask of then-President Obama.
We're gonna stomp Obama now, an announcer said.
Hey, I know I'm a clown, the rodeo clown replied.
He's just running around acting like one.
Doesn't know he is one.
The media quoted a bystander who compared the act to a KKK rally.
The lieutenant governor of the state condemned the act, as did one of the senators.
The rodeo clown was fired, even though he'd dressed up as other presidents in the past and done the exact same routine.
Fast forward four years.
On Tuesday, TMZ posted photos of comedian Kathy Griffin, who has helped host CNN's New Year's Eve coverage for a decade, holding a mock-up of President's severed head covered in blood.
Griffin has a long record of anti-Trump sentiment, of course.
In February, she told MSNBC's Chris Matthews, quote, I'm a big resister.
And I don't believe in compromise with this president.
I also think he's crazy.
I think he's mentally ill.
He's also an idiot.
But this photoshoot crossed a rather obvious line.
It celebrated Trump's prospective murder.
Imagine if anyone on the right had done something similar with Obama.
The outcry would have been deafening.
Yet, the same people who ask for Tribble warnings for material that might offend anyone, the same people who believe there's a rape culture that pervades America, the same people who say President Trump has incentivized a culture of political violence across the land, many of them are silent about Griffin's antics.
Why?
Because political violence is no longer taboo in the U.S.
It's just another tactic to utilize when useful and denigrate when others engaged in it.
That sentiment expresses itself on both sides of the political aisle.
When Montana House candidate Greg Gianforte allegedly body-slammed a reporter, prominent conservatives, including talk show host Laura Ingraham, demeaned his victim as a wuss and championed Gianforte as a sort of stalwart man's man.
When leftists attacked Trump rallies during the 2016 election cycle, the media attempted to paint them as the defenders of the common good against Trump himself.
The overused phrase cycle of violence is often used by the press to refer to situations in which an aggressor acts violently and somebody defends him.
But we've entered an actual cycle in political violent rhetoric, whereby the vileness of the left provokes a direct response from the right and vice versa.
And it's getting worse.
If you spend all day proclaiming that you're in a civil war with other Americans, that you're part of a resistance, it's only a matter of time until you become willing to look the other way at violence itself.
If Americans aren't your brothers and sisters, if we disagree, then they will quickly become your enemies.
Kathy Griffin may think it's hilarious to hold up a bloody head of the President of the United States, but she's tearing away at the social fabric far more than President Trump is.
And those who backed her play are helping provoke their enemies to respond in kind.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So, Donald Trump did a very, very, very good thing, and we are very happy about that today.
So we'll be discussing all aspects of the Paris Accord, what Trump did, what he said.
He gave what I thought was the best speech of his presidency thus far.
Really, really good speech that he gave about the Paris Accords yesterday.
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Okay, so.
President Trump, in my absence, I leave for two days, and many a thing has happened, but the big thing that happened is a very good thing, and that is, President Trump came out, and he rejected the Paris Accord.
So, for people who don't know what the Paris Accord is, I think that it's important to spell what this is out, so people understand.
First of all, it was basically...
Basically, the accord was, President Obama, in the very last days of his administration, he went to Paris and he met with all of these nations, and they all agreed to voluntarily submit these non-binding resolutions on how they were going to cut their carbon emissions.
That's basically what it was.
Now, there are a couple problems here.
Number one, non-binding.
Number two, none of the resolutions was rejected.
There was nobody there who said, well, you know, Congo.
You did a terrible job here.
This is, you know, whatever country it is.
France.
You're not recommending that you cut enough.
China.
You're not recommending that you cut enough.
So we reject your resolution.
We want you to bring a new resolution to the table, and here's an enforcement mechanism.
Basically, it was like you and a group of your friends pledged that you're gonna lose weight, and you get to pick your own target.
So, you have a friend who comes in and says, I want to lose one pound over the next six months.
Everyone goes, yay!
And your friend really needs to lose 50 pounds?
Not a useful thing.
Also, no enforcement mechanism.
So, if they don't lose the one pound, nobody says to them, that was kind of bad.
You said you were going to lose a pound and you didn't.
So it was basically just a bunch of people slapping each other on the back pretending they were doing something for the world when actually they weren't doing anything for the world.
Trump pulls out of the accord because what he says is it's just a way for people to generate anti-US headlines.
In other words, Obama committed to a bunch of resolutions about lowering our carbon emissions that we were never going to meet, knowing that his successor would then have to eat it.
Right?
If we didn't meet those resolutions, then his successor, the United States, would then be labeled as backing off its commitments, being ripped up and down.
He was making a promise that somebody else's body was going to have to cash.
And because of that, Trump says, look, this whole agreement is a joke and we're pulling out.
So Trump speaks yesterday and he gives a very good speech.
This is why he was elected.
You know, it was for stuff like this.
Here he was explaining what exactly it would do to the United States to abide by the actual resolutions that we had adopted with regard to the Paris Accord.
Compliance with the terms of the Paris Accord and the owner's energy restrictions that is placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025, according to the National Economic Research Associates.
This includes 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs, not what we need.
Believe me, this is not what we need.
Including automobile jobs and the further decimation of vital American industries on which countless communities rely.
They rely for so much, and we would be giving them so little.
According to this same study, by 2040, compliance with the commitments Put into place by the previous administration would cut production for the following sectors.
Paper, down 12 percent.
Cement, down 23 percent.
Iron and steel, down 38 percent.
Coal, and I happen to love the coal miners, Down 86%.
Natural gas down 31%.
Okay, so the reason that this is good, what he's doing right here, is he's spelling out a trade-off that Obama refused to acknowledge actually occurs.
And that trade-off is, if you place heavy regulations on American industries, jobs are lost.
If you place heavy regulations on American carbon emissions, then there's going to be an economic cost to that.
And people on the right and the left pretend that this is not the case.
Trump, you'll see later, actually pretends the opposite is the case.
He says, well, we can have All the environmentalism we want and we can also have as much economic growth as we want.
Not super true, but his balance is closer to the correct balance than Obama's balance was close to the correct balance.
So he spells out the cost to Americans and he's not going to lose a single vote in 2018 or 2020 based on this.
There are a lot of people who feel like these regulations, and I've spoken in Pennsylvania recently, You talk to manufacturers in Pennsylvania, they are afraid the regulations are going to destroy their industry and they are right.
He continues along these lines and he points out that there would be a lot of loss in the economy if you continue along the lines of these Paris Accords.
The cost to the economy at this time would be close to three trillion dollars in lost GDP and six and a half million industrial jobs.
Well, households would have $7,000 less income, and in many cases, much worse than that.
Okay, and this is, again, true.
What he is saying is that basically the cost of energy production go up dramatically when you put heavy regulations on energy production, and that means that people are going to have less money to spend on other things.
Again, true.
He continues along these lines.
And this is where when Trump said America first, there are people who were saying, OK, if you were talking about this kind of stuff, then I'm with him.
OK, when he says America first, what he what he should be meaning is that we can't allow other countries to go on doing exactly what they want with their industries and then unilaterally cut our own economy to no net effect.
He picks on China here and he has right to pick on China.
China's not going to make any serious emissions cuts.
All of the emissions cuts that China has talked about under the Paris Accord are things that they are already doing.
They're things that are already occurring.
So for example, in the United States, in the last couple of years, we've cut our carbon emissions by 3%.
That's not because of regulations.
That's because natural gas has replaced, in many cases, For example, under the agreement, China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years.
It's because our cars are getting more efficient.
In other words, free markets make more green energy than do government mandates.
Government mandates just make people poorer.
But China is going to be able to do what they want, and we're supposed to regulate ourselves to no effect.
Here is Trump saying that.
For example, under the agreement, China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years, 13.
They can do whatever they want for 13 years, not us.
Yes.
India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries.
There are many other examples, but the bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair at the highest level To the United States.
I don't think that a lot of Americans are going to disagree with that, and he is correct that the reason the rest of the world is so intent on the United States picking up the burden is because they would like to see the United States taken down a peg on the global economic level.
He points that out, and again, this is exactly correct from President Trump.
The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement.
They went wild.
They were so happy.
For the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage.
A cynic would say the obvious reason for economic competitors and their wish to see us remain in the agreement is so that we continue to suffer this self-inflicted major economic wound.
Stop there, but that's exactly right.
Finally, the final point that he makes that's really an important one is that even if we were to comply by all of the resolutions that have been undertaken in the Paris Accord, again, non-binding resolutions undertaken in the Paris Accord, it wouldn't really make much of a difference over the course of the century.
So here he is explaining, using data from MIT, that if people just did what they were talking about under the Paris Accord, it wouldn't actually do anything, but it would hurt the economy pretty badly.
Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree.
Think of that.
This much Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100.
Tiny, tiny amount.
In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America, and this is incredible statistic, would totally wipe out the gains from America's expected reductions in the year 2030.
After we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered Exactly right.
And this is Trump doing the right thing.
He drops a line in here that I think really sums up what his presidency should be about, what he's always said it was about.
He said, I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.
And that is totally fair.
That is a smart political line.
Now, the left has absolutely lost its mind over this.
And I want to talk in one second about that.
But first I want to talk about All of the reasons why what Trump did was right.
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Okay, so a few more notes about the Paris Accord, and then I want to get to the left's insane reaction to this, because it's totally over the top.
So, number one, the Accord was actually a treaty, but Obama never treated it that way.
So, if Obama really thought this was super-duper-duper important, super-de-duper important, then what he should have done is signed the Paris Accords with some pretty significant American restrictions on carbon emissions, and then submitted it to the Senate and used his bully pulpit to get it approved.
Remember, treaties under the U.S.
Constitution must be approved by two-thirds of the Senate.
So, if he thinks it's that important, if the world is at stake, if we're all going to die, if it's going to be the day after tomorrow and Dennis Quaid's going to be hiding in the subway station while the waves pour through New York City, then you would think you might be able to get two-thirds of senators to vote for this thing.
Obama couldn't even do that when he had 60 senators from the Democratic Party there.
So the idea that this is ever going to be a political winner for Democrats is really stupid.
Also, if you're going to do a treaty, do a treaty.
Second, there are some significant legal implementation problems with the Paris Accords.
So, Donald McGahn is the White House Counsel.
He pointed out that, theoretically, you could have a court that would strike down the EPA's proposals to kill some of these anti-coal regulations on the basis of the Paris Accords.
Now, legally, should they be able to do that?
No.
The left says the courts wouldn't do that.
Of course, the left also said 15, 20 years ago that the courts wouldn't impose gay marriage from above, and then they did that.
So, whenever the left says the courts will not do this, what they really mean is the courts won't do this tomorrow, but in the next six months, maybe.
Third, this would have had no impact.
Like, none.
The statistic that Trump cites there, where he says the global climate would be lowered by a grand total of 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 if we kept by the Paris Accord, that is 100% true.
MIT is saying, no, no, no, no, no.
That's only if people stop dividing by their obligations in 2030.
Right, but the Paris Accord only runs through 2030, so what, is he supposed to assume that we're going to ratchet it up after 2030?
He can't make assumptions about facts not in evidence.
Fourth, it lets other countries free ride.
Oren Kass points out a commentary magazine today.
China committed to begin reducing emissions by 2030, roughly when its economic development would have caused this to happen anyway.
India made no emissions commitment, pledging only to make progress on efficiency, at half the rate it had progressed in recent years.
Pakistan outdid the rest, submitting a single page that offered to, quote, reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.
This is a definition of the word peak, not a commitment.
An April report by Transport Environment found only three European countries pursuing policies in line with their Paris commitments, and one of these, Germany, has now seen two straight years of emissions increases.
The Philippines has outright renounced its commitment.
A study published by the American Geophysical Union warns that India's coal plant construction is incompatible with its own targets.
And all of this is fine.
The only people who get ripped are the United States, because, of course, we're the most powerful.
We're also supposed to fund, like, one-third of the entire commitment for all of the Paris Accord redistribution.
We're supposed to put, like, three billion dollars in.
Obama and the left have been claiming for years that this is going to create jobs.
No evidence it's going to create jobs.
The Paris Accord was basically meaningless.
Now, that said, it is important to point out that, you know, the Trump pulling out of it doesn't actually materially change much because the Paris Accords weren't going to be implemented in any case.
They're going to have the same shelf life as the Kyoto Protocol, adopted by the Clinton administration in 1997, never ratified by the Senate, and basically DOA.
So, It's a big symbolic move, but symbolism matters when it comes to this stuff, and it's the symbolism the left is going nuts over.
So the left has completely lost its mind, and it's really funny stuff.
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