Somebody who noticed is Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform and one of the signers of the 2017 letter. Norquist told The Epoch Times on Nov. 5 that dropping the Paris deal is one of the two keys to a Trump victory next year.
“This is ‘and I mean it,’ and it signals to everybody who’s trying to invest in the U.S. that we are actually going to be producing energy, we’re not going to ban fracking,” Norquist said.
Norquist called the Paris accord one of two significant threats to continuing the economic boom begun by the tax cuts and reforms approved by Trump and the Republican congressional majority in December 2017.
“I think there are twin dangers to the recovery and therefore to the reelection, and that is, one, trade wars slowing things down. In the last year, we should have been going gangbusters like we are now, with the decision not to increase tariffs on China. At least for now, we’re not going further in the tariff tit-for-tat.
Dodging a Bullet
With the election still a year off, Trump’s reelection isn’t certain, of course, but the one thing critics of the 2015 agreement agree on today is that the United States dodges an economically deadly bullet by getting out of the Paris deal.Actively backed by former President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State John Kerry, the agreement, which was never submitted to the Senate for ratification as an international treaty, committed the United States to enact policies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by next year, and by as much as 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. (By contrast, China’s initial reductions were delayed to 2030).
Obama’s policies included a massive Clean Power Plant regulatory structure for all existing and new power plants, higher fuel economy standards for cars and trucks, strict regulation of methane emissions, and tougher energy conservation standards for existing and new buildings.
Obama went even further, however, by putting in place regulatory plans designed to reduce greenhouse emissions 83 percent over 2005 by 2050, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Nick Loris, an energy and environmental economist.
“That would have come with significantly high regulatory costs in the form of higher energy prices, so in that regard, I think we are saved from some of the costly policies that would likely have been imposed through this agreement,” Loris told The Epoch Times on Nov. 6.
Loris said the actual costs, had the accord been fully implemented, would likely have been even higher than the Heritage study projected. And he cited the high costs of litigation that would have been filed by environmental groups seeking to force compliance by federal officials.
Even without the accord, U.S. greenhouse emissions are down 14 percent compared to 2005, due in no small part to the increasing use of natural gas, Loris added.
Keeping Promises
Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance and one of the signers with Norquist of the 2017 letter to Trump, told The Epoch Times on Nov. 5 that even getting out of the Paris deal was intentionally made difficult.“If you look at the way they constructed it, they tried to make it darn near impossible to get out of it,” Pyle said. “There were so many tripwires that the administration had to stumble through, and we had heard there was still some rumblings about it.”
Even so, Pyle said, “this was one of the big issues on which he withstood the onslaught of the corporations, and the greens, and so forth to do what I think is really the absolutely best thing for this country.”
Republican political strategist Matt Mackowiak told The Epoch Times that withdrawing from the Paris accord is good politics for the president.
“Trump’s voters see him as delivering on his promises and that explains their devotion to him, through thick and thin. Trump’s base is as intense as any I have ever seen,” Mackowiak said.
