Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Obama Seeks Global Climate Treaty Without Congress

by JASmius

Or, in other words, business as usual in the Age of The One:

Barack Obama is working toward an international agreement that would pressure countries to cut fossil fuel emissions, and is doing so without seeking congressional approval, the New York Times reports.

The agreement is set to be signed in Paris in 2015.

The U.S. Constitution requires a president to obtain a two-thirds majority vote of the Senate for a treaty to be legally binding. That isn't likely to happen because Republicans, who oppose the agreement, hold 45 Senate seats.

That number will be an estimated 52 seats in the next Congress, with majority control coming along with it.  Which will have no bearing on the treaty in question because in the post-American fascist polity that occupies most of this continent, the term "legally binding" is an irrelevant technicality having no bearing on the political realities on the proverbial ground.

Case in point:

So, the White House is working with other countries on a plan that would be what they call "politically binding" and would "name and shame" the nations that need to cut pollution, the Times reports."....

If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time, Paul Bledsoe, a climate change official from the Clinton administration, told the Times.

Instead, U.S. negotiators are aiming for an agreement that blends legally binding rules from a 1992 treaty and new voluntary promises. Such a deal would not require Senate ratification, negotiators say. 

Once again, just as a reminder: carbon is not a "pollutant," unless every life form on the planet is expected to never exhale.  Which would be a real bummer for all the plant life on the planet.  Also, until such time as civilization has made the necessary breakthroughs in nuclear fusion and solar energy storage technology necessary to provide practical and economically viable alternatives to oil and coal and (clean-burning) methane (natural gas to the less educated), such a "politically binding treaty" - strictly speaking, it wouldn't be a "treaty" at all - as O is pushing would be calamitous for....well, pretty much every country, but particularly poor/"developing" countries that are nowhere near prosperous enough to be able to afford such self-inflicted privations on their indigenous populations.  Or, put another way, even if carbon was a pollutant, only rich countries can afford to clean up their environments.  And as we continue to see, once those clean-ups get started, they can easily get way, way out of hand.

That said, this "treaty" business is really nothing new.  "Politically binding" means more of the same hysterical shrieking from the same mendacious left-wing extremists about "climatic disaster" if humanity doesn't climb back down the "evolutionary ladder" they're so fond of and reject the modernity that effete jet-setting pinkos will never, EVER themselves part with, no matter how many people around the world have to languish in, and perish from, the imposed filth, pestilence, poverty, squalor, and primitivism that need not have existed otherwise.

But it will be imposed here - in fact, it already has - via Red Barry's pen and phone.

Kind of make me wonder what countries are going to collude with this exercise in targeted international communism, given how much O has done to destroy trust in the U.S. under his rule.  Perhaps "work with other countries" means "bribe the corrupt ones and coerce the rest".  It'd put a whole new twist on "American imperialism," wouldn't it?

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