Paris Accords – Memphis Flyer

This is a peculiar holiday season. Tradition urges us to be festive, and we will do our best to comply, though it may require more than the usual determination to be of good cheer. The current week began in a climate of uncertainty, and we mean that in both a literal and a figurative sense — literal in the sense that there was a day or two of genuinely cold and dreary weather, sufficient to remind us that, with winter approaching, we are indeed at the mercy of the elements. That chilly prospect coexists this year with wildfires raging once again in the far West, tokens, we are told, of unusually severe drought conditions, and (need we add?) of climate change — a term that is now taboo in the vocabulary of this nation’s reigning government.

In the eight years of President Barack Obama’s administration, the attitude regarding this fact of elemental crisis was summarized by this statement on the White House website: “President Obama believes that no challenge poses a greater threat to our children, our planet, and future generations than climate change.”

Under President Trump, that line has been replaced by this one: “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.” And no, we are not making this up.

This week marks the second anniversary of the signing of the much-celebrated international accord on climate change in Paris — a compact entered into with the full cooperation of the United States. As is well known, President Trump has withdrawn our participation in the agreement, putting the United States in the position of being the only nation on earth formally dissenting from the goals of long-term planet survival.

This very week, to mark the anniversary of the international consensus on climate change, the nations participating in the agreement convened in Paris for a commemorative One Planet Summit, committed to the goal of what the organizers called “carbon neutrality” — i.e., the progressive reduction of CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The United States government was represented at the affair by a stand-alone booth promoting the availability of American coal, the fossil fuel that has been pinpointed as a major source of the deleterious greenhouse effect stemming from excessive CO2. And we’re not making this up, either.

One of the most intriguing statements emanating so far from the summit has been an announcement from French President Emmanuel Macron concerning an ongoing competition sponsored by his government to provide grants allowing climate scientists from elsewhere to relocate in France so as to pursue their researches into combating climate change. Of the 18 grants offered, 13 have been awarded to American scientists. And the name given to this grant program? “Make Our Planet Great Again” — an obvious counterpoint, for those who need reminding, to Trump’s nativist slogan “Make America Great Again.”

And, one more time, we are not making this up, either. Vive la Difference!

There is a serious argument to be made that the most important recent development on the national political scene is not the ongoing and inexorable rush to judgment on the troubling Russophilic foibles of President Donald J. Trump, a Barnum-

like figure who seems more and more out of his element, even dangerously so. That would be the alarming decision by Trump to remove the United States from the common-sense Paris Accord pledging the nations of the Earth to work together on a means to combat the unmistakable menace of climate change.

Trump’s decision puts the United States, formerly something of a leader on the environmental front, in the unaccustomed position of an international outlier — at variance not only with scientific consensus but with world opinion. As such, it is as much a scandal and embarrassment as is his cavalier disregard of the nation’s long-established NATO alliance. The president’s decision to jettison such environmental safeguards as currently exist (backed by his scofflaw appointee as EPA head Scott Pruitt) constitutes an immediate threat to public safety, which is more consistently threatened these days by unpredictable phenomena from the natural world than it is by ISIS, al Qaeda, Vladimir Putin, and all the country’s other potential political and military enemies rolled into one.

Memphians in particular have spent much of the last 10 days coping with the loss of power coming from the latest in what, in a very short number of years, has been a series of freak weather events. The swirling winds and seeming nonstop rainstorms of the weekend before last closely resembled, both in their severity and in the damage wreaked, the severe weather disturbance that, a decade or so back, we locals dubbed “Hurricane Elvis.” Just a tad further back than that was an ice storm that immobilized transportation, caused fatalities, and knocked out power on a scale comparable to the other mentioned events.

Beyond that, we residents of the Mississippi Delta area have learned to cope with frequent tornado watches and warnings and with the real thing itself — like the lethal one of the mid-’90s that laid waste to portions of Germantown — and with several successor tornados of similar intensity.

We’re talking about lives lost and endangered, billions of dollars in damages, nationwide, setbacks in urban progress, and, not least, the “fear itself” that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once declared to be our worst and most crippling adversary.

That was a time, of course, when the leader of the nation could be trusted to deal truthfully and responsibility with reality. Virtually all the previous 44 presidents fell into that category. Now, we ended up with one who distrusts not only the consensus of the scientific community but, it would seem, truth itself.

There has to be a way out of this predicament. Hopefully, the voices which assured us at the resolution of the Watergate crisis that “the system worked” will be able to say that again. But it remains to be seen.