Coyote Blog

As expected, Trump gave notice yesterday to the UN that the US is pulling out of the Paris climate accords.  This marks the second time he has done so, making participation in these accords one of the EO ping pong balls that get swatted back and forth every inauguration day.

The reason this is possible is that supporters of these accords have never submitted the agreement to the Senate for ratification, which would make the terms of the agreement more legally binding and much harder to casually reverse.  Per Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution:

[the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;

Woodrow Wilson spent a huge amount of time, most of his remaining prestige, and probably his remaining health negotiating the Versailles Treaty, but it was all for nothing in this country because the Senate did not approve the treat, which is why we were never in the League of Nations.**

My understanding is that something like the Paris Climate Accords there is actually a potentially less daunting way to adopt the accords as US law without getting a 2/3 vote in the Senate -- legislation could be crafted with rules mirroring the commitments in the Accords and then passed normally through the House and Senate.

Neither of these courses were pursued by President Obama or President Biden, even when they possessed Congressional majorities.  This is likely because -- whatever their public position is on climate change -- legislators know that adopting economically expensive mandates in an international agreement that are not matched by countries like China and India (see below) is wildly unpopular.  And so the basic approach has been to negotiate and "commit" the US to these agreements by unilateral executive action, and then attempt to use the regulatory tools available to the Administration to attempt to comply. [A more cynical view is that US Presidents have done what every other world leader has done in signing these pacts-- sign them as a virtue-signaling position with no idea of how to meet the commitments and perhaps no real intention of doing so].

Update:  This is really a stunning chart.  We have returned to the same carbon intensity we had before the Civil War.

** It is also why US wine producers, at least until a new treaty with the EU was approved in 2006, could legally use the word "champagne" to describe certain types of sparkling wine.  The history on this is complicated, and goes back further, but essentially the international agreement to not allow any wine outside of the Champagne region of France to use that name was embodied into the Treaty of Versailles, which the US did not ratify.  There is an organization called the CIVC which is essentially the Champagne union that defends the champagne IP, sometimes to ridiculous ends (reminiscent of the NFL and the word "Superbowl.")  I remember they sued Apple over calling a gold/bronze iphone color "champagne".

One of the hardest things to do in history is to read history in context, shutting out our foreknowledge of what is going to happen -- knowledge the players at the time did not have.

Apparently Neville Chamberlain is back in the public discourse, again raised from the dead as the boogeyman to scare us away from any insufficiently militaristic approach to international affairs.

There is no doubt that Neville Chamberlain sold out the Czechs at Munich, and the Munich agreement was shown to be a fraud on Hitler's part when he invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia just months later.  In retrospect, we can weep at the lost opportunity as we now know, but no one knew then, that Hitler's generals planned a coup against him that was undermined by the Munich agreement.

But all that being said, let's not forget the historic context.  World War I was a cataclysm for England and Europe.   It was probably the worst thing to happen to Europe since the black death.   And many learned folks at the time felt that this disaster had been avoidable (and many historians today might agree).  They felt that there had been too much rush to war, and too little diplomacy.  If someone like Britain had been more aggressive in dragging all the parties to the bargaining table in 1914, perhaps a European-wide war could have been avoided or at least contained to the Balkans.

There simply was no energy in 1938, no collective will to start another war.  Even in France, which arguably had the most to lose from a reinvigorated Germany, the country simply could not face another war.   As an illustration, one could argue that an even better and more logical time to "stop Hitler" occurred before Munich in March of 1936 when Hitler violated the Versailles Treaty and reoccupied the Rhineland with military forces.  France had every right to oppose this occupation, and Hitler's generals said later that their forces were so puny at the time that the French could have stopped them with a brigade and sent them running back across the Rhine.  And the French did nothing.

In addition, Britain and France had very little ability to do much about Hitler's ambitions in Eastern Europe anyway.  How were they going to get troops to the Sudetenland?  We saw later in Poland how little ability they had to do anything in Eastern Europe.

And finally, everyone was boxed in by having accepted Woodrow Wilson's formula of "self-determination of peoples."  Building the entire post-war realignment on this shoddy building block is what really led to disaster.  Emphasizing this essentially nationalist formulation as the fundamental moral principle of international relations -- rather than, say, the protection of individual rights of all peoples -- really empowered Hitler.  In the Saarland, in the Rhineland, in Austria, and in the Sudetenland, it lent him the moral high ground.  He was just fulfilling Wilson's formulation, wasn't he?  These were all majority-German lands coming home to Germany.

Postscript:  Years ago in my youth I used to excoriate FDR for caving into Stalin at Yalta, specifically in giving away most of Eastern Europe.  I still wish he hadn't given his moral authority and approval to the move, but even if we stood on the table and screamed at Stalin in opposition, what were we going to do?  Was there any appetite for extending the war?  Zero.  That is what folks who oppose the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan get wrong in suggesting there were alternatives.  All those alternatives involved a longer war and more American deaths which no one wanted.