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".

Perhaps this is yet another negative legacy of Woodrow Wilson and his "Making the world safe for democracy" meme.  We talk all the time about allying with and siding with and protecting democracies, but all "democracy" really means in practice (at least today) is that the country has some sort of nominal election process.  Elections are fine, they are less bad than most other ways of selecting government officials, but what we really should care about is that a country protects individuals rights, has free markets, and a rule of law.  If a county has those things, I am not sure I care particularly if they vote or pick leaders by randomly selecting folks from the phone book.

You can see this problem at work here, :

Most democratic governments – including the United States – condemned the attempted recent military coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and welcomed its failure, citing the need to respect Turkey’s “democratic” institutions. But in the aftermath, Erdogan took the opportunity to persecute his political opponents on a large scale, including firing thousands of judges who might constrain his authoritarian tendencies. Erdogan’s government was also severely undermining civil liberties long before the coup, even going so far as to pass a law criminalizing “insults” to the president, under which hundreds of people have been prosecuted. Erdogan’s own commitment own commitment to democracy is questionable, at best. He famously once called democracy a tram that “[y]ou ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”

This raises the question of whether the coup attempt against Erdogan might have been justified. More generally, is it ever justified to forcibly overthrow a democratic government? In this 2013 post, written after the successful military coup against Egypt’s radical Islamist government, I argued that the answer is sometimes “yes.” There should be a strong presumption against forcibly removing a democratic regime. But that presumption might be overcome if the government in question poses a grave threat to human rights, or is likely to destroy democracy itself by shutting down future political competition.

While we can argue if Erdogan is "committed" to democracy, I think it is pretty clear that he is not committed to the protection of individual rights.

What we need is a new alliance not to protect the world for democracy -- that word may originally have meant what I want it to mean but now it seems possible to just check the democracy box merely by having some kind of voting.  We need a new (much smaller than the UN) alliance to make the world safe for, what?  We need a name.  What do we call a country with strong protections of individual rights, free markets, and the rule of law?

Postscript:  yes, there are snarky answers to the last question, such as "increasingly rare" and "net here anymore".

Here is me on November 13

Which gives me the idea that every portrait in a public space of FDR needs to begin by talking about the unconscionable internship of Japanese and every portrait of Wilson needs to start with what an awful racist he was. Time to rename the Wilson school at Princeton!

On November 18, a group of Princeton students occupied the President's office (wow, everything old is new again) and, among their demands was the insistence that the Woodrow Wilson school be renamed because Wilson was a racist.

I have no quibble about calling Wilson a racist.  However, I suggested removing his name mainly because I thought it was one racist the protesters would not challenge.  Wilson was one of the fathers of the Constitutional reinterpretation in the 20th century that allowed the Progressive agenda to go forward at the Federal level, when so much of it wouldn't (and didn't) seem allowable by a straight-forward reading of the Constitution.   Wilson is thus a sort of Godfather to the New Deal and the Great Society and even to Obama's end-runs around the legislature through executive action.

Instapundit has several links to biographies of Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace prize for starting the green revolution and perhaps single-handedly saving hundreds of millions from starvation.  This is a particularly interesting one.

Borlaug won his prize, of course, back when the Nobel Peace prize was actually given to people who made the world a better place.  Today the prize is typically given to whatever person did the most to appease a major dictatorship or terrorist or to whoever was most vocal worldwide in their socialism or  anti-Americanism.  This description of the Nobel committee's criteria may sound flippant, but it is clear to me that the committee is dominated by those who favor peace ahead of anything else.  Which, in real life, means that you have to be ready to live with ... anything else, including murder, rape, genocide, totalitarianism, etc. 

Just look at the list of recent winners.  In 1985 they gave the peace prize to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, who as a group systematically opposed everything the US was doing at the time which in 5 years would result in a true reduction in the risk of nuclear war.    In 1988 they gave the award to the serial rapists in the UN peacekeeping forces.    For God sakes in 1994 Yasser Arafat won, perhaps the single person most responsible for chaos in the Middle East.  In 2001 Kofi Anan won, at the very time he was out-Enroning Ken Lay by helping Saddam Hussein steal $20 billion while enriching his own son with contractor kickbacks.  And of course in 2002 Jimmy Carter won for appeasing just about every dictator in the world, but North Korea in particular (interestingly, Jimmy Carter is the only US president since Woodrow Wilson to win the award.  Can you think of any president in the last 60 years who has done less than Jimmy Carter to create a free and peaceful world?)

As a footnote, it would be impossible for Norman Borlaug to win the Peace prize today.  Greens and environmentalists have never liked him, and the politically correct Nobel Committee would never make a choice today that would irritate these groups.  People like Wangari Maathai who fit into the progressive-green sustainable development camp are preferred, even if they don't have nearly the same impact in actually saving or improving lives.