Trump should submit the Paris Climate Agreement to Senate for up or down vote

 Bonner Cohen:

In what might be the final weeks of his administration, President Donald Trump can help seal his legacy by definitively freeing the United States from the shackles of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden has made it abundantly clear that he intends to take the country back into the Paris agreement, from which the United States formally withdrew on Nov. 4.

Agreed to by 189 signatory nations in December 2015, the Paris pact is the latest effort by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to address what is says is the urgent problem of rising temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Under the agreement, developed countries committed to carrying out the lion’s share of reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions.  And of those industrialized nations, none would carry a heavier burden than the United States, which Obama administration negotiators pledged would cut its emissions by about 25 percent by 2025 compared with 2005 levels.

U.S. participation in the agreement would cost the average family $20,000 and the national GDP $2.5 trillion by 2035, according to the Heritage Foundation.   This sacrifice would be made to achieve a global reduction in temperatures of a barely measurable 0.015 degrees Celsius by 2100.  Meanwhile, China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, pledged to do little more than have its CO2 emissions peak in 2030.

Not prepared to squander America’s global leadership in fossil-fuel-based energy production, and deprive the country’s families and industries of affordable and reliable energy, President Trump announced U.S. withdrawal from the pact in June 2017.

He did so, however, in the worst possible way, one that provides a future president a pathway to push the United States back in.  What Obama administration representatives negotiated in Paris was a de facto treaty, but one they branded an “agreement” so they could avoid having the document sent to the Senate, where it faced certain rejection.

 The Constitution provides that the president “shall have the Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur” (Article II, section 2).

By circumventing the Constitution’s requirement that a treaty receive the Senate’s approval by a two-thirds majority (today 67 votes), the Obama White House sought to unilaterally bind the country to the narrow (if far-reaching) interests of global green elites.

What Trump should have done in the summer of 2017 is exactly what the Constitution provides: send the treaty to the Senate for its advice and consent.  Instead, he followed a procedure laid out in the agreement that allows signatories to exit the pact within a certain time.  For the United States, that day of exit fell on Nov. 4, 2020, one day after the election.

But it’s not too late to correct the mistake. The upcoming lame-duck session of Congress will provide the president the opportunity to rid the country of the Paris pact once and for all. Failing to do so runs the risk of subjecting Americans to even greater burdens than were detailed in the original December 2015 document.

... 

This is a great idea.  It will also put pressure on the environmental wacko caucus in the Senate.  While he is at it he should also put Obama's terrible Iran deal before the Senate for them to vote up or down on.