Axios: Say, Does Anyone Remember When Global Warming Was a Thing?

Ackshually , climate change is still technically a thing. It's just not the "thing" that its beneficiaries used to know. AP Photo/Markus Schreiber Axios offers us what amounts to an early anniversary gift to Donald Trump exactly one week before the one-year mark of his presidency. The report details the "collapse" of the global-warming grift and credits it entirely to Trump, which the White House will no doubt embrace and Trump voters will celebrate. However much Trump would like it, though, he doesn't deserve full credit for a murder that truly amounts mainly to a suicide: The climate agenda's fall from grace over the past year has been stunning - in speed, scale and scope. Why it matters: Whether this collapse in climate-change ambition proves permanent or temporary will shape the planet - which is still warming in unprecedented ways - and trillions of dollars in global energy investment. Driving the news: President Trump last week announced that he's withdrawing from the world's flagship climate treaty that's been in place for more than 30 years, making the U.S. the only country not to be part of it. "There's no hand-waving about how 'We want to cooperate on climate,' " oil historian and S&P Global vice chairman Dan Yergin said in an interview. "It's, 'We're slamming the door on that issue.' " That much is true. Last week, Trump formally withdrew the US from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as well as 65 multilateral organizations tasked with implementing it. Trump withdrew over issues of national sovereignty and international interference, but also because he perceives the global-warming establishment as both a backdoor effort to impose socialism and also a massive grift for the Left and bureaucrats. The sheer number of organizations tied to the UNFCCC aptly demonstrates the latter claim, at least. However, the real culprit in the death of Global Warming Inc is ... Global Warming Inc. For the thirty-four years of the UNFCCC, we have heard nothing but how the world only has twelve years to save itself! We have been warned that we'd see cities swallowed up by rising oceans, a theme that gave us at least one cheesy cinematic guilty pleasure ( Waterworld ) and another film so bad that it's unwatchable ( The Day After Tomorrow ). Every human conflict has been tied to global warming, as though wars only started with the internal-combustion engine and that religious and territorial disputes only went back to the launching of Standard Oil. Every hurricane and tornado is treated as evidence that the sky is falling, while the actual decline in the numbers of both are treated as, well ... just weather . All of that didn't deliver the killing blow. Greta Thunberg's high-school-dropout lectures didn't do it, either. Neither did the spectacle of watching the world's elite travel on private aircraft to five-star resorts in order to publicly demand that the rest of us accept a lower standard of living without reliable energy. What really killed...

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