Trump’s Climate Speech — Full of Covfefe

America first? Really? Who’d ever thought a U.S. president could make his Russian and Chinese counterparts appear better global citizens than us? But now even Putin and Xi Jinping are on the climate change high road, while America slithers down the other (accompanied only by the dictators of Syria and Nicaragua).

After Trump’s European trip, Germany’s leader Merkel judged that the era of U.S. leadership is over and Europe is on its own. Trump proved her point with his announcement of withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. A grown-up nation does not renege on its promises. Far from making America great again, he’s deformed it from an upstanding world leader into a child in a temper tantrum. America has never been this ungreat.

Trump says it’s to protect U.S. jobs. He just says things without regard to any reality; it’s just more covfefe.

It is true that even if carbon emissions went to zero, global temperatures would still rise, only a little less than otherwise. So if we were to curb emissions by reducing industrial output, to combat climate change, the economic harm would outweigh any benefit. But that’s not what Paris does.

Instead, it merely recognizes carbon’s effect on climate and the desirability of minimizing it to the extent we can. Simple common sense. Its targets are not binding commitments, with any penalties for noncompliance, but rather just earnestly expressed ambitions. Which virtually every other nation on Earth agreed are wise.

So no job losses. Zip, zero, zilch. Nor any transfer of wealth from America to other nations — more nonsensical Trump covfefe. His whole speech was a farrago of nonsense detached from reality, an embarrassment to the country. Transitioning sensibly from dirtier to cleaner energy sources can only have economic (as well as environmental) benefits. Trump’s coal fetish is simply insane. Coal blights the planet as well as miners’ health, and is a comparatively costly energy source. Even China, the world’s leading coal nation, is assiduously cutting back on it. And clean energy is creating around ten times as many jobs.

So why would Trump go out of his way to trash what he himself referred to as a “non-binding” agreement? To pander to his base of course — the rest of the world can go hang. Sensible heads in both government and business almost unanimously advised him against withdrawing from Paris. Polls show a majority even of Trump supporters opposed doing it. So this is aimed at the hard core of the hard core. Even politically it seems insane.

But it sticks a thumb in the eye of the world order, so Trump can play the disruptor. And it reflects yet again his bottomless ignorance about the world, the willful ignorance of a fool who thinks he knows it all. And perhaps also Trump, even in his literally diseased mind, could see that his record so far is not his lie of triumphant accomplishment but a train wreck. Trashing Paris was at least one thing he’d said he’d do that he could actually do. To him a no-brainer. Too bad it really is brainless.

In the Rose Garden he said the world was laughing at us for agreeing to Paris, and that will stop. Trump has an uncanny thing for turning reality exactly inside out. They weren’t laughing at us then, but now they are, while shaking their heads sadly.