Reason #3 why Biden should not rejoin the Paris Climate Accords: it is immoral. A moral international policy is one that expands human flourishing and human freedom. Paris is a path to outlawing fossil fuels, the way to provide affordable, reliable energy for billions of people.
Global CO2 emissions are rising, and not because of the US (1/6th and falling). They are rising because billions of people in the developing world are bringing themselves out of poverty by using fossil fuels to power factories, farms, vehicles, and appliances.
The developing world overwhelmingly uses fossil fuels because that is by far the lowest-cost way for them to get reliable energy. Unreliable solar and wind can’t come close. That’s why China and India have hundreds of new coal plants under construction.
The only moral and practical way to lower global CO2 emissions is to encourage innovation that could make low-carbon energy cheap for everyone. It is immoral and impractical to tell the whole world, especially the developing world, to stay unempowered and poor.
While many claim that our climate is less livable than ever because of fossil fuels, it is actually more livable than ever thanks to fossil fuel powered development. Rising CO2 levels will cause mild, manageable warming as well as significant global greening--not a crisis.
When you hear scary claims about a “climate crisis,” keep in mind that climate catastrophists have been claiming climate crisis for 40 years. For example, Obama science advisor John Holdren predicted in the 1980s that we’d have up to 1 billion climate deaths today.
After 40 years of “climate crisis” predictions by climate catastrophists, human beings are safer than ever from climate. The climate death rate has decreased by *98%* over the last century.
Fossil fuels were supposed to make climate far more dangerous in the last 40 years but they have actually made it far safer by providing low-cost, reliable energy for the development that protects us against storms, protect us against extreme temperatures, and alleviate drought.
Fossil fuels' CO2 emissions have contributed to the warming of the last 170 years, but that warming has been mild and manageable—1 degree Celsius, mostly in the colder parts of the world.
Fossil fuels' CO2 emissions have not only contributed to mild and manageable warming, they have also caused the benefit of significant global greening. Thanks to fossil fuels the Earth is far greener than it was just 40 years ago.
If the world continues using fossil fuels to provide low-cost, reliable, global-scale energy, the result will not be a climate crisis but continued manageable warming, significant greening, and a far better life for billions who will have the power to develop and flourish.
If America tries to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use by following the Paris Climate Accords we will not prevent a crisis, we will cause a crisis by making energy completely unreliable and unaffordable for American industry and American consumers.
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