24.9 - Outrage of the Week: TheRump quits Paris Accord

Outrage of the Week: TheRump quits Paris Accord

Now for our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week - and this week, you're probably not surprised, it's TheRump's withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement in a statement chock full of nonsense and lies about the environment, global warming, and the economy and in a decision opposed by the American public by better than 2-1.

Burt rather than dwell on his inanity, I want instead to note two things: One is that much of the world reacted pretty much along the lines of "the heck with you and no, we are not going to 'renegotiate' this" and that domestically, many local governments are prepared to pick up the ball that TheRump fumbled so badly.

There is a growing list of at last count 289 mayors and 10 governors who have denounced the decision to withdraw and more importantly, have vowed to ignore TheRump's decision and to continue to abide by the federal Clean Power Plan and the Paris accord, including looking to meet the goal of reducing emissions to 26%-28% below 2005 levels, in their own cities and states.

Three states - California, New York, and Washington - created the United States Climate Alliance to serve as a way for states to coordinate efforts to deal with climate change. As one small sign of what can be done, those three states together make up about a fifth of the US population and a fifth of the US GDP - but produced just 11 percent of US emissions in 2014.

As of June 8, a total of 12 states and Puerto Rico, representing together a third of the US population and a third of the US GDP, had joined.

And this doesn't even address the many businesses and corporations that have realized how much of a threat global warming is to their bottom lines and so have committed to continue to do at least something to avoid the worst effects.

So the bottom line is that most of the world and at least a good part of the US are saying to TheRump, "screw you, keep peddling your fantasies about coal jobs that are never coming back and we'll get on with saving the world without you."

And that is definitely not an outrage.