Critics denounce China climate pact as “lopsided,” “suicidal,” and a “charade”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8080
It’s easy to find praise in the media for what CNN calls President Obama’s “historic” new agreement with China on carbon-emissions reductions. And it’s important to recognize the widespread objections.
Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls the agreement a “big deal.” At the Atlantic, a piece from China expert James Fallows got the headline “Is the U.S.-China climate pact as big a deal as it seems? Wednesday’s news doesn’t mean that global climate negotiations will succeed. But it means they’re no longer guaranteed to fail.” A USA Today editorial called the agreement “an important step toward averting catastrophic disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
In an op-ed in that same paper, though, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma scorned it as a “non-binding charade.” Inhofe’s family once built and publicized an igloo after a Washington, DC, snowfall to mock former vice president Al Gore, on the premise that it’s funny and revealing to contrast a cold weather event with a warming climate. USA Today notes that Sen. Inhofe is expected to become chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
At the widely read Wall Street Journal, the editorial “Green leap forward"—echoing a 3-minute WSJ online opinion video —mocked the agreement not only in its headline’s historical allusion but in this paragraph:
The climate-change campaign against fossil fuels has been having a hard time with democracy. Voters in the US support fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline, Australia repealed its carbon tax, and frustration with green energy costs is rising across Europe. So perhaps it’s not surprising that President Obama has turned to a dictatorship for help with his anticarbon ambitions.
Rush Limbaugh, who hosts what Wikipedia calls “the number one commercial talk show since at least 1991,” declared that not even the word outrageous covers the president’s agreement with the people whom Limbaugh, using Cold War jargon, calls “the ChiComs.” It’s actually “suicidal,” he charged. Limbaugh quoted Fox News analyst Stuart Varney:
This is not a lopsided deal. This is a total cave on the part of President Obama to his Chinese counterpart. We are going to accelerate the cutting of our emissions. We’ve got even bolder targets. China doesn’t have to do anything. They can keep on polluting at this current level, even increase their emissions for another 15 years. All they’ve agreed to do is peak their emissions in the year 2030. We cut; they don’t. And then when you come to the money, we’re gonna pay for this. Our utility bills are going to go up, and it’s gonna cost us jobs. It doesn’t cost the Chinese anything. They pay nothing extra for this so-called agreement. It is totally lopsided.
Varney was also cited in the Media Matters posting “Right-wing media paint historic climate agreement as proof of Obama administration’s weakness.” At the similarly liberal ClimateProgress blog, the posting “Fox News melts down over the U.S.-China climate deal” cited him too.
The Fox News online news story “Obama vows drastic emissions cut, gets little back from China in new deal” quoted Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, the incoming majority leader: “This unrealistic plan, that the president would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs.” The Washington Post elaborated under the headline “GOP congressional leaders denounce U.S.-China deal on climate change.” The Post reported, “While there is little lawmakers can do to block the US-China climate agreement, McConnell’s aides have already started investigating ways they could block or delay implementation of the EPA’s proposed rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Climate Progress posting pointed out an irony involving the pundit and harsh Obama critic Charles Krauthammer, who has been saying for at least six years that he’s a climate-change “agnostic who believes instinctively that it can’t be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.” A few days before the new agreement was announced, Krauthammer said in a Fox News TV panel discussion, “I think the one item [the president] could negotiate, and I’m serious about this, climate change. That’s the one where if we and China could agree it would make a difference. You could shut down every coal mine in Kentucky it won’t make a dime’s worth of difference. If he gets an agreement with China, which he won’t, but that’s the one area it would be historic.” The posting added that a few days later, Krauthammer “said Obama should push for a climate agreement with China, that ‘if we get one with China we have something real.’”
This media report must not close without noting another irony. On 14 November, after all of the comments cited above, Fox News published another online news story, this time under the headline “US-China climate accord gives hope for global agreement.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.