The China Deal: Trick or Treaty

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

13 November 14

nternational agreements always have seemed to bring out the worst in our politics. The very first really big one -- the Jay Treaty with Great Britain, signed into law in 1796 -- roiled up the newborn country enough that people suggested that the sainted George Washington, then the president of the United States, resign his office. (Historian Sean Wilentz also points out that the public brawl over the treaty included someone's crowning Alexander Hamilton with a rock, and Hamilton's challenging a man named James Nicholson to a duel, which history later proved to be the worst idea generally that Hamilton ever had.) In modern times, we've had fights over nuclear test-ban treaties, and over the Panama Canal Treaty, which later may have helped Ronald Reagan get elected.

But it is only recently, as the prion disease acquired by the Republican party when it first ate the monkeybrains back in 1980 has come to eat away fully the party's reasoning faculties, that the fights over treaties became unmoored from reality, and drifted off into the skies over Crazytown. This is how the Republicans were able to bring down the International Treaty On The Rights Of The Disabled, and to bring it down right there in front of Bob Dole, who was sitting in a wheelchair in the Senate chamber. This is how the gun-fondlers and their political enablers have convinced so many people that the UN is coming to seize their bang-bangs. This is how my new friend, Joni Ernst, came to be so concerned about Agenda 21 and the future of all our golfs that she had to soft-pedal her fanaticism lest the voters of Iowa think they were sending Alex Jones's inner child to the U.S. Senate. Fights over treaties always have been highly flammable ones because they always have been really about the country's place in the world. They've grown out of the primal American ambivalence about foreign entanglements and foreign adventurism that was baked into the country's politics right at the outset. (Again, from Wilentz, the New England Federalists were adamantly against even the Louisiana Purchase. One of them, Rufus King, was sharp enough to notice that the purchase would redound to the political credit of the Jefferson administration and to the Democratic-Republican party. Shades of Bill Kristol's warning about national health-care reform.) More than a few people down through the years have found the country's international relations a vast underground reservoir through which they could tap into the kind of nativist paranoia that is part of the country's historical fundament. Those fights are now more intense because one of our two major political parties has grown completely demented.

On Wednesday, the president concluded a milestone agreement with China by which the two countries agreed to take steps to combat aggressively the rising global threat of climate change. In it, the president agreed that the United States would set a new target for reducing carbon emissions by 2020 and China agreed to stop its emissions from growing by the same date. The treaty could mark the end of a long-standing dispute between the two countries over the effects of carbon emissions, as well as serving as an inspiration to the rest of the world to get serious about the imminent threat to the planet of uncontrolled climate change.

A climate deal between China and the United States, the world's No. 1 and No. 2 carbon polluters, is viewed as essential to concluding a new global accord. Unless Beijing and Washington can resolve their differences, climate experts say, few other countries will agree to mandatory cuts in emissions, and any meaningful worldwide pact will be likely to founder. "The United States and China have often been seen as antagonists," said a senior official, speaking in advance of Mr. Obama's remarks. "We hope that this announcement can usher in a new day in which China and the U.S. can act much more as partners."

Now, do I entirely trust the Chinese to live up to their end of the bargain? It's hard to say, and ideology doesn't have a damn thing to do about it. There are a lot of people over there who got rich, and who stay rich, operating industries that emit carbon pollution, and I don't think Chinese plutocrats differ greatly from American plutocrats as far as their inherent desire to be good stewards of the earth is concerned. At the same time, the Chinese also are jumping into Green technology with both feet, clearly seeing an exploding market in such things over the next couple of decades, so maybe their plutocrats will be able to make the highly pragmatic decision that, hey, let's get even richer doing this! Whereas our plutocrats seem content to bankroll candidates who deny that climate change is even happening at all, or who boast of their ignorance of the subject, one way or another. Guess what? None of those Chinese billionaires scrambling to build solar panels for the world are scientists, either, but they know how to make a buck. Why are their plutocrats such better capitalists than our plutocrats are? 'Ees a puzzlement, and this is not to say I trust the United States governments of the future to make good on this deal, either.

The United States environmental community seemed a bit wrongfooted by the news. (The essential Bill McKibben sizes up the pros and cons pretty well. Trust, but verify, and follow through, and build on it, fast. Seems to me to be the way to go.) However, newly emboldened by their victory in last week's midterms, the Republicans slapped on the old clown shoes and did a buck-and-wing. (This does take away one of their prime talking-points against doing anything about the problem. Go Talk To China is now inoperable. Marco Rubio will be grieved.) Giving them a chance to weigh in on this issue is like watching raccoons deal with a sugar cube. The raccoon takes the cube and dunks it in water, causing it to dissolve, whereupon the raccoon starts screeching and hollering and running around in circles. Enter Mitch McConnell.

"I read the agreement - requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years while these carbon emission regulations are creating havoc in my state and other states around the country," McConnell, who hails from the coal state of Kentucky, said on Capitol Hill.

Here, with a sugar cube of his own, is John Boehner.

Boehner called the deal another example of Obama's "job-crushing policies." "And it is the latest example of the president's crusade against affordable, reliable energy that is already hurting jobs and squeezing middle-class families," Boehner said in a statement Wednesday.

And, last up at the banks of the creek is Senator Jim Inhofe, the walking bag of retrograde lunacy who shortly will be running the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee because American voters are stupid.

Inhofe criticized the deal as unfair and knocked the Chinese pledge to produce 20% of its energy from zero-emission sources as "hollow and not believeable." "The United States will be required to more steeply reduce our carbon emissions while China won't have to reduce anything," Inhofe said.

Which doesn't matter, of course, because climate change is a hoax.

It's a non-binding agreement, with all that means, the upside being that, as such, we won't have to have a noisy ratification fight in the newly wingnutted U.S. Senate. But it is nonetheless a considerable achievement for the president, and for Secretary of State John Kerry. And, in other environmental news, the federal government told endangered Gunnison Sage Grouse that the federal government has its back. Expect the Gunnison Sage Grouse to become the spotted owl, or the snail darter, of the new century. Expect mockery from the big ol' 'ho's in the pay of the extraction industries. Pay them no mind. The Earth is smiling today.