5 steps ...

Five steps President Trump can take to stop us from doing harm... in the developing world’s quest for the better and longer life that reliable electric power can bring. Watts Up ... Generate Power: Instruct U.S. representatives at the World Bank and the regional development banks, as well as officials of the Agency for International Development (the State Department’s foreign aid office) to support rather than oppose, as we currently do, loans and grants for power plants that rely on coal, gas, or oil. By helping countries build modern, efficient plants outfitted with “scrubbers” we can dramatically cut emissions of sulfur dioxide and other particulates. Unlike carbon dioxide, which is a beneficial trace gas that increases crop yields as a fertilizer, these are real pollutants, and need to be controlled. Support the Grid: The Obama administration’s Power Africa campaign is biased in favor of “off-grid” solutions such as small-scale, local wind and solar farms. This is colonialist to the core in a continent that is still “under-developing” by exporting raw materials to its former masters in return for imports of finished goods. Africa needs to have consistent power for factories and offices, or it will never be able to compete in the global economy. The only way to have consistent power is with a modern grid. Period. The grid can develop slowly, so that it can be maintained, but in the long run, as the success of China shows, you can’t get there without it. Aid only sustainable infrastructure projects: Developing countries, and African ones in particular, are littered with abandoned “White Elephants” – high-technology factories, dams, processing plants, wells, and tractors provided by well-meaning foreign aid donors. They fell into disuse because recipient governments lacked the political will and the economic environment needed to sustain them. Bringing technology in from a different country that is at a different stage of economic development is tricky in the best of circumstances. It is a waste of money and time if the recipient government is undemocratic, corrupt, or repressive. American diplomats and foreign aid officials need to be rewarded rather than punished, as they inevitably are in the foreign aid game, for properly assessing the likelihood of sustainability and cancelling projects. Most economic development comes when the local conditions permit it. Foreign aid can do little when dictatorship and corruption prevail, as they do in most African countries. End biofuel requirements: “Biofuel starvation” is what Africans call it when companies from developed countries take over villages’ crop lands so they can make a profit meeting “green” fuel requirements. The Trump administration should drop our own ethanol minimums, and make it a principal point of trade and diplomacy talks with European countries to get them to drop theirs. Oppose “carbon-content” rules: In their never-ending quest to find phony “carbon off-sets” that allow them to claim reductions in carbon dioxide without closing their own power plants, European countries have made a mess out of the simple act of importing goods from developing countries. Flowers from Kenya, for example, pay a carbon tax because they are transported on airplanes, which use more fossil-fuel per flower than a slower ship. As part of an international consortium on air travel, the United States can object to and reverse such rules, leading to more trade, and jobs, in developing countries. Congress enacted legislation in 2011 that blocked the consortium’s scheme to place a carbon tax on all air travel. As we protect our travel rights we should also look out for those of exporters in developing countries. To achieve these changes, and to make them stick, Trump should make it clear that the paradigm of fossil-fueled climate catastrophe is being rejected. Under Obama nearly every department of government created empires of staff whose primary purpose appears to have been to spend taxpayer dollars demonizing greenhouse gasses. While it is possible simply to ignore, as many countries hypocritically have, the 2015 Paris Agreement and its voluntary “economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets” and the 1992 UN Framework Treaty and its reporting requirements, Trump should announce our withdrawal from them as a way to shock our domestic bureaucracy into doing less harm. Presidents have the power to withdraw from agreements and treaties, as Carter did from our treaty with Taiwan in order to improve relations with China, Reagan did from the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court to avoid losing a case about our war on Nicaragua, and George W. Bush did from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The technical withdrawal will take a few years, because of the terms of those accords, but the announcement itself would put a stop to the gravy train of “climate finance” and climate reparations” that waste billions of dollars of foreign aid. [FULL WUWT] I was looking for "Charge Al Gore with crimes against humanity."  Sigh. Maybe Trump can add that to the list.