Climate scientist James Hansen called it “a fraud really, a fake.” President Donald Trump called it “a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.” And this odd couple of alarmist scientist and skeptical politician agreed: the Obama-led Paris climate accord was all about lobbyists and imaging, not climate change.

As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country. This includes ending the implementation of the nationally determined contribution and, very importantly, the Green Climate Fund which is costing the United States a vast fortune.— -President Trump on the Paris Climate Agreement , June 1, 2017

Trump’s decision, one year in, remains bold, brilliant, and correct. And it will only get better as the rest of the world confronts the disconnect between what economic coordination and progress require and what starry-eyed bureaucrats want.

Consumers desire the most affordable, plentiful, reliable energies. Taxpayers favor neutrality, non-involvement. And governments ’round the world need to direct their limited resources to real here-and-now problems, not speculative, distant, unsolvable ones. As such, the U.S.-side Paris-deflating decision is pro-world, leaving only parasitic bureaucrats in the cold.

The Agreement

What exactly is the Paris climate agreement? In the words of its sponsor, the United Nations:

The Paris Agreement requires all Parties to put forward their best efforts [to reduce man-made greenhouse gases] through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead. This includes requirements that all Parties report regularly on their emissions and on their implementation efforts.

The goal of the accord is to limit the rise of global temperatures to not more than 2 degrees Celsius—and attempt to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius—above pre-industrial levels. The highly debatable assumption is that temperatures will otherwise surpass these levels because of human activity in the foreseeable future.

The accord is necessarily voluntary and aspirational for each of its signatories. Yet it is binding on citizens, in that each nation-party can forcibly intervene in its own energy market to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), as well as methane and other manmade greenhouse gases, despite the cost and hardship of doing so.

In the U.S., President Barack Obama was barreling down the interventionist tracks on the pretense of complying with the Paris Agreement, which was ratified (under its own terms) in November 2016. The U.S. was going firm on emissions reductions, while the rest of the world had much more latitude in its supposed reductions. And the US was the chief payer into the accord’s “Green Fund” to subsidize poorer nations in their forced energy transformation efforts.