Opinion

Here are the countries not in the Paris Climate Accord

To hell with your children's future. To hell with your children's future. Photo: Susan Walsh, Associated Press Photo: Susan Walsh, Associated Press Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close Here are the countries not in the Paris Climate Accord 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

President Trump announced Thursday that he will withdraw the United States from participation in the Paris climate accord, weakening global efforts to combat climate change and siding with conservatives who argued that the landmark 2015 agreement was harming the economy. - NYT

Syria and Nicaragua.

That’s it. Just those two. Even North Korea signed, along with 194 other nations, back in 2015, and North Korea is completely insane and run by a tiny-brained, quasi-dictator man-baby with an enormous head and puny hands and… oh wait.

Odds are spectacularly good Trump has no idea what the Paris Climate Accord is actually all about, what it contains, why it’s actually important. He has proven time and again he has absolutely no grasp of policy, doesn’t understand complex ideas or globally imperiling issues, can’t recite a single lucid detail of any GOP agenda item, be it TrumpCare or his own disastrous budget, he blindly spews forth.

Remember, the President of the United States does not like to read. He gets distracted easily, demands simplistic pie charts and one-page intelligence summaries, watches Fox & Friends at 3 a.m., all alone and raging into the void; he can barely send a tweet without multiple typos, misspellings, ALL CAPS, the grammar of a 5-year-old, all the while desperately hoping someone of genuine import and global respect will actually approve of him. They never, ever do.

Reporters should ask Trump what the Paris deal was—just in general—I guarantee you he doesn't have a clue—cuz if he did—he'd never leave it. — Scott Dworkin (@funder) May 31, 2017

Trump's despicable decision to yank America from Paris (and NATO/Article 5, et al), is nothing but a moral gut-punch of the highest order, an icepick in the heart of America’s stature in the world, a quietly racist bit of Obama-bashing designed, as David Axelrod points out, mainly to appease his liberal-loathing base, given how nearly all Trump’s business advisers, foreign policy experts and the CEOs of all major American industries – not to mention his fellow G8 leaders, and even the pope – advised, in no uncertain terms, against it.

But his base is all Trump’s got. And they are a vicious, small-minded lot indeed, stuck in a perpetual anti-progress, anti-education, anti-science, anti-liberal, misanthropic rage, and they gotta have their hatemeat.

Germany’s Angela Merkel said it straight up: Europe can no longer rely on the U.S. for help or support. She might as well have spoken for the whole of the planet: Thanks to Trump, the world can no longer count on America for much of anything cooperative, forward thinking, unifying. Our powers of diplomacy are being decimated, every minute Trump is in power. To say we're now a laughingstock doesn't go nearly far enough; we're an increasingly volatile engine of potential planetary annihilation. We now represent only moral violence, stunning incompetence, and menace.

And the world is right to shun us.

Have been in two European cities today. News is all Paris. Vibe is mournful. Feels like U.S. giving up 75 years of global leadership. — Cody Keenan (@codykeenan) May 31, 2017

Is there any irony in the fact that the Paris Accord, as landmark as it was, also wasn’t even all that well-regarded? It’s not legally binding, not a formal treaty (because the Obama-hating GOP would never have allowed it); by many accounts, it fell far short on many far more dramatically needed points of change.

But it was a vital, groundbreaking start that brought the entire world, including India and China, into a semblance of ideological harmony and shared purpose. It's a weak but far-better-than-nothing foundation upon which to build real momentum, real policy. What’s more, it provided a genuine glimmer of hope that we as a species might not be done for after all – a glimmer that Trump has now, with a grunt and a dumb-guy shrug, snuffed out. (Of course, it was far from the first time).

Withdrawing from the #ParisAgreement will Make America Dirtier Again & further cede American leadership. And coal is not coming back. https://t.co/QhefGeyXgf — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) May 31, 2017

By the way? Nicaragua rejected Paris because it didn’t go far enough. So it will be just the U.S. and Syria, which hasn’t been able to sign on, due to a small problem known as a ruthless, genocidal civil war, as led by Assad.

Excellent company indeed.