Outcome of the Paris Accord: a re-founding act of American democracy?

Interview with Drieu Godefridi, Belgian philosopher, jurist, author of “Le GIEC etMort; Vive le Science” (The IPCC is Dead: Long Live Science) published in English under the title “The IPCC: A Scientific Body?” Godefridi discusses his view that the exit of the Trump Administration from the Paris Agreement is a sensible return to American democracy. Godefridi traces the incremental takeover of public policy by globalists and minority view activists using unelected, unaccountable politically-rife bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the guise of ‘science’ to foist ever-more economically detrimental demands on the West. These groups use contrived morality and guilt to affect a bank hold-up, the trigger-about-to-be-pulled being the ‘climate catastrophe.’

Without arguing the science, President Trump called that bluff as he exited the Paris Agreement.He called it on economic and common-sense grounds, being accountable and representing the interests of Americans as an elected official. This is in stark contrast to the EU where the unelected, unaccountable EU commission has become detached from the people’s needs and entrenched in the ideological fantasy of the day. This translation includes this introduction and clarifying details for North American audiences.

Question: Drieu Godefridi, you qualify the American decision to leave the Paris Agreement as the re-founding act of the American democracy. Could you expand on this surprising point of view, surprising at least, compared to that of most European politicians and analysts?

Reply: You are right, this point of view is undoubtedly in the minority. Globalists are now considered as opposed to nationalists. The Europeans and the American Democrats would be the Globalists. The nationalists are the Republican supporters of “America First”. From this point of view, to the Globalist, everything is simple: the American exit from the Paris Accord is a selfish act of a narrow nationalist who cares about the immediate economic interests of America at the expense of the collective interest and that of the planet.

On the surface, this narrative is very convincing, it has only one fault: it is false.

The Paris Accord marks the apotheosis, not of “globalism,” but of a particular version of globalism, which one should rather qualify as socialist. Indeed, let us recall the actual content of the Paris Agreement! What does it foresee? Essentially, two things: the drastic reduction of CO 2 emissions in the West, right away, with the possibility for states such as China – the world’s largest CO 2 emitter – to continue to increase emissions to 2030, with no requirement whatsoever to reduce emissions. The second essential component of “Paris” is the Green Fund, which provides for the transfer of $ 100 billion a year from the West to the rest of the world. “Paris” is therefore, first and foremost, the triumph of what was called “support for the Third World” in the 70s and 80s, that is to say, a massive and permanent transfer of wealth from the West to the rest of the world.

Question: We can see the socialist component. But what about globalism? How does the Paris Agreement contribute to globalism?

Reply: “Paris” is doubly globalist: first, because the transfer of wealth will be done through a clever network of international institutions, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Green Fund — an institution, with a secretariat, directors, exotic meeting places, etc. —and all the intermediate institutions created by the Paris Agreement.

Secondly, “Paris” is driven by “morality” with the IPCC itself employing the services of moral philosophers to help them make their political case. The founding moral intuition which presides over the Paris Agreement is internationalist socialism. International socialism has always considered that the differential of wealth that benefits the West results from the pillage of the rest of the planet. This is described in terms of imperialism, colonization, exploitation of weaker partners. In that world view, the only “just” solution (aka “climate justice”) to this is the immediate and unconditional transfer of a substantial portion of these wealth to the rest of the world. Thus, the Paris Accord discloses itself clearly as a matter of globalism, but of a very particular vision of it – internationalist socialism.

Question: Even if the Paris Agreement is indeed motivated by a socialist vision, is it not selfish and unjust on the part of the Americans to refuse to share their wealth?

Reply: The founding thesis of universalist socialism is that the wealth of the West is born of the plunder of the rest of the world. This is obviously false, and this has been demonstrated time and time again. The West owes its surplus of wealth to the preference given over five centuries to a particular economic system, capitalism! [1] The West has rejected the alternatives, socialism or subsistence. Moreover, the falsehood about the capitalist West as simple global robber barons is so well entrenched in leftist/socialist/globalists that even the concessions and foreign aid made to date by the West on are never enough to satisfy the transfer of wealth desired by the Third Worldists.

With the Paris Accord, which is not born from nothing, we enter a completely different dimension. This time, it is no longer morality, generosity or compassion (i.e. disaster relief) that requires the transfer of the wealth of the West. It’s science! It is the idea that because the Western industrial world has polluted the world for so many years should mean that the West must transfer its wealth to the rest of the world, which can continue to pollute. Further, this guilt money must be paid into the Green Fund which puts unaccountable, unelected green groups and green rent-seekers an opportunity to exploit this ultimate global subsidy for renewable-intermittent energies! Admire the finesse of the process: it employs the very strength of the West — capitalism — to show that the West has sinned. How naive and amateur are the Third Worldists of the past, with their moral arguments, faced with the omnipotence of the scientific argument!

However, and this should have put the flea in the ear of at least some of the European “leaders”, the results are exactly the same: bleeding the West to the benefit of the rest of the world.

Question: This coincidence of the present scientific argument with the moral argument of the past does not invalidate the scientific argument! If science tells the truth, is it not fair that the West polluter “pays” the rest of the planet?

Reply: Your question is perfectly intelligent. The coincidence of the two arguments does not invalidate the science. However, you likely will have noticed, like me, that the climate debate does not deserve to be described as scientific in any way, anymore. What is the matrix of climate science? That is the IPCC, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As early as 2010, I demonstrated in the book “Le GIEC est mort, vive la science”/ “The IPCC: A Scientific Body?” that by its composition, competences and functioning, the IPCC is a totally political organization, and not a scientific one as it claims. I do not have the competence to pronounce on the science of climate as such, nor do I need it: for it is easy to understand that a political organization can only produce political reports. The current “science” of climate is that of a scholar steeped in science… and politics – with a dominant political gene.

Question: Are you telling us that there is no such thing as credible climate science?

Reply: Certainly not. But what matters is that so much of the science is skewed by politics – via the IPCC – and by massive public subsidies for scientists, NGOs and companies in line with the IPCC, that it is not possible to qualify the thesis as dominated by science. (It should be noted, moreover, that public subsidies are now supplemented by subsidies from the renewable-intermittent industries, which are closely dependent on public subsidies.)

By way of example, here is how John Broome, IPCC moral philosopher, describes the writing process of the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) – which is the document used by governments to set national climate policies:

“In effect, the text is edited by several hundred people sitting together in a big room. One hundred and seven countries sent delegations of varying sizes. Saudi Arabia is said to have sent ten or more. The delegates arrive with political interests. Many oppose each other diametrically. Moreover, their governments are already locked in negotiations preparing for the major climate-change meeting that is planned for Paris next year under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The wording of the SPM matters to the delegates, since it may be quoted in the negotiations. At our IPCC meeting, they treated the SPM as though it were a legal document rather than a scientific report. It was flattering in one way to find so many governments giving our work such serious attention. But the effects of their attention were often infuriating. To achieve consensus, the text of the SPM was made vaguer in many places, and its content diluted to the extent that in some places not much substance remained.” [2]

Question: So the American release of “Paris” is neither selfish nor contrary to science?

Reply: One thinks what one wants of the American president, but he perfectly grasped the essence of the Paris Agreement, which is to redistribute the wealth of the West to the rest of the world – he expressly declared it on the Lawn of the White House, on June 1st, 2017 when making the American exit from Paris official. In so doing, he has stopped the formidable internationalist socialist machinery that was in the process of being set up. In other words, he has refused to validate the third-world moral intuition, and the scientific pretext that gave birth to the Paris Agreement. I do not think there is any other way to read this outcome.

Question: Yet, in so doing, he is reforming American democracy?

Reply: In my view, yes. We live in a reality of which we know that it has become strongly globalized economically. There has been much less attention to the other globalization that has taken place before our eyes, that of an extremely dense network of international organizations and institutions that has increasingly been given the power to create standards by right.

Question: How would this second globalization – that of the law – be more problematic than the first one? Are the two not complementary?

Reply: The difficulty is that these global organizations are not subject to the same democratic requirements – election and accountability – as well as separation of powers, as are our democratic national institutions. We have denounced so much the “democratic deficit” of the European institutions! Indeed, it is wrong that the faceless and very ideological judges – here I point at the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU – decide on the future of Europe in such major areas as immigration or terrorism. They do so, completely apart from the wishes of European citizenry. But this deficit is nothing compared to that of the other international organizations, which generally have only a vague idea of democracy (and often appoint despots to human rights commissions, for instance)! One notes here, before all, the United Nations, whose umbrella organization in the field of climate, the UNFCCC, is just an emanation.

What we have been seeing for the past two decades, in the areas of climate, gender theory, immigration and terrorism, and so on, is that activist minority ideologues have confiscated democratic debate. By acting at the international level, they have an enormous advantage. As soon as such an unaccountable international body has seized a cause, its standards prevail over national parliaments! When gender theory was enshrined in its most radical version in 2011 by a Council of Europe Convention, it became virtually impossible to dislodge it. When, in cases such as HIRSI (2012), the European Courts devoted the “no border” ideology, it became almost impossible for the national ministers who wished to defend their own borders to do so. Examples that come to mind are Francken in Belgium, his British and Austrian counterpart, or the countries of the Visegrád group – a handful able to oppose it effectively. But it is in the domain of climate that this confiscation of democratic debate is the most masterful, reaching a kind of virtuosity.

Question: Why?

Reply: But by the effect of science! The theory of gender is meant to be scientific, but it does not deceive anyone: it is an ideology, assumed as such by authors like Judith Butler. The ideology of the “no border” is moral, it does not claim to be scientific. Climate is something else! Every time since its birth in the fold of the IPCC, the ideology of the climate has claimed science as its foundational authority – and science in its most precise version! Physics! The politicized IPCC has never stopped claiming it is presenting science since. So, it is this second globalization, a prelude to a world government that is openly called for by the elites of internationalist socialism, which is threatened today by the American exit of the Paris Agreement.

Question: Let us finish with a prognosis: and now, what will happen?

Reply: In my humble opinion, two things: first, “Paris” is dead. We are going to witness a form of hysterical “debate” in Europe. It is clear that France, Belgium and Germany will compete as to who is more virtuous, climate-wise, and that they are supported by the gigantic economic sector of the $1.5 trillion/year sector of “Big Climate” – that of industries and investors in Renewable-intermittent energies, and by high finance helped by ‘green’ groups, which would have had control over the massive transfers of the Green Fund. Of course, economically, the European position is not tenable. The Paris Accord would have been the bank heist of the millennium had Americans complied, is not possible with only the funds of European states such as France, Belgium or the countries of the Southern Europe. These are completely drained financially. These countries are over-indebted, have historically unprecedented levels of taxation, they owe a large amount of money to NATO, how could they finance the Green Fund? Through the EU climate policies, they are increasing the price of their energy every day while the rest of the world – beginning with the Americans – will now lower the price of theirs? Simply stating it this way exposes the lack of serious intent.

As for the science of climate, we are going to experience interesting developments. The head of the American environmental agency, Scott Pruitt, announced the setting up of working groups to disentangle the Science from the Ideology in climate science.

Question: You believe that this will be the outcome?

Reply: I believe this even more today – that this is the solution that I foresaw in 2010! However, this will only have a “virtuous” outcome if the Americans do not replicate the UN error, that is to say, to subject scientists to politics, and pretend – what the IPCC has done with impunity since its foundation – to derive moral and juridical norms from “science”, which is of course an aberration.

Question: A word of conclusion?

Reply: What dies with “Paris” is the socialist globalism in its present format. It will be reborn from its ashes! After the Third World-ism, after climatism, it will arise as a New Emperor in New Clothes, do not doubt it! The (twisted) egalitarian drive that presides over socialism in all its forms is not ready to disappear. Under the aegis of the previous occupants of the White House, America itself, traditionally more resistant to socialism than the Europeans, has already largely embarked on this path. Therefore, from this point of view, the American break from the Paris-globalist bank heist, deserves to be described as a re-founding – as a return to the roots of American democracy and the wisdom of its founding fathers.

Read the original interview with Drieu Godefridi here.