Fanatical globalists in happier days ...
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The meaning is clear, even if the terminology is often opaque: To leave the Paris Accord on "climate change" is to turn off a giant spigot of American wealth redistribution, which is to strike a blow at bad old-fashioned international communism -- or, in its 21st century guise, postmodern global governance by fanatical elites. Bully for President Trump for bucking these postmodern slavedrivers of collectivism.
Not that every Paris Accorder speaks in riddles. Take the "world renowned climate economist" Ottmar Edenhofer. Assuming his Wikipedia page is a reasonably accurate CV, Edenhofer's career includes being a professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Technical University of Berlin;deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change.
From 2008 to 2015 Edenhofer was a co-chair of the UN-connected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III "Mitigation of Climate Change."
His work goes on, from a council on "Low-Carbon Transition," to a "High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices," to something called the "Green Growth Knowledge Platform," and even that's not even all. This is a man who lives and breaths "climate change," no pun intended if there was one.
In an interview in November 2010, Edenhofer himself made the clearest possible case that all of this "climate change" study and policy-making was really about Something Else:
First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
Tell it to CNN and Hollywood and all those crony-capitalist billionaires who have left post-Paris-Trump, not in a mere buff, but in the afterburn of their private Gulfstreams.
Edenhofer was rather more guarded in his reaction this week, but his meaning was still clear.
Experts such as Ottmar Edenhofer, a world-renowned climate economist, do not expect the US withdrawal to trigger a domino effect. But a withdrawal will send a “catastrophic signal for multilateralism,” Mr. Edenhofer said, “and an extremely negative signal far beyond climate policy....”
Good. Let's hope.