In what has become a familiar refrain, the United Nations last month issued a report scolding the world’s leading economic powers for not doing enough to fight climate change — even as the UN refuses to police China for completely abandoning that effort.
But if the rest of the world still wants to pursue the goals of the Paris Climate Accords to cut global emissions and eventually phase out fossil fuels, it won’t do so on America’s dime, if Rep. Matt Gaetz has anything to say about it.
The Fort Walton Beach Republican last week pushed through an amendment to the State Department’s budget that ends U.S. financial support for the Accords.
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The 2015 agreement is supposed to reduce global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next few decades, with emissions targeted to peak in 2025.
But the primary method of doing so is to force the developed nations, primarily in the West, to utterly alter their economies and lifestyles, by switching from highly efficient fossil fuels.
The House put a stop to U.S. funding for that by supporting Gaetz’s amendment 219-213. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania was the only Republican to join Democrats in voting against Gaetz’s amendment.
Gaetz trumpeted the vote as a victory over a clearly “America Last” policy.
“U.S. taxpayers should not be funding this globalist, America Last enterprise, which uses climate change as a trojan horse to attack the American economy,” Gaetz said in an email to constituents on Friday. “I’m proud to have put a hard stop to any funding within [the budget bill] from going to the Paris Climate Accords.”
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Gaetz’s comments followed a House floor speech he gave Thursday in which he attacked the Accords for hamstringing America.
He labeled U.S. funding of the Accords the “unilateral surrender of the American economy.”
Gaetz also called it a “globalist enterprise” that was intended to punish the U.S. financially, with taxpayers footing the bill, without providing any benefit to Americans.
In response to comments by left-wing Democratic Rep. Babara Lee of California who called for rejecting Gaetz’s amendment, he replied that adhering to the Accords will only kill American jobs and economic growth, “while China and India play us like fools.”
“It is neither moral nor smart to drive our nation deeper into debt, to jeopardize the future of this country, so that we can engage in a globalist virtue signal,” said Gaetz.
It seems unclear whether Gaetz’s amendment will survive when the Senate takes up the House measure.
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