No recent US president has allowed prices to rise too far too fast. It is political suicide.
Today is Friday, the 13th day since opening ceremonies at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, and the top ministers of all the countries have returned to Scotland to ink a deal. In a piece scheduled for next Monday’s The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert laid out the long and winding road that took us here.
At COP21, in Paris, nations were invited to submit their own, voluntary emissions targets. This choose-your-own-adventure approach was aimed at avoiding a repeat of Copenhagen and also at circumventing the U.S. Senate, which would have had to approve a new binding agreement. When all the voluntary targets were tallied, analysts concluded that the world was poised for warming of almost three degrees Celsius — roughly five degrees Fahrenheit — a disastrous prospect. Then Donald Trump announced that the U.S. wouldn’t honor its commitments.
The delegates in Scotland all know that anything negotiated with President Biden could just as easily be undone by President Trump in 2024 from behind his prison bars.
Nature doesn’t play politics. The year 2021 is now expected to qualify among the hottest seven in history, all of them recorded since 2014. There have been so many storms in the Atlantic this year that the National Hurricane…