Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and Disney chief executive Bob Iger say they will leave President Donald Trump's advisory councils after he confirmed the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

Mr Trump announced he would pull the US from the landmark global agreement to fight climate change, saying that the Paris agreement was "unfair" to the US and would cause jobs to move overseas.

While the move was welcomed by conservative groups and Republicans, several business leaders — including Mr Musk and Mr Iger, and the heads of companies including Google, Facebook Shell and Amazon — have spoken out against the decision.

"Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world," Mr Musk said in a Twitter post.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-02/paris-climate-deal-donald-trump-to...

Trump decided that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement signed last year:

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Trump proclaimed in a forceful, lengthy and at times rambling speech from the Rose Garden of the White House. He added, “As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.”

All things considered, this is a bad decision made for dubious reasons. If theagreement is non-binding (and it is), the only burdens that the U.S. is under are those that we choose to impose on ourselves. A non-binding agreement can’timpose anything on anyone. The reason that the agreement has near-universal support around the world is that it formally requires very little of its adherents. While that means that withdrawal from the agreement is not quite the disaster many claim it is, it also shows that withdrawal is an unnecessary repudiation of a commitment that the U.S. just made. As Paul Pillar put it earlier tonight:

The non-binding nature of the agreement meant that there was not some unbearable onus that could be removed only through withdrawal.

An agreement that is “non-binding” cannot also be “draconian,” and the fact that Trump chose to describe it both ways confirms that he doesn’t really understand it, or is simply being fed lines to recite, or both. David Roberts sums up nicely how the agreement works:

Instead, the Paris accord relies on the power of transparency and peer pressure. It asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. Public pledges are a powerful driver. They can spur and organize domestic policy. Failure to live up to them can bring reputational damage. But they have no legal force in and of themselves.

One problem in withdrawing from an agreement such as this is that it needlessly creates rifts with other governments whose cooperation we need on many other issues, and it makes the U.S. seem less trustworthy when it joins international agreements. Indeed, it reeks of unilateralism for its own sake, and doesn’t take into account the potential costs for the U.S. that will come from doing this. If we want U.S. commitments to mean something now and in the future, it does no good to renege on them as soon as the president that made them is out of office. Insofar as the U.S. encourages more constructive behavior from others by leading by example, that is another reason to remain a party to the agreement.

Trump’s statement included some bizarre claims that he would be able to come up with a better agreement:

And we’ll sit down with the Democrats and all of the people that represent either the Paris Accord or something that we can do that’s much better than the Paris Accord.

One of the persistent flaws in Trump’s view of international agreements is that he seems to think that it puts pressure on other parties to walk away from an agreement that has already been made. Far from forcing a better deal from the other parties, this just demonstrates that our government isn’t interested in making a deal, and the other parties to the agreement respond accordingly. Trump can’t possibly improve on a non-binding agreement that calls for voluntary contributions, and the other signatories aren’t interested in talking to him about it in any case. This decision gains the U.S. nothing it didn’t already have, and it harms our relations with many allies in the process.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/trump-and-the-paris-agree...

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were highly imperfect men. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Southerners were rank hypocrites for declaring “all men are created equal” while owning men, women and children as their slaves. John Adams was sour and disputatious, and later as president would sign the Sedition Act cracking down on criticism of the government. John Hancock was accused of amassing his fortune through smuggling. Benjamin Franklin could have been described as kind of a dirty old man.

Yet they laid out a set of principles, later codified in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, that transcended their flaws. At this bizarre moment in our history, it is useful to remember that the ideas and institutions of the American experiment are much more powerful and enduring than the idiosyncrasies of our leaders.

I call this moment bizarre for obvious reasons. As Thomas Paine would write in December 1776: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

We have a president who neither understands nor respects the basic norms of American democracy. Make no mistake: Donald Trump is a true aberration. There is no figure like him in U.S. history, for which we should be thankful.

Trump’s inexperience is unique; he is the only president never to have served in government or the military. This weakness is exponentially compounded by his ignorance of both policy and process, his lack of curiosity, his inability to focus and his tremendous insecurity. He refuses to acknowledge his shortcomings, let alone come to terms with them; and he desperately craves the kind of sycophantic adulation that George Washington, a genuine hero, pointedly rejected.

Trump is a #FakeHero. He strings along his supporters with promises he has no idea how to keep. Like many a would-be strongman before him, he defines himself politically by the fights he picks; he erects straw men — faceless “elites,” cable television hosts, Muslims, Mexicans, nonexistent individuals or groups waging an imaginary “war on Christmas” — because authoritarians always need enemies. Yet his ego is a delicate hothouse flower, threatened by the slightest puff of criticism.

The Founders, mindful of their own faults, ultimately designed a system to contain a rogue president. They limited his elective term to four years, gave checking and balancing powers to the legislative and judicial branches, and designed impeachment as a last-ditch remedy. The Trump presidency compels all of us to be mindful of our constitutional duties.

The role of the citizenry — to express approval or disapproval at the ballot box — includes making sure that suffrage is not selectively and unfairly denied by restrictive voter-ID laws or partisan purges of the voter rolls. It is heartening that red states have joined blue in resisting the attempt by Trump’s trumped-up “voter fraud” commission to assemble a national list of voters. Perhaps some future administration could be trusted to make sense of our confusing patchwork of voting systems. This one can’t.

Congress must assert its powers of oversight. One reason the signers of the Declaration gathered in Philadelphia to pledge “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” to the cause of independence was that they saw the mingling of royal power and British commercial interests as corrupt. We now have a president whose far-flung business empire — which he has refused to divest, and which his family still operates — presents myriad potential conflicts of interest. Trump has deepened the swamp, not drained it; and Congress has a duty to sort through the muck.

Congress must also let Trump know, in no uncertain terms, that any attempt to impede or disrupt special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian election meddling will have the gravest consequences. Trump should be told that firing Mueller would automatically be considered grounds for impeachment.

The justices of the Supreme Court, meanwhile, should study the court’s decisions in United States v. Nixon, which forced Richard Nixon to turn over his White House tapes; and Bush v. Gore, which halted the 2000 vote recount in Florida. Both were instances wherein the court, which rightly shies away from decisions that determine who occupies the presidency, felt it had no choice but to act. It is no stretch to imagine that Trump’s contempt for the Constitution will once again force the court’s hand.

The Fourth of July is no day for despair. It’s a day to remember that our system, though vulnerable to a charlatan such as Trump, is robust and resilient. Eventually he will be tossed or voted out. And the star-spangled banner yet will wave.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-fakehero-president-is-an-ins...

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http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/4849

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/5236

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/28850

and more illustrations that shows that Trump ISN'T AN ABERRATION... but part of the continuum with his own style of creating crap.

Should we mention Bill Clinton who molested an intern at the White House? Unique? Who knows...