#104) Paris Climate Agreement

June 1, 2017

Dear Mr. President,

Here's one of your biggest problems – you love to shoot your mouth off and whip people up into a frenzy of outrage and indignation even if you have to make up false facts to be outraged and indignant about.  It makes you feel important and liked (like a weird politician/rock star hybrid).  While on the campaign trail you whipped up the crowds by shouting that you would remove the US from the Paris climate agreement and the crowd LOVED it.  That's because the crowd was ill-informed (because of your false facts) and ignorant of the actual details of the Paris climate agreement and they were looking for a "show" not a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons of global climate change and energy policy.  But politics isn't about putting on a good "show", it's about actually running the country in a safe and beneficial way.

Recently you received an open letter from hundreds of companies (Mars, Nike, Levi Strauss, Starbucks, Tesla, Apple, G.E. to name just a few) urging you to stay and honor the promises made by the Paris agreement for the simple reason that, "failure by the US to build a clean economy endangers American prosperity."  You're a businessman, come on, it couldn't be any easier to understand than that. 

The problem is that you promised your fan base a show. You promised to withdraw from the agreement with all the outrage and indignation you could muster.  But there's nothing to be outraged or indignant about because we chose the goals. Nobody forced anything down our throats. We weren't manipulated by any foreign country. Each country in the agreement laid out a framework for adopting clean energy and thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions for themselves.  Everybody wrote a plan that would work for their own individual country.  What France plans to do is different from what India plans to do and what China plans to do, etc.  And the United States decided to set the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% by 2025 because that's what seemed reasonable and doable to us.  Not because some outside agency forced us to.

So now you're caught between a rock and a hard place; do you withdraw from the agreement and lessen our global competitiveness but keep your fan base happy, or stay in the agreement, reap the economic benefits of it, but anger your fans.  Hundreds of CEOS and millions of average citizens think we should stay with the agreement.  I'm still angry that you shot your stupid mouth off 10 months ago about something that you clearly did not fully understand…again!  I'm afraid you're ego is so fragile you might choose to withdraw just to save face rather than own up to making a mistake, not understanding the climate agreement, and sticking with it.

Please don't mess this up. Just do the right thing.

Sincerely,

Amy Beaton