This morning finds me styling at the California Club in downtown Los Angeles, after a splendid evening last night conducting a structured conversation with Paul Wolfowitz at the annual dinner of the Friends of Ronald Reagan. One of the things about having breakfast at the California Club morningafterwise is that you can read the New York Times in hard copy.
So it was with mounting incredulity that I kept going down the right-hand Paul Krugman column about trade today and finding myself mostly in agreement with it. Whazzit? Did the California Club switch out my coffee for Sanka or something? “Surely this will go wrong in the usual ways after the fold,” I kept thinking. But no; Krugman kept mostly making sense. Did I just happen to hit on his stopped-clock column for this year?
Ah, but then we come to the money graph:
What I find myself thinking about, in particular, is climate change — an all-important issue we can’t confront effectively unless all major nations participate in a joint effort, with last year’s Paris agreement just the beginning. How is that going to work if America shows itself to be a nation that reneges on its deals?
This is just too much fun, as it suggests obliquely that even a President Bernie Sanders would have as one of his unintended consequences the scuttling of “international climate action.” No wonder Krugman wants to make a (tepid) defense of trade agreements. This comes on the heels of yesterday’s terrific article in USA Today by Ted Nordhaus about how Bernie’s opposition to fracking would set back the cause of lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Isn’t it fun when liberal pieties crash into each other like a demolition derby?
By the way, I’m still waiting for the climatistas to blame the rise of Trump on climate change. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. It’s only a matter of time.
Incidentally, the California Club also offers much better reading material than the Times for your breakfast or lunch edification:
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.