Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

China, US agree limits on emissions, but experts see little new

Bill Clinton's Kyoto deal committed the US to cuts that would have been seriously costly to the American economy and committed India and China to nothing.

This is Obama's Kyoto II.

It commits the US to significantly deeper cuts in emissions than already planned in return for a non-binding Chinese intention to pollute no more than the peak their own experts expect in a few decades, anyway.

Clinton's Kyoto deal died in the senate where even Democrats wouldn't go for it, though the entire power of the left wing noise machine demanded it.

As many have pointed out, these deals are useless in themselves since observed to the letter the planet would still spin off into global warming hell, if there is any validity to that idea to begin with, and just about as fast as it already is headed there.

But observed to the letter they would further impoverish the ordinary people of America while allowing unlimited pollution to make Chinese, Indians, and others as much richer as possible, as fast as possible.

Need I point out that apart from those with property interests in fossil fuels, the billionaires who run our world will in any event be fine and the higher costs of alternative energy will fall, of course, on the little people of America.

Times like this you have to wonder whether the Democrats really are, all told, from the viewpoint of the 99%, the lesser evil.

Update.

I have seen it said no treaty is involved in this agreement, and that O can implement the US part by regulatory changes.

If it is so it should not be, since such big and important changes should be done by the legislative power and not the executive power.

Broadly, the job of the executive power is not to decide what needs to be enforced (that's a job for the legislature), but only to enforce it.

The American government fudges on that by passing what approaches de facto legislative power to the executive in the guise of regulatory discretion.

And if it is so and he does make such regulatory changes it would not be without fierce Republican opposition and might be a significant campaign issue in 2016.

Kyoto I as an issue did not generally play to the Democrats' advantage, as I recall.

This is an astonishingly deceptive story from AP.

Obama's Climate Deal With China Enrages GOP In Congress

How many ways can you deceive?

China is bound to nothing by the deal.

And the deal won't do anything serious about the problem, if there is one, largely because it only binds us.

It thus would certainly impose significant costs on Americans while not at all certainly doing more than insignificant good, if any, for anyone.

But, hey, the Chinese agreed to a deal!

A first!

What great news!

Uh-huh.

Update, 11132014, 2052 hrs. EDT.

Since O and his lefty supporters are far from stupid I conclude that global warming, real or not, due to our industrial emissions or not, is a smokescreen, a pretext for a vast ideologically driven project to "level the global playing field" by leveling America down.

An enterprise that, not coincidentally, will make a lot of rich people very much richer.

I say again I often wonder whether it is really true that, on the whole, the Democrats are the lesser evil.

Personally, I would expect a president who wished America well - a Patriot King, one might almost say - to seek to prolong the age of American economic and military preeminence.

For the sake of America and Americans.

But the age of patriot presidents seems to be past, and our rulers now sacrifice and expend our power and wealth for the good of others on a global scale.

Yes, this, too, belongs to American exceptionalism, to the role of the proudly indispensable nation.

Mandeville's wisdom applies to countries, too.

A national mission is the political offspring that flattery begot upon pride.