All climate agreements are a joke

Can you find Gambia on a globe? Either way, it is the only nation on Earth that is successfully living up to its commitments under the Paris accord on climate change.

That's how serious the Paris Agreement is — no one is living up to their commitments except for Gambia. Aren't you glad President Joe Biden's first act in office was to rejoin the accord?

According to a new report from Climate Action Tracker, the United States and Germany are doing an "insufficient" job. China, the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, is doing a "highly insufficient" job in curbing those emissions.

Usually, the most astounding thing about government actions on climate change is the way Western leaders live in denial. They pretend their own nations' emissions mean something when China continues to build coal-fired power plants and flatly refuses to participate meaningfully in emissions reduction. Speaking of which, China just rebuffed John Kerry's request that it undertake serious emissions reductions, which the Paris accord did not require of it. Maybe the Obama administration should have negotiated a bit better. And as a consequence, there is no chance that the world will reduce global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

But that's not the most striking thing. What is most striking is the arrogant idiocy of the world's leaders, who believe they can change the weather by signing treaties and talking to each other. It isn't so, and all past experience in this regard has demonstrated that it isn't so.