Paris deal: already showing itself to be a big dud

Walter Russell Mead states what is fairly obvious who understand normal-people economics as the engine of human advancement - and, not incidentally, a cleaner environment:

The Chinese are rich enough now to care about how filthy their air is; that will drive change more than anything that happens in Paris. Fracking has made natural gas cheaper and more reliable than coal in the United States. Online shopping is keeping people home from the malls, and more and more workers are working remotely. Down the road, more changes will come as the world shifts from a manufacturing economy based on metal bashing to an information and service economy. Technological change is also coming: self-driving cars, renewable energy that can actually compete with fossil fuels without generous government subsidies, genetically modified plants that don’t need fertilizer or pesticide, safe nuclear power. Always and everywhere, capitalism is pushing companies to produce more goods using fewer raw materials and energy, and generating less waste.

And carbon-capture systems don't fit into the picture at present. They've priced themselves out of the real-world market:

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Amber Rudd, the UK energy and climate change secretary, described the 1.5C goal as merely “aspirational” while defending the UK government’s decision last month to scrap £1bn in funding for carbon capture systems that could hold emissions down. “I don’t think it was a mistake,” she said. “They are still expensive.”

Of course, the overlords will give lip service to by-God forcing countries to develop such systems, but in the end, that good old LITD First Law of Economics will prevail: The money has to come from somewhere.

Even Freedom-Haters see that this arrangement is not feasible on the political level, let alone the economic reality:

Kerry had compelling political reasons to take the $100 billion a year of climate money out of the text of the treaty. Though not in the treaty, the $100 billion a year — now pushed back to 2025 — survives as a formal decision of the Paris conference (paragraph 54 of the decision document). That massive fund would have been not only a killer for the deal, it would also have been a killer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. As secretary of state, Clinton made the $100 billion pledge at the Copenhagen climate conference to keep those talks from cratering.

Of course, there will be an attempt at a raw shakedown, couched in ever-so-bureaucratize language about "international financing and technology transfer":

Article Four of the Paris Agreement states that developing countries should be provided with support for implementing the agreement, and this provision in turn is tied to Article Nine on the obligation of developed country parties to provide financial contributions to developing countries. India’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution makes this conditionality explicit by tying its mitigation efforts “to the availability and level of international financing and technology transfer” (emphasis is mine). By contrast, developed countries are on the hook and obligated to ratchet up their emissions cuts over time — whatever developing countries do or don’t do — in perpetuity.

Excuse me, India, may I chime in here for a moment? "Technology" belongs to particular companies, and it is their decision whether to "transfer" it. I doubt they will do so unless it's a "transfer" known "selling something of value at a profit."

Then there is this aspect: the Paris "agreement" puts the Most Equal Comrade on the position of being an outlaw. Not for the first time, I know, but on a perhaps unprecedented scale.

President Obama has developed a new presidential doctrine to bind his successors by aiming to make them accountable to the court of international opinion. “Everybody else is taking climate change really seriously,” the president said at a press conference shortly before he left Paris. “They think it’s a really big problem. . . . So whoever is the next president of the United States . . . is going to need to think this is really important.” If the president decides to ratify the Paris Agreement without obtaining congressional approval from two-thirds of the Senate, not only will he ensure that the only way of reversing the agreement will be to put a Republican in the White House, but he also will be subverting Article Two of the U.S. Constitution. For America, the Paris Agreement is a very big deal.

Exit question: How far can something this bad and wrong go before it finally meets the kind of death that bad and wrong things inevitably do?