Donald Trump's Vision of Pittsburgh is Sooooooo 80s

[Cattledog]

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/donald-trump-pittsburgh-paris

Donald Trump officially announced the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change on Thursday, framing the 2015 deal as a kind of global plot to sabotage America.

"The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country's expense," Trump said. "They don't put America first. I do, and I always will."

And if Paris was the symbol of that ideology, the alternative, a nation of miners and pipelines, belching smoke like a charcoal grill, was represented by…Pittsburgh? "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," Trump said.

It was a bad comparison, since citizens of both Pittsburgh and Paris share an interest in averting a minimum projected sea level rise of 2.4 feet by 2100, in the scenario in which the climate accord's goals aren't met.

But it was an especially bad comparison because Pittsburgh isn't the burned-out steel town Trump thinks it is. In fact, it's a pretty good example of how a city can recover and adapt to changing economic circumstances. Pittsburgh's doing OK.

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