Climate pact a bad deal for the U.S.

The nations of the world will gather in Paris later this month to negotiate a major climate change agreement. Most of the world's leaders will arrive in carbon-spewing private jets. It would be even more appropriate if they drove Volkswagens.

The Paris conference stems from the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the goal of which was the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere." The United States has done its part: our emissions aren't merely stable, they're dropping.

Since 2008, U.S. emissions have declined by almost 11 percent. If they fall another 6 percent, we'll be at 1992 levels. The biggest contributor to this decline is fracked natural gas.

We're not alone in cutting carbon. Europe's done it too, mostly by closing inefficient East German industries and shifting to natural gas in Britain. It's the free market at work: those German factories were built by communists, while British coal was mined by socialists and owned by the state.

But all that apparently isn't good enough. In Paris, the Obama administration's goal is to do an end-run around the Senate by negotiating a tricky, two-headed agreement.

The first part will be a political promise to reduce our emissions. The second, legally binding part will send billions of dollars to the developing world for "climate change adaptation."

The point of this convoluted structure, as White House spokesman Josh Earnest has said, is to deny Congress "some opportunity to render judgment about a climate change agreement." The administration wants to claim the deal isn't a treaty because it wants to commit to it without a Senate vote.

But for the developing nations in Paris, it's not what the United States does that matters. And they don't want to cut emissions, because that would leave them forever trapped in poverty. Without fossil fuels, all of us would still be peasants. What they do very much want is that American money.

So in Paris, the developing world will sign onto the non-binding pledge to reduce emissions, but only if the United States commits to sending them a big check. It's a great deal for the developing world, but a terrible one for us: all we get are bills and regulations.

The only place a Paris agreement will reduce emissions is in the United States and Europe, where they are falling. And that's where VW comes in: the German firm has acknowledged that about 11 million of its cars deliberately cheated on nitrogen oxide emissions tests.

Germany has spent years burnishing its record as an emissions crusader and champion of corporate good governance. Yet the scandal still happened. And despite masses of government tests, the cheating was found by university researchers.

VW is a large company, but it's just one firm. Multiply VW by millions, and you'll see the problem with Paris: Catching cheaters will be hard, because governments (and climate scientists) know less than they think they do. And preventing cheating will be impossible, because the Paris deal won't meaningfully bind developing nations.

Even if you believe in man-made global warming, Paris isn't the answer. If you pay other nations because they're emitters, they have an incentive to keep on emitting so they can ask for more money. If you say you'll take it away, they have an incentive to lie about their emissions.

Big reductions in carbon won't come from threatening developing nations with poverty, or bribing them with American taxpayer dollars. Reductions will come when those nations are rich enough to move away from smokestack industries. Any other answer is as phony as VW's clean diesels.