The Twitter blizzard consisted of Tweets like this one from @dogydownfilms. Photo: Instagram
Before last month’s presidential inauguration, the advocacy group Protect Our Winters staged a 24-hour “Twitter blizzard” with tweets about the need for the United States to keep the Paris Agreement, an agreement that will work towards mitigating the world’s greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2020. And in keeping with this winter’s epic weather pattern, snow it did.
The social media storm reached 11 million people with a tempest of 24,000 Tweets on January 5 and 6, from legions of Olympians, professional athletes and regular skiers and snowboarders alike. Emblazoned with a snowflake icon, Tweets from POW carried the hashtag #KeepParis.
Nearly a month into his presidency, Donald Trump has not followed through on his campaign promise to drop the agreement, a 200-nation pact reached in 2015 to slow greenhouse gas emissions.
The folks at POW hoped to get a response from the Tweeter-in-Chief himself. And though that never came, Trump is now well aware of resistance to his hopes to scrap the Paris Agreement. As the Los Angeles Times reports, some of Trump’s own cabinet appointees, along with major corporations and even moderate Republicans see no reason to back away from the climate accord.
As you might imagine, the support for the agreement at the highest levels of government and business don’t necessarily arise from environmental concerns.
“Outside the confines of Trump campaign rallies, the offices of a few free market think tanks and the tea party stalwarts in Congress, the broader consensus is that abandoning Paris won’t save trillions of dollars, as Trump promised, but hurt the economy,” reports the Times.
