The Five' panel explains why the Paris Climate Accord is meaningless

The panel on Fox News' "The Five" discussed the Paris climate accord and why it would have been meaningless to stay on board, and just as meaningless to leave it. They discussed the issue on Wednesday before Trump made his announcement that the U.S. would abandon the agreement.

"Imagine a ticket where the prize is way smaller than the price of entry," Greg Gutfeld explained. "A ticket that costs 10 grand, that gets you 5 bucks in a hundred years — that's the accord's most optimistic prediction. That it will cut temperatures by 0.05 percent Celsius over a century, let that sink in."

"In scientific terms, it's trivial," he said, "in human terms, it's homicidal. Trivial because there would be no difference if we did nothing, but it turns homicidal when you think about what we might have done instead with all those trillions of dollars."

"You could solve everything from malaria to malnutrition," he concluded.

"The other interesting thing is if you remember when this was signed we talked about it on the show," Dana Perino said later on in the segment. "We were making fun of them for saying that President [Barack] Obama deserved all this credit because it actually will achieve nothing."

"If you look at the Massachusetts, M.I.T., assessment," she said, "it was something like global temperatures could reduce by 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100. That's a long time."

Perino went on to say that Trump could have said that the accord "doesn't really have any teeth in it," had he chosen to stay in it, but also could say that it doesn't matter if he chose to leave it. "Either way, I think it doesn't matter."

"I actually read what it said, listen to this," Jesse Waters said, piling on. "It sets goals for reducing emissions. And then every year they meet at a fancy place and they talk about whether or not they met those goals."

"This is why President Obama didn't deserve all that praise and adulation at the time," Perino pointed out.

"And it's non-binding," Waters continued, "and there are no penalties for not reaching the goals, and you can pull out of it, and there are no penalties for that either. So the whole thing is worthless.

"And even considering that Trump's policies do take into effect," he said, "under Trump's current policy approach, by 2025, our carbon emissions will be going down 19 percent lower than they will have been in 2005. So they're already projecting lower emissions, significantly, if we just continue down the path we're going on."

The lone voice of dissension came from Juan Williams who pointed out that the reduction in temperatures didn't take into account how they would have risen without the accord. Williams then said this was a distraction from Trump's failures to achieve his policy goals.

Politifact substantiated Perino's citation for the expected temperature change, with even the study's author lamenting that it wouldn't be enough under the Paris Accord.