John Oliver on the Paris climate deal: 'Trump may have done us a tiny favor'

Extract from The Guardian

On Last Week Tonight, the host mocked the president for his decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement

‘The whole world is not secretly conspiring against the United States’ ... John Oliver. Photograph: YouTube

Jake Nevins

Tuesday 6 June 2017 01.54 AEST

John Oliver addressed Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, calling the president a “fucking egomaniac”.

On Sunday’s episode of his HBO show Last Week Tonight, Oliver stated: “Earth, the adopted home world of Björk: the reason we have to talk about Earth is this,” before showing news clips of Trump’s speech at the White House rose garden last week in which he formally announced his intention to remove the US from the agreement, agreed by 195 nations in a global effort to fight climate change.
Trump’s decision was “hardly surprising”, said Oliver. “As a title, [Paris accords] is so off-brand for him it might as well have been called ‘the globalist cock surrender’ or a light jog.
“But pulling out of this is a huge deal,” he continued, firing back at Trump’s claim that the deal made the US a laughingstock to other countries. “They were happy because they secured a landmark victory for the future of the planet, you fucking egomaniac. The whole world is not secretly conspiring against the United States.”

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver mocked the president for his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 4 June 2017 HD : Paris Agreement - Last Week Tonight 6/4/17 HBO  

Oliver then addressed the president’s belief that the deal harmed American businesses, 25 of which, including Microsoft and Intel, bought an advertisement in the New York Times in a last-ditch attempt to persuade Trump to remain a part of the agreement.

“Well, come on. He was clearly never going to be convinced by an ad in the New York Times,” Oliver joked. “How was he going to see it? If those companies really wanted to get his attention, they needed to talk KFC into putting out a full-bucket ad which he could read on the toilet while eating chicken, because that, at his core, is who our president is.”

But Oliver remains optimistic about the fight against climate change, suggesting Trump’s highly controversial decision has its benefits.
“Trump may have inadvertently done us a tiny favor this week, because the problem with climate change is that it’s always felt so abstract and impersonal and far off in the future,” he explained. “The usual symbols that we use don’t do much to fix or help that. It’s either a graph that’s difficult to understand or a sad polar bear on a small piece of ice. And it’s hard to get emotionally fired up over that.
“But this week, the climate change movement may have gotten a symbol to rally around, because apparently it was never quite enough to motivate ourselves out of love for this large gassy orb,” Oliver joked. “But maybe just maybe we can now motivate ourselves to do something out of our loathing of this one,” he concluded, pointing to an image of Trump.