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Technically it never reached the point of being able to be ratified. First, there must be the "advice and consent" of the Senate, and THEN ratified by the POTUS. However, there is a long tradition in the US called "Sole Executive" agreements. Congress has tried several times to "revoke" this tradition and failed, so this is one of those measures that is "not specifically denied" so technically allowed. In regards to the Paris Agreement, there is (was?) a high chance of any monetary costs incurred by US entities would have been challenged and blocked; reasons for this stem from the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

The Paris Agreement was, however, crafted specifically with this in mind. They purposly did NOT call it a "treaty", and this is exact reason why most of the terms are nonbinding, and why it calls for countries to set targets without setting sanctions for noncompliance. It's purposely vague because of US law.

References: International Agreements and U.S. Law
The Constitution - Executive agreements
The Paris Accord and the Reality of Presidential Power

Unlike Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower possessed, at most, a tepid commitment to human rights, ...
The real problem for the administration came in the form of the civil rights movement domestically ...
A clearly distressed Eisenhower was compelled to call in the National Guard to enforce the court's decision and to protect from mob violence the African American students who were scheduled to attend the high school.

Read more: http://www.americanforeignrela...

Is that the relevant point? You don't think that agreements should be ratified when they don't have penalties? You're saying it's okay for the president to speak for the country and make agreements without oversight? Could there be any bad consequences down the road if we let it pass this one time?

Well, it'd hardly be the first time (source):

You kinda left out this part:

Controversy surrounds the legal authority of the president to make executive agreements. The practice of unilateral presidential accords with foreign nations conflicts with the constitutional emphasis on joint decision-making, and with the Framers' understanding of the reach and breadth of the treaty power, which Hamilton described in a letter under the pseudonym "Camillus" as "competent to all the stipulations which the exigencies of national affairs might require; competent to the making of treaties of alliance, treaties of commerce, treaties of peace, and every other species of convention usual among nations. And it was emphatically for this reason that it was so carefully guarded; the cooperation of two-thirds of the Senate with the president, being required to make any treaty whatever."

The BEST defense of Obama that you can muster is "others have done it too!!!!"

REALLY?!?!!

Is that the relevant point? You don't think that agreements should be ratified when they don't have penalties? You're saying it's okay for the president to speak for the country and make agreements without oversight? Could there be any bad consequences down the road if we let it pass this one time?

Well, it'd hardly be the first time (source):

Presidents often have chosen to exclude the Senate in making some controversial and historic international pacts through the channel of executive agreements, among them, the destroyer-base deal with Great Britain in 1940, the Yalta and Potsdam agreements of 1945, the Vietnam peace agreement of 1973, and the Sinai agreements of 1975.

If you can end WWII with a few executive agreements, a fluffy climate promise seems like small potatoes. It's constitutionally controversial, but there's also tons of small practical agreements made here and there with other nations. It was probably never the intent that the president had to run back to Congress to get their permission to give an embassy an extra parking spot. It's actually an odd coupling, Congress can declare war but the President can apparently end one, seems like a mismatch even though he's commander-in-chief. Unfortunately I don't think you'll get a do-over to make it clearer any time soon.

Which is of course irrelevant. The US (nor USSR) were not under international sanctions with agreements not to do it at the time, unlike North Korea.

Speaking of irrelevant.

Not that it matters, I couldn't find much in you post that was true.
Cold war sanctions

this article is interesting (I'm not able to check the validity).

some highlights:
- Sweden tried to implement a neutral Scandinavian block but failed ultimately as Denmark and Norway joined the NATO.
- Finland signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union and regarded itself as strictly neutral. The US used the status of Finland as example for a successful co-existence with the SU while still remaining independent and neutral.
- While exporting of strategic goods and technology to neutral states was forbidden the US included the neutral countries in the economical import/export network

A Wikipedia article claims that "the U.S. promised to provide military force in aid of Sweden in case of Soviet aggression. Knowledge of this guarantee was by the Swedish governments kept from the Swedish public until 1994, when a Swedish research commission found evidence for it" - unfortunately without source.

Congress passed the Case Act of 1972, requiring the secretary of state to send to Congress within sixty days the text of "any international agreement, other than a treaty," to which the United States is a party. If the president decided that publication would compromise national security, he could transmit it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs under an injunction of secrecy removable only by the president. But presidents from Nixon to Clinton ignored or circumvented the statute, and congressional enforcement efforts have been largely ineffective. The source: http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/A-D/The-Constitution-Executive-agreements.html

Jefferson's political ideal was an agrarian republic of "small" independent farmers. The world of the slave-holding elite

While Thomas Jefferson wanted an agrarian society he was against slavery. Sure, he owned some slaves however all of them he inherited from either his father or his father-in-law, but he himself was antislavery. Some of the slaves he freed. Also in his original drafts of the "Declaration of Independence" he wrote that all people, including negros and women, had the same natural rights he wrote of. That's not exactly the elitist you make him out to be.