Repealing the climate hoax

OPINION:

President Trump made his international debut as the 47th president at the World Economic Forum on Thursday. Speaking via video feed, he informed the assembled grandees that the United States is no longer a party to their climate schemes.

In 2019, it was Greta Thunberg who headlined the globalist gabfest to inspire panic over “runaway global warming.” The then-teenage activist added, “We are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who proposed the Green New Deal, echoed this apocalyptic timeline.

Mr. Trump refuses to play along with the doom-and-gloom grift.

“The Green New Deal was such a total disgrace,” he said. “It was conceived by people who are … less-than-average students and never even took a course in energy or the environment. It was just a game. Remember the world was going to end in 12 years? Well, the 12 years has come and gone.”

This is not the sort of thing elites traveled from every corner of the globe to hear. Heads of state and corporate titans went to great effort chartering more than 1,000 private jet flights to reach the ritzy Alpine resort town of Davos in style.

Because of insufficient runway warming, however, several arrivals from destinations such as Barcelona, Cologne and Oslo had to be diverted.

Such delays could have been avoided had they, as Mr. Trump did, taken advantage of videoconferencing. Or, they might have selected a clean-energy mode of transport, such as a sailboat. But comfort is king for those peddling remedies to looming climate catastrophes.

No wonder Mr. Trump isn’t buying what they’re selling. His first-week executive orders unraveled the preferential treatment prior administrations bestowed on inefficient “green” energy projects. Simultaneously, the White House is removing barriers to oil and gas exploration.

“We need double the energy we currently have,” Mr. Trump said, vowing to accelerate approval of new power generation plants.

The president also withdrew from the Paris climate accord, eliminated the electric car mandate and revoked permits for bird-slicing offshore windmill projects. In another bold move, he canceled the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding that preposterously branded carbon dioxide — a gas essential to life on this planet — as a pollutant.

The “pollution” designation gave unelected Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats a free hand to hobble productive businesses with red tape, intentionally driving up costs in the hopes of meeting pointless carbon dioxide reduction targets, thereby cooling the planet.

Global warming claims are especially rich after major cities along the Gulf of America just experienced near-blizzard conditions for the first time in a century. New Orleans was buried under 10 inches of snow. Pensacola, Florida, had to scramble to borrow enough snowplows to deal with the nearly 8 inches that fell Thursday.

Naturally, weather and climate aren’t the same thing. The journal Science recently published a paper exploring the planet’s temperature history using geologic data. The analysis revealed cycles of temperature ups and downs taking place over millions of years — long before mankind invented internal combustion.

There has never been a reason to panic or stop developing the most efficient sources of energy. Returning to sensible policies won’t just reduce the cost of filling up the tank or heating a home. Across the board, goods will be cheaper to produce and transport, easing inflation.

That’s a relief to the families who’ve been struggling to make ends meet — the sorts of people who never receive an invitation to Davos.