Pittsburgh or Paris? Donald Trump, Political Scientist
By NBP Editorial Board | June 2, 2017, 17:42 EDT
John Brayton, of Haverhill, holds up a sign protesting what he sees as the Trump administration’s indifference to global warming during the climate change rally on Boston Common on Saturday, April 29, 2017.
Photo by Lori Brannigan Kelly for New Boston Post. The wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Left over President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate change agreement is not only overblown, it’s puzzling.
This was, after all, a campaign promise that Trump made. That he ever considered not pulling us out of the accord is more surprising than his actually doing it is.
But aside from keeping a promise, his decision is also good news for the United States.
The Paris accord is not based on the idea that global climate is changing. That observation is not only “settled science” — it has been the case through all of the planet’s existence.
The Paris accord is about taxing production and use of materials. It’s about limiting economic activity that allows people to make and use goods that they need. And it’s a bad idea.
Taxing and regulating carbon consumption to try to limit man’s effect on climate will someday be looked upon by economists the way bloodletting is seen by doctors today.
But actually, bloodletting was a better idea. If the disease really were in the blood, then it makes sense that getting rid of portions of the blood would also get rid of the disease. Today, through medical science, we know that’s wrong, that bloodletting is not only ineffective but also harmful. But it’s hard to blame physicians from centuries ago for not realizing that, given what they had to go on.
Yet in our own day, we have abundant evidence that climate change, though real, has been occurring since the planet’s beginning, including periods when activity by man could have had little or no effect. Temperatures have gone up, such as in the Middle Ages; and temperatures have gone down, such as in the mini-Ice Age.
Do we human beings have an effect on climate today?
Well, sure. Everybody and everything does. But do we actually cause global warming through emissions of so-called greenhouse gases?
The evidence is mixed, at best. The pro-tax-and-regulation “settled science” claimants would be easier to believe if they weren’t so reluctant to fork over their data.
Instead, they haven’t proven the sky is falling, or if it is that we’re causing it to fall, or that anything they say we should do would prevent it from falling.
But it’s easy to show how many people would get hurt if their anti-economy prescriptions were put into practice: all of us.
Trump made the right decision.
