As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country. This includes ending the implementation of the nationally determined contribution and, very importantly, the Green Climate Fund which is costing the United States a vast fortune.

-President Trump on the Paris Climate Agreement, June 1, 2017

Climate scientist James Hansen called it “a fraud really, a fake.” President Donald Trump called it “a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.” And this odd couple of alarmist scientist and skeptical politician agreed: the Obama-led Paris climate accord was all about lobbyists and imaging, not climate change.

Trump’s decision, one year in, remains bold, brilliant, and correct. And it will only get better as the rest of the world confronts the disconnect between what economic coordination and progress require and what starry-eyed bureaucrats want.

Consumers desire the most affordable, plentiful, reliable energies. Taxpayers favor neutrality, non-involvement. And governments ’round the world need to direct their limited resources to real here-and-now problems, not speculative, distant, unsolvable ones. As such, the U.S.-side Paris-deflating decision is pro-world, leaving only parasitic bureaucrats in the cold.

The Agreement

What exactly is the Paris climate agreement? In the words of its sponsor, the United Nations:

The Paris Agreement requires all Parties to put forward their best efforts [to reduce man-made greenhouse gases] through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead. This includes requirements that all Parties report regularly on their emissions and on their implementation efforts.

The goal of the accord is to limit the rise of global temperatures to not more than 2 degrees Celsius—and attempt to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius—above pre-industrial levels. The highly debatable assumption is that temperatures will otherwise surpass these levels because of human activity in the foreseeable future.

The accord is necessarily voluntary and aspirational for each of its signatories. Yet it is binding on citizens, in that each nation-party can forcibly intervene in its own energy market to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), as well as methane and other manmade greenhouse gases, despite the cost and hardship of doing so.

In the U.S., President Barack Obama was barreling down the interventionist tracks on the pretense of complying with the Paris Agreement, which was ratified (under its own terms) in November 2016. The U.S. was going firm on emissions reductions, while the rest of the world had much more latitude in its supposed reductions. And the US was the chief payer into the accord’s “Green Fund” to subsidize poorer nations in their forced energy transformation efforts.

Trump’s Reasoning

President Trump’s statement one year ago today on the Paris pullout comprised 2,500 words. Here are some highlights:

• “Compliance with the terms of the Paris Accord and the onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025 according to the National Economic Research Associates.”
• “China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years—13…. Not us. India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries.”
• “China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020…. Even Europe is allowed to continue construction of coal plants.”
• “Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree—think of that; this much—Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100…. In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America … in the year 2030.”
• “The [Paris Accord’s] Green Fund would likely obligate the United States to commit potentially tens of billions of dollars of which the United States has already handed over $1 billion…. In 2015, the Green Climate Fund’s executive director reportedly stated that estimated funding needed would increase to $450 billion per year after 2020. And nobody even knows where the money is going to.”
• “The risks [of the Paris Accord] grow as historically these agreements only tend to become more and more ambitious over time. In other words, the Paris framework is a starting point—as bad as it is—not an end point.”
• “… exiting the agreement protects the United States from future intrusions on the United States’ sovereignty and massive future legal liability. Believe me, we have massive legal liability if we stay in.”

Conclusion

The case against the Paris Agreement has only grown stronger as its “worthless words,” as Hansen called them, have run up against the reality of a business-as-usual mineral-energy world. China and India are going big with coal. The European Union’s CO₂ emissions are rising. And a globally-connected natural-gas world emerging from the shale-gas boom is locking in a fossil-fuel-future for decades to come.

“The president made a tremendously courageous decision by saying we’re going to get out of the Paris Accord, put America first, and make sure that we lead with action and not words,” stated EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. In fact, Trump’s announcement goes down as one of the greatest single energy-policy moments in recent history, joining President Reagan’s oil price-and-allocation decontrol order of January 1981, which ended the Nixon-to-Carter energy crisis.

May the Paris Agreement continue to unravel and go the way of the ill-fated Kyoto Protocol of 1997. And may energy consumers and taxpayers win to help make the world, not only the U.S., great.

“If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050…. The rise in global temperature is predicted to … caus[e] sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”

— Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun.” New York Times, June 24, 1988.

It has been 30 years since the alarm bell was sounded for manmade global warming caused by modern industrial society. And predictions made on that day—and ever since—continue to be falsified in the real world.

The predictions made by climate scientist James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer back in 1988—and reported as model projected by journalist Philip Shabecoff—constitute yet another exaggerated Malthusian scare, joining those of the population bomb (Paul Ehrlich), resource exhaustion (Club of Rome), Peak Oil (M. King Hubbert), and global cooling (John Holdren).

Erroneous Predictive Scares

Consider the opening global warming salvo (quoted above). Dire predictions of global warming and sea-level rise are well on their way to being falsified—and by a lot, not a little. Meanwhile, a CO2-led global greening has occurred, and climate-related deaths have plummeted as industrialization and prosperity have overcome statism in many areas of the world.

Take the mid-point of the above’s predicted warming, six degrees. At the thirty-year mark, how is it looking? The increase is about one degree—and largely holding (the much-discussed “pause” or “warming hiatus”). And remember, the world has naturally warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age to the present, a good thing if climate economists are to be believed.

Turning to sea-level rise, the exaggeration appears greater. Both before and after the 1980s, decadal sea-level rise has been a few inches. And it has not been appreciably accelerating. “The rate of sea level rise during the period ~1925–1960 is as large as the rate of sea level rise the past few decades, noted climate scientist Judith Curry. “Human emissions of CO2 mostly grew after 1950; so, humans don’t seem to be to blame for the early 20th century sea level rise, nor for the sea level rise in the 19th and late 18th centuries.”

The sky-is-falling pitch went from bad to worse when scientist James Hansen was joined by politician Al Gore. Sea levels could rise twenty feet, claimed Gore in his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, a prediction that has brought rebuke even from those sympathetic to the climate cause.

Now-or-Never Exaggerations

In the same book/movie, Al Gore prophesied that unless the world dramatically reduced greenhouse gasses, we would hit a “point of no return.” In his book review of Gore’s effort, James Hansen unequivocally stated: “We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

Time is up on Gore’s “point of no return” and Hansen’s “critical tipping point.” But neither has owned up to their exaggeration or made new predictions—as if they will suddenly be proven right.

Another scare-and-hide prediction came from Rajendra Pachauri. While head of a United Nations climate panel, he pleaded that without drastic action before 2012, it would be too late to save the planet. In the same year, Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, predicted “global disaster” from the demise of Arctic sea ice in four years. He too, has gone quiet.

Nothing new, back in the late 1980s, the UN claimed that if global warming were not checked by 2000, rising sea levels would wash entire countries away

There is some levity in the charade. In 2009, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted that the world had only 50 days to save the planet from global warming. But fifty days, six months, and eight years later, the earth seems fine.

Climate Hysteria hits Trump

The Democratic Party Platform heading into the 2016 election compared the fight against global warming to World War II. “World War III is well and truly underway,” declared Bill McKibben in the New Republic. “And we are losing.” Those opposed to a new “war effort” were compared to everything from Nazis to Holocaust deniers.

Heading into the 2016 election, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson warned that “a vote for Trump is a vote for climate catastrophe.” In Mother Jones, professor Michael Klare similarly argued that “electing green-minded leaders, stopping climate deniers (or ignorers) from capturing high office, and opposing fossil fueled ultranationalism is the only realistic path to a habitable planet.”

Trump won the election, and the shrill got shriller. “Donald Trump’s climate policies would create dozens of failed states south of the U.S. border and around the world,” opined Joe Romm at Think Progress. “It would be a world where everyone eventually becomes a veteran, a refugee, or a casualty of war.”

At Vox, Brad Plumer joined in:

Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States…. We’re at risk of departing from the stable climatic conditions that sustained civilization for thousands of years and lurching into the unknown. The world’s poorest countries, in particular, are ill-equipped to handle this disruption.

Renewable energy researcher John Abraham contended that Trump’s election means we’ve “missed our last off-ramp on the road to catastrophic climate change.” Not to be outdone, academic Noam Chomsky argued that Trump is aiding “the destruction of organized human life.”

Falsified Alarms, Compromised Science

If science is prediction, the Malthusian science of sustainability is pseudo-science. But worse, by not fessing up, by doubling down on doom, the scientific program has been compromised.

“In their efforts to promote their ‘cause,’” Judith Curry told Congress, “the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem.” She continued:

This behavior risks destroying science’s reputation for honesty. It is this objectivity and honesty which gives science a privileged seat at the table. Without this objectivity and honesty, scientists become regarded as another lobbyist group.

Even DC-establishment environmentalists have worried about a backfire. In 2007, two mainstream climate scientists warned against the “Hollywoodization” of their discipline. They complained about “a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.” To which Al Gore (the guilty party) responded: “I am trying to communicate the essence [of global warming] in the lay language that I understand.”

“There has to be a lot of shrillness taken out of our language,” remarked Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp in 2011. “In the environmental community, we have to be more humble. We can’t take the attitude that we have all the answers.”

Most recently, Elizabeth Arnold, longtime climate reporter for National Public Radio, warned that too much “fear and gloom,” leading to “apocalypse fatigue,” should be replaced by a message of “hope” and “solutions” lest the public disengage. But taxes and statism don’t sound good either.

Conclusion

If the climate problem is exaggerated, that issue should be demoted. Enter an unstated agenda of deindustrialization and a quest for money and power that otherwise might be beyond reach of the climate campaigners. It all gets back to what Tim Wirth, then US Senator from Colorado, stated at the beginning of the climate alarm:

We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

“Right thing” in terms of economic and environmental policy? That’s a fallacy to explode on another day.

Kinder-Morgan, the nation’s largest midstream energy company, just announced a multi-billion-dollar pipeline project to move two billion cubic feet of natural gas each day from West Texas to Gulf Coast consumers. At the same time, on the other side of the country, a federal judge threw out a climate-related lawsuit against some of the largest oil and gas companies in world.

All this brings to mind two non-binding shareholder resolutions instructing Kinder-Morgan to issue an environmental sustainability report and to assess the risk of climate change policy on its operations.

Amid a booming wellhead-to-burner-tip fossil-fuel market, and with clear judicial protection, should energy companies like Kinder-Morgan wade into the climate issue?

No, free market adherents argue. To economist Milton Friedman, profit-maximization best serves consumers and investors so long as the firm engages in “open and free competition without deception or fraud,” while respecting ethical norms.

In Just Business: Business Ethics in Action, Elaine Sternberg warned business to steer clear of shifting, subjective, emotional issues. A firm is not political debating society, much less a government, charity, church, or club. A firm creates long-term value for its owners, which then can use their wealth for philanthropic ends (such as Richard Kinder’s greening Houston initiative.)

So, Friedman/Sternberg would say: do not be distracted by stakeholder politics—and refrain from issuing specialized reports on social issues, such as global warming politics.

What about the basic ethics of its operations? Here, Kinder-Morgan can defer to the existing literature about the efficacy of the midstream energy business. Pipelines are a safer alternative than truck or rail transportation. Storage related to transportation (another major Kinder-Morgan function) ensures the reliability of energy deliveries to countless consumers.

Say that an outside party were to write, gratis, an environmental sustainability report for Kinder-Morgan. What might it say?

At a minimum, opposing viewpoints would have to be summarized. Take the famous global warming Senate hearing that just turned thirty years old. As summarized by the New York Times, climate models then predicted a temperature increase between 3 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2025–2050. Yet today, the recorded global increase is south of one degree. And temperatures have been relatively flat since the late 1990s (the much-discussed “pause” or “warming hiatus”).

Given global lukewarming, the benefits of carbon dioxide come into play, beginning with accelerated plant growth via the CO2 fertilization effect.

An environmental sustainability report should also highlight the utilitarian case for affordable, plentiful, reliable energy. As Alex Epstein argues in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, natural gas, coal, and oil have dramatically improved and protected life. “We don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous,” he states. “We take a dangerous climate and make it safe.” Climate-related deaths, in fact, have dramatically declined in the last century, as much as 99 percent. The protective nature of mineral energy and the wealth creation thereof are causal in this regard.

Dense hydrocarbons, in fact, have environmental advantages relative to dilute, intermittent renewables. “The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt,” noted Peter Huber in his book Hard Green. “Extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption.”

His conclusion? “The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.”

Kinder-Morgan, as other energy companies, should leave the sustainability and climate debates to scientists, public-policy wonks, and government bodies. Focus on serving consumers in the marketplace. And in this company’s and founder’s case, stay profitable so Houston can be greener too.