OPINION:
Predicting tomorrow’s weather is often a crapshoot. Predicting the weather on a day a century from now is obviously throwing money away. Shoveling cash into schemes for regulating climate patterns generations far in the future is an investment in a fool’s gold mine. President Trump vows that Americans won’t be fooled again.
His proposed budget for fiscal 2018 “America First” eliminates State Department appropriations that would have gone to the United Nations Green Climate Fund, a favorite charity of Barack Obama’s administration. He says his environmental leadership marked “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” and pledged $3 billion to the fund, and made good on the first billion. The Trump budget further deletes the State Department’s annual $6.4 million allocation to U.N. climate change schemes. Mick Mulvaney, the director of Management and Budget, says “we consider that to be a waste of money.”
Timing is everything in weather forecasting and legislating, and 17 congressional Republicans put the wrong side of a wet finger to the prevailing wind. They co-sponsored a Republican Climate Resolution, vowing to keep climate change on the front burner just as the new president is taking it off the stove. The congressmen, including Elise Stefanik of New York, Carlos Curbelo of Florida, and Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania, argue that the changing climate — rain today, sunny tomorrow — could harm “productivity in key economic sectors such as construction, agriculture, and tourism, saddling future generations with costly economic and environmental burdens.” No tourist wants to be rained on at the Lincoln Memorial, but the clouds usually clear overnight.
Congress throws its weight behind hundreds of resolutions of varying importance each year, and enthusiasts for this resolution might find greater enthusiasm for a “National Rosie the Riveter Day,” or “Clean-up, Fix-up and Paint-up Week,” good causes both surely are. The Trump administration is attempting to do something even more useful by peeling back Obama-era regulations that restrain the U.S. economy like nothing since the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver.
To this end, the president announced a one-year review of the federal fuel-economy standards drawn up by Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, which would require manufacturers to raise the fleet average of cars 35 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon over the next 12 years. That would add $3,800 to the price of a new car.
The winds of climate change restraint are felt overseas as well. Representatives of the Group of 20 nations, meeting in Germany earlier this month, dropped from their final communique an affirmation of efforts to shower more government money on “green” projects. “Climate change,” says one government official, “is out for the time being.”
Mandates to use solar and wind sources for generating electric power have raised the price of electricity in Germany to three times what an American consumer typically pays. As a consequence, electricity has been cut off to more than 330,000 mostly poor households over the past year.
Americans learned the hard way that control of the climate is not as simple as blowing money on futile energy schemes — the $535 million wasted on Solyndra still smolders in collective memory. Mr. Trump’s budgetary and regulatory policies demonstrate a level-headed intent to “heal the planet” by firing up the stalled engines of the American economy.
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