Grant Carbon Dioxide a Presidential Pardon

Unlike Hunter Biden whom his dad just pardoned, carbon dioxide has gotten an unjustly bad rap.

Even President Ilham Aliyev, host of the 2024 29th annual United Nations global climate conference held in Baku, Azerbaijan, says so, telling delegates that CO2-emitting fossil fuels are a “gift of God.”

Aliyev went on to criticize attendees and the “Western fake news media” for the “double standards, a habit to lecture other countries and political hypocrisy” of developed countries on climate matters.

Bear in mind that this is the same U.N. annual conference that kicked off the Paris Climate Agreement “net-zero” fantasy carbon pledges in 2015 with hopes this year of establishing a global emissions trading market.

Just for the record, global CO2 emissions reached an all-time high in 2023 despite global renewable energy investments of nearly $12 trillion over nine years leading up to that time — nearly twice the level Paris promoted — while fossil fuels continue to provide about 80% of the world’s energy.

Meanwhile the key reasons we were told this climate salvation were so urgent have since proven to be false alarms.

Recall, for example, the distressed polar bear floating away to its death on melting ice in Al Gore’s 2006 science fiction horror film “An Inconvenient Truth” due to global warming before the scare got rebranded as “climate change.”

Rather than facing extinction, thanks to curbs on hunting rather than upon CO2, the polar bear population has more than doubled since the 1960s from around 12,000 to about 26,000.

And those coral aquatic environments such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef that are being killed by CO2-induced rising ocean temperatures?

After sustaining substantial hurricane damage in 2009 scientists predicted that the reef’s coral would be reduced by another half by 2022. Whereas over the past three years, it has gained more cover than at any point since records were first collected in 1986.

Then in 2019, the U.N. warned us that rising oceans would flood coastal and island regions unless we gave billions of dollars to help poor and developing countries battle climate change.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was featured in a suit standing up to his thighs in water for a Time magazine cover shot taken at the small Pacific Island of Tuvalu for a headlined feature titled “Our Sinking Planet.”

Incidentally, seas have in fact not been rising at an accelerated rate … just the same 7 inches per century that has been occurring since long before the Industrial Revolution introduced smokestacks and SUVs.

Even The New York Times recently fessed up on what it called “surprising” news that almost all atoll islands are stable or increasing in size. That's a fact that as Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, points out has been scientifically documented for more than a decade as accretion in the form of additional sand from old coral washes up on low-lying shores to replace erosion from ocean waves.

Nor, as President Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed, is “climate change” causing more frequent or extreme killer weather events.

For example, records dating back to 1850 indicate the number of major U.S. Category 3-5 landfall hurricanes has overall been declining, whereas few dispute that temperatures have warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius since that time when a “Little Ice Age” mercifully ended in the mid-1800s.

President Biden was also extremely wrong by a factor of 25 in stating that “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.”

Whereas extreme heat kills an estimated 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills about 152,000, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold.

Even more people will die without adequate, affordable and reliable fossil energy — natural gas in particular — to warm their homes.

In any case, there is no evidence whatsoever of any climate emergency.

A "World Climate Declaration" made public by the nonprofit scientific Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) endorsed by 1,609 informed scientists and professionals — including two Nobel Laureates, John Clauser (USA) and Ivar Giaever (Norway/USA) — clearly says otherwise.

CLINTEL points out that consistently failed climate models and predictions have exaggerated the effect of greenhouse gases while ignoring the enriching and vital vegetation benefits of CO2 which is essential to all life.

A new Trump administration must and will base government energy policies upon urgent, pragmatic realities rather than unsupportable climate alarm hype.

We can cheerfully count on President Trump to withdraw America from the Paris Climate Agreement, just as he previously did before President Biden reversed that prudent executive decision.

It’s also time to send that agreement along with the United Nations’ companion Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 to the 53-seat GOP majority Senate to permanently kill from further consideration lacking the two-thirds consent approval required for all binding international treaties.

Closer to home, let’s be hopeful that Trump’s new EPA administrator Lee Zeldon, along with Chris Wright, his pick as the next secretary of Energy, are successful in rooting out the climate-energy bureaucracies where repressive regulations are being established through agency rulemaking rather than congressional legislation and oversight.

A monumental step forward would be for President Trump to prevail upon Congress to reverse the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding which unfairly brands CO2 as a “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act used as justification for imposing anti-fossil regulations across DOT, DOE, and numerous other government alphabet agencies.

No, CO2 is not a dangerous pollutant.

It instead deserves grateful respect and long-overdue presidential and media pardons.