“Until last week, Richard Nixon was responsible for the two worst-conceived American energy policies. On June 1, Donald Trump’s announcement of U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords displaced all competitors as the worst presidential initiative on energy in our nation’s history.”

– Hakes, “Quitting the Paris Climate Pact in Historical Perspective” (June 6, 2017)

“Historian Hakes got it exactly backwards. President Nixon violated economic law by imposing federal pricing on energy; President Trump removed an impetus to federal pricing for carbon-dioxide (CO2). Only if Trump had stayed in Paris would the Nixon analogy come into play.”

His bio line at Real Clear Energy reads: Jay Hakes is an energy historian who has worked for three presidents on energy issues. Experience aside, Mr. Hakes made just about the worst analogy possible regarding Donald Trump’s courageous decision to withdraw the United States from the redistributionist, toothless, ill-conceived Paris climate agreement.…

“Radical environmentalists will fight the [new executive] order in every way they can, in Congress, in the courts, in the media, and apparently in the streets. As a citizen, you need to stay informed of the stakes and tactics in this battle, and we at the Cornwall Alliance need your support to keep up the good fight.”

In a recent post, E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation provided this update in the moral trenches of the climate-change public policy debate.

“Environmentalists Vow to Fight Trump in the Streets Over Climate Policy”

If you pay attention to news sources outside the typical conservative camp, you’ll have noticed two things in the last couple days: First the titles are all ridiculous in their alarmism (we are all going to die, etc.…

“‘An inability to tolerate views different’? ‘Rage reactions’? Can we apply this mental health standard to Joe Romm and James Hansen, not to mention Paul Ehrlich in his diatribes against Julian Simon?”

“This is ironic to those of us who have encountered angry neo-Malthusians trying to wake us up to the coming food famine (1960s warnings), resource famine (1970s warnings), and, most recently, climate alarmism. Does this standard apply to them as it does to all things Trump?”

I have resubscribed to the New York Times. I received a 50 percent discount, and with Trump’s upset win in November I wanted to better understand what the intellectual/media elite were thinking. (And the answer is … they still don’t get it.)

In the Letters section of February 14th edition, I encountered “Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump.”…

“As a first priority, the Trump Administration must review, revise, reject or even rescind the SCC, and reduce its values well below what Obama used – perhaps even to zero or negative numbers. Doing so will destroy the justification for many expensive, intrusive, punitive, useless, counterproductive regulations.”

“The benefit estimates … will remain orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable SCC estimates, which means the B-C ratios will also remain very high.”

The Obama Administration aggressively used a Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) scheme to justify federal regulations pertaining to carbon-based fuels, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, coal mine and pipeline permit denials, energy development foreign aid, and many other actions.

While “SCC” may sound esoteric or academic, it is a critical concept. Without the artificial and inflated SCC estimates, many recent energy and environmental regulations could not have been justified or promulgated.…