RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Donald Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. The United States never should have been in it in the first place, and it’s not even entirely clear that it ever was. In choosing American interests over Davos pieties — in the face of resistance from some within his own administration — the president here has made good on his promise to put America first.

The Paris Agreement is a treaty in all but name: The European signatories put it through their usual treaty-ratification protocols, but the United States did not. President Obama went to great lengths to pretend that the treaty was something other than a treaty because he did not wish to submit it for ratification by the Senate, which was almost sure to reject it — as, indeed, the Senate would likely reject it today. In a government of laws, process matters.

Substance matters, too, and here the Paris Agreement is deficient.

Even if one accepts, for the sake of argument, the alarmist interpretation of climate-change data, the Paris Agreement is unlikely to produce the desired result — and may not produce any result at all. Two countries that are responsible for a large share of greenhouse-gas emissions — China and India, the world largest and fourth-largest carbon dioxide emitters, respectively — have made only modest commitments under the agreement, which puts most of the onus on the more developed nations of North America and Western Europe. Both would continue to emit more carbon dioxide through at least 2030, and both have chosen, as their major commitment, not reductions in total emissions but reductions in “carbon intensity” — meaning emissions per unit of GDP. But these improvements are likely to happen anyway, irrespective of treaties or public policy, due to ordinary economic changes, such as the growth of the low-impact services sector relative to heavy industry, the aging-out of high-emissions vehicles, and the replacement of antiquated infrastructure.

There may be a certain humanitarian appeal in asking the richer nations to pay the higher price, but the developed world already is far more efficient in its use of energy. If you measure greenhouse-gas emissions relative to economic output, the United States already is more than twice as green as China, and it is a middling performer on that metric: France is five times as efficient, Norway and Sweden six times. The real cost of marginal emissions reductions is necessarily going to be much higher in Switzerland than it is in Mongolia.

The Paris Agreement fails to take that economic reality into account, and it does so in ways that could end up making emissions worse rather than improving them. For example, limiting the amount of coal consumed by North American power plants would not necessarily reduce the amount of coal consumed on Earth — and climate change is, famously, a planetary issue — but would instead most likely result in shifting coal consumption from relatively clean North American facilities to relatively dirty ones in China — the U.S. already is a net exporter of coal, and China is the world’s largest importer of it. Global energy markets are no great respecters of idealism, and the gentlemen in Beijing and New Delhi (and elsewhere) cannot reasonably be expected to adopt policies that will materially lower the standards of living of their respective peoples in order to satisfy the moral longings of Western elites. We don’t expect the powers that be in Washington to do so, either, and Trump here has chosen the right course.

The total costs of climate change to the United States would run less than 2 percent of GDP a century from now.

If you consider climate change a moral issue — and acting on it a moral imperative — then the Paris Agreement might look attractive: The desire to do something, anything at all, is very strong in environmental circles. But the question is more intelligently viewed as a question of risk assessment and cost–benefit trade-offs, in which case planning for future adaptation programs is the more intelligent course of action. As the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates the costs (and NRDC is not exactly the Heritage Foundation), the total costs of climate change to the United States — expansively defined to include everything from hurricane damage to higher food costs — would run less than 2 percent of GDP a century from now. Other studies have produced similar findings. Taking radical and expensive action in the present to avoid the possibility of a 1.8 percent hit to a GDP that will be much larger in the year 2100 than it is today is a losing proposition — especially given that the Paris Agreement is far from guaranteed to produce any meaningful results.

Climate change presents the world with genuine risks, and there is of course room for international action in addressing them. But the Paris Agreement takes the wrong approach, committing the United States to a high-cost/low-return program that secures neither our national interests nor global environmental interests. It is part of the Obama administration’s legacy of putting sentiment over substance, and the United States is better off without it.

When Canada’s Conservative party picked a new leader on May 27, most political observers believed that the libertarian-leaning Maxime Bernier, a sitting member of parliament and former cabinet minister, would win by a comfortable margin. Instead, the party chose Andrew Scheer, an MP and ex-House speaker whose views more closely align with former prime minister Stephen Harper.

On the surface, this may seem like a puzzling decision. The common perception is that Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau won the 2015 federal election by presenting himself as a left-leaning alternative to Harper. And while Trudeau’s political honeymoon is over, he continues to hold solid personal approval ratings (46 percent, according to an April poll by Nanos Research) and remains a strong bet to win the next election in 2019.

Bernier, therefore, seemed to fit the growing international trend of new, dynamic political leaders with moderate fiscal sensibilities and social values. Scheer, a fiscal and social conservative by comparison, appeared to be a step backward in the eyes of some pundits, commentators, and columnists.

Appearances can be deceiving, however.

Scheer has been an MP since 2004. At 38, he’s seven years younger than Trudeau, and as a husband and father of five he maintains the same youthful outlook on life as the current PM. His time as deputy speaker (2008–11) and then speaker of the House (2011–15) also worked to his political advantage during the leadership campaign. These are nonpartisan positions without voting privileges, meaning that the bulk of his political career has been spent developing relationships with politicians of different stripes. Most have described him as a thoughtful, pleasant, and intelligent individual.

Meanwhile, Scheer’s conservative values are perceived to be the natural continuation of Harper’s political legacy. He’s been called “Stephen Harper with a smile,” and for good reason.

Like his predecessor, he believes in small government, lower taxes, cracking down on crime, and greater individual liberty. He wants to reestablish a more muscular foreign policy, getting Canada back into the important fight against radical Islamic terrorism. He also wants to maintain a big-tent party, and recognizes that the Conservatives must continue to expand and broaden their base to ensure long-term political success.

Will the new leaders put an end to the anti-Israel bias that is the more painful because Irish fighters and pilots and captains helped Israel’s fight for independence; hundreds of Irish Americans like Paul O’Dwyer, Hugh Carey, helped mobilize support for Israel in America; the Lord Mayor of Dublin Robert Briscoe was Jewish, and Israel’s Major General Chaim Herzog who became Israel’s President in 1983 was born in Ireland…..rsk

We interrupt the panic about populism in Europe to bring some good news from Ireland. That country will get a new Prime Minister on Friday, and the Irish are choosing between two good options who offer a lesson for the revival of European economies.

The leadership change is precipitated by incumbent Enda Kenny’s resignation over a complex police scandal involving charges of special treatment for prominent officials. His center-right Fine Gael party must now select a new Prime Minister and party leader.

Fine Gael is traditionally the more free market of Ireland’s main parties but has often struggled to overcome entrenched interests in Dublin. So it’s remarkable that in this race both candidates to replace Mr. Kenny are running on aggressive pro-liberalization platforms.

The leading contender, Leo Varadkar, is the more eloquent of the two. Most of the media are wowed that he’s only 38, the son of an Indian immigrant and gay. But credit Fine Gael and Irish voters for taking Mr. Varadkar’s policy ideas more seriously than his biography.

Those ideas include administrative reforms such as prohibiting strikes by public-employee unions in critical services. He wants to address widespread worries about housing costs by phasing out subsidies for first-time buyers and focusing instead on new construction.

Mr. Varadkar and his challenger, Simon Coveney, both promise to reduce Ireland’s top marginal tax rate on income—income and payroll taxes combined—to below 50%, and reduce taxes for lower-income payers by adjusting brackets. Both advocate pension reforms centered on private savings accounts. Both would keep the 12.5% top corporate-tax rate while cutting other taxes on domestic firms and the self-employed to expand the economy beyond its reliance on global companies.

That reform agreement is a lesson to most others in Europe, not least British Prime Minister Theresa May, who is running on a welfare-state-as-usual platform. Mr. Kenny and his predecessor slashed government spending by €10 billion ($11.2 billion) to repair the post-financial crisis budget, as compared to €5 billion in tax increases. This weighting toward spending cuts helped return the economy to growth, and revenues are now booming. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump announced the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on Thursday, to the horror of green elites world-wide. If the decision shows he is more mindful of American economic interests than they are, the other virtue of pulling out is to expose the fraudulence of this Potemkin village.

In a Rose Garden ceremony, Mr. Trump broke with the 2015 agreement, starting the formal four-year withdrawal process: “We’re getting out. And we will start to renegotiate and we’ll see if there’s a better deal. If we can, great. If we can’t, that’s fine.”

This nonchalance inspired a predictable political meltdown, with the anticarbon lobby invoking death, planetary disaster and a permanent historical stain. Billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer called it “a traitorous act of war against the American people,” while Barack Obama accused his successor of joining “a small handful of nations that reject the future,” whatever that means. Get ready for another march on the White House.

But amid the outrage, the aggrieved still haven’t gotten around to resolving the central Paris contradiction, which is that it promises to be Earth-saving but fails on its own terms. It is a pledge of phony progress.

The 195 signatory nations volunteered their own carbon emission-reduction pledges, known as “intended nationally determined contributions,” or INDCs. China and the other developing nations account for 63% of annual global CO 2 emissions, and their share is rising. They submitted INDCs that pledged to peak the carbon status quo “around” 2030, and maybe later, or never, since Paris included no enforcement mechanisms to prevent cheating.

Meanwhile, the developed OECD nations—responsible for 55% of world CO 2 as recently as 2000—made unrealistic assurances that even they knew they could not achieve. As central-planning prone as the Obama Administration was, it never identified a tax-and-regulation program that came close to meeting its own emissions pledge of 26% to 28% reductions from 2005 levels by 2025.

Paris is thus an exercise in moral and social signaling that is likely to exert little if any influence on atmospheric CO 2 , much less on global temperatures. The Paris target was to limit the surface temperature increase to “well below” two degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial level by 2100. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joint Program conclude that even if every INDC is fulfilled to the letter, the temperature increase will be in the range of 1.9–2.6 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 3.1–5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Such forecasts are highly uncertain, which is inherent when scientists attempt to predict the future behavior of a system as complex as global climate. The best form of climate-change insurance is a large and growing economy so that future generations can afford to adapt to whatever they may confront.

Barack Obama’s foreign-policy failures, and those of his predecessors, regarding North Korea, are coming back to bedevil Donald Trump’s new presidency. Trump administration spokesmen have rightly said that Obama’s policy of “strategic patience,” a synonym for doing nothing, is over. But they have not yet articulated a replacement strategy.

Analysts across the political spectrum now believe that North Korea is perilously close to fabricating nuclear devices — at least five of which have already been detonated — small enough to mount on intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking targets within the continental United States. Some estimates posit this capability as early as 2018, with targets closer to the Korean Peninsula, including Japan and Hawaii likely at risk earlier.

Time is thus in desperately short supply, one of the fruits of 25 years of wasted efforts negotiating with Pyongyang. The harsh reality is that Kim Jung Un and his predecessors were never going to be chit-chatted out of their nuclear-weapons program, which they have always regarded as essential to regime survival. Neither persuasion nor coercion, nor any mix of the two, has succeeded before, and we have no reason to believe they will start succeeding now.

There are any number of suggestions about how to increase military pressure on North Korea, including scenarios for pre-emptive attacks against its nuclear and ballistic-missile assets. Certainly, no American president should be willing to countenance the risk to innocent U.S. civilians, and those of our vulnerable friends and allies in the region, that Pyongyang’s erratic leadership increasingly poses. Moreover, we must be sure China understands President Trump’s determination — reportedly explained in person to Chinese President Xi Jinping during the recent Mar-a-Lago summit — not to be held hostage by Pyongyang.

Unfortunately, however, years of savage Obama Administration defense budget cuts have rendered U.S. military options far from optimal. Obama underfunded national missile-defense programs, thereby rendering this last line of defense woefully inadequate compared to how President George W. Bush originally conceived it.

President Donald Trump said Thursday he has decided to withdraw the U.S. from the “draconian” Paris climate accord in an effort to boost American industry and independence, making a dramatic shift in policy despite intense lobbying from business leaders and close U.S. allies.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” Mr. Trump said, calling the decision a “reassertion of our sovereignty.”

Mr. Trump said he would begin negotiations to either re-enter the agreement under new terms or craft a new deal that he judges fair to the U.S. and its workers.

Framing the decision mostly in economic and political terms, the president focused on the agreement’s benefits for the world’s other leading carbon emitters, China and India. He voiced his concern for protecting the environment and eschewed any reiteration of his past claims that climate change isn’t real, but he said his decision is rooted in protecting the country’s interests.

“This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the U.S.,” Mr. Trump said.

The president’s “America first” stance was aimed squarely at his own political base, as he claimed a political win by delivering on a bold campaign promise after several others have thus far been unfulfilled. He has muddled the NAFTA trade deal and declaring China a manipulator, and was talked down from moving the embassy in Israel.

Mr. Trump’s action represents a 180-degree turn from the agenda of former President Barack Obama. It was cheered by some domestic industries, notably independent coal, oil and gas companies, including Murray Energy Corp., the country’s largest privately held coal miner.

But many large U.S. corporations opposed the move, including Exxon Mobil Corp. , General Electric Co. and Apple Inc., whose chief executives all publicly argued in favor of remaining in the pact. After Mr. Trump’s announcement, Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk said he was withdrawing from the president’s advisory councils, saying the decision “is not good for America or the world.”

Many big companies said exiting the Paris deal would have little immediate impact on their investments and strategies because they are facing customer and shareholder demands to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. They also operate in other countries, and in U.S. states, where climate rules remain a fact of life, so they continue to face government pressure on the issue. CONTINUE AT SITE

It has become routine for Palestinians to name public places, including streets, schools, parks and public squares after hard core terrorists convicted of the most heinous offenses. Over the years, Israel has vigorously protested these outrages to the European Union, the United Nations, and the United States. The latter, particularly under the Obama administration, offered faux sympathy and little else, while the UN and EU were routinely dismissive of Israel’s objections. In the eyes of the UN and EU, the Palestinians could do no wrong and the Obama administration, by its deafening silence, gravitated toward this obscene position. This shocking inaction further encouraged the Palestinians to engage in what can only be described as depraved and aberrant behavior.

But on May 28, something strange but surprisingly decent happened at the UN. UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a stinging rebuke to the Palestinian Authority for naming a women’s center after Dalal Mughrabi, a notorious terrorist. In 1978, Mughrabi along with seven other Arab terrorists commandeered a bus packed with civilians and mercilessly murdered 37 people, including 12 children.

For the Palestinians, this act of debauchery warranted praise and Mughrabi was elevated to the status of heroin and martyr. On May 26, the watchdog group, Palestinian Media Watch revealed that a women’s center named after Mughrabi in the Arab town of Burqa was constructed with funds provided by the UN and Norway. A prominent sign posted on the building bore the logos of the Palestinian Authority, the UN and Norway. Worse yet, PMW quoted a village council member who stated that “the center will focus especially on the history of the struggle of Martyr Dalal Mughrabi and on presenting it to the youth groups, and…constitutes the beginning of the launch of enrichment activities regarding the history of the Palestinian struggle.”

Upon learning of the outrage, a spokesperson for Guterres released a statement that termed the naming “offensive” and “unacceptable” and described it as a “glorification of terrorism” and an “obstacle to peace.” Guterres also demanded the immediate removal of the UN’s logo. Just two days prior, Norway issued a similar rebuke to the Palestinian Authority demanding not only the removal of the Norwegian logo but the return of all Norwegian funds earmarked for the project.

Berlin — Germans do not seem too friendly to Americans these days.

According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School study of global media, 98 percent of German public television news portrays President Donald Trump negatively, making it by far the most anti-Trump media in the world.

Yet the disdain predates the election of Trump, who is roundly despised here for his unapologetic anti–European Union views.

In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey of European countries, Germany had the least favorable impression of America. Only about 50 percent of Germans expressed positive feelings toward the U.S. Former president Barack Obama, who visited here last week to lecture the world on diversity and tolerance, never changed negative attitudes much from the unpopular George W. Bush years.

Germans apparently do not appreciate that fellow NATO member America still subsidizes their defense. Nor do they seem appreciative of their huge trade surplus ($65 billion) with the United States.

Germans seem to have forgotten that American troops for 45 years kept the Soviets from absorbing all of Germany. The Berlin Airlift is now premodern history.

Why, then, do confident Germans increasingly dislike the United States?

It is complicated.

Since 1989, Germany has worked hard on its post-unification image as a largely pacifistic country. It is eager to teach other nations how to conduct themselves peacefully and to pursue shared global goals such as reducing global warming or opening national borders to the world’s refugees.

Implicit in Germany’s utopian message is that postmodern Germans know best what not to do — given their terrible 20th-century past, with the aggressions of imperial Germany and later the savagery and Holocaust perpetuated by Hitler’s Third Reich.

Yet being guilt-ridden does not equate to being humble (never a German strong suit).

The same conceit of an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally uniform state that drew Germany into conflict with the U.S. (whose late entry into both World War I and World War II helped ensure German defeats) has never quite disappeared.

Instead, German condescension merely has been updated.