RUTHFULLY YOURS

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