A Breath of Fresh Air: Pres. Donald Trump has the climate alarmists--including the Pope--in a sweat over his undoing of Obama's energy policies.

• Author: Orient, Jane M.
• Position: POLITICAL LANDSCAPE - Pope Francis

THE TRUMP Administration has announced the removal of climate change from the list of national security threats. This Obama Administration priority was responsible for policies such as trying to make the U.S. Navy a "Great Green Fleet" running on "advanced biofuels." The rationale was that global warming (renamed "climate change") was a bigger threat than terrorist attacks or North Korean nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, and that running aircraft carriers on a blend of 90% diesel and a very costly additive made from beef fat or palm oil somehow would protect against bad weather over the next century.

Climate change supposedly is our greatest global health threat, according to a consortium of medical organizations and Pope Francis, who still are bellyaching about Pres. Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. The predicted climate disruption--in their opinion--evidently is worse than poverty, AIDS, poor sanitation, Ebola, or other emerging infectious diseases. It is, indeed, supposed to worsen those factors, for example, by increasing the range of insect vectors like mosquitoes. (Never mind that mosquitoes thrive in Alaska and Siberia.)

Fifty years of public health gains could be reversed, warn 22 authors in the British journal, The Lancet, if we do not take urgent action to limit emissions of carbon dioxide from the fuels that now power 80% of the world's economy (coal, oil, and natural gas--"fossil fuels"). The "planet still has time to heal," they say, but we are on a "countdown."

It is a little hard to get the public aroused about heat waves 50 years from now, while people are shoveling "heart attack snow," or trying to keep from freezing to death. Fatalities from cold historically are far more prevalent than deaths from heat waves. Arctic cold this winter has set dozens of records for low temperatures in the U.S. Northeast, and a Siberian cold front killed dozens in Central and Eastern Europe, with 50-year record lows as far south as Bulgaria.

European countries, such as England and Germany, are taking the lead on turning to "renewables"--for instance, the German Energiewende. So, prices for fuel and electricity have soared. Many people have to choose whether to "heat or eat."

It takes an apocalyptic threat to get people to accept economic hardship. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and prominent U.S. academics constantly trumpet a litany of horribles that supposedly will be inevitable without drastic, immediate changes. California and other jurisdictions claim that they will take unilateral action to "protect" or "stabilize" Earth's climate despite Trump's opposition. Dozens of congressmen from both parties have joined the Climate Solutions Caucus to oppose Trump.

Pres. Trump's priority is energy security, or energy dominance, for the U.S. His initiatives include removing climate alarmism messages...