The media remain outraged over President Donald Trump’s decision last week to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, a boondoggle which would have cost the U.S. an estimated $3 trillion and 6.5 million industrial-sector American jobs by 2040 with no actual effect on the climate. But the narrative at The New York Times is that the coal miners and oil industry elites have struck a grand bargain with Republicans to ignore, if not further, the destruction of the planet.

Other media themes suggest that Trump is somehow ceding power and influence to China by withdrawing from this unratified and toothless treaty. However, “China has serious air quality issues (not from carbon dioxide), and Beijing has repeatedly falsified its coal consumption and air monitoring data, even as it participated in the Paris Agreement,” reports The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal. “There is no environmental comparison between the U.S. and China.”

Even if all parties to the Paris agreement were to successfully cut emissions, it would only lower temperatures approximately three tenths of a degree by the end of the century at a grand total cost of about $100 trillion, according to Danish statistician Dr. Bjorn Lomborg.

Yet The Hill ran with the title, “Globe heaps scorn on Trump for Paris exit.” Christiana Figueres, “the former head of the United Nation’s climate change mission,” blasted Trump’s move as an “absolute death blow to the international credibility of the current U.S. leadership.”

The many exaggerated claims that media critics and climate change advocates have made about leaving this accord parallel the sham science that underpins the theory of climate change. I wrote recently about how both the actual science, as well as the interests of the U.S., in terms of economics and sovereignty, make it clear that Trump made the right move for America. It was another Obama legacy item cobbled together largely by bribing countries to sign on.

An article in The Washington Times adds credence to that argument. The article, entitled Developing nations in Paris climate accord threaten to keep polluting unless they’re paid, points out that “Supporters of the deal routinely point out that 193 countries have signed on. Although that is technically true, the vast majority of commitments offered in Paris would result in emissions increases or would require billions of dollars in funding—or, in many cases, both.”

In addition, “Some analysts say the final figure for worldwide compliance with the Paris pledges would be in the trillions of dollars. U.N. officials estimated that it would cost at least $100 billion per year, and that figure could rise to more than $400 billion per year by 2020 to ensure compliance.”

Ironically, some climate change activists and climatologists opposed the Paris accord before they defended it. Investor’s Business Daily describes how, for example, “James Hansen, the undisputed hero of the climate-change movement, called the Paris deal ‘a fraud really, a fake…It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.’” Similarly, it notes, a climate change professor, Kevin Anderson, called the accord “worse than inept,” and an environmental group called it “a sham of a deal.”

“The problem is that nobody, even on the left, people who are the biggest anthropogenic climate change advocates cannot tell you what we are supposed to do to stop climate change,” observes Ben Shapiro, conservative political commentator. “Everything they are talking about is…trimming around the edges.”

Even climate change advocate Al Gore has gone on record calling the accord merely symbolic. Here is an exchange from last weekend between Fox News’ Chris Wallace and Gore:

Wallace: “You would agree that even if all 195 nations, now 194, met their targets, it still wouldn’t solve the problem.”

Gore: “That is correct. However, it sends a very powerful signal to business and industry and civil society, and countries around the world.”

In other words, the accord was symbolic, and Trump’s withdrawal sends the message that the United States will no longer hinder its own economy and jobs potential to appease the demands of pseudo-scientific climate change activists. The emperor has no clothes.

The global warming alarmists have had a terrible record on their computer-model predictions. For example, “Dire predictions that the Arctic would be devoid of sea ice by September this year have proven to be unfounded after latest satellite images showed there is far more now than in 2012.”

Still, according to the Times, Trump chose to withdraw using a formal mechanism, which means that it could take four years to divest the United States from this agreement. In other words, if Trump is not reelected, a new administration might decide to participate.

The Paris accord isn’t the only toothless—and dangerous—agreement to which former President Barack Obama obligated the United States. As Andy McCarthy argues, Paris should have been considered a treaty and subjected to a Senate vote. Similarly, Obama participated in the unsigned Iran deal—another instance where the emperor has no clothes.

As we have repeatedly reported, the Obama State Department admitted to then-Republican Congressman Mike Pompeo that since the Iran deal was never signed, it amounted to little more than a set of political commitments. Iran gained more than $100 billion in previously frozen assets, and is provided a pathway to having nuclear weapons within a few years, if they don’t already have them.

As Pompeo wrote, “Unsigned, this agreement is nothing more than a press release and just about as enforceable.”

So one Obama agreement costs the U.S. trillions of dollars with little or no benefit to the climate, and another agreement provides a totalitarian theocratic regime a path to having nuclear weapons and nuclear legitimacy. These were, and are, dangerous farces of foreign policy. Where were the media to criticize when Obama struck both of these deals? They were praising him, not questioning these deals’ soundness.

Roger Aronoff