After President Donald Trump announced last week that the United States would pull out of the climate accord, liberal Democrats and the left-wing media went into hysterics.

Pulling out of the Obama-era accord was one of the president's major campaign promises and it's doubtful many Trump-haters even know what is in the nonminding agreement. Bottom line is that American families would be paying more while making less.According to a Heritage study, the overall effect of the agreement would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by more than $2.5 trillion and eliminate 400,000 jobs by 2035. It's estimated Pennsylvania's GDP would decline by 1.8 percent and the state would lose 140,000 jobs.An American family of four would see electricity costs increase by between 13 percent and 20 percent annually.What is often buried by the anti-Trump media is that the U.S. remains the leader in emission controls in the world and that the president left the door open to re-enter negotiations for a better deal.We liked Carly Fiorina's explanation of the issue during last year's presidential debates. When asked her reaction to Obama and other Democrats' contention that climate change is, if not the biggest, immediate threat to our national security, Fiorina answered: "It is delusional for President Obama and Hillary Clinton and anyone else to say that climate change is our near-term most severe security threat. It is ISIS, period, followed closely by Iran and perhaps Russia."She said the most prudent approach to the climate change issue comes from conservatives who are guided by science and not the alarmists in their proposals.The batting average for climate change alarmists is not very good. Some headliners in recent years include:• 1989: A director of the United Nations Environmental Program predicted "entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels by the year 2000.• 1990: Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton professor and Al Gore adviser, predicted that by 1995, the greenhouse effect would be "desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia" with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots.• 2005: UNEP warned that by 2010, some 50 million "climate refugees" would be fleeing low-lying Caribbean and Pacific islands inundated by rising seas.• 2007: Al Gore predicted that the North Pole would be ice-free by the summer of 2013.There is also plenty of hypocrisy on the liberal side. In a statement posted on Facebook last week, former Secretary of State John Kerry called the action one of the most disastrous and shallow, untruthful decisions a president of the United States has made in his lifetime.Kerry, who sails a yacht and owns five homes, is not one to lecture us on carbon dioxide pollution.As President Barack Obama's secretary of state, he became the most traveled secretary of state in history in only his first 18 months on the job, logging more than a half million miles in an aging, inefficient 757. Kerry's long-haul flights produced twice as many emissions per mile as our passenger cars as the Airbus expends as much energy as 3,500 family cars.When it comes to running up sky miles, Hillary Clinton and Barack and Michelle Obama were also pollution-making machines. Just last month, Obama traveled to Italy, using pollution-heavy transportation to give a speech on, of course, climate change.Newly released emails showed that Hillary Clinton once requested to fly to Betty Ford's funeral in 2011 in a separate plane rather than share a plane ride with Michelle Obama.Former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winning environmentalist Al Gore was accused of hypocrisy when a research group claimed his 20-room, eight-bathroom home consumed more electricity in a month than the average American household did in a year.A number of Hollywood elitists are on the hypocrisy A-list. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, a "champion" of the environment, is one example.After attending a small celebration to mark the release of a video by singer Paul McCartney during the Obama era, she and her husband stepped into a chauffeured gas-guzzling Lincoln Town Car to go to dinner. The "trip" took about 10 seconds. Several others who were at the same event took the short walk in a few minutes.Hypocrites like this are the last ones we need to hear preach about polluting the environment or saving the planet for our grandchildren.By Jim Zbick |

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