By Jay Ambrose

Tribune News Service

He had a lot to do with starting it, all of this concern about greenhouse gases heating up the earth to the point of catastrophe. We’re talking about James Hansen, once with NASA, as loud a voice on global warming as anyone has ever been, and guess what he said in 2015 when the Paris climate accord was formulated.

That it was a fraud. A fake. It would accomplish nothing except to let international leaders off the hook through pretense instead of substance. The facts prove his point even as multitudes have abandoned them. President Donald Trump has started a process of removing the United States from the deal, and even though he said he would be happy to join in working out something better, people all over are saying he wants to destroy the world.

What could come closer to that end is the deal itself. Even if all 195 national signatories fully complied with it, experts agree it would do next to nothing to stop temperature increases said by some to be disastrous by century’s end. But even compliance won’t likely happen on a large scale because the non-binding prescriptions would wreck economies, eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs — including those of agreeable politicians — while otherwise wreaking havoc.

The accord would meantime serve as an excuse not to do what Hansen and friends say is needed, such as relying much more on nuclear power. Heads of state will tell you that simply signing onto it and doing a few things here and there made them heroic on this score. They will point to the United States as the culprit. The truth is different. Mostly through free market hydraulic fracking of natural gas, we have lowered carbon dioxide emissions more than just about anybody else in the world.

The renewable fuels answer? They could be a big help someday maybe, but the technology really isn’t there yet, and, by the way, the best means of finding that technology is again the free market. The answer is not governmental, crony-capitalism advantages and subsidies that diminish competition and performance and are causing some firms to cheer for the accord. But that, of course, is a big part of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which serves as his means of accord compliance, economic wreckage and holding down world temperatures by maybe one or two hundredths of a degree Celsius by 2100. That’s it. Really.

The plan also happens to be unconstitutional, as in illegally rewriting state laws from the White House, and even making the deal in Paris was unconstitutional without later Senate approval that was not sought. That was the Obama unilateralist, autocratic way, of course, even as his defenders screech otherwise, and what it does is stymie real progress.

The most persuasive of all arguments for the accord is that it’s a start, that it can be built on and improved, as Trump suggested. But the real solutions — such as natural gas, building up economies for the sake of later adaptive measures and, most of all, nuclear power — tend to infuriate many top hands whose doctrinaire environmentalist religion too often gets in the way of science.

Owing to major developments, nuclear power is about as safe as anything and will keep our modern economies thriving. In California, which is often called tops in the fight against global warming, carbon dioxide emissions rose as a refutation when a nuclear plant was closed.

Global warming is a reality, although it’s not the case, as is often implied, that 97 percent of all scientists agree that the end times are on the way minus the handiwork of our politicians. Most agree the earth is warming and humans are a factor, but what many also point out is that predictions have been badly flawed and that natural variables keep many pertinent issues a mystery. Fossil fuels will remain necessary for quite a while, and one argument for that is human life.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com.