Mr. President: Don't listen to the pope’s climate-change baloney

Watching the First Lady effortlessly and comfortably hug, kiss, laugh with, and bolster the confidence of young children in hospitals in Italy and Brussels made my heart swell with pride. Melania Trump visited The Hospital of the Baby Jesus (Bambino Gesu Hospital) in Rome, which is now the lead children’s research hospital in Europe and is part of the Holy See. Melania actually wrote to the pope to be able to visit that particular hospital.

When the Trumps then met with the pope, it was revealed that Melania is indeed Catholic. During her upbringing in Slovenia, Communist rule meant that you said you were atheist or you wouldn’t be able to eat. She wore a lace veil when she met the pope. I remember wearing a similar veil to each daily mass when I was young, out of respect for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. So I really feel a connection to the First Lady on this European trip. Remembering that she said the Lord’s Prayer at a rally here in the States, knowing she is a Catholic and unashamed, seeing her have her rosary beads blessed by the Holy Father, I am very pleased. She is an obviously beautiful woman with an equally obvious beautiful heart.

What worries me about this meeting with the pope is the possibility that Donald Trump will listen to European and South American backwardness and support the Paris Climate Treaty. He might do this out of some silly belief that the present pope must be right about climate change and how it’s destroying the poor, since he is, after all, the pope. The first thought on the mind of the pope is the poor, so it makes sense to those who want to help the poor to listen to the pope, right? It is certainly possible that Donald Trump appreciates the happiness of his recently blessed wife and respects the holiness of the pope. And it is certain that he maintains people around him who are clearly talking the talk of climate-change baloney. To me, that’s a recipe for really bad decision making.

On climate change, the pope is wrong. He has put forward an encyclical to proclaim that climate change is making the poor poorer and it is up to the wealthy nations to change the climate in order to save the poor. His encyclical was based partly on advice from noted atheists like Stephen Hawking, and he is surrounded by advisers such as Cardinal Rodriguez of Honduras, who said that capitalism itself is destroying the climate — an insult directed at the United States.

The Washington Post noted that Pope Francis gave President Trump a copy of his encyclical and Trump pledged to read it. I hope that the president knows that The Washington Post sought comments from the Sierra Club for its article on the exchange, and a spokesman for the Sierra Club said, “Receiving a copy of Laudato Si directly from Pope Francis is an extraordinary gift, and Trump would do well to heed its critically important message on the moral obligation to act on climate as he meets with world leaders in the coming days.” I hope also that the president knows that the Sierra Club has been working directly with a myriad of activists in every state to shut down coal production and coal-fired power plants, hand in hand with the Obama administration with its “dirty coal” mantra. The Sierra Club has bragged for the past decade on its website of the over 250 coal plants it has shut down in America. I witnessed it in my own small town. The Sierra Club’s members are radical environmental ideologues whose work is definitely not about planting trees, but about destroying the nation’s industries.

It is American ingenuity (read: capitalism) that has already solved the so-called “dirty coal” issue, yet advisers to the president like Gary Cohn are still out there using the language of the left to destroy jobs and industry. Cohn has recently said that Trump is “evolving” on the Paris agreement and that “coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore as feedstock,” something that the poor people of the world would certainly wonder at. They might say, “We aren’t going to eat it, but we would like to be able to warm ourselves and use cheap electricity to better ourselves with.”

The basic truths that President Trump must realize are that God’s world heals itself and we can in no way alter its climate by what amounts to turning back the clock one hundred years on energy consumption; that people of means have no idea how hard it is on people without to take away their one source of cheap energy; that capitalism is the only way the poor get out of poverty, and no tax on nations will help the poor of the world like cheap energy and heat can; that Cohn’s words on climate change reflect a surrender to political correctness to pander to the sensibilities of the posh and completely reject the difficulties that stupid world government decisions force upon the everyday lives of the Forgotten Man.

In order to make America great again, we must rely on capitalism and our faith in God to lift the poor. There is no doubt that capitalism and faith are the reason we are a great nation to begin with.