This piece originally appeared at WashingtonExaminer.com and has been republished here with permission.

The following is a guest article by David M. Simon

The next president and Congress should repeal every aspect of the Biden administration’s climate change legislative and regulatory program.

It is economically destructive, damages national security, and at most will have a barely detectable impact on global temperatures.

It should never have been pursued, moreover, because strong scientific data show that neither global warming nor the increased emission of carbon dioxide causes harm.

The Biden administration admits Goldman Sachs has estimated that President Joe Biden’s signature climate change legislation, the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, will cost taxpayers $1.2 trillion by 2031.

Even worse, the Biden administration’s regulations, executive orders, and other agency actions that limit oil production, refining, transport, and use have sharply raised oil and gasoline prices.

The per barrel price of West Texas Intermediate was $51.56 in January 2020, when the economy was humming before the coronavirus pandemic, and about $50 in December 2020, the month before Biden took office. Since May 27, 2021, it has ranged from $66.74 to $123.70.

The average per gallon price of gasoline was $2.64 in January 2020 and $2.28 in December 2020. Since May 2021, it has ranged from $3.07 to $5.03.

The oil price spike triggered by the Biden climate change program has also been enriching petrostates and fueling Russia’s war against Ukraine and Iran’s nuclear weapons development program, worldwide terrorism, and proxy wars against Israel and in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

The Biden climate change program, furthermore, at most will have a barely detectable impact on global temperatures. For example, environmental statistician Bjorn Lomborg has noted concerning the Inflation Reduction Act that “if you plug the predicted emissions decline into the climate model used for all major United Nations climate reports, it turns out the global temperature will be cut by only 0.0009 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.”

Scientific data show, moreover, that rather than being an “existential threat” as Biden preaches, global warming, including the 1.34 degrees Celsius average temperature increase since 1880, has saved and will continue to save millions of lives.

A study by 22 scientists from several nations, published in May 2015 by the Lancet, of more than 74 million deaths from 1985 to 2012 in the United States and around the world found that cooler temperatures kill 17 times more people than warmer temperatures. In July 2021, the Lancet published another study that similarly reported that cooler temperatures kill nine times more.

Some of the world’s greatest scientists have similarly noted that increased carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial rather than harmful.

In March 2023, Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser emphatically stated that “increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world.”

William Happer of Princeton University, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and hundreds of other scientists wrote in February 2017 that the carbon dioxide that we each exhale “is not a pollutant.”

And Happer and Lindzen attest in July 2023 comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency that “a major social benefit of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is the indisputable science that it increases the amount of food that plants produce through what is known as CO2 fertilization. More CO2 means more food. … The effects know no boundaries.”

Global warming and increased carbon dioxide emissions also neither cause more natural disasters nor make them deadlier.

Since 1920, as temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions have increased (and the world’s population has quadrupled), average deaths per year from natural disasters have decreased by more than 90%.

A National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration report, updated on April 17, shows no increase in the “frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.”

The percentage of global land burned per year by fires has been declining since 1905. In 2022, “the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area.”

An EPA report updated on Nov. 1, 2023, states that the “absolute sea level has risen at an average rate of 0.06 inches per year from 1880 to 2013,” including a slightly increased rate since 1993 — a tiny “0.12 to 0.14 inches per year.”

The next administration and Congress should repeal every aspect of the Biden climate change program. Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate-related disclosures rule, the EPA greenhouse gas emissions mandates and regulations, the executive order barring the Keystone XL pipeline, the pre-Biden administration Renewable Fuel Standard that limits oil refining, and all the other laws, regulations, subsidies, and executive orders that seek to limit or prevent global warming or greenhouse gas emissions.

David M. Simon is a senior fellow with Unleash Prosperity and a lawyer in Chicago. For more, please see www.dmswritings.com.