St. Paul Reporter

Officials in Minnesota and other states have lamented President Donald Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, but a summary report issued last year by The Heartland Institute suggests the agreement may have been based on faulty science.

Forced reduction of greenhouse gas emission (GHG) to 90 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 would lead only to 4 percent less emissions than what is already is projected for that year, according to The Heartland Institute's report Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels.

"Most regulations aimed at reducing GHG emissions have costs that are hundreds and even thousands of times greater than their benefits," the report stated. "The global war on fossil fuels, which commenced in earnest in the 1980s and reached a fever pitch in the second decade of the twenty-first century, was never founded on sound science or economics."

The U.S. moved earlier this month to officially withdraw from the Paris climate accord, a 2015 United Nations agreement in which hundreds of nations agreed to reduce GHG in a bid to keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Minnesota and other states have pledged to continue working toward the Paris accord.  

Under the agreement, the United States' part in the global war on fossil fuels would have been to reduce its GHG by almost 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. That would be pointless because the science behind the agreement is not sound, according to the Heartland Institute's 29-page report.

"The authors of and contributors to Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels urge the world's policymakers to acknowledge this truth and end that war," the report said.

The report was compiled through the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which was founded in 2003 to fact-check claims about global climate change. The 117 scientists, economists and other experts who worked on the report refuted the U.N.'s claims about the impacts of climate change.  

The summary report was released in October 2018 as an early look at the full 1,000-page report released in December at a climate science symposium during the United Nations Conference of the Parties in Katowice, Poland.