That government report on climate change certainly set tounges to wagging in the mainstream media, didn’t it? I was repeatedly informed that man-made climate change was the reason for the wildfires in California, coastal flooding, too many hurricanes, a lack of hurricanes and Kanye West wearing a #MAGA hat. And the worst part of it all is that we don’t even have a plan to deal with it, having refused to join in on the Paris Accord.

Why can’t we be more like Europe? They’re all on board with fighting emissions and saving the planet. But are they really? A new study reveals that almost all of the other G-20 nations are actually not doing nearly enough and are missing their own goals. (Time)

Three years ago, world leaders from nearly every country around the world laid out specific plans to fight climate change that included strategies to slash their greenhouse gas emissions. Those commitments generated optimism that the world might finally address global warming and helped seal the deal on the Paris Agreement. Now, the majority of G20 countries aren’t following through on their promises, according to a new report from the United Nation Environment Programme. And, even if countries followed through, the world would fall short of limiting temperature rise to safe levels. “Countries are not doing enough,” says UNEP official Phillip Drost, who coordinated the report. “We need to mitigate more emissions.”

So this United Nations report points the finger at almost everyone in the G-20 and says that goals are not being met. The only exceptions are Russia, Turkey and China. Of course, Russia and Turkey set their goals so low that they could be met with virtually no effort. And China has been notoriously deceptive in how they record and report emissions data, including boasting about creating a vast carbon cap-and-trade system without signs of it producing much by way of production.

Meanwhile, what the United Nations failed to mention was that in 2017, the United States actually exceeded those global goals for reducing carbon emissions. (Fox News)

America is now the world leader in cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Yes, you read that right. According to a June report by BP – measuring global carbon dioxide emissions from the use of oil, gas and coal – the United States reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 41.8 million tons from 2016 to 2017, marking the third consecutive year Americans’ carbon dioxide emissions fell. The United States’ carbon dioxide reduction is more than double the next closest nation included in the study, Ukraine. And the U.S. reductions are part of a larger, decade-long trend. From 2006 to 2016, BP reports the United States slashed its carbon dioxide emissions by about 12 percent.

The US oil and gas industry has cut carbon dioxide emissions faster than any other industrialized nation. And do you know what else? We did it without some global consortium of nations forcing us to do it. Heck… we did it without our own government forcing us to speed up the reductions. We did it because the market likes efficiency and despises waste. Cleaner drilling operations mean that less of the industry’s profits were literally going up in flames during flaring operations.

But hey, United Nations. You just keep on thinking. That’s what you’re good at. (Apologies for the Butch Cassidy reference.)