One of Trump's first executive orders expected to halt all work on 'climate change' measures

Signing off on orders puts Trump, who has presided over a sprawling business empire but has never before held public office, in a familiar place similar to the CEO role that made him famous, and will give him some victories with his supporters before he has to turn to the lumbering process of getting Congress to pass bills. . . . Another proposed executive order would require all cabinet departments to disclose and pause current work being done in connection with Obama's initiatives to curb carbon emissions to combat climate change.

To the extent the government's work on "climate change" involves regulatory agencies harassing businessses over their manufacturing practices, or threatening lawsuits, or conducting investigations into companies who don't buy into the left's global warming orthodoxy, this move could do a lot to unleash American industry. And it needs to be unleashed. Obama has been on an eight-year crusade to attack the American business community, not only on behalf of global warmists but also on behalf of the labor unions who do so much to help pay the campaign expenses of Democrat politicians.

But let's get back to global warming, er . . . "climate change," if you prefer. The left would have you believe the entire debate here is over whether it exists or not, and whether man is responsible for it. I am skeptical about that, but the main reason I'm skeptical and always have been is that for the left it's more about the agenda they're using it to push. Let's assume for the sake of discussion that global warming is real, and that man is causing it, and that's it's all the bad things they say it is. OK. That begs the next question: Does this justify that high taxes and heavy regulations they want to impose on industry in order to supposedly deal with it? I say no. If carbon emissions are a problem, then the answer is cleaner technology and that is likely to come from the private sector, so the key is to unleash the ingenuity of the private sector and let those who develop the solution be rewarded for doing so. That's not what the left wants to hear, of course. The whole reason they push the global warming narrative is to justify bigger government. If everyone becomes convinced that the "solution" to "global warming" is a private-sector one, the left will stop talking about it in a hurry and move on to some other supposed crisis whose only answer is big government. This is what they do. Anyway, if the is going to be one of Trump's first actions, good. It shows he's not going to just accept the way things have always been done in Washington - not that anything about Trump to date suggested he would. Today should be fun! (Thanks to Jim Hoft at the Gateway Pundit for my blatant ripoff of the image. I couldn't stop laughing when I saw it.)

Dan's new novel, BACKSTOP, is a story of spiritual warfare and baseball. Download it from Amazon here