“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” —Joseph Heller, Catch-22

In an earth-shaking new article, The Washington Post has exposed the shocking revelation that — GASP! — President Donald Trump is not following Barack Obama’s agenda! In fact, he is doing the opposite in most cases, and with a vigor and determination that would lead one to believe it’s what the American people elected him to do.

And yet at every turn, anti-Trump Obama holdovers and lifelong bureaucrats attempt to undermine the Trump agenda.

In the Post article, the writers breathlessly reveal that Trump is ignoring an analysis made by his own administration regarding the impact of global warming. The analysis claims Earth will see a four-degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures if we don’t immediately implement economy-crushing environmental regulations. The author of this environmental impact statement? A bureaucrat within the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

That’s right … the Post is up in arms because Trump ignored a policy statement on global warming by a traffic-safety bureaucrat. What’s next? Discovering Trump ignored policy statements on food safety by an IRS employee? Trump ignoring recommendations for placement of missile-defense silos from the cashier at the White House gift shop?

The problem for the global warming hysterics is that they have played Chicken Little for so long, and made so many dire prophecies that never came true, that sane people now tune them out as background noise.

In the 1970s we were warned of a coming Ice Age that would doom humanity. Scientist Paul Ehrlich became world famous after predicting four billion people would perish by 1989 in the “Great Die-Off” (which would have been almost 80% of the world’s population at the time). Other scientists predicted that 80% of all species would be extinct by 1995, and the Earth would be a chilly 11 degrees colder by the year 2000.

However, by the early 1980s, the fearmongering over a coming Ice Age had been discarded for fearmongering over “global warming,” claiming man’s industrial activities were increasing CO₂ levels to catastrophic proportions. Before long (we were told), ocean levels would rise so high that New York City would be underwater.

Yet despite all of these frenzied warnings, the predictions never seemed to materialize. New York is not underwater, and despite claims of near-extinction, polar bears are thriving. The polar ice caps are not only not melting, they are setting record highs for sea ice levels.

Of course, global warming (oops… “climate change”) was never about saving the environment, it was about the destruction of free-market capitalism in order to usher in global socialism.

This was openly admitted by none other than Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), the global governing body for all things climate change.

Speaking at a 2012 conference in Doha, Qatar, Figueres declared that the entire climate change process was about a “complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” In 2015 at that same conference, Figueres reiterated that the climate change conference was “not a discussion about the temperature.” No, she said, “That is just a proxy. The discussion is about the decarbonization of the economy.”

This should have been evident to everyone paying attention during the first couple of years of the Obama presidency, when Democrats were pushing the Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” bill that would have fined Americans for exceeding government-mandated carbon emissions limitations.

In testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, under questioning by Republican committee members, admitted that the United States could hit every single emissions limitation goal in the bill, at a cost of trillions of dollars to the taxpayers, but only reduce the global temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius at most.

If the true goal were to reduce CO₂ emissions and thus temperatures, rather than transform the world into a global socialist utopia, then environmentalists would be praising the United States. After all, despite widespread condemnation for refusing to sign on to the Kyoto Accord, and even greater outrage when President Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord last year, it is the United States that is leading the world in reducing CO₂ emissions, and it’s not even close. In fact, almost every country that signed onto these climate treaties have seen an increase in CO₂ emissions.

And at the end of the day, that is why progressives loathe Donald Trump and his conservative policies. Their policies sound wonderful and compassionate and idealistic but are utter failures in practice. Then along comes Trump, by their estimate a hate-filled, bombastic, uncouth idiot, and in less than two years his policies have lowered carbon emissions, jump-started the economy, led to the creation of millions of jobs, and created enormous prosperity for tens of millions of Americans.

If environmentalists truly want to reduce global temperatures, then shutting off all the hot air being blown by progressive Democrats, global-warming alarmists, and even deep-state bureaucrats at the NHTSA might be a good place to start.