In a bizarre irony, the German daily newspaper Die Welt has proclaimed U.S. President Donald Trump “the most successful climate protector in the world” after a new global climate report revealed that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped dramatically during Trump’s first year in office.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released its “Global Energy and CO2 Status Report, 2017” on March 22, which contained the bombshell news that the “biggest drop in emissions came from the United States,” which made folks at Die Welt sit up and take notice.

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increased overall by 1.4 percent in 2017, the report revealed, and in most major economies, carbon dioxide emissions increased as well.

The United States led the small pack of countries that managed to lower greenhouse gas emissions, accompanied by UK, Japan, and Mexico. According to IEA figures, the United States managed to reduce CO2 emissions in 2017 by 0.5 percent, or 25 million tons, to 4810 million tons.

President Trump has been in the climate-change doghouse ever since he announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, something Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defined as a “dishonor” to God.

As Breitbart News reported at the time, because of his decision, the president was accused of waging a “war on the environment” tantamount to genocide. Several journals and news outlets even went so far as to suggest that Mr. Trump was guilty of “environmental racism” by pulling the United States out of the climate agreement.

Essence magazine said Trump had continued “his war on people of color in America” while Blavity, a website that caters to people of color, said that Trump’s decision “will worsen environmental racism,” insisting that climate change is “inherently a black issue and not just a ‘human issue.’”

The Atlantic suggested that environmental racism is “the new Jim Crow,” referring to laws that segregated blacks and whites in their use of public schools, public places, transportation, restrooms, and restaurants.

Enter Daniel Wetzel, energy journalist for Die Welt, a self-described “liberal cosmopolitan” German newspaper.

Mr. Wetzel doffed his hat to President Trump, saying that despite being stigmatized as an enemy of the environment, he has shown himself to be quite the contrary. Wetzel contrasted the positive U.S. results with those of China, which signed on to the Paris Climate Accord. While U.S. emissions dropped, China’s grew by nearly a full percentage point in 2017.

Curiously, some of the countries that chastised the United States for dropping out of the Paris Accord performed far worse than the U.S. during 2017, with the European Union (EU) emissions rising by a stunning 46 million tons. Germany itself has not reduced its emissions for nine years in a row.

The decline in U.S. carbon emissions was due to a number of factors, the study found, including growth in the use of renewables, the liberalization of fracking with the consequent increase in clean-burning natural gas, and America’s continued high use of clean nuclear energy, which supplies about 20 percent of U.S. energy needs.

As Breitbart News reported last summer, air pollution in the U.S. is among the lowest on the planet, according to studies by the World Health Organization (WHO),

In WHO’s 2017 report on air pollution, the United States was listed as one of the countries with the cleanest air in the world, significantly cleaner than the air in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the UK, Japan, Austria, and France.

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