The US and Paris

Wobbles by US President Donald Trump on his campaign promise to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty should comfort detractors worried that he wouldn't learn while in office. Remaining in the agreement, a position supported by some oil and gas industry leaders, would be acceptable. But it would be acceptable only under certain conditions.

Here's a list:

• Disengage climate mitigation from ulterior motives. Prime among these is the push to leave oil and gas in the ground. Even under aggressive programs for limiting emissions of greenhouse gases, fluid hydrocarbons will dominate energy use for decades. Why make them more expensive than they need to be and foreclose gains from resource development?

The answer to that question comes from other agendas driving climate politics. Activist and writer Naomi Klein, who counseled the Pope, dislikes capitalism. Activist and writer Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, dislikes consumerism. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during 2002-15, dislikes meat. Taken together, what these leaders of the climate change movement, present and past, really want is for people to share everything, have nothing to share, and eat only plants.

• Recognize that climate politics tends to be antidemocratic. The climate agenda is driven by activism because centrally planned vegetarianism wins no votes. People who want to own things and eat meat should not be prohibited from doing so in response to fears about climatological catastrophes they don't share.

• Reassert priorities against which reasonable mitigation of climate change would seek balance. Economic health matters to human welfare. Affordable energy matters to economic health.

• Rescue science from politics. Climate campaigners use the word "science" as moral judgment. Their tiresome claims of "consensus" misconstrue scientific processes. Worse yet, many scientists defensive about their hypotheses, if not their research funding, participate in the distortion. Scientists should welcome competition among viewpoints. With climate, too many of them do not.

• Restore truthful disclosure to political arguments. Achieving emission cuts considered necessary to meet temperature targets of the Paris agreement demands sacrifice people don't want to make. Energy will become too expensive. Diets will have to change. And the effort might have little or no effect on global average temperature.

• Acknowledge that no one really knows how much global average temperature responds to lowered emissions of greenhouse gases. Assumptions about the relationship are theoretical. Temperatures aren't validating the theory, which predicts much more warming than has been observed.

• Chasten the diplomats. Foreign-affairs professionals love international deal-making. It's what they do. Mitigation of climate change requires international deals. So diplomats eagerly negotiate climate agreements for the sake of the negotiating agreements, certain they're saving the world from trouble they might not fully understand. And the world gets photos of hand-holding negotiators of an unenforceable agreement not likely to be fully implemented and sure to impose hardship to the extent that it is-while influencing temperature very little.

• Condemn the repression that so far fouls political discussion about climate change. Scientists questioning assertions of the need to take sacrificial precaution against global warming have been shunned, harassed, and possibly-in an Apr. 22 incident at the University of Alabama in Huntsville-shot at. Oil companies and interest groups leaning toward skepticism have been subject to prosecutorial witch-hunts. Such repression is intolerable. It weakens the case for active mitigation.

• Address the genuine issue. Proponents of aggressive precaution treat climate change as an issue of faith, with believers on one side and deniers on the other. Yet very few of those dismissed as deniers reject the phenomenon of climate change or the existence of human contribution to it. The issue craving discussion is the extent to which people affordably can limit observed warming and how they might go about it.

If the Paris agreement can become the platform for deliberation of climate-change policy free of extremist manipulation, it offers value and deserves US participation. But its foundations need adjustment in line with conditions outlined here.

If that can't happen, the US should withdraw.