Reprinted with permission from Investor’s Business Daily. Originally published February 13, 2013.

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By IBD Editorial Board.

The president’s proposed Energy Security Fund will stifle the private energy sector boom and provide permanent funding for future Solyndras and electric cars that nobody wants. And what about that pipeline, sir?

A nonexistent crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and in justifying his proposal for a cap-and-tax scheme, President Obama claimed in his State Of The Union that “the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15.” He was lying.

The fact is, according to new data released quietly last October by Britain’s Met Office, the world’s natural post-Ice Age warming trend stopped about 16 years ago. From the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

Undaunted by the truth, Obama claimed, again falsely, “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, all are now more frequent and more intense.” But, for example, as Marc Morano documents at Climate Depot, all of the world’s most devastating floods occurred before 1976.

The U.S. has been experiencing less and less drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining, global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, and the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined.

President Obama linked Superstorm Sandy to climate change, yet Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, writes: “The U.S. is currently experiencing the longest ever recorded period with no strikes of a Category 3 or stronger hurricane.”

As for tornadoes, Pielke reports: “Over the past six decades, tornado damage has declined after accounting for development that has put more property into harm’s way.”

Astonishingly, the president invoked an emission-belching China as our role model in fighting climate change, saying that “countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy.”

China has in fact overtaken the U.S. as the world’s top polluter, according to a study published in the Journal of Environment Economics and Management by a University of California-Berkeley research team. And the evidence is seen daily in the skies over Beijing.

Yes, Mr. President, oil and natural gas production is up and emissions are down. But the credit is due to the technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, employed on private lands in states like Pennsylvania and North Dakota. It is a technology you and your environmentalist buddies are trying to prohibit.

If the president’s proposal sounded familiar, it may be because it’s an echo of the $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund presidential candidate Hillary Clinton proposed.

It was to siphon off oil companies’ “excessive” profits to promote alternative energy development, much like the windfall profit tax and Jimmy Carter‘s long-defunct SynFuels Corp. were supposed to do.

Her proposal itself was an echo of one of the Clinton-Gore administration’s first acts in office. It was a proposal, with Al Gore taking the lead, for a $72 billion BTU tax on all fossil fuels, including oil, coal and natural gas, that would have done nothing but increase energy prices and decrease economic activity.

The Earth is not warming and carbon emissions are not driving climate change. Yet that will probably be the reason Obama will use to kill off the Keystone XL pipeline, unmentioned in his address, which would bring Canadian crude from the oil sands of Alberta to our Gulf Coast refineries. Enviros claim the extraction process releases too much carbon dioxide.

“Should the eco-activists be allowed to shut down the U.S. economy based on faulty science?” asks Len Maier, president of Friends of Science, a climate science review organization. He thinks not, and neither do we.

Instead of more Solyndras and Chevy Volts, we would prefer the 800,000 barrels of oil a day and the estimated 343,000 new U.S. jobs by 2015 if Keystone XL is allowed to proceed.

Really, only our business climate needs to be changed.