The White House maintains that international agreements such as the one approved last year in Paris are necessary to combat what it calls “man-made climate change.”

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama continues to focus on domestic regulations and standards on everything from power plants to automobiles.

“Over the past seven-and-a half years, we’ve transformed the United States into a global leader in the fight against climate change, but this is not a fight that any one country – no matter how powerful – can take alone,” Obama proclaimed Saturday at the G-20 Summit. “The Paris agreement alone won’t solve the climate crisis, but it does establish an enduring framework that enables countries to ratchet down their carbon emissions over time, and to set more ambitious targets as technology advances.”

Nick Loris, an economist with The Heritage Foundation, explains that this is all very concerning for fans of what he calls affordable, reliable energy.

“Unilaterally – both through this agreement and [by] using the EPA and other bureaucracies in the U.S. – the federal government is driving up energy costs through regulations on new power plants, existing power plants [and] on vehicles,” Loris argues. “Cumulatively, this has huge economic impacts because energy prices affect everybody in just about everything we do and everything we make.”

As a result, Loris believes that this will have a tremendous negative ripple effect on the economy – where power costs will rise and, as a result, producers will produce less and consumers will consume less.

“Electricity expenditures will increase, you have destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs, total income loss we analyze [to be] $30,000 [per] family of four over the next 20 years, and an aggregate GDP loss of more than $2.5 trillion,” Loris informed. “So [there are] huge, huge economic costs for both this Paris protocol and the unilateral regulations that will impact the domestic energy economy.”

Meanwhile, the global warming critic contends the media’s portrayal of carbon dioxide is often wrong.

“If you’ve taken any type of science class in your life, you know that carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas,” Loris says. “It’s something that we exhale that is a necessary component for photosynthesis and the growth of green vegetation, yet the media is buying into this notion that the Obama administration is portraying and that’s that carbon dioxide is this harmful pollutant that has all these adverse effects to human health and the environment – which is just completely untrue.”

He also maintains that the American public is being duped

“[The only reason why we have this carbon dioxide crusade is because of its alleged impact on climate change, which is turning out not to be producing the doomsday scenarios that a lot of the climate heretics predicted it would do,” Loris concludes.