Mr. Bush doesn't intend all the catastrophic consequences of his simple decision to offer legislation to regulate carbon emission. But then, by this point he should be quite familiar with the concept of unintended consequences. And he needs to recognize that he cannot pass "sensible "legislation. (I have serious doubts that any legislation on this topic could be sensible.)

All he can do is set the stage for next year's legislation, by giving away the rhetorical store and weakening the already modest backbone of Republican legislators. The liberal world order will not let go of their global-warming assault on free economies until hell freezes over -- by which point, obviously, the global-warming theory will be visibly disproven.

The Guardian describes an extraordinary manifesto authored "by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists..." At first glance, the manifesto appears to mark a return to the policy of deterrence; a rueful admission that nothing but a revival of the balance of terror can now secure the West against forces that its publics are unwilling to mobilize against. That thought will ironically comfort many of those who lived through the long shadow of East versus West. After all, if deterrence kept the West safe against the Soviets for the long duration of the Cold War might not containment and the mutual balance of terror also safeguard it indefinitely against radical Islam?

Deterrence worked because it made peace the only alternative to utter destruction. But it worked against the Soviets because for all their belligerence could always be counted on to choose life. The Commissars may have been stupid but they were not crazy. Can the same assumption be made about Islamic radicals who desire death? From the point of a theocratic zealot the rational choice may be to hasten Armageddon.

On closer inspection the manifesto might not be about deterrence at all. It is about committing to prevent terrorists from acquiring WMDs at all costs. The reason Lord Inge's remark that "to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence" is so significant is that it brings the trigger point back from second-strike or launch on attack to one in which WMD acquisition itself becomes the casus belli. It is almost a form of pre-deterrence. 

After a year of concentrated effort that includes a multimillion-dollar p.r. campaign on top of An Inconvenient Truth and slavish media coverage parroting the climate-alarmist line, recent polls show that public opinion on global warming has barely budged. Only about a third of Americans, according to a recent Gallup survey, are agitated about climate change, and even people who say the environment is their most important issue rank climate change behind air and water quality in importance.

Meanwhile a backlash in the scientific community has begun. New York Times veteran science reporter William Broad filed a devastating article about scientists who are “alarmed” at Gore’s alarmism; Gore’s account of global warming goes far beyond the evidence. The dissents from Gore’s extremism, Broad explained, “come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists” who have “no political ax to grind.” It appears Gore refused to be interviewed directly for the article; he responded to e-mail questions only.

Noting the goal, “seriously” stated by the Group of Eight, to cut world CO2 emissions in half by the year 2050, a couple of techies at the Tokyo Institute of Technology sat down with their calculators, and coolly worked out what will be required to meet this goal, on an equal per capita basis, around the planet. The 88 percent is the figure for North America. The Europeans get off relatively easily: they only have to shut down 83 percent of their economy; the Japanese 85 percent.

Only 35 percent of the Chinese economy will have to go. And good news for India, much of which is still living in the Arcadian low-carbon past. The Indians get to gun their carbon emissions by 137 percent over the next four decades.

McCain says that gas prices will go down, because cap and trade will stimulate the development of new green energy sources. I don't see how this works at all. If the prices go down, won't consumption just go right back up, defeating the whole point of the exercise? And if this fanciful model worked, carbon taxes would have the exact same effect, right?