American Thinker Blog: Think green; but don't buy green

The phenomenon is called licensing, which works like this: When we do a something we feel is praiseworthy, we build up credit in our moral-worth bank, credit many people subconsciously feel gives them license for doing something reprehensible, like lying and stealing. Feels right to me: I've always got a pleasant frisson of smug superiority when eschewing a plastic bag at the checkout stand for a single item, though I have never shoplifted a candy bar or lied to friends to balance out my moral accounts. Apparently that's a temptation too strong for some, including His Greeniness Himself: "When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to ‘green' type." I didn't say it: that's the Guardian, Manchester, England.

[Odd stuff from David Frum: He disses climate alarmists, yet advocates a carbon dioxide swindle tax]

The money raised from the tax would be pro-rated between the two governments in proportion to their country’s respective greenhouse-gas output. It could be used to cut other taxes or to repay the debt incurred in the 2008 financial crisis.
...
The climate-change issue has provoked great skepticism. Too many climate advocates have engaged in hysterical exaggeration (that’s you, Al Gore). Others have engaged in dirty tricks and data manipulation (hello, “hide the decline”). But maybe the biggest problem of all is the well-founded suspicion that many climate-change activists are trying to use the environment to smuggle in other concerns: to promote the redistribution of wealth to poorer countries, to expand the role of government in the private economy.

The climate issue won’t go anywhere until climate advocates jettison those unrelated priorities. Junk the secret agenda, and the core problem may prove surprisingly easy to fix.