The Big Green Lie Exposed - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest

Not since the incident at Chappaquiddick derailed the Ted Kennedy for President boomlet of 1969 has a political movement imploded so fast and so messily as the green crusade to stop global warming. Just last November, the world’s leaders were elbowing each other aside to get in front of the cameras at what was billed as the Copenhagen Summit to Save the Planet. These days, nothing in the world is deader than the drive for a UN climate treaty — and polls around the world show voters less worried about climate change than about a host of other issues.

Here in the US, Al Gore has unaccountably disappeared from the leadership of the climate change movement; John Kerry has taken over the leadership of America’s greens...chances of significant climate legislation during President Obama’s first term range from slim to none.

The global process is in an even deeper hole. The greens, it is increasingly clear, bet the ranch on the Copenhagen process. That horrible meltdown, perhaps the biggest and most chaotic public embarrassment in the history of multilateral summits, turned climate change from global poster boy to global pariah. The green activists who advised their bosses to go to that summit and make large public commitments about global warming are in the doghouse now.

“[Cap-and-trade] is not in my vocabulary” — Reid | GlobalWarming.org

So what’s a poor progressive politician to do? Why, dissemble, obfuscate, and prevaricate to fool the voter.

The problem with this strategy — beyond the sheer dishonesty of it — is that people aren’t as dim as progressive politicians assume. Most people do not spend their time monitoring Congress, but they don’t need to. Numerous watchdog groups are ready to pounce on every ploy to steal our liberty and prosperity, and in Age of the Internet, information travels fast.

Reid and company are fooling themselves if they believe rebranding cap-and-trade as “pollution limits” will blunt public opposition to energy taxes.

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Here We Go Again

I see that four climate scientists, including the incoming head of IPCC WGII, Chris Field, have written up an op-ed for Politico calling for political action on climate change. That they are calling for political action is not problematic, but the following statement in the op-ed ed is a problem:

Climate change caused by humans is already affecting our lives and livelihoods — with extreme storms, unusual floods and droughts, intense heat waves, rising seas and many changes in biological systems — as climate scientists have projected.