Hard to beat a good editorial cartoon to sum up a point (in fact, check ours out!). We submit this from Investors Business Daily’s Pulitzer-winning Michael Ramirez:

It’s mostly Beltway insiders and grassroots activists who really know what the heck “cap-and-trade” really means, but as it’s becoming a larger threat more people are taking the time to investigate. While we don’t have official editorial positions on this here web log, it’s safe to say we come down on the side that this kind of government intervention is a major recipe for trouble. We think there’s plenty of support for such a position, too.

Some believe a cap-and-trade system — which puts a limit on carbon emissions and allows firms to trade credits for producing pollution — creates a market mechanism that should eventually reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Chilling Effect reader miggs, who works for an energy recycling firm, has commented here that “If there were a REAL cap-and-trade system, we’d have dirty power producers paying clean power producers for the right to pollute.” That’s certainly a rational position (and we thank readers for engaging in respectful dialog!) and in a perfect world it would hold true. But as Robert Samuelson, probably the best mainstream economics columnist out there, argues today regarding cap-and-trade:

Unfortunately, it’s the darling of environmental groups and their political allies.

The chief political virtue of cap-and-trade — a complex scheme to reduce greenhouse gases — is its complexity. This allows its environmental supporters to shape public perceptions in essentially deceptive ways.

Cap-and-trade would act as a tax, but it’s not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it’s promoted as a “free market” mechanism.

There is some fair room to debate whether the current Lieberman-Warner iteration of cap-and-trade is a fair representation. miggs argues:

The bill currently being proposed, however — Lieberman-Warner — isn’t really cap-and-trade, but cap-and-spend: limit carbon emissions, fine polluters who go beyond that, and then put all the money in a $5.6 trillion government slush fund to dole out subsidies to various interests in the name of “preventing economic hardship.” The government, rather than the market, picks the winners. That’s the wrong way to go.

Indeed, miggs calls it cap-and-spend, Samuelson calls it cap-and-tax (they really are both right since they go hand-in-hand). miggs sums up his position, writing: “I favor cap-and-trade because it would encourage clean, cheap power production IF DONE RIGHT”. The problem is that such an “if” is unlikely to ever materialize. In the end, we can’t agree with our reader that a pure cap-and-trade plan would work because we simply believe no complex, government-driven system can beat the market in terms of social good. We do, however, have much room for common ground with our reader when he argues: “That said, if the government merely opened the energy markets, companies like RED would flourish anyway.”

The National Association of Manufacturers is one of the surest voices against bad energy policy (perhaps because they are the front line that will be injured under bad energy policies that harm the economy?). Here’s NAM’s latest, worthy contribution:

Learn more at nam.org/climatechangetoolkit.

• Watts Up With That?: NASA Funds Toy Snowmobile Project at Georgia Tech to Monitor Climate Change Affecting Ice Shelves
• Climate Audit asks why we should believe there won’t be future revisions to key global warming date (answer: we probably shouldn’t)
• Sure, we could wreck the economy to address a climate that’s going to change on its own, but the Copenhagen Consensus Committee says fighting malnutrition is cheaper to fight than global warming (key quote from Bjorn Lomborg: “Climate change is very clearly a problem, but the ways that we deal with climate change right now, like cutting carbon emissions, cost a lot but do very little good … If you really care about making sure the world becomes a better place, you can do much more for your dollar.”)
• The Financial Post’s Peter Foster describes Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Foster’s European kowtow on global warming and the notion of lost species: “The carnage is taking place entirely in computers. This makes “progress” on the issue a bit of a problem. Still, since enviro-hysteria is about faith not facts, and votes not reason, Mr. Harper chose to sing in Bonn from the bio-hymnbook.”
• Friends of the Earth are, apparently, not friends of the Church: the activist group condemned comments from a Reverend who questioned global warming, declaring “the debate is over” (we ought to create a drinking game on that little canaard).
  

Yes, according to NRO’s Mark Hemingway. Pointing to news that an Italian opera will tell the tall tale of Al Gore, Hemingway writes:

Man, Gore is just the gift that keeps on giving. I do not see how the libretto here can amount to anything other than unintentional satire. As for the intentionally satirical libretto, I leave it up to NRO’s opera fanatics to email me with ideas and if I get enough good ones, I’ll try and post the best submissions tomorrow.

For those who don’t know, “jumping the shark” is a term referencing Happy Days. But the Fonze was way cooler than Al Gore. Whether Gore’s hysteria show gets put out of its misery like a fading TV show has yet to be seen. We hope Hemingway is right, and we will be keeping an eye out for his submissions.

Hat tip: Shopfloor.org.

Browsing through the archives, we found a note from the Onion — America’s finest news source — that Beer Production Threatened By Climate Change. We shudder to imagine if this were real. Thankfully, it’s no more real than the dozens of hoax maladies that pop up each week and blame global warming. We’ll drink to good jokes and recognizing what’s true from what’s just foam.

BONUS ONION: Germans Making ‘Green’ Bombs, what do you think?

No Green PC here.  After his annual meeting with shareholders, Exxon Mobil Chairman and Chief Exec Rex Tillerson pulled no punches in his remarks to the media on the anticipated high economic costs of climate change policy…

“My view is that this is so extraordinarily important to people the world over, that to not have a debate on it is irresponsible,” he said. “To suggest that we know everything we need to know about these issues is irresponsible.

“And I will take all the criticism that comes with it. Anybody that tells you that they got this figured out is not being truthful. There are too many complexities around climate science for anybody to fully understand all of the causes and effects and consequences of what you may chose to do to attempt to affect that. We have to let scientists to continue their investigative work, unencumbered by political influences. This is too important to be cute with it.”

We mentioned the other day Czech president Vaclav Klaus’ gauntlet to Al Gore: debate! No noise from Gore. But Klaus had more to say this week, and boy, did he say it. IBD, probably the top news outlet tracking the threat of global warming alarmism to the U.S. and world economy, predictably has the best roundup. From the IBD editorial today:

But the biggest price to pay, Klaus insists, is the loss of freedom.

Writing in the Financial Times last June, he said: “As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism.”

Tyrants, dictators and demagogues have traditionally invoked “foreign devils” to frighten, stifle and control their people and their countries. Now they invoke the threat of planetary doom spawned by unfettered capitalism.

Klaus warns: “This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.”

Klaus is right. Karl Marx would have signed Kyoto.

Well, Karl Marx has not proven to be good company. Perhaps we ought not have our economy join him in the dustbin of history.

Watts Up With That? has “How not to measure temperature, part 63″

If you’re intellectually honest, you have nothing to fear in a debate. If you’re concerned about stature, it’s OK to debate another nation’s president. Al Gore — demigod to the anti-economy, anti-science cohort — is ducking a debate that meets those concerns:

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Tuesday he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming, as he presented the English version of his latest book that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms. “I many times tried to talk to have a public exchange of views with him, and he’s not too much willing to make such a conversation,” Klaus said. “So I’m ready to do it.”

Klaus was speaking a the National Press Building in Washington to present his new book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles – What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?, before meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday.

“My answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity,” he said.

As more and more people speak up, it’s clear Emporer Gore has no clothes. Somehow — unjustly — he still has a Nobel Prize.