Warming to McCain

It's good to see a politician rewarded for a courageous and unpopular stand, as John McCain has been over Iraq. History will show he was as central to the battle of Washington as Gen. David Petraeus has been to the battle of Baghdad. Our enemies strategized that America lacks staying power. Mr. McCain's role deprived them of their plan for victory.

But honor, the value that underlined Mr. McCain's stand, is no use on an issue like global warming. Here, he could use a little more Mitt Romney, his vanquished nemesis whose name has now resurfaced in the veep sweepstakes.

Mr. Romney was tagged as a wonk because he "immerses himself in data." But one thing immersion can do that casual "gut" proceedings can't is let you know when the data don't provide an answer, even if people are telling you it does.

If the warming of the 1980s and 1990s were shown to be extraordinary, that would at least indicate something extraordinary is going on. If the pace of warming or the scale were correlated in some sensible fashion with the rise in atmospheric CO2, that might suggest cause – but such correlation is lacking.

It perhaps takes somebody steeped like Mr. Romney in real-world analytics to find a footing against the media tide. But the fact remains: The push toward warming that CO2 provides in theory is no reason to presume in confidence that CO2 is actually responsible for any observed warming in a system as complex and chaotic as our atmosphere.

In his climate speech on Monday, Mr. McCain exhibited (as the press usually does) a complete lack of consciousness of the fact that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming. Yet policy must be a matter of costs and benefits, adjusted for the uncertainties involved. Which brings us to today's irony: He who finds a six-figure earmark an affront to humanity is prepared to wave through a trillion-dollar climate bill without, as far as anyone can tell, a single systematic thought about costs and benefits.

He who sees "corruption" behind every campaign check goes all compliant when GE, DuPont and Ford chant that climate policy "will create more economic opportunities than risks for the U.S. economy."

Mr. McCain argues that green energy mandates will leave us better off whether or not man-made global warming is real. This is an error that Mr. Romney wouldn't make – and one Al Gore makes all the time. Yes, hole-digging can be profitable if government subsidizes hole-digging. For society, however, there is only cost – measured in the labor and resources diverted to hole-digging from activities that actually fulfill the wants and needs of people.

Let's see: An estimate by the International Energy Agency holds that, to ward off the worst of climate change, the world by 2030 must build 34 hydroelectric dams the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, 510 nuclear plants, 289,000 wind turbines, 6,800 biomass plants and 714 fossil fuel plants equipped with unproven CO2 capture technology.

None of this will happen; if it did, it would merely slow progress toward a more carbon-rich atmosphere; and (of course) any impact on climate would be purely speculative.

Then what, as a practical matter, would be the aim of global warming policy? Our political system permits only one answer: to please the special interests that even now are gathering at the trough for subsidies in the name of climate change.

Politics is often a business of adaptive dishonesty, and never more so than when dealing with an issue like climate change. Real solutions are lacking so politicians can only devote themselves to telling voters what they want to hear while dishing out favors to whatever lobbyists are handy (and Mr. McCain picked a venue to do both on Monday, a wind turbine factory in Oregon). But let's also concede: Nobody who seriously wants to be president in 2008 is going to question the "consensus" on global warming.

And yet every journalistic tendril senses that the fuss over warming is about to cool. Global mean temperatures have been flat for a decade. The biofuel folly has chased away any easy belief that we can centrally plan our way out of reliance on fossil fuels. Voters seem more concerned with high gas prices. Even the town criers of global warming acknowledge that we will be stuck adapting to whatever climate comes along.

Mr. McCain's virtues are many, but he's a politician. Yet, happily, the spheres are moving and whatever energy boondoggles are coming, they are likely to be less costly than the boondoggles that might have been enacted even a year or two ago when Al Gore was riding high. For this, we will be able to thank the climate gods and no one else.

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