“More than 7,000 environmental NGO activists attended the Doha confab … won’t forget who sent them…. They and the official delegates will be there [next time] for specific objectives: more money, more power, more control.”

The eighteenth Conference of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP-18) has ended. It was the latest chapter in the interminable negotiations over wealth redistribution and control of energy use and economic growth – in the name of preventing “dangerous manmade global warming.” Next year in Warsaw!

For people who believe humans can prevent “catastrophic climate change” by adjusting atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by a few parts per million – or are determined to crave control of “destructive” fossil fuels and “unsustainable” economic systems – Doha was a failure.

Only 37 of 194 nations signed the treaty that replaces the Kyoto Protocol, which expires December 31 – and several countries may withdraw their consent.…

Last week, a Hall of Shame cronyism memo turned 15 years old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano.

Global green planners such as Palmisano were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). His memo reflects the train-just-left-the-station mentality, as well as the specific benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron. Enron, in fact, had no less than six profit centers tied to pricing carbon dioxide (CO2), and seven if CO2 were capped and traded.) The story of Enron as the darling company of Left environmentalists has been well told elsewhere.)

The Washington Post broke the memo soon after Enron’s demise, showing how Enron was hardly a free-market, capitalistic company. …

“You don’t want [California’s] system with caps, where you have trading, you have derivatives, you have markets that then collapse and don’t actually reduce emissions much. That’s been tried in Europe, and it didn’t do much.”

– James Hansen, quoted in David Baker, “James Hansen Blasts Cap-and-Trade,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 2012.

“Cap-and-trade’s complexity provides a breeding ground for special interests…. Why do those special interests deserve it anyhow?”

– James Hansen, “The People vs. Cap-and-Tax,” New York City, January 12, 2010.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen has long attracted criticism as the progenitor of modern climate alarmism. In recent years, Hansen has been prone to hyperbolic statements against fossil fuels, ignoring the moral imperative for abundant, affordable, and reliable mass energies (called progressive energy by Alex Epstein).…

“No matter how much you pay with a carbon levy, virtually nothing is received climatically…. No matter the level of domestic action that we take, it will pale in comparison to the rapid expansion of carbon dioxide emissions in other parts of the world.”

How much global warming will result from U.S. emissions over the course of this century, and how much of that could be prevented by a carbon tax? These two questions have the same simple answer—virtually none. One or two tenths of a degree a century out with–and without–a carbon tax makes the whole climate debate a peculiar exercise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the earth’s average temperature will increase somewhere between 1.1°C and 6.4°C over the 21^st century, depending on the assumed pathway of anthropogenic emissions (both greenhouse gases and aerosols) and the actual (but unknown) climate sensitivity.…