The collapse last week of the Lieberman-Warner bill, the enviro-Left’s attempt to bribe Senators to impose energy rationing on the nation, shows that we are now left with only two energy-policy choices: We can adopt fudging issues as a policy, which will achieve nothing, hurt many, and satisfy no one; or we can pursue a free-market policy that will anger green activists and alarmists but actually do some good. Chances are that fudge is on the menu.

How did we get here? To answer that question, a look at the recently failed policy proposal is instructive. The Boxer Amendment — all 490 pages of it — to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act sought to reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by instituting a “cap-and-trade” regime to make energy use more expensive. Leaving aside the folly of proposing this at a time when Americans are hurting from steeply rising energy prices, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) and her well-funded environmental-movement allies realized that they could not sell this scheme without massive bribery.

I recently watched a re-run of the television series The Incredible Hulk, starring Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby.  In this episode, Bruce Banner attempted to use a radiation chamber in a nuclear plant to reverse the effects of the gamma rays that caused his monstrous condition.  The last thirty minutes of the episode dealt with an earthquake that caused the cooling systems to fail and a nuclear meltdown was imminent.  The entire city was evacuated.  Freeways were jammed with automobiles and residents fled for their lives.  But in the end, the Hulk saved the nuclear plant, and the city, from certain destruction.  The episode was from 1978.

KEVIN, we need to talk. We need to talk about our future. Don’t get me wrong. The early days of carefree symbolism were fun.

Signing the Kyoto Protocol provided a nice, cost-free inner glow to our collective conscience about climate change. Turning off our lights for Earth Hour was a similarly low-cost bit of climate change fun, as we sat by the dreamy glow of candlelight. And who can forget going to the movies to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, shedding tears for humanity and those poor polar bears? Now that the gimmicks are over, we need to get serious about our relationship. Our relationship with climate change. We need to talk about cost. Yes, I know, money is such a gauche topic. But we need to talk about just how much confronting climate change is going to cost us. Kevin, isn’t it time to start telling us how it will affect petrol prices, the cost of our groceries and our electricity bills?

There is no distinctly native American criminal class, Mark Twain observed - except Congress.

A century later, government power and intrusiveness have increased exponentially. As a result, virtually every business and interest now employs lobbyists who can navigate Washington, explain technology to tech-challenged members and staffs, show why provisions are vital or disastrous, and give clients "a seat at the table" where subsidies, mandates, taxes and penalties are meted out.

The system is both the cause and result of far too many congressmen becoming members of what commentator Charles Krauthammer calls an "ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class" that has arrogated unto itself the right to rule American citizens - today in the name of saving planet Earth.

While the East Coast swelters in temperatures that are in the high 90’s, I waited for the usual environmental propaganda to say that this was proof of global warming, but it has not yet been pumped through the usual mainstream media system of lies about the climate.

Instead, the reality is that the Earth continues to cool  and one interesting example of that was a news item out of Aspen, Colorado. The Aspen Skiing company announced on Monday, June 9, that it will open Aspen Mountain from June 13 to June 15 for skiers and snowboarders. It seems that record winter snowfall has left an average of more than three feet of snow on the upper slopes.