Environment: The world's leading crusader on climate change is said to be making some fellow Democrats nervous. With gasoline north of $4 a gallon, it's no surprise.

Al Gore has been storming the planet with a message that boils (no pun intended) down to two points. First, global warming is the greatest crisis facing mankind. Second, the cost of solving this problem is either not all that big a deal or well worth paying — take your pick.

It's a mix of environmental panic and economic complacency, and it has so far earned Gore a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar.

But if Oslo and Hollywood are showing unconditional love, Washington is a tad more ambivalent. The Hill, the daily newspaper covering Congress, reports that some members of Gore's own party were uneasy about him taking his crusade to the nation's capital, where on Thursday he delivered a major address on climate change.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., told the paper before the speech that voters aren't in a mood to hear about expensive alternative energy schemes. "If it looks like it's just a continuation of an attack on our economy and family budgets, then it starts getting dispiriting," he said. "The fact is," added Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., "the price issue of oil and gas has become a very dominant issue."

Gore's speech turned out to be everything they'd feared. He set an impossibly ambitious target — all electricity in America to be generated from wind, sun and other non-fossil-fuel sources in 10 years — and proposed a carbon tax to help foot the bill.

Gore suggested offsetting the carbon levy — which would jack up the price of everything produced or transported by fossil fuels, as well as the price of the fuels themselves — with a cut in the Social Security/Medicare payroll tax.

But that tax cut would be much less visible to the typical wage-earner than the higher prices caused everywhere by the carbon tax. Practical politicians know this. But that's what you get when you look to a divinity school dropout for your science policy.

Last year, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., floated the carbon tax idea as a way of gauging how serious politicians really were about paying for an ambitious energy transformation. He found that they weren't serious, and the idea died. And that was when gasoline prices were quite a bit lower than they are now.

Rising gas prices later helped kill off a cap-and-trade plan that would have had the economic impact of a carbon tax, even if not structured as one. Introduced in the Senate by Independent Joe Lieberman and Republican John Warner, the cap-and-trade bill fizzled out in June after failing to gain even a majority of votes to overcome a filibuster.

Gore seems blissfully unaware of these head winds. To the environmental left, that may be part of his charm. But it also shows a cavalier rejection of reality that promises to alienate many more Democrats, not to mention Republicans. Whatever one's stand on global-warming science, the usual rules of democracy apply to the task of dealing with it.

As for the costs of Gore's ideas, Yale economist William Nordhaus, in his well-regarded book "A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies," ran a standard economic model to compare all the major global warming plans. Gore's proposed solution was by far the worst, at a net cost of $21 trillion over 100 years.

It's the height of stupidity to push plans that bludgeon millions of already-stressed consumers with even higher prices. It's also unfair. The rich can sail along barely aware of carbon taxes or cap-and-trade costs. The poor cannot.

Democrats who grasp this reality this might well be wondering what people such as Gore are thinking. One thing is clear: Concern for the ordinary American has never seemed weaker in the ranks of hard-core greens.

For at least some of them, the economic pain felt by consumers is good if it gets them out of their cars, onto buses and trains, out of the suburbs and back into crowded central cities, leaving only the rich able to live an expansive life close to nature.

For most of us, that scenario sounds like regression to a poorer past. To the environmentalists who can't get enough of Gore, it's more like nirvana.  Source