Goldberg: Assessing pre-blame for climate-change summit

By Jonah Goldberg

This week's Copenhagen summit on climate change already seems doomed to failure, and voices on both sides of the global-warming debate are trying to pin the blame on Climategate. Republicans on Capitol Hill are trying to use Climategate to scuttle the Democrats' cap-and-trade legislation. Even the Saudis are getting in on the act, saying the scandal casts the entire case for global warming in doubt.

“Climategate” refers to the leaking of vast numbers of e-mails and other documents from a leading British global-warming outfit, the Climatic Research Unit. The e-mails show, depending on your outlook, anything from sloppiness, pettiness and dishonesty to outright fraud among some of the world's leading climate scientists.

The e-mails don't show that the scientists don't believe global warming is real. Rather, they show that the scientists believe in global warming so much, they think they're justified in doing anything to fight it. .

Climategate is a big deal, but we should be clear: It's not why cap-and-trade should be scuttled, and it's not why Copenhagen will produce nothing.

Here is one simple, inconvenient truth: No developing country with significant and remotely accessible stocks of fossil fuels will agree to leave the stuff in the ground.

“Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet's oil reserves - about

1 trillion barrels, currently worth about

$40 trillion,” writes energy expert Peter Huber in City Journal.

And it's not just the nasty countries. Canada insists on exploiting its vast and dirty oil reserves in the so-called “tar sands” under Alberta. If Canada, which has long been the U.N.'s Richie Cunningham, won't play ball, does anyone think the Chinese, Indians or Brazilians will?

Here's another inconvenient truth: The United States will not agree to draconian carbon caps either, for the simple reason it would be political suicide for all but a handful of politicians. Unless you represent hyper-wealthy liberal enclaves or the ethanol moonshine industry, it makes no sense to vote for anything like cap-and-trade.

That's why the Kyoto Protocol never made it out of the crib in the United States.

It was often said that President George W. Bush “refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.” This is technically true - because Bush couldn't sign Kyoto. It was already signed during the Clinton presidency. The important point is that Clinton immediately shoved it in his desk drawer because he knew it would never be ratified by the Senate. Indeed, the Senate voted 95-0 to not even consider ratifying it so long as developing countries like China were left out of the scheme.

Overlooked by the mobs who decried Bush's “treason against the planet” (to borrow a phrase from Paul Krugman) is the fact that President Barack Obama has opted to stay out of the Kyoto system for the same reason.

It would be a shame if people believed Copenhagen's inevitable failure hinged on Climategate. Even if the CRU researchers were the model of scientific dispassion, these schemes are pointless. It makes no sense to waste trillions of dollars on “fixes” that will do little to fix the alleged problem.

It's time to start over, beginning with the science.

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