Our suit, CEI vs. NASA (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia), followed on the heels of ClimateGate, and a December 2009 Notice of Intent to Sue if NASA did not turn over certain records withheld since CEI sought them in August 2007 and January 2008 requests. That Notice was eleven months ago and, despite NASA offering some documents and admitting — temporarily — that certain others relating to the advocacy site used by NASA scientists, RealClimate.org were “agency records”, NASA then ceased its brief steps to comply with the transparency statute FOIA.

Despite NASA stonewalling CEI has already learned, for example, that NASA does not, contrary to widespread media and pressure group claims, have an independent temperature data set. Instead, as NASA told USA Today in an email, despite its serial, breathless press releases trumpeting some new temperature high, it actually is just a modeling office, which also (for unknown reasons, possibly extra attention and importance, or mere advocacy)  cobbles together some US data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) with that of the Climatic Research Unit’s temperature history. You may recall how CRU withdrew its claim to a temperature history data set after ClimateGate led to an admission it actually lost its data.

Specifically, CEI’s FOIA suit seeks documents and emails relating to NASA’s temperature record, which NASA was forced to correct in response to criticism from a leading climate watchdog, Steve McIntyre.  Those corrections destroyed NASA’s stance that U.S. temperatures have been steadily rising in recent years and returned 1934, not 1998, to being the warmest year on record. NASA refuses to give CEI the computer file they used to make these changes, whose title includes “Steve” and “alternate cleaning.”

CEI also seeks emails from NASA scientists using Real Climate.org on official time using official resources, often to advance what NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (its climate activist office) has decided is appropriate public advocacy.

In addition to uncovering the “Steve”/”cleaning” file, a few of the more interesting pieces of evidence expounded upon in CEI’s brief include:

* After CEI filed the FOIA seeking RealClimate emails, administrators at Real Climate deleted all timestamps on all of their postings, making it impossible to show they were made during work hours.  But we kept color copies of the original posts.

* NASA admits that it discovered 3,500 emails on Dr. Schmidt’s NASA computer related to his work on RealClimate but won’t produce them.

* NASA did not ask Dr. Schmidt to look for responsive records until 22 months after we sent them the FOIA and threatened to sue.  It is highly likely relevant emails were destroyed during this period.

* NASA’s delay in responding to CEI’s FOIA requests was extraordinary, far outside its normal or even most egregious examples of delay or non-compliance. For instance:

o   NASA took more than 900 days to produce documents pursuant to CEI’s two 2007 requests.  The agency took more than 700 days to produce records in response to CEI’s 2008 request.  NASA does not explain these delays. FOIA requires that an agency produce responsive records within 20 days. Although agencies rarely meet that deadline, even for “complex” FOIA requests, NASA’s average processing time is under 100 days. In 2008, NASA processed complex requests in 82 days, on average. In 2009, it processed such requests in 89 days, on average.

o   Prompted by congressional inquiries, the NASA Inspector General investigated the delay associated with these FOIA Requests. The Inspector General determined that the delays were caused by “inadequate direction” as to what documents were requested; “inadequate communication between NASA personnel; and “inadequate staffing” at the Goddard FOIA office.  In reality, one of the primary reasons for the delay was that NASA did not inform GISS officials about one of the requests and inexplicably held documents for years instead of producing them on a rolling basis, as requested.

We should argue this within the month. CEI requests the court allow it to proceed to the discovery stage next, examining records and deposing relevant witnesses.

Researchers who have long questioned the premise of man-made global warming theories point out that alarmist claims are driven more by computer models that omit key variables than they are by actual observations. The growing “climategate” scandal goes a long way toward vindicating the scientific skeptics who have been ostracized in the media and the academic community. Emails that have been leaked to the Internet from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia show that researchers have deliberately fudged and manipulated data in an effort to account for predicted catastrophic warming that has not materialized.

In his testimony before the British Parliament, Phil Jones, the CRU director, suggested that he would be cleared of any wrongdoing once a fuller body of evidence is presented. The emails that have been made public were only a “tenth of one percent” of his correspondence, Jones said.

If anything, the more recent email revelations serve to invalidate the use of climate models that figure prominently into the reports issued through the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC author wrote in an email addressed to other alarmists in October of last year. “The CERES data published in August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data surely are wrong.  Our observing system is inadequate.”

In another email addressed to Tom Wigley, a physicist with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Trenberth makes the following comment:

“Hi Tom — How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

This exchange is particularly significant because it demonstrates that climate models that have been used to rationalize expansive regulatory schemes are in error, Steve Milloy editor and founder of JunkScience.com said in interview.

“We’ve had no warming for the past 10-15 years, even though carbon dioxide emissions have increased,” he observed. “The upper atmosphere should be warming at a much greater rate than the lower atmosphere but this is not happening. It means that we don’t understand energy flows, and if you don’t understand how something works it cannot be modeled. It’s insanity to go forward with regulations that are not based on something we understand, but that’s what is being proposed.”

Although “climategate” is properly viewed as an “unexpected gift” to skeptics in that it shows  “Big Science in its natural state,” it is not exactly new, laments David Berlinski, a senior fellow with The Discovery Institute.

“In the 1970s, the Club of Rome was on everyone’s lips with their hysterical warnings of mass disasters that were shortly to arrive,” he wrote in an email message. “My first book, On Systems Analysis, which I wrote for the MIT press, was an expose and a denunciation of the kind of stuff then current. I cannot see that anything has changed. Then as now, the people doing the hustle were doing it for money. Phil Jones and the CRU, after all, took 23 million dollars of public funds to fudge their data and the Club of Rome in their time took in as much.”

Berlinski continues:

“The overwhelming consensus is, as it always is, utter nonsense because it is in the first place an illusion: There are very many scientists who dissent from global warming. And it is utter nonsense because it is based on nothing more than a trend line. No one has the faintest idea what the trend represents or whether it will continue or whether even the trend itself was based on data so fudged as to be meaningless. The latter, I think.”

“What is at work deep down is a delusion as striking as various Zulu beliefs and no more credible: To wit, that because there is something that might for the sake of convenience be designated as the global atmosphere, there is as well a science of the global atmosphere, one in which for various initial conditions of the GA, laws of its evolution might be adduced from which explanations and predictions would flow. There is no such science; there are no such laws. To be sure one can say with easy confidence that the GA is determined by fundamental physics.”

Berlinski appeared in the 2008 documentary “Expelled : No Intelligence Allowed,” which probes into the mistreatment of scientists who have raised questions about Charles Darwin’s 150 year old theory of evolution.  Ben Stein, the former Nixon speechwriter turned Hollywood actor, served as the film’s narrator. The film is built around the idea that free thinkers who dissent from the orthodoxy of “Big Science” are being silenced and marginalized. In light of the “climategate” scandal, “Expelled” now appears quite prescient.

Berlinski, who is also a noted mathematician, is not himself a proponent of Intelligent Design theory, but he does defend biologists and astronomers appearing in the documentary who are open to the idea as an alternative to Darwinian views that continue to dominate the scientific academy.

In reality, science has never operated by consensus. Over time, prevailing views are either substantiated or dismissed as new evidence emerges. The momentum is now very much with Easterbrook and other researchers who have identified natural forces as opposed to human activity as the primary driving force behind warming and cooling trends. Ideally, they should find greater expression.

But Berlinski is not so confident over the long term.

“Climate science stands exposed but only for the moment,” he wrote. “It will be back. I cannot see much difference between evolutionary science and climate science and I have no expectation that the winds of dissent will ever blow from the one to the other. Why should they? In just the past few years, large scale econometric models have, once again, been shown to be unreliable and intellectually worthless. The world-wide economy tanked and not one — not one! — econometric model predicted it.”

Global warming alarmism as a movement appears to have peaked; that’s the good news. A new Gallup Poll shows the American public now dismisses catastrophic claims. Unfortunately, the political agenda that always stood behind the man-made global warming scare remains in motion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) endangerment finding aimed against greenhouse gasses could open the way to centralized planning and government control that irrevocably transforms American society.

Sen. Lisa  Murkowsi (R-Alaska) has introduced a resolution to block EPA action under the Congressional Review Act. It deserves the full support of small government activists. But the economic case against new regulations, as important and compelling as they are, may be insufficient standing alone.

The grand designs of the statists who now hold sway in Washington D.C. can only be uprooted and defeated by attacking the nexus that exists between Big Government and Big Science. Swollen federal agencies that have victimized private property owners, business owners and private citizens in the name of environmentalism could become quite vulnerable in short order.

Take some of the false claims in the 2007 IPCC report.

– The IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. The forecast was based on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999, and the Indian glaciologist who was interviewed, Syed Hasnain, says that he was misquoted, indeed he had provide no date. Professor Hasnain discovered the mistake in 2008 when he read the IPCC’s published report, but he said: “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report. . . . My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Even more disturbingly, Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.’s climate chief, first denied that he knew about the error before the Copenhagen global warming conference. He only admitted that he knew about it before the conference when a writer for the journal Science, Pallava Bagla, pointed to email correspondence that he had with Pachauri last fall.

– The IPCC warned that because of global warming the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s.” They cited one study to support their claim, but when the research was published in 2008, after the IPCC report was released, the study noted: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

– The IPCC warned that up to 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming, but the sole source for that claim was a non-refereed report authored by two people who the Sunday Times of London referred to as “two green activists,” one of them with the World Wildlife Fund.

– The IPCC even got wrong the percentage of the Netherlands that is below sea level. The report claims that the percent is 55 percent, when the right number is 26 percent.

On February 3rd, Mr. Pachauri however defended the UN’s IPCC report by saying that the critics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder. I hope that they apply [asbestos] to their faces every day.” While Pachauri admits that the IPCC was inaccurate about the Himalayan glaciers melting, he claimed that the attacks were motivated by “business interests” who “spread a lot of disinformation.”

Finally, it should be noted that Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which enforces that country’s freedom of information act regulations, has come to some conclusions regarding Climategate. The ICO found that the University of East Anglia breached violated British law by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming. The UK Daily Mail reports that “the scientists will escape prosecution because the offences took place more than six months ago.” Out of 105 freedom of information requests, Professor Phil Jones, who headed the university’s Climate Research Unit, only complied with 10 requests.

For too long global warming proponents have claimed that their claims can’t be questioned. Science should be more transparent than this. But relying on misreported news stories and white papers put out by non-scientists from advocacy cases isn’t science.  Why these climate temperature data has been hidden and why researchers won’t answer questions on adjustments that they have made has become quite troubling. In this age of computers and website, there is no excuse for hiding data.

Findings_Mann_Inquiry –

My take-away, to spoil the ending for you, is that the panel revealed most of what we need to know about the ability of this internal inquiry to credibly assess charges of misfeasance, by limiting their evidentiary pursuit outside of select blogs and media reports to speaking with Mann, aided by a supportive NAS report (to the exclusion of the Wegman Committee report, inexplicable including for a factor cited, below) and one panel member interviewing ex parte two Mann supporters.

In my opinion, by this approach they did not do, and will in hindsight not be deemed as having done, themselves or their institution any favors.

1. This is simply a point of interest but, in describing the CRU e-mail cache that finally (not first) shined a light on Mann’s practices so as to bring the sort of scrutiny that can yield direct professional consequence, the panel chose the word “purloined”, vs. hacked or stolen. P. 3, p. 5.

This is an odd word choice in the general style and vocabulary of the document, and I am guessing that this was selected as the most neutral term; even if it includes “to steal”, the word also contemplates the actions of a suddenly unwelcome “whistleblower”, that erstwhile celebrated creature which the facts available indicate was the source of the documents long-sought under the UK’s freedom of information law.   p. 3

2. The panel considered the NAS report that Mann’s suspect practices had prompted, but not the Wegman Committee Report p. 3. The University’s odd decision had already been noted by others, for its sheer incomprehensibility. Even CRU emails acknowledge the importance of reading both, not one of them (go here and hit search for the numerous entries; why, even Mann delves into the Wegman problem his CRU emails at issue — assuming this mail wasn’t weeded out in the paring down from 377 “Mann” emails to focus on 47 of them). “No inquiry, even (especially?) threshold , can be credible if it excludes that detailed assessment of relevant behavior even if it addresses work predating Mann’s tenure at PSU..so did the NAS report the panel reviewed.” Not that the reports predated his tenure, they addressed work that did.

3. Just as a point of interest, I was struck by the panel’s inclusion of this assessment in a ten-page summary of two-months’ work. “Throughout the interview, Dr. Mann answered each question carefully:”    p. 4  ["... In addition, Dr. Mann provided a ten page supplemental written response to the matters discussed during his interview." P. 4]

4. In the in-person interview, “He explained the content and meaning of the emails about which we inquired;”  p. 4

It is problematic that they only interviewed Mann even to reach a threshold determination. If the content and meaning of the emails is important, as is implicit, then why would they not speak to the authors of these important emails mentioning him, and many others not written by him, which made the final cut for scrutiny and assessment?

Consider this in a judicial context and you see the curiosity of calling in Mann but only Mann to explain what other people wrote and meant. Happens in trials all the time. Um, like when the authors are dead.

5. “He explained that he never used inappropriate influence in reviewing papers by other scientists who disagreed with the conclusions of his science;” though I note that this does not cover Mann pressuring others re: reviewing and publication. Seems sort of relevant, even if he did also issued a blanket denial of any inappropriate behavior.

6. “On January 22, 2010, the inquiry committee and Dr. Brune met again to review the evidence, including but not limited to Dr. Mann’s answers to the committee’s questions, both in the interview and in his subsequent submissions. All were impressed by Dr. Mann’s composure and his forthright responses to all of the queries that were asked of him.” (emphasis added) The assertion of Mann’s “forthrightness” alone, given inter alia the panel did not, as noted above, apparently interview others necessary to make such a determination (outside of one panel member meeting ex parte with two well-known Mann supports, see bottom of page 4), is troubling. But I suppose that’s what internal inquiries and other self-policing often produces.

7. The money conclusion, except for any that inform your assessment of the credibility of the inquiry, is this:

Finding 4. After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee could not make a definitive finding whether there exists any evidence to substantiate that Dr. Mann did engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities.” Pp. 6-7.

Reading the panel’s quantification of this finding over the next two pages, they sure look like a band edging over toward the outcome, when the music (inquiries) stops, that leaves them standing pretty squarely on the spot staked out in the initial wagon-circling, dismissive response of the relevant and cloistered scientific community detailed by Wegman et al. Maybe they behaved less purely than is the driven snow, but that’s more a matter of perception derived from “private” correspondence never intended for outside assessment; who has not been indiscreet? However that is not the same as violating laws, etc.

The wagon-circlers in ClimateGate’s early days involved climate scientists waving away the actions of fellow climate scientists with whom they shared parallel interests of not seeing their gravy train derailed; Indeed, the panel summarizes that response of others as “nothing more than the private discussions of scientists engaged in a hotly debated topic of enormous social impact.”

Penn State risks the appearance of waving away the actions of a fellow Penn Stater with whom they share the interests in this not being a drawn-out tawdry affair for the University. We will see how they distinguish their own, surely more verbose ultimate conclusions from the wagon-circlers’ pithy dismissal.

8. Also troubling is the panel’s selective notation that “some may seek to use the debate over Dr. Mann’s research conduct and that of his colleagues as a proxy for the larger and more substantive debate over the science of anthropogenic global warming and its societal (political and economic) ramifications”. P. 8.

Yes. And some may seek to diminish the scrutiny of Mann’s research and conduct and that of his colleagues to protect the larger and more substantive industry that they represent. Why only one of these interests is worth mentioning is of a part with the panel being taken by just how forthright their subject was, despite not acquiring context to make that judgment but which assertion was material for inclusion in a ten-page assessment of more than two months’ work.

Sadly, the panel’s express focus, the only one among the relevant issues which troubles them for further inquiry — “questions in the public’s mind about Dr. Mann’s conduct of his research activity, given that this may be undermining confidence in his findings as a scientist, and given that it may be undermining public trust in science in general and climate science specifically” (p. 9) — is likely to be viewed in hindsight as having revealed a driving desire of dispelling questions and rehabilitating Mann, “science” and/or the University, not into fairly exploring the substance.

In conclusion, these points all remind us of the frequent need for and widespread use of independent inquiry when seeking to truly discern the meaning and importance of credibly alleged misfeasance. Penn State is heading toward concluding that this is all a big misperception, a matter of appearances more than substance. Something similar can be said about their initial assessment. Appearances matter, and this doesn’t appear good.

In a normal scandal where the government appears to have been ripped off, someone in the legislative or executive branch can usually be counted on to investigate the alleged fraud, if for no other reason than advancing their own political career.  In the case of this scandal, however, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have calculated that their political interests are best served by ignoring ClimateGate.  This is sure to continue as new scandals emerge.

That leaves only the judicial branch as a place where climate change fraud can be unmasked in a government forum.

Individuals with inside knowledge about scientists, businesses, or any organization who knowingly used false statements to get (or keep) government money to perpetuate the “climate change” machine should consider a lawsuit under the federal False Claims Act.

The False Claims Act permits whistleblowers to sue in the name of the government as a “qui tam” plaintiff.  Qui tam whistleblowers have used the FCA for decades to police (some would say hound) government contractors accused of obtaining government money by means of false statements.  What’s the non-altruistic incentive for exposing fraud on the government?  Successful whistleblowers can keep a share of the money that a federal judge or jury says should be paid back to the government, sometimes up to 30% of the recovery.  Indeed, whistleblowers have recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in these suits over the last 20 years.

There is no reason this legal tool can’t be used against unscrupulous professors, scientists, and “green jobs” hucksters who knowingly submit false statements to get government grants that fund their research, fuel their green-tech start-ups, and underwrite their proselytizing about supposed man-made climate change.

Importantly, false statements necessary to justify a False Claims Act suit don’t have to involve the same type of data-manipulation exposed in the current ClimateGate scandal.  A climate-fraud FCA case could be made out of any type of false statement made in order to get or keep government money.  Government grants and contracts typically involve a significant amount of ongoing certification of compliance with bureaucratic restrictions – think of a government contractor’s progress reports or a hospital’s never-ending stream of paperwork assuring that all is in order – and false statements in this paperwork may open the door to a lawsuit.

What about retaliation against those who blow the whistle on their organization or their boss?  The law provides extremely strong protections for those who bring a lawsuit.  In fact, the FCA contains separate provisions permitting whistleblowers to recover for such retaliation.

Finally, a few important caveats for anyone considering a qui tam suit:

First, secrecy is important, at least at the beginning.  You may lose the opportunity to litigate on behalf of the government if you or someone else publicizes your inside information.  The FCA imposes strict guidelines on whistleblowers’ ability to maintain suits based on information that has been publicly disclosed.

Second, states and state universities (like Prof. Michael Mann’s employer Penn State) cannot be sued under the FCA for reasons having to do with federalism, but individuals working at state universities can be named as defendants if they caused false claims to be submitted.

Third, before filing suit, whistleblowers must share the information supporting their suit with the Justice Department.  Although the government has the option of taking over the litigation to recover the money, it is unlikely, to say the least, that the current Justice Department would assist a whistleblower whose FCA case threatened to undermine the administration’s climate-change policies.  If (or when) the government declines to intervene, the whistleblower plaintiff and their lawyers can vigorously prosecute the lawsuit, with all the powerful tools of pre-trial discovery.

A climate fraud False Claims Act suit would be no small undertaking.  The rewards, however, could be quite substantial, and not just in monetary terms.  Who would like to see a videotaped deposition of a climate-change fraudster defending his or her actions under oath?  I sure would.

Mr. Mosher was instrumental in promulgating the now infamous “hacked” emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  These e-mails have called into question the methods, the calculations, the peer review process, even the overall SCIENCE involved in the Global Warming arguments that drove the Cap and Trade Legislation as well as the UN Climate Conference and Kyoto Protocols.  Mr. Mosher obtained these emails on a CD from an unidentified colleague.  After days of review, Mr. Mosher realized the importance of the information he was sitting on, and he began the process of posting the information on various “Climate Change” websites and blogs.  Because the postings came from Mr. Mosher, the community immediately took them seriously.  The rest is “Under Media” history.

At the end of the ten minute interview, in-studio guest Adam Baldwin asked Mr. Mosher the final question:

“I think one of the big, missing stories here is how the scientific publishing mechanism is corrupted.  I mean, I think of “Global Warming” as kind of a religion, and what you see in the mails is how they construct the canon, of how they corrupt the journal publishing, to get the papers published what they WANT published, with the reviewers that they want reviewing it and the papers they don’t want published, they keep out.”

What is the last, remaining argument the Global Warming cultists have?  “There are no peer reviewed studies!”  In this one, succinct statement, Mr. Mosher connects the Climate-gate e-mails with a silver bullet to the heart of this argument.  Why are there no peer reviewed studies?  Because the “Peers” are silencing dissent through intimidation and bullying.  It is the way the left has been trying to move their agenda forward for years.

Against ebryonic stem cell research?  “You are anti-science!”

Against Same-sex Marriage?  “You hate gay people!”

Against partial-birth abortion?  “You hate women!”

In favor of keeping terrorists in Gitmo?  “You are a torturer!”

And, in the words of Congressmen, Senators and even a former President:

Against Obamacare?  “Racist!”

Troubled by such results, several green groups to rush out polls of their own, riddled with gauzy questions generally distilling to “wouldn’t you want to save the planet from destruction if you could get rich doing so?” I oversimplify, but not grossly. This week the National Wildlife Federation claimed two-thirds of Americans want federal limits on greenhouse gases! Surely a Congress desperate to do something popular will hop on board this train? Not likely.

The shocker from these forays is that a substantial number have so little regard for the alarmist claptrap that they’re willing to dismiss even loaded questions designed to elicit a positive response.

You may recall a Washington Post poll conducted a few years ago, even before the cooling trend became pronounced, and severe winters of the sort that green activists assured us were now a thing of the past serially returned. That poll prompted a WaPo headline trumpeting that the public wanted to address climate change “at whatever the cost”.

This is the sort of tool employed for years to support the talking point that it was that mean George W. Bush that stood between the United States, nay, the world, in agreeing to climate harmony in the form of a treaty and domestic cap-and-trade language (Copenhagen just now put the lie to that, for any who actually believed the argument).

Of course, the Post pollsters didn’t actually pressure test that result, laden with cheap virtue as are all such ventures where the only cost is a reply. All they dared learn was that “at any cost” meant to the majority something less than a dollar more per gallon. If only cap-and-trade would merely inflict that harm, why, the greens might be onto something. But our president has admitted the axiom that cap-and-trade is designed to cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket”, “bankrupt[ing]” industries.

So despite the flurry of greenie claims that the public is, too, with them, another poll came out this week commissioned by the National Federation of Independent Business. Its results track far better with the only poll that matters, more on which in a moment.

NFIB found that two-thirds of small business owners and managers — the people whose sentiments drive three-fourths of new-job creation — oppose a cap-and-trade scheme.  52 percent of voters oppose it, making it about as popular as Obama’s health care takeover. 54 percent of small business owners and managers, and 42 percent of voters, believe that such a system would result in job loss.

The reason the results were different is that NFIB’s pollsters added context to what they were asking, if possibly more soberly than is warranted but, hey, they erred on that side for credibility giving them a leg up on the greens. So respondents were at least challenged to consider that the policies are not free-ice cream — even if still just in answering a poll question, which hurts slightly less than actually paying the additional amounts or losing your job. Polls claiming to show public support for cap-and-trade seem to prefer a don’t ask, don’t tell approach.

Elected lawmakers, who appear to jealously guard only one job — their own — are unlikely to try and ram through cap-and-trade next year as the greens’ polls indicate would be the popular thing to do. In fact, numerous self-styled “centrist” Democrat senators and even the occasional liberal like Sen. Jay Rockefeller have indicated that, no, this appears to be a good issue to think about for 2011. That’s an odd-numbered year, you see, with no elections, and the public, as reflected in the NFIB poll, want nothing to do with this scheme and want their lawmakers to have even less to do with it.

So let the greens wave about polls whose questions smack more than a little like scripts from late-night real estate get-rich-quick infomercials. Senators know that this stove is hot, and they aren’t about to lay their own hands on it. That’s not to say there won’t be feints and even a few death throes this Congress to try and convince a dispirited left-wing base that they should be excited about voting in 2010.

But cap-and-trade is a dead parrot. In a way, that’s a shame. Actually trying to pass it would allow for salting the political earth from which the sneaky, cynical idea sprang. But that, too, shall come.