By Alan Caruba

For a brief period I subscribed to The Economist, the London-based internationally distributed magazine, but I stopped as it became obvious that its editors are idiots and the general purpose of the magazine is to ignore any and all facts that might contradict their obsession with “global warming” and now “climate change.”

Last year, The Economist had a cover that said, “Stop Climate Change.” That’s like saying stop the Earth from circumnavigating the Sun. The issue came out about the same time as the entire fictitious infrastructure of “global warming” came undone and resulted in the collapse of the last United Nations conference of liars who had gathered in Copenhagen to impose the purchase, sale and trade of “carbon credits” on the world.

A year later, the Chicago Exchange that had been set up to cash in on the scam had closed its doors. The one in Europe is selling carbon credits for pennies these days. Naturally, California, besotted with global warming idiocy, is preparing to have its own exchanges.

Apparently, despite glaring headlines in British newspapers, no one at The Economist was aware that the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia University, had been found to be rigging the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data for years. Having collected millions of pounds for its bogus research, we are still waiting for its director, Phil Jones, to find accommodations in Reading Goal, a famed British prison.

Did the Economist’s editors learn anything in the past year? No. Indeed, its latest issue sports a cover that says “How to Live with Climate Change.” In a year’s time, they have gone from saying stop climate change to learn to live with it. Is there a choice?

This is not the most original idea given the fact that human beings have been living with climate change since we climbed down from the trees and began walking upright, developing language, and spreading across the face of the Earth.

Eskimos found ways to survive in the Arctic. Polynesians learned to travel among Pacific islands. Everywhere civilizations came and went while agriculture was introduced to feed more and more people who, in turn, preferred living in cities as opposed to plowing the soil. The art and science of war flourished.

The Economist focused its attention on next week’s “meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, the subject of a conference to be held in Cancun, Mexico.

You may recall that President Obama attended last year’s conference in Copenhagen that foundered on the news that there never was any dramatic increase in the Earth’s temperature.

Leaked emails revealed that the only “proof” of “global warming” could be found in corrupt, falsified computer models churned out by the CRU and a coordinated climate scam out of Pennsylvania State University, the recipient of comparable “climate research” funding.

The President had to depart early because of a massive blizzard that enveloped Copenhagen.

Even the Economist had to admit that “in the wake of the Copenhagen summit, there is a growing acceptance that the effort to avert serious climate change has run out of steam.” That’s also likely due to the fact that there is no way to “avert serious climate change.”

The Economist, however, held out hope that “a few climatic disasters” might get the scam going again.

It is an act of journalistic criminality to publish outright lies, but The Economist is not deterred by anything resembling the truth. It asserts a “likelihood” that “the Earth will be at least 3 degrees Celsius warmer at the end of this century than it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution, less warming is possible, but so is more, and quicker.” So there could be less, but there could be more

This is utter rot.

It is typical of the way “global warming” was always predicted to arrive twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now; all based on manipulated and mendacious computer models. The usual predictions of heat waves, droughts, along with melting poles and glaciers are cited in its cover editorial.

Just as the Cancun festival of climate lies will do, The Economist rhapsodizes about a massive redistribution of wealth from industrialized developed nations to those in the grip of despots, Islam, communism or other systems that keep them poor. When interviewed recently, IPCC official, Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist, bluntly said that “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.”

So what is climate change policy really about? It is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.” If this sounds like the usual communist claptrap, it is. See post here.

By Jim Snyder and Kim Chipman

Cap-and-trade may be just the first casualty of the science-doubters in the House and Senate.

“I am vindicated,” says Republican Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who was ridiculed by environmentalists in 2003 when he declared that man-made global warming was the “greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people.”

He has reason to crow: His party’s sweep of the midterm elections will bring into office almost four dozen new lawmakers (11 senators and at least 36 House members) who share his skepticism about climate change, according to ThinkProgress, an arm of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Washington research group allied with Democrats. They join a smaller group of Republican incumbents, some of whom will assume powerful committee positions in January, who also reject that global warming is an immediate threat.

Their influence could be felt soon. When Obama Administration negotiators arrive in Cancun, Mexico, on Nov. 29 for 12 days of climate-change talks, they will no longer be able to claim that their policy agenda—to push for global action on climate change—has the full backing of Congress.

The day after the Nov. 2 elections, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the new balance of power requires him to scale back his environmental agenda. The President has all but scrapped plans for legislation that would require companies to buy and sell pollution allowances, a so-called cap-and-trade system. Even modest goals could be tough to realize. Republicans say they will seek to roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules, set to take effect in January, limiting carbon emissions, as well as restrictions on coal mining. They also may try to block billions of dollars in federal funds the Administration has directed to wind, solar, and other alternative sources, as well as electric-car technologies, areas Obama pitches as the manufacturing engines of the future.

“It’s hard to spin that it’s a good thing,” says Gerard Waldron, a partner with Washington-based law firm Covington & Burling, referring to the elections that gave Republicans control of the House and more seats in the Senate. “We’re going to focus on our domestic situation, and we’ll have to explain to the world what American democracy looks like.” Companies that have invested in renewables are disappointed. “Climate change isn’t going away,” says Lewis Hay, CEO of NextEra Energy, the largest U.S. producer of wind and solar energy. “We’re going to have to take action sooner or later.”

As an aide to Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who heads a House panel on global warming, Waldron helped write cap-and-trade legislation. The House passed a bill in 2009, but it died earlier this year in the Senate. The bill’s demise led the Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary U.S. carbon trading market acquired this summer for $600 million by Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), to announce in October that it planned to shut down at yearend for lack of activity.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who agree the earth is warming because of man-made activity has been in free fall, dropping to 34 percent in October, from 50 percent in July 2006, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Now lawmakers who reject the notion that there is ironclad evidence of global warming are rising in seniority in the House. Representative Ralph M. Hall, a Texas Republican, is in line to chair the House Science and Technology Committee, which oversees numerous federal agencies conducting climate-change research. “Reasonable people have serious questions about our knowledge of the state of the science,” Hall says. Representative John Shimkus of Illinois is vying to become chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. At a March 2009 hearing, he said the Bible teaches that climate change won’t destroy the planet.

Such statements could make it more difficult for the U.S. to convince other countries that it can meet its goal, pledged a year ago in Copenhagen, of cutting emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The U.S. will join about 190 countries in Cancun for U.N.-led talks aimed at drafting a new treaty. Obama’s lead negotiator, Todd D. Stern, has said the U.S. will stand behind the target. It’s probably a waste of time, says Inhofe. With Congress unlikely to adopt any carbon limits, negotiators will have little to do “other than swim,” he says.

The U.S. insists it will reduce emissions by raising fuel-efficiency standards and through EPA regulation. The new Congress, however, could vote to delay the EPA rules or prohibit the agency from spending any money to implement them, which would have the same effect. With 9.6 percent unemployment, now is not the time to put new conditions on business, says Representative-elect Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), a skeptic. “We can’t be put in a position where we are going to rush headlong into a policy that is going to tax our businesses and our families,” says Walsh, a Tea Party favorite.

The bottom line: Numerous global-warming skeptics taking office in the next Congress will try to undo President Obama’s environmental initiatives.

Snyder is a reporter for Bloomberg News. Chipman is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

Story in Business Week is here.

IBD Editorial

Energy: Former Vice President Al Gore admitted Monday that his pivotal 1994 Senate vote for ethanol subsidies was bad policy but good politics. That says a lot about the reality of environmentalism in government.

As the ethanol tax credit comes up for renewal in Congress on Dec. 31, it’s worth noting it only came about because the vice president cast the decisive 51st vote in favor of it in 1994. At the time, he packaged it as a big move to preserve the environment in a market-friendly, sustainable manner, and for years defended his vote because it was supposedly good for us.

“The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be,” he recounted in 1998.

Now the real story emerges. On Monday he matter-of-factly told a bankers group in Greece it was actually about helping himself. “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president,” the former vice president said.

One is tempted to praise a man who admits mistakes, but the magnitude of what Gore actually did through his cynically cast vote as an elected leader in a position of trust suggests sorry isn’t enough. Gore’s vote drove food prices higher, trashed the environment, and drew American capital into inefficient energy sources over efficient ones. This should be an object lesson in the importance of not trusting politicians on the environment.

Start with what it is - a tax credit for special interests that has cost U.S. taxpayers $16 billion. And costs are rising. The centrally planned ethanol mandate has risen from 7.5 billion gallons by 2012 to 35 billion by 2022. In the last year alone, it’s cost $7 billion. From the tax credit, refiners make a profit on blended ethanol even when it costs more than gasoline, an unfair price distortion.

No wonder refiners told farmers they could buy all the corn they could grow - Uncle Sam was picking up the tab. Today, 41% of all corn grown in America goes to ethanol - not to the dinner table.

Among the unintended consequences, farmland that had been efficiently planted with multiple crops ended up as monolithic cornfields, using 1,700 gallons of water to make a gallon of ethanol. Food prices surged as the government’s ethanol monster got fed.

As corn exports fell, inflation soared abroad. In Mexico, riots broke out over rising tortilla prices. Inflation hurts the poor most. Then there was the product itself, ethanol, a fuel that’s been around since the days of Henry Ford. It burns 30% less efficiently than other forms of energy, such as oil, clean coal, shale and natural gas. As IBD wrote earlier this month, ethanol “has never made much sense economically or environmentally.” Gore confirms this.

Still, ethanol mandates did wonders for Gore’s political life, bringing him everything from a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for environmentalism to big bucks to speak in places like Athens, Greece. By his own admission, Gore’s mistake came at our expense and for that he deserves scorn. More importantly, the feel-good era of environmentalism by government diktat must end.

Taxpayers shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of environmentalism to satisfy one man’s ambitions. See post here.

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The European Mess caused by the enviro socialist agenda. Will US follow?

This Quantitative Easing cartoon is hilarious and tells you how an inexperienced government team - here the Fed - can make an endless series of mistakes about the ecconomy much as the government has done with the environment, health care, etc.