Copenhagen's Collapse

The climate change sequel is a bust.
'Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all," President-elect Obama said of global warming last November. "Delay is no longer an option." It turns out that delay really is an option—the only one that has world-wide support.
Over the weekend Mr. Obama bowed to reality and admitted that little of substance will come of the climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month. For the last year the President has been promising a binding international carbon-regulation treaty a la the Kyoto Protocol, but instead negotiators from 192 countries now hope to reach a preliminary agreement that they'll sign such a treaty when they meet in Mexico City in 2010. No doubt.
The environmental lobby is blaming Copenhagen's pre-emptive collapse on the Senate's failure to ram through a cap-and-trade scheme like the House did in June, arguing that "the world" won't make commitments until the U.S. does. But there will always be one excuse or another, given that developing countries like China and India will never be masochistic enough to subject their economies to the West's climate neuroses. Meanwhile, Europe has proved with Kyoto that the only emissions quotas it will accept are those that don't actually have to be met.
President George W. Bush, for all the obloquy heaped on him for walking away from Kyoto, tried to shift the climate-change debate toward policies that were realistic and achievable, in particular by insisting that benefits had to justify any brakes on economic growth. This strategy resulted in far too much taxpayer waste, including the green-pork subsidies that Mr. Obama loves and has ramped up. Yet it also prevented Mr. Bush from making grandiose if futile promises with no relationship to political reality.
Of course, the pointlessness of Copenhagen will now become part of Mr. Obama's argument that the Senate must inflict cap and tax on the U.S., as well as a justification for the EPA's nondemocratic carbon crackdown via clean-air regulation. If he and we are lucky, however, the Senate will fail to act too, the EPA will get tied up in court, and the economy will recover faster without the looming burden of higher energy taxes.