Sen. Lieberman's eco-boondoggle

In the mid-1990s, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, then a proud Democrat, dropped by the Republican-American's offices for a rare visit with the editorial board. He started ticking off the dangers of global warming caused by carbon-dioxide emissions, but one of our editors had just finished reading a lengthy article by the Hoover Institution's Thomas Gale Moore showing past warming had benefited human civilization and helped bring an end to the Dark Ages.

Sen. Lieberman was utterly unaware of this research; even more disturbingly, he did not seem interested in learning more about it. He remains a global-warming dogmatist, brooking no dissent or nuance. This week, the Senate likely will vote on America's Climate Security Act, a bipartisan save-the-world muddle he concocted with Sen. John Warner, R-Va.

The measure's centerpiece is a cap-and-trade scheme that would allow heavy industrial polluters to buy credits from those who come in under their emissions quotas. As The Wall Street Journal and others have pointed out, this strategy would require a massive bureaucracy to organize and administer the cap-and-trade system. By auctioning off allowances — permissible emissions levels — the government would suck $1.5 trillion from the economy by 2023, says the Congressional Budget Office. That's not counting the cost of the care and feeding of an unknown number of administrators, lawyers, paper-pushers and inspectors driving this bureaucratic beast. Nor does it address the government's motive to manipulate emissions standards to its own fiscal benefit.

Why not just call for a carbon tax? It would accomplish the same objectives: Businesses would be just as eager to invest in anti-pollution technology; inventors and entrepreneurs would by just as happy to oblige. But a carbon tax "would be too clear and candid for political comfort," George Will explained in his syndicated column Sunday. "It clearly would be what cap-and-trade deviously is — a tax — but one with a known cost. Therefore, taxpayers would demand a commensurate reduction of other taxes."

Sen. Lieberman, the co-creator of this monster, is technically an independent because Connecticut Democrats threw him over in the 2006 primary in favor of Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont, whose strident opposition to the Iraq war contrasted with Sen. Lieberman's impassioned support. The state certainly would have been served better if Alan Schlesinger, the long-odds Republican candidate from Derby, had won. Even a Lamont victory might have been preferable: As a first-term senator, he wouldn't have been able to influence the Bush administration's Iraq policy, which lately has been making important gains; but as a businessman, he might have discerned the profound economic hazards posed by the Climate Security Act.

Perhaps there are enough Republican global-warming skeptics and Democrats who want to tackle climate change head on to pull the plug on this eco-boondoggle.