Kim Strassel: Cap and trade is dead

Today I might be mad
Tomorrow I'll be glad
'Cause I'll have Friday on my mind
The Easybeats, "Friday on my Mind," 1966.

One reason to look forward to Friday is that's the day Kim Strassel's Potomac Watch column comes out in the Wall Street Journal.

Her last magnum opus, which appears under the headline "Cap and Trade is Dead," is the best obituary I've read since Idi Amin descended into Hell.

So declares Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, taking a few minutes away from a Thanksgiving retreat with his family. "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in."

If any politician might be qualified to offer last rites, it would be Mr. Inhofe. The top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee has spent the past decade in the thick of Washington's climate fight. He's seen the back of three cap-and-trade bills, rode herd on an overweening Environmental Protection Agency, and steadfastly insisted that global researchers were "cooking" the science behind man-made global warming.

This week he's looking prescient. The more than 3,000 emails and documents from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have found their way to the Internet have blown the lid off the "science" of manmade global warming. CRU is a nerve center for many of those researchers who have authored the United Nations' global warming reports and fueled the political movement to regulate carbon.

Their correspondence show a claque of scientists massaging data to make it fit their theories, squelching scientists who disagreed, punishing academic journals that didn't toe the apocalyptic line, and hiding their work from public view. "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow," glumly wrote George Monbiot, a U.K. writer who has been among the fiercest warming alarmists. The documents "could scarcely be more damaging." And that's from a believer.

Cap and trade is dead, but the farce plays on. Next month, the Copenhagen climate change summit will take place, with President Barack Obama in attendance.

Things didn't turn out so well the last time Obama traveled to the Danish capital.

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