House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President-Elect Barack Obama.

I won’t be surprised if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Environment Committee chair Barbara Boxer and President-elect Barack Obama all send flowers to certain people I generally consider allies in the fight against committing economic suicide in the name of “global warming.” The reason: these three supporters of the moribund and politically dangerous carbon dioxide “cap-and-trade” rationing scheme have just had their prospects immeasurably improved by those whose ox they hope to Gore. (So to speak).

Start with industry. An unfortunate rule of thumb is that trade associations and Washington representatives are principally focused not on fighting bad ideas, and possibly losing, but instead on claiming worse outcomes were avoided and – critically – that they were at the table when this occurred. Consider how in late 2008 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reprised its ill-fated endorsement of HillaryCare, by calling the draft Dingell-Boucher cap-and-trade bill “reasonable.” Apparently it was an offering to “be at the table so we’re not on the menu” as the tired saying goes.

The notion of saying “no” to horrible ideas is simply too embarrassing to consider. As Newt Gingrich reminded us in this context at about the same time, there’s also simply no opportunity to show how clever we are in designing alternatives if we just say “no.” Meanwhile, this action helpfully jerked the center of the issue significantly to the left.

Fortunately, both Reps. John Dingell (D-MI) and Rick Boucher (D-VA) have since been deposed as key Congressional leaders on energy by true global warming radicals from Beverly Hills and Massachusetts, Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, respectively. One can only hope that this coup serves as a wake-up call that appeasement’s unhappy history stands little chance of improvement on this issue.

Next up to save the anxious Democrats was a cadre of conservative thinkers – like Charles Krauthammer and Art Laffer – calling for a carbon tax instead of the apparently inevitable cap-and-trade. They were joined by select lawmakers, and even by the company demonized by the global warming industry for their past sins of supporting speech on both sides of this debate.

This latter entry was tailor made for the alarmists to position themselves as being on the side of the consumer. All of them provide real bogeymen against which the cap-and-traders will now claim they are protecting the public, supplanting “those people who want to tax your energy” railed against by candidate John McCain, who vowed the soothing balm of a “market mechanism” instead. Well, now replace McCain’s imaginary tax-collector with a team that Democratic Central Casting couldn’t have invented any better. All of this could have benefited from a little more thinking-through.

And excuse me for asking but, since no one says any feasibly adopted tax (or cap-and-trade scheme) would change the climate, to what are we really, ultimately agreeing here? “Peace” with these people is not for sale here, my friends.

The question remains, how much have the forces behind imposing a carbon cap-and-trade scheme on the US understood this political landscape? They announced again recently their paralysis over the prospect of being tagged as the ones who visited this scheme upon you. You see first that they hoped George W. Bush would take ownership of it with an EPA rulemaking, subsequent to Massachusetts v. EPA. When the administration wisely pushed that off into the future with an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (implicating a lengthy regulatory process), it seemed that Congressional champions might possibly act.

Yet the leaders in Congress, while claiming that they have the necessary votes to enact precisely that which they demanded for six years, as the minority party, also indicated that 2009 was likely to be the third year of their own stalling. They’re terrified of doing this, just as the Obama administration would rather not be known for what EPA would do, but for their intervention. That hardly signals inevitability. So why bail them out?

Is it possible they are cagily, consciously, waiting for the Chamber to beg for cap-and-trade in order to rescue them from the ravages of what an unchecked EPA might do? Did they predict that some Republican-types would leap into the fray to helpfully cast the carbon rationers as the more responsible parties by crying out for taxation? Or are the rationers merely the unwitting beneficiaries of this behavior?

Please indulge my gloating, as I have publicly predicted the tax offering for some time, also confident that our friends would not, upon reflection, say instead, for example, “if you’re serious – and I have no reason to doubt that – why are you not proposing a tax, instead? It is much less costly even though, I admit, it offers no opportunity to reward those businesses lobbying for cap-and-trade.” Notice the number of issues one can raise in a single question? But, no. It was too tempting to be the one calling for the tax.

We’ve seen this before, when friends took credit for “shutting down government” even when it was a president who refused to sign their duly adopted budget, or when they failed to simply assert continuation of the Clinton-Gore policy of refusing to seek ratification of Kyoto. As I say, it makes sense to think these things through before the bold pronouncements, with which one’s adversaries often find great use.

How well the rationers have considered these gifts in their gambit matters only slightly, as we judge whether they are still acting out of fear, or savvy. The ultimate point is that they must be called to take ownership of that which they seek to do to us. It is past time to stop making their frightful task any easier.

The obvious first step is to remove the false urgency of a potential EPA rulemaking, by clarifying for the Supreme Court and the agency that the Clean Air Act as written is actually not intended as a vehicle to regulate greenhouse gases. It’s quick, clean and would allow Congress to consider what would possibly be the most expensive course ever charted at least with deliberation. That legislation has been proposed, by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). If Congress can pass a pay raise, now of all times, why not this?

Naturally, the Blackburn solution is being ignored. There’s an urgent crisis to make as big a mess of this issue as possible, after all.

Christopher C. Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His latest book is Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.