Despite the most creative rhetoric this side of ObamaCare, voters have figured out that "cap and trade" involves artificial carbon rationing and vast new energy taxes. So the main goal of John Kerry and Joe Lieberman has been attempting to disguise these truths in the climate bill they released to much fanfare last week.

The bill was nine months in gestation once it became clear that the version the House passed last summer—which one of five Democrats opposed—was doomed in the Senate. Yet no one should mistake Kerry-Lieberman for a new approach.

Jim Lucier, an investment analyst at Capital Alpha Partners, calls it the Mr. Potato Head bill. The cosmetic features can be rearranged, but it's still a Mr. Potato Head. This is still cap and tax—except with new and larger subsidies, outright corporate bribes, and the rest of the political palm-greasing that Democrats hope can still lead to a Rose Garden ceremony this year.

The bill sets a 2020 target for reducing CO2 emissions by 17% from 2005 levels, and 83% by 2050, the same as the House. Of course, please don't say this has anything to do with global warming. "We don't want to mix messages here," Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said on Earth Day. "I'm all for protecting the Earth, but this is about energy independence."

Mr. Graham helped Messrs. Kerry and Lieberman write the bill before bailing out last month. Their main innovation was to create separate regulations for transportation, utilities and manufacturing. The goal is to buy industry support by offering special short-term favors to each one—but also to hide the taxes that will hit all forms of carbon energy, and thus most goods and services.

Producers and importers of gasoline and jet fuel, for example, would be cordoned off from the wider carbon-permit auctions and instead buy separate, nontradable allowances pegged to the fixed price at which the auction closes. The technical term for this is a "linked fee," but consumers are unlikely to observe the distinction when pump prices rise under this de facto gas tax.

"There is no gas tax, never was a gas tax, will not be a gas tax, I don't know where that came from, but it is just wrong. Period," Mr. Kerry rumbled at a press conference in late April. "There is not even a linked fee, there is not a tax, there is nothing similar." No, except for the gas tax that dare not speak its name.

Messrs. Kerry and Lieberman hope to peel off a few Republicans with sweeteners like more offshore drilling and royalty-sharing for coastal states. Given the Gulf oil leak, liberals may not accept even this fillip. The bill would also subsidize loan guarantees to expand nuclear power, which is the GOP analogue to Democratic wind turbines and solar panels.

Despite media caricature, the main obstacle to cap and tax isn't Republican intransigence. Energy politics splits on geographic more than partisan lines, and the folks in the hinterlands who rely on coal-fired power and heavy manufacturing will get socked the hardest. Midwest Democrats are Mr. Kerry's real opposition.

Big business is on board for the subsidies, and even the Chamber of Commerce had kind words for this "work in progress." The bill landed with endorsements from such luminaries as John Doerr, a Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist and Al Gore's business partner; John Rowe, the CEO of the nuclear utility Exelon; and Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric. Every business or interest that could afford a half-competent lobbyist stands to benefit, at least until cap and tax is in place and environmentalists crack down over time.

Oh, and since America is not a planet, Kerry-Lieberman will have little to no effect on global CO2 concentrations as the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian economies expand. But the bill would impose carbon tariffs on countries that don't adopt similar restrictions, likely leading to a trade war.

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