Recent events have given some conservatives hope that AGW will, in the end, be an issue that they leverage for political benefit.

I argued three things: (1) anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, (2) current projections of its expected impact are wildly uncertain, but are not sufficient to justify the costs of an aggressive emissions reduction program, and (3) conservatives have an unseen political opportunity to win on the issue by pointing this out. . .

proponents of emissions reductions will respond with four arguments: (1) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by claiming the science actually now says things will be even worse than we previously thought, (2) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by embedding indefensible discount rate assumptions in the black box of econometric calculations used by economists to conduct the cost-benefit analysis, (3) deflate the analyzed costs of emissions mitigation by claiming a free lunch – that there is a cost-free or low-cost way to radically reduce emissions, and/or (4) turn this into a moral crusade asserting that we have a moral duty to the poor of the world because of our past sins of emission. . .

It is very possible that conservatives could mobilize sufficient opposition, even in the minority, to prevent its passage, but there is a real possibility that there will be a cap-and-trade law. Even in this scenario, it will fail in practice, either because (as in Europe to date) it becomes a pointless boondoggle, or because it starts to actually restrict energy use, and therefore becomes a visible drag on the economy. One way or the other, it would just create an issue for conservatives to campaign on, win and roll-back.

I suppose this could happen, though I remain unpersuaded. The fact that this sort of conservative position is correct is not enough to give the conservatives power, besides which it isn't a dominant view even among conservatives. It's a faint echo of old Rove rope-a-dope schemes to sit back and allow leftists to work themselves into untenable positions.

An equally forlorn hope is that environmentalists will awake from their stupor and begin to work for effective responses to AGW rather than squandering their energies on ineffective political scams. It's another facet of what Dan Dagget, Author of Gardeners of Eden calls the Leave-It-Alone Assumption. Dagget was specifically speaking about land management and "the absurdity that the actual condition of a piece of land is irrelevant to determining if it is healthy or not". All that matters to paleo-environmentalists is that humans be excluded, even if the result is a bare dirt landscape devoid of life.

The emissions reduction religion is the same in that the sole objective is to limit emissions, even if that just delays AGW for a brief period, less than ten years, moving the date of the rapture from 2100 to 2106, for example. The important part is that humans be punished, not that the planet be well managed.

If both conservatives and environmentalists were advocating effective responses to AGW then I might agree that conservatives have some hope. Leftist policies will never be of any use for this issue, but that will not matter unless and until environmentalists decide that the planet matters more than their favored politics. That has never been the case in the past, so there is little reason to suspect it will be the case in future.