During the election campaign I boggled about seemingly intelligent and putatively educated people swooning over Obama's empty rhetoric. He pandered this way and that incoherently, but that was all they wished for. The problem is that his incoherent promises can't be kept, and that was perfectly clear all along.

“At the end of the day,” Mr. Shapiro said in an e-mail statement, “the advisers will be charged with implementing President-elect Obama’s strong targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050. However, the president-elect appointed a cabinet with diverse views and looks forward to strong debate within the cabinet on how best to achieve those outcomes.” . . .

In a forum at the Brookings Institution a year ago, Mr. Summers said the current moment on climate change was analogous to that on health care in 1992: Everyone agreed that the current system was unsustainable, but there was less agreement on how to address the complexities and costs. There was a general expectation that with the inauguration of a new Democratic president, something would be done.

“In the end,” Mr. Summers said, “what everyone agreed needed to happen didn’t happen in 1993.”

It is trivially simple to find fault with the status quo. That doesn't mean that anything can be done about it. Democrats have punked themselves by advocating lowered emissions. There are two glaring defects with such advocacy: achieving significant reductions will severely harm society and so be massively resisted, and even those massive reductions will have no effect on global climate. It's an exceedingly painful but utterly empty gesture.

This is what I find so distasteful about Democrats. They seem to have no sense. I believe that I have more real concern for many of the issues that they claim to care about, but insist on realistic and effective policies rather than the feel good wanking that seems to be sufficient for them.

As we slid into war after 9/11 I kept hoping that someone with a bully pulpit would call bullshit. War would spill blood and treasure, knock some heads and slay some monsters, but when the dust settled nothing else would be settled. It was an empty gesture. Things have changed, but not in any significant way. Things are just as unsettled and threatening as they have ever been.

Now I am hoping for someone to call bullshit on the climate warriors. I suspect that this hope too is in vain, since none of the players have the courage, or foolishness, to buck the tide and make what might well be career limiting remarks. Only those who have nothing to lose can bear the risk.

The chief effects of the wars have been to make some fortunes for those who were well positioned. The climate hustle has done the same so far - ethanol? - and has no prospect of achieving anything else. That's politics.