Governance is becoming more difficult while also getting worse. The trend for many decades has been to ever more oppressive and destructive governance, so it's almost encouraging that governance is also growing ever more difficult to do. Societies grow ever more fractious, stubbornly resistant to authority or control while remaining deeply concerned about the general state of things.

As President Obama arrives in Copenhagen hoping to seal an elusive deal on climate change, his approval rating on dealing with global warming has crumbled at home and there is broad opposition to spending taxpayer money to encourage developing nations to curtail their energy use, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

There's also rising public doubt and growing political polarization about what scientists have to say on the environment, and a widespread perception that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether global warming is happening.

But for all the challenges American policymakers have to overcome, nearly two-thirds of people surveyed say the federal government should regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to curb global warming.

I think that this is a flawed understanding of the situation. Few people want regulations - they don't even grasp what that would mean to their lives. They are agitated about all of the screeching from the untrustworthy politicians and scientists about gases and want it to stop. That's why we get the apparent contradiction of public demand for action and public rejection of proposed actions. Yes, they want the verbal assaults to stop; no they don't want the verbal assaults to be replaced by economic and physical assaults.

The situation is clarified by grasping that the screeching is not really about gases, it's just the current concern being exploited by those seeking political domination and wealth through power. It's their business, their jobs. This is what they do for a living. They are precisely the same as marketers of any other product who seek to create desire and demand for their products through sly or overt denigration of life without their goods, and fantastic exaggerations of the bliss one may experience with them.

The ruse is exposed when we consider the product, the solution on offer.

whatever happened to the UN’s famous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)? The famous MDGs, elaborated in 2000 by Jeffrey Sachs, the UN’s essentially command-and-control five year plans for cutting global poverty by leaps and bounds over a fifteen year period? . . .

Today, the MDGs no longer look especially relevant. It looks, to my innocent eye, as though they are in the process of being replaced in Copenhagen. Because, in very round numbers, the amounts talked about in this climate change fund look somewhat like the kinds of numbers called for in Sachs’ MDGs — tens to hundreds of billions annually. So here’s my question ... is the climate fund, looked at without regard to, er, climate, really just the latest, crisis-driven version of the MDGs — which in any case have pretty much failed for lack of funding?

Yes, of course. The goal is the same. But the MDGs were no more about poverty than the current ruse is about gases. It's just a con to extract money from the gullible. No poverty would be alleviated. No gas reductions would occur. It's a jobs program for bureaucrats supported mostly by private enterprises and kleptocrats who would siphon off the vast majority of the funds for their own benefit. It's a wealth transfer from ordinary people to politicians and their potted industry colluders.

Poverty is an issue. GHGs are an issue. That isn't disputed by many, though there are a few semi-credible analyses that deserve continuing attention. They might not be wrong. The issue is that the policies prescribed for remediation and the institutions claiming jurisdiction are not credible. They are the tired old ideas that have so often failed, perversely and persistently proffered by the same old recidivist hucksters who have been busted for their crimes in the past.