John McCain gave a global warming/climate change speech on Monday. (The term used by the scaremongers depends on the weather the day they give their speech.) McCain favors an approach known as "cap and trade" which will have the net effect of raising energy costs for everyone. You'll need the Bush tax cuts then.

For those of you, like me, who are less than enthusiastic about a McCain presidency -- the Democrats plans are far worse.

You really have to wonder why McCain would even bother doing this. Yes, it's an effort to reach out to independents who by-and-large buy the global warming scaremongering put out by the mainstream media. If he's elected president and gets something like this through congress, which with a Democrat congress he likely will, he won't get any credit for it. President George W. Bush raised the standards on diesel emissions shortly after he came into office -- something President Bill Clinton neglected to do -- and what did he get for it? Nothing.

But McCain, and everyone else for that matter would do well to look at the science.

Regular visits to Climate Audit would be helpful. (Though the science discussed there is often very complicated, it's not difficult to tell that proprietor Steve McIntyre is offering up effective critiques of the anthropogenic global warming and its adherents andherence to basic scientific principles.) As would studying the work of Anthony Watts who is building a pretty effective case that the U.S. ground temperature monitoring stations reported temperature rise is indicative of what is known as the Urban Heat Island effect and not global warming.

Finally, here's another couple of videos from that rowdy professor from Down Under, Bob Carter, on the proposition that CO2 is causing a global temperature rise.

There's a real danger that scaremongers are aiming to increase human misery on this Earth for nothing. By limiting CO2 output and the benefits that go along with it -- think about how poor Africans could benefit from even rudimentary gasoline-powered farming equipment over the human- and animal-powered variety -- we are attempting to turn back the technological clock. We here in the U.S. may be able to adapt. We can, to a certain extent, afford to handicap our economy and still get by.

Banning DDT in the U.S. didn't have a noticable effect on mosquito-borne diseases because we could afford more expensive chemical concoctions to achieve the same result. Banning DDT in Africa has resulted in millions of deaths because they couldn't afford the more expensive pesticides.

It looks like we'll be replaying that sad song again.

UPDATE

National Review interviews "The Skeptical Environmentalist" author Bjorn Lomborg on McCain's plan and The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins also weighs in.