As Hugh noted Monday, Rahm Emanuel floated a new carbon tax on the Sunday talk shows. (The Times has more.) Doesn’t sound right, coming from him; Rahm Emanuel just doesn’t strike me as a fellow who cares deeply about global warming. Whatever spasms of conscience drove his politics as a youth have been long replaced with love of power, money, influence, and just the sheer joy of being a big schwingin’ honcho in the firmament of Dudes What Has the Juice. Eco-wusses worry that their neighbors are using ethically incorrect bulbs and taking immorally long hot showers; opportunistic pols take an evaluating squint at the green racket, figure there’s a good percentage, push it hard, and see how much coin falls out at the end of the day. If Al Capone was alive today, he’d be selling organic beer. It’s the Chicago way.

So when Rahm talks about cap and trade, you know he couldn’t care less what it does to the economy. It’s an angle. For others on the left, though, the depressing effect is a feature, not a bug: people consume too much, drive too much, have big homes in the suburbs instead of Euro-nooks in a condo on a light-rail line. These are bad things that make Mama Gaia cry and produce hurricanes; they’re morally suspect as well, since they feed into some perverse American idea that we’re entitled to drive cars and eat meat. No one on the left ever suffered a loss of support from their core audience insisting that Americans had to do less, have less, be less. Unless the subject is public service unions.

Still, the crafty minds at the Obama White House may have deduced by osmosis that the dunderdolts out there in Bitterville and Clingistan are not in a mood to pay seven dollars for gas, so cap-and-trade is being rebranded as “regulations” on utilities. If they hike utility rates by making electricity generators pay indulgences, well, rates may spike, the cost of everything that uses juice may increase, but it’ll be vague and indistinct. The base will be happy because there will be less evil carbon, and giant bird-dicing propellors may be built somewhere, possibly. (But not somewhere that would intrude on the peace and sanctity of, say, Ted Kennedy’s grave.) Jobs will not be created, but no one was ever fired from a job that didn’t exist in the first place.

It’s just the first step, though – once the utilities are bent to the will of the eschatological fanatics and their gimlet-eyed political expeditors, gas taxes are next. Which makes me think of something my family does. We have a gas station, but we also sell lubricants and oils and av-gas and other ichors that might as well be Liquid Tobacco. The company is sustained in part by a contract to fill trains that roar across the prairie at night, bearing goods. Food, furniture, gizmos, clothes – container after container is borne from port to depot, and that takes energy in its most useful form. Petrochemicals. Every night a truck from our company goes to the waiting trains, chuffing in the yard, and every night they’re fueled up and sent on the next leg.

Every cent you add to the cost of fuel adds to the cost of the items on the train.

They can’t not know that.

Which means they simply do not care.

Rahm may not give two twigs for global warming, but one suspects the President does – either because it’s what all smart people believe, or because it’s just one of those deliciously amorphous crises that strengthens the things that have made America great, like treaties with the EU. The fact that most people don’t want – the fact that most people have the peculiar fixation on jobs and the economy, not bleeding more money out of the private sector – is mere proof it’s the right thing to do, since that’s what leaders do. Right? They persuade, argue, enlighten, and move us together as a nation towards our new common goals.

Or, just pass some regulations and get it down over the people’s objectives; same thing in the end, right? Easier, too.

You suspect that if 9/11 had happened under Obama, would have been an opportunity not just for rote prostration before the jihadist justifications, but a perfect time to rethink why we, as a nation, feel compelled to build tall buildings. Not only would we have left Afghanistan alone, we would have banned any structure more than 20 stories tall. Or as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Rahm wouldn’t have cared; he could get a nice office in the top of an old-style skyscraper in Chicago. That’s what his class is all about: working the rubes so he can have a seat at the table. The carcass of Western Civ will keep him fed. After it’s gone, well, you’re all on your own.

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