Several weeks ago, I discussed some recent examples of federal government agencies attempting to break free of the requirement that they let the Congress make the laws. I mentioned the FDA's attempt to seize regulatory authority over tobacco and the Labor Department's dismissal of congressional intent in its attempt to extend the unemployment insurance program to cover the "voluntarily" unemployed. I also mentioned briefly what may ultimately become be the most far-reaching abuse of executive power -- the EPA's poorly concealed ambition to administer a program regulating the 85 percent of America's energy supply that comes from fossil (carbon-based) fuels.

When fossil fuels are combusted (or oxidized), they release carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the most ubiquitous byproduct of industrial civilization. Over the past two years, as EPA watchdog Congressman David McIntosh of Indiana has masterfully demonstrated, the Clinton Administration has been attempting, through sophistical reasoning, to lay the legal predicate for future EPA regulation of CO2.

The closing weeks of a campaign that may give us a president for whom this cause is a near-religious vocation might be a good time to sketch more fully the web of foolishness and danger involved in the innocuous sounding project of "regulating CO2."

EPA regulation of CO2 would nominally be an attempt to avert, what we are told, is the catastrophic "global warming" now approaching inexorably in the wake of modern industrial civilization. The credentialed worriers confidently predict a full menu of disasters -- extreme weather events, melting ice sheets and the unchecked spread of tropical diseases. They contend that our only hope is to take firm, painful steps now to significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide produced by man and his machines.

The assertion is that "climate change" is a global problem and that global regulatory action is necessary. Such action is the purpose of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty signed by the United States, but not yet ratified by the Senate or by enough of the world's nations to take force. Under the Protocol, U.S. carbon emissions in the period 2008-2012 would be restricted to a level seven percent below that of 1990. The general target for the industrial world for the same period is a five percent reduction. As we will see, there is reason to believe that the EPA is eager to begin the task of bringing American CO2 production under rigorous control. It is certain that Al Gore is eager to do so and that he considers the task as tantamount to a religious duty.

But U.S. energy consumption -- while significantly more efficient all the time -- is nonetheless growing rapidly and will likely continue to do so for the entire period contemplated by Kyoto. Thus, as my friend Dr. Marlo Lewis puts it, "The Kyoto Protocol is at loggerheads with one of the broadest and deepest trends in the global marketplace."

It is difficult to know where to begin in listing the evils and dangers of the Kyoto Protocol; the urgency is profound to prevent the Senate from ratifying it and to prevent the executive regulatory octopus from attempting to enforce satisfying the American targets in the Protocol.

Current scientific evidence does not support the claim that catastrophic global warming is underway. What it does show is that much of the slight warming that has been recorded over the past century and beyond, occurred before the bulk of man-made emissions were produced. Attempts by computer models to predict the future course of global temperature have been repeatedly thwarted by the failure of those same models accurately to "predict" the course of events from one known previous state to another. And this is not surprising -- it is a dirty secret of the environmental propagandists that computer modeling remains woefully inadequate to capture even the complexity of systems much simpler than global climate. At the scale of analysis involved in predicting temperature trends over decades and centuries, the answers the computer generates reflect mostly the predispositions of the programmer who chose the data and the inevitably arbitrary rules for crunching it that were fed to the computer.

A related absurdity of the Kyoto panic is that the record of similar "scientific" warnings of impending environmental disaster and resource depletion have been spectacularly wrong in wave after wave for decades, with no discernible effect on the learned worriers. The Kyoto-crowd of the 1970s was unanimous in predicting that continuing or increased dependence on fossil fuels would lead to the depletion of the world's oil reserves and chronic energy shortages in a time frame that concluded years ago. They considered it literally impossible for the world to do what we have in fact done -- rely upon the initiative and enterprise of freedom to continue to provide the energy we needed. The doomsayers failed to foresee such technological and managerial innovations as remote sensing (which dramatically reduced the cost of locating new oil supplies), deep ocean drilling and just-in-time inventory management. These earlier predictions, like the global temperature fretting of today, were generated by consistently assuming that human economic, scientific, and technological activity would proceed straight along the course of the present day, with no innovation, intelligent response to difficulty, or even plain old good luck.

Further, it is perfectly possible, even likely, that increased CO2 will be beneficial to everyone. Dr. Lewis says, "to paraphrase a now-famous statement of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the balance of evidence suggests that man-made CO2 is not destabilizing the climate system but, rather, is enhancing global food security and biodiversity -- beneficially 'greening' the planet."

Whether or not the dire consequences of global warming come to pass, certain predictions about the economic and political effects of regulating CO2 to prevent it are assured. First, massive, inevitably clumsy and arbitrary government intervention to reduce the energy metabolism of the American economy would dramatically reduce -- or even reverse -- our long-term economic growth. Kyoto-induced energy rationing and the resulting surge in energy costs would make this summer's gasoline price spikes seem like trifles by comparison. By definition, the eliminated energy usage would have been for projects otherwise dictated by the free economic decisions of the wealth creators in the private sector. A serious effort to meet the Kyoto target in America would be the equivalent of a vast and pervasive new tax. But economic growth is the key to ending the material suffering that is still the lot of the poor. A Kyoto-inspired suppression of enterprise would prolong, and perhaps even increase, the suffering of many poor Americans, not to mention billions in underdeveloped countries.

One particular area in which the suppression of CO2 production would cause great harm is in threatening to choke the massive human benefits of the telecom revolution. The growth of the Internet and associated technologies will require very substantial electrical usage and is a principal reason that American and global consumption of electricity is growing -- and will continue to grow -- at rates that make the Kyoto targets absurdly low. Muddleheaded restraint on the production of electricity by placing draconian limits on coal-burning power plants would delay or distort a communications revolution that is on track to becoming the greatest engine of wealth-creation for the world's poor in history.

Even more certain is the vast increase of intrusive political authority CO2 regulation would require. To be effective, the enforcing agency would need to have detailed regulatory authority over the most pervasive byproduct of industrial civilization. And it would need to exercise that authority in conjunction with equivalent regulatory bodies all over the world. The resultant global nanny would make previous government intrusion look like a libertarian golden age.

For all these reasons, Congress has not been eager to encourage the environmental quackery and political tyranny that Kyoto represents. The Senate has indefinitely put off a vote on ratification and a series of legislative acts concerning the regulatory power of the EPA carefully and deliberately omitted CO2. In 1999, Congress passed a law barring the EPA from proposing or issuing regulations to implement the Kyoto Protocol, in effect making it illegal for the EPA to regulate CO2. Still, the EPA has deployed both convoluted legal reasoning and the simpler tactic of huffy silence to avoid admitting that it must absolutely await new congressional legislation before the regulation of CO2 becomes even a theoretical possibility for it. Such forbearance is not easy for an agency animated by the faith that environmental orthodoxy is the new saving religion of humanity. Restraint will be even harder for them if the high priest of that cause is the new president next year.

The anti-CO2, anti-growth, anti-liberty, anti-life, proto-tyrannical totem worship of Kyoto gets everything wrong. At its heart is the same distrust of the future, of free men and their independent judgment, and -- despite their mildew-green rhetoric -- of the goodness of nature, that has always characterized the socialist death wish. It is no accident that international "family planning" -- the pseudo-scientific and heartless eugenics war of the green elites upon the world's unborn -- is also near to the heart of the Kyoto crowd.

The neurotic meddling of those who want to eliminate all the risk and incalculable possibility from human life reflects not a scientific judgment but an irrational objection to the uncertainties of Nature, and of human life and striving. Ultimately, the worrying betrays an even deeper sickness and a refusal to accept a truth that we must all remember -- that it is the Providence of God upon which the future of all our hopes depends. It is no counsel of despair, but the liberating truth, to say that mankind cannot secure absolutely its future in time and on the earth. The thousands of fussy planners in Kyoto and their allies biding their time at the EPA could learn much from the nameless millions of more humble mortals who understand the real wisdom of human life -- to spend our days doing the good we can, not hoping to eliminate completely the possibility of disaster, and to leave the rest in God's hands. Even real science, never mind the lab-coat rhetoric of Kyoto, has its limits and must eventually yield to faith. Such wisdom clears the mind wonderfully and could enable even environmentalist ideologues to think more clearly.

It is possible, indeed, that we may one day conclude that earth is "in the balance" and that it is our duty to summon the energy of all good men to cooperate, and sacrifice, to preserve our common home. Someday, even Chicken Little may get it right. But I think it is highly unlikely that such a challenge will be first noticed by such a spirit of mendacity, irrationality, petty ambition and unmanly worry as animates the Kyoto project. We could do worse than to make our electoral decisions -- particularly in the Senate -- mindful of the candidates' willingness to stand up to this servile and dangerous crusade.