Mr. Back-to-Earth

OPINION:

Rep. John Dingell, Michigan Democrat and chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is the best Democratic advocate for global-warming realism in the Democratic 110th Congress. With House fuel-economy legislation negotiations entering the final stage, he’s trying to start a serious debate, which is more than the global-warming hotspurs on the left want. They prefer scorn for dissenters.

To get this debate, Mr. Dingell proposed a carbon tax with serious teeth. We wouldn’t endorse the idea in a hundred years — we’re among the skeptics that it’s man who’s warming the globe — and we’re grateful that there’s small chance of passage of this tax. But it promises to bring this debate back to Earth. The proposal demonstrates how much it would cost to limit carbon emissions if congressional global-warming scourges were truly serious. They aren’t.

Mr. Dingell has not released a detailed plan. He floated a federal gasoline tax hike of 50 cents a gallon — a non-starter — over the current 18.4 cents, which has not been increased in 14 years. He would further tax carbon emissions. “I sincerely doubt that the American people are willing to pay what this is really going to cost them,” he said then. He didn’t even broach the subject of China’s emissions — with current growth rates, China would more than make up for whatever reductions the United States could make. One thing at a time.

The point is to show that it is not acceptable for lawmakers who preen their feathers pretending that carbon limits can be enacted on the cheap.

Currently, the leading edge of Democratic global-warming proposals are an increase for the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards — which passed the Senate and now has the House embroiled in head-counting — and a carbon cap-and-trade system. The common thread in the thinking of senior Democrats seems to be that carbon emissions can be reduced by fobbing the costs on to industry. House Democrats do not appear to have the need votes because so many of them have real, actual constituents whose interests they must take into account.

It may have occurred to some of them that raising mileage standards might merely persuade drivers to drive more, since it would be less expensive to do so. Others may have taken into account the news that 46,000 additional traffic deaths could result from the tradeoff between safety and fuel-economy standards.

“I will be introducing in the next little bit a carbon tax bill, just to sort of see how people really feel about this,” Mr. Dingell says. “When you see the criticism I get, I think you’ll see the answer to your question.” If and when the House fuel-economy bill fails, listen for the sound of silence. We won’t see many of those global-warming scourges lining up behind Mr. Dingell.