Tags: Dick Cheney | energy | George W. Bush

In 2000, I promised myself I wasn't going to write about American politics until May.

I was going to take a break from the life-force sucking hobby of railing against beady-eyed Republican ranch owners and their fork-tongued trophy wives.

I'd wasted enough Chi driving down that dead end lane. When Dick Cheney became de facto President of the United States, I figured it was a good time to start meditating again, work on my Czech and begin a self-taught course in South American literature.

So much for that. The news kept coming in, and kept getting worse. For a while it seemed that Colin Powell and Christie Whitman at the State Department and the EPA might temper extremist tendencies in the two key areas of foreign policy and the environment.

It's now clear that both had been outflanked by hardliners in the Defense and Energy Departments. The bell tolled with Powell over Korean policy, and then with Whitman over carbon dioxide taxes. Double Whammy.

Of course the news that the White House doesn't consider carbon dioxide pollution fit for taxation or regulation shouldn't have shocked anyone. Bush's government was a fossil-fuel industry mutual-aid society and everybody knew it. And yet Cheney spokesman George W. Bush awoke our slow-witted but darling hopes during the campaign when he said that he was "concerned" by climate change.

He raised them further when he said that he would regulate emissions of carbon gasses coming from US power plants. Maybe, just maybe, the GOP had finally seen beyond the short-term profit logic of their unctuous patrons and realized how catastrophic continued faith in their medieval science will be for their grandchildren.

Those hopes, so sad in retrospect, are now more dead than Dick Cheney in 2010. What everybody already knew is now official: this administration was up to its monogrammed tie-clips in coal and put away barrels of crude like lemon-lime Gatorade.

Dick Cheney and Spencer Abraham dictated energy policy like 19th century school marms, and the only lessons on the board were exploration, production and subsidization. The Kyoto Protocol was looked upon like some bong left on the Oval Office desk by the Clinton team, to be sneered at and tossed away. Let the pinko Europeans and those pissant little island nations squeal all they want. It don't matter none.

The Bush White House said that carbon dioxide can't be taxed because it is not listed as a pollutant in the Clean Air Act. So it isn't. But one needn't be a legislative ninja or constitutional law professor to know that in America laws are changed and federal acts routinely amended by Congress. Mr. Bush could push to enlarge the mandate of the Clean Air Act, as his father admirably did in 1990.

For the Cheney team to use a literalist interpretation of the existing law as its first line of excuse - followed by non-sequitors about the California crisis and summer energy bills - was nothing less than a grinning slap across the worried face of the entire international community, the overwhelming majority of which is justifiably terrified at the prospect of a five degree temperature leap in the next century.

In his letter explaining the decision to Senator Chuck Hagel, Bush also repeated one of his favorite and most well-rehearsed one-liners about how 'before any action is taken on climate change more evidence must be gathered. '

No doubt the dumbest leader in the industrialized world had already devoured the two massive volumes produced by the authoritative UN Panel on Climate Change and has found their warnings unconvincing. Or perhaps he was conducting his own private research into the complex science of global warming. Or maybe everybody's favorite frat boy was just waiting to find the perfect nickname for the life-on-earth threatening phenomenon.

May I suggest 'Slugger'?