The Republican contenders are talking a pretty good game. But the fact is that every past attempt to achieve even minor regulatory reform has failed; the economy is in such dire condition and the new rules being implemented are so damaging, that much more than reform is now required. My guess is that voters are not going to buy a lot of big talk unless they feel that the candidate is up to taking on the regulatory bureaucracy, the environmental pressure groups and the establishment media.

It is not easy to find out whether a candidate has the toughness now needed to push government out of the way so that free people acting in free markets can put America back on a path of robust, long-term growth. It appears that many conservative voters are using how the candidates have responded to the global warming juggernaut as a litmus test. Take Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, for example. He has proposed abolishing the EPA. That's bold and visionary. Yet it was less than four years ago that Gingrich sat on a loveseat with the Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi and made a television commercial for Al Gore advocating that everyone needed to work together to solve global warming. That's when it looked as if the global warming agenda was on the verge of being enacted. Sorry, Newt, you're not up to the job.

Then there's former Governor Mitt Romney. When he ran for the nomination in 2008, Romney was not as gung-ho to do something about global warming as McCain, but he criticised President Bush for not doing enough. Now that global warming is a losing issue, Romney has adopted Bush's position. Global warming is a problem, but doing anything about it is too expensive. Romney has even brought in former Bush officials to advise him on these issues. If President Bush wasn't up to the job (and he certainly wasn't), then neither is Romney.

If you're looking for a gutsy guy, what about former Utah governor Jon Huntsman? He is a global warming true believer and has gone after Rick Perry for not being sufficiently trustful of scientific authority. Huntsman said during a debate in mid-September: "When you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said...all I'm saying is, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can't run from the science." For Huntsman to win, he is going to have to convince more than one per cent of Republican voters that he's the right man for the job.