And that's why President Obama dropped global warming and started talking about transforming America's boring old fossil fuel economy into an exciting new clean energy economy and replacing all those dirty jobs digging coal and drilling for oil with green jobs that are almost as desirable as practising law (well, not really). As Obama put it in June 2010: "As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs — but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment." For those not captivated by this vision, Obama warns that if we are unwilling to grow wealthier by replacing cheap fossil fuels with expensive but unreliable alternatives such as windmills, then we will lose the race to build tomorrow's technologies to China. (Note that China gets 80 per cent of its electricity from coal, while the US gets just under half.)

Polls have shown that Americans are highly enthusiastic about clean energy, at least until they learn how much more expensive it is. But the new rationale has quickly worn thin as the claims of green jobs have been revealed as bogus. The end of the line was reached in September, when solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which had received $527 million in government loans, collapsed. Risky loans are just one part of the massively expensive corporate welfare system that has been created for renewable energy. Wind and solar power and ethanol get billions of taxpayer dollars a year in subsidies. Solyndra's collapse was so embarrassing that when the president presented his new jobs package to a joint session of Congress a few days later, he didn't mention green jobs or clean energy. Instead, he focused on new highway projects.

The rhetoric has been abandoned, but not the policies. Immediately after the Democrats' stunning defeat in the 2010 congressional elections, Obama said: "Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat." Faced with a hostile Congress, the administration is pursuing a mind-boggling list of new regulations under existing pollution laws to skin the cat — that is, to put the squeeze on fossil fuel production and use.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has finalised Clean Air Act rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and is at various stages of implementing new regulations to further reduce conventional air pollutants from electricity utilities, industrial boilers and cement plants, and to impose tighter standards on regional haze and on air pollutants produced in one state that are blown into other states. Utilities have already started announcing coal plant closures. A novel interpretation of the Clean Water Act has been concocted to block permits for new surface coalmines in Appalachia, including West Virginia (which since Gore has become a reliably Republican state in presidential voting).