The day after Republicans won a majority in the House in the November 2010 elections, President Obama acknowledged that cap-and-trade was dead, but he added ominously: "Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat."

With no chance of getting any energy-rationing legislation through Congress, Obama has spent the past two years using the Clean Air Act and other existing laws to implement environmental regulations to constrict fossil energy production, including shale gas, and raise the price of using fossil fuels. Only a few of these new regulations have gone into effect, but several others will start to bite in the next few years, and the administration has a bunch of new ones on the drawing board.

These regulations will not do much to reduce emissions, but taken together they are almost certain eventually to do a lot of economic damage. US economic growth is weak now. If the American economy slides back into recession, Obama's other ways of skinning the cat are likely to be a significant contributor to the downturn.  

The global warming fad will almost certainly continue to fade, but that does not guarantee that the environmental Left's anti-energy agenda will collapse-least of all in the US, the country that more than any other built its economy on abundant, affordable energy. Continuing along the path that made America the wealthiest country in the world is not, it would seem, part of President Obama's  agenda.