FACT: If drivers are fuming now, they’ll be downright apoplectic if the McCain-Lieberman climate change bill ever becomes law. Under McCain-Lieberman, gasoline prices, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Energy Information Administration, would soar to rising heights, with no relief in sight. “Delivered energy prices for the transportation sector increase significantly in the S.139 case compared to the reference case,” EIA found. “In the S.139 case, gasoline fuel price in 2001 constant dollars increases by 40 cents per gallon (27 percent) above the reference case price.” From 2008 through 2025, prices go up steadily, reaching, as EIA reports, a zenith of $1.90 per gallon in 2025. No doubt, then, will one still hear shrieks and cries of “Big Oil” gouging consumers at the pump.

FACT: Kyoto will do nothing for the environment or have any impact on global temperatures. This is the unequivocal conclusion of Altero Matteoli, Italy’s minister for the environment and territory. With Italy hosting the next round of global climate negotiations, Matteoli said on July 7 that, “Within the framework of [Kyoto], we will manage to reach a 2 percent reduction in emissions at best, but we all know that we need to halve greenhouse emissions world-wide by 2050 in order to prevent further damage to climate.” Now, even if one concedes that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming or damaging climate (they’re not), according to Matteoli, the world would have to reduce emissions by 50 percent to have any effect. Put another way, the world would need 25 Kyotos to stop global warming. The Energy Information Administration said one Kyoto, among other destructive effects, would cost the U.S. economy $400 billion annually. Guess President Bush ain’t so unsophisticated after all.

FACT: CEG could find itself even busier if the policies championed by Joe Kennedy’s friends in the Democratic Party and the environmental movement become law. Those policies, which call for, among other things, regulating carbon dioxide emissions, would hit the poor and elderly the hardest, as several independent, non-partisan analyses have convincingly shown. There are several: the international Kyoto Protocol, which Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates (WEFA) says would cause a doubling of energy and electricity prices; the Clean Power Act, which in 2010, according to EIA, would increase overall residential-energy costs by 17 percent and household electricity costs by 25 percent; and the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, a Kyoto implementation bill, that EIA says would make electricity prices 46 percent higher in 2025.

FACT: Following California’s lead is not exactly sound advice. There is a serious natural gas crisis, and it can be traced in large part to lawsuits filed by NRDC and its extremist allies, who have blocked natural gas production on federal lands for years. In January, Peter Morton, of the Wilderness Society, warned energy companies that environmental groups will sue them if they try to obtain leases allowing energy production on federal lands. Fed Chairman Greenspan, during last week’s Senate Energy Committee hearing, candidly discussed the consequences of Big Green obstruction: “I do say this: I say that it is essential that one recognizes what the cost in energy policy is if you restrict the access to certain areas where preliminary seismic analysis has indicated very significant capabilities in gas.”