Tom, as long you and your partisans see the world as a struggle between Capitalism and Communism you are doomed to failure because you are fighting the wrong battle with a non-existent enemy. This would be fun to watch except the rest of us are being dragged along with you and your fantasies. Communism is dead. It fell apart almost twenty years ago. WE won the cold war.

We are now living in in exactly the kind of world we wanted to create when we were struggling with the Reds for world domination. Our biggest rivals, the Chinese, have embraced capitalism with a vengeance, and we are getting our clocks cleaned regularly by them and the Europeans and the Russians while we gladly cooperate in our own destruction by borrowing their money to finance our own unsustainable lifestyle and our vice and luxury economy. They are doing to us exactly what we did to the rest of the world for half a century.

We are losing an economic competition in a capitalist jungle. At the same time, we are engaged in battle with religious fanatics, also of an undeniable non-communist persuasion. None of this is an ideological struggle against collectivism, the world is playing the game by our rules now and the outcome (as it has always been) will be settled by political, diplomatic and ideological sideshows with an occasional bloodbath for the non-negotiable issues. If you don't like the deals that were negotiated at Kyoto, don't blame it on the socialist bogeyman, blame it on our capitalist rivals who outmaneuvered us because they know what the battle is really all about. And they will use every trick and scheme just like we did when we were wresting economic power from Europe and keeping the Soviets at bay. Do you really want to know why the world hates us so much? Because for a century we did to them exactly what they are getting ready to do to us now. It's called economic imperialism.

So of course, the global warming issue has geopolitical implications and is part of an international struggle that bases itself utimately on the control of capital. Do you really expect people to cooperate with us? No, we're going to have to negotiate, and we're not going to get everything we want. The trouble is, right now, we aren't likely to get anything we need. Instead of using our remaining influence to hammer out a meaningful global warming compromise that protects our economic interests, we are bribing scientists and muzzling government researchers to try and finesse a public relations solution to a physical problem and a political complication. We have decided to ignore the issue and hope it will go away, and to blame the big bad commies for it. This blind reliance on ideological purity is exactly what dismantled the Soviet Empire, and almost buried the Chinese, until they got hip to the program.

This is a brave new world, TB, a world we largely made ourselves. And we are now facing an enemy that looks remarkably like us.