The feature-film-worthy drama surrounding the global warming debate may be reaching it's crescendo at the Copenhagen Summit. In the wake of the still-developing British "climate-gate" scandal, the global summit opened on Monday with typical doomsday predictions (to include an Apocalypse-themed movie aimed at today's children) and a dogmatic recitation from the UN (perhaps in the vein of Big Lie theory) that there is, unequivocally, no doubt that humans are the cause of accelerating global warming - a claim contradicted by a New York Times article released the previous day citing persistent and renewed skepticism. (See Ronald Rychlak's revealing policy study on the manipulation of visual evidence. Hat tip: Prof. Robert Destro.)  

A major issues at Copenhagen is whether developed nations will subsidize the carbon-reduction procedures of developing nations. That is, will rich nations pay for poor nations to remain poorer than they would otherwise need, in an effort to curb carbon emissions from those nations. The summit was thrown into turmoil yesterday by the leak of a secret draft agreement (here) by rich nations which would relocate decision making power from the UN to the World Bank (i.e., rich countries), repudiate the Kyoto protocols by enforcing stricter carbon-emission levels on poor nations than rich nations, and heavily condition grants to poor countries.

In the days leading to the summit, an article published in 45 countries (56 newspapers) criticized American "obstructionism" and lamented that Obama was bound by a reluctant, domestically-oriented Congress (which has refused to seriously debate the politically suicidal cap-and-trade legislation). Ever anxious to appease the global community, Obama yesterday announced a counter-intuitive strategy - dubbed by the Powerline boys as "Democracy 2.0" - by which the EPA declared greenhouse gasses (as a source of global warming) to be a health hazard and is thus enabled to regulate U.S. industry without the hassle of bothersome legislation.

Like the Nobel Prize he will soon accept, any laurels placed upon Obama by the UN and Copenhagen attendees will not be perceived by Americans as a success for the U.S.  However, whereas the Nobel was of no consequence to our national interest, domestic greenhouse gas regulations and any Copenhagen agreement (including the much maligned, and hence sensible, Danish text) will have potentially sever repercussions on the U.S. economy (a NYT article today prices any Copenhagen accord at "trillions of dollars over the next few decades"). Trading the resuscitation of America's foremost national concern for international progress on an issue of very little importance to most Americans will not improve Obama's abysmal approval rating. One can only hope that a self-preservation instinct will prod Obama into continuing America's proud tradition of "obstructing" the policies of global warming madness.

UPDATE #1: Sarah Palin weighs in here, going so far as to call for Obama to boycott Copenhagen.

UPDATE #2: Powerline has a must read post on the EPA's CO2 finding (fronting a Cato article by Patrick Michaels and Paul Knapenberger).  Scott Johnson concludes:

The architects of the modern administrative state with its vast array of administrative agencies combining legislative, executive, and judicial powers have sought to displace the system of self-government imagined under limited powers into being by the American Constitution. As we see in the case of the EPA endangerment finding, they have achieved extraordinary success.