A story in today’s Wall Street Journal provides additional evidence of the fantasy world that is climate politics:

An educational group that former Vice President Al Gore is helping to launch intends to spend millions of dollars convincing Americans that global warming is an urgent problem.

The U.S. hasn’t enacted mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, a situation many environmentalists attribute to slim public awareness of the consequences of rising temperatures.

The group, which yesterday adopted the name Alliance for Climate Protection, plans to use advertising and grass-roots organizing to try to raise awareness, particularly among labor groups, hunters, evangelicals and conservatives in general.

The effort, still in the planning stages, will look “like a political campaign,” predicts Lee M. Thomas, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency during President Ronald Reagan’s second term and has agreed to be a board member.

This is a wasted effort for a number of reasons. First, as we’ve documented here many times (e.g., here and here) while he public does not have a deep grasp of the technical details of global warming, it does have an overwhelming awareness of the issue. Not only is there awareness, but an overwhelming majority already favor action. Public education to achieve awareness and support for action that already exist will be efforts wasted on the convinced (e.g., here).

A second reason is that any effort to elevate the intensity of public opinion (not mentioned in the article, but necessary to elevate one issue over another in the public’s eye) will run a very real risk of making policy arguments that are misleading and perhaps simply incorrect. Assertions that future hurricane damages can be modulated via emissions policies are an example of this type of policy over-promising. The reason for this is that global warming is not an issue for which immediate action can lead to tangible short-term benefits (e.g., discussed here), so for many people it simply does not compare to the importance of other issues that do have short-term effects, like gas prices and hurricane reinforced roofs.

The Alliance for Climate Protection seems to me to simply be a Bizzaro version of the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition and I suspect that it will have much the same effectiveness on public opinion and ultimate fate..