Bush, as we all know by now, used family pull to get into the safe haven of the National Guard, where we are absolutely certain he kept at least one dental appointment, but are somewhat vaguer about the rest of his service record. As for his vice president, well, he had “other priorities.”

Vietnam, never fully gone, is back again this presidential year and, as the country finds itself in another bloody swamp — or sand pit — our baby-boom generation leaders are being forced once again to account for what they did back in the 1960s and ’70s.

John Kerry has a much better war story to tell the American people than Bush: He not only served, he was a hero who saved men’s lives. So the president’s aggressive political machine, as ever taking the offensive when it senses its own weakness, is trying to find a way to wound Kerry before Bush loses any more blood. Here’s the new GOP line of attack, as demonstrated by Republican Party chairman Ed Gillespie, New York Times columnist David Brooks, the National Review, and all the usual TV frothers (none of whom found a way to serve his country in Vietnam, or today in Iraq): yes, Kerry was a decorated hero, but he betrayed his fellow soldiers when he came home by denouncing the war, casting shame on their great sacrifice. (Newt Gingrich, another draft-dodging hawk, announced last weekend that Republicans would play the traitor card, by tarring Kerry as a “Jane Fonda antiwar liberal.”) The fact that most veterans returned from Vietnam as disillusioned with the war as Kerry was — and that many of these gray-haired warriors are rallying around his campaign today — puts a bit of a crimp in the Republican strategy. But that has not stopped Karl Rove and company from continuing to bang this drum.

To many members of the Vietnam generation — including antiwar activists such as myself — John Kerry was a hero twice over. He not only fought valiantly during the war, he again put himself on the line when he came home, by trying to awaken America to what he had learned about the war, and once again trying to save lives.

Kerry’s postwar bravery calls to mind another American hero from that era, Daniel Ellsberg, the military advisor who returned from Vietnam equally heartsick about what was being done in his country’s name. Like Kerry, Ellsberg did not sink into bitterness or complacency after he returned. He changed history by copying the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret history of the war, and releasing them to the press. If the nation’s leaders would not tell the American people the dark truths about the war that they confided among themselves, Ellsberg would, though he risked prison and ruin.

Three decades later, the ghosts of Vietnam have also been revisiting the 72-year-old Ellsberg, who lives in Kensington, Calif., not far from the University of California at Berkeley campus, with his wife, Patricia. As Bush’s National Guard controversy erupted in the press, “The Fog of War,” Errol Morris’ powerful, Academy Award-nominated documentary on the hard-won lessons of history, literally brought the war home for Ellsberg. Morris brought his film, along with its subject, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara — the man who had commissioned the Pentagon Papers — to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Auditorium earlier this month. Ellsberg was in the audience, as McNamara alternately thrilled the graying crowd of peace veterans with his impassioned denunciations of the folly of war and then frustrated them with his refusal — once again — to publicly condemn a sitting president and his tragic military adventure.

I spoke with Ellsberg about the return of Vietnam to presidential politics and Robert McNamara’s reemergence on the national stage.

The Republicans are attacking Kerry now for betraying his fellow Vietnam veterans by condemning the war after he returned

They are? Amazing! I don’t even like to hear this. It makes me gag. Is this something new, I haven’t heard about this? This is just obscene. I hate to hear this. The fact is that Kerry’s group, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, upheld the honor of this country.

Kerry’s GOP critics are saying he’s a political waffler because he questioned the war before he went, but then went to Vietnam anyway. And then he publicly denounced the war after he returned.

As I said, this is making my flesh crawl, to hear George Bush, who went into the National Guard to stay out of Vietnam, even though he supposedly supported the war …

Yes, not only did he support the war, but he thought the U.S. should have fought it harder …

You mean he wanted those other guys to fight it even harder. He wanted his fellow airmen, who were not in the National Guard, but in the Air Force, to put themselves much more at risk in killing people in North Vietnam, dodging SAMs [surface to air missiles], while he dodged his monthly duties in Alabama in an outfit that was preparing for war in Europe, should that arise.

And of course he’s at one with virtually all of the neocons in that respect. Cheney had “other priorities” during Vietnam and apparently spent the war in a secure location somewhere, I guess in Arizona. Rumsfeld had indeed flown in the Air Force in the 1950s, so no lack of courage there, just to fly those planes takes courage. But I noticed that Rumsfeld, who’s exactly my age, did not manage to use his military training in any way in Vietnam. He was too old presumably to go there as a flyer. But there were lots of jobs for him in Vietnam if had wanted, but he chose to sit out the war back here.

I joined the service — the Marines — just about the same time he did, in the 1950s, which were peacetime years. Nonetheless, when I was 34, and he was 34, I signed up again and went to Vietnam.

What year did you go?

In 1965. I was a civilian, but I volunteered to go there with General Ed Lansdale to evaluate our pacification program. I was in 38 of the 43 provinces. But the point is, I found a way to use my Marine training as an infantry company commander, and I used that training to observe troops in action in Vietnam, under fire.

So for these guys, who never served in action when they had a chance, to criticize Kerry now, it’s just appalling. You’ve got me kind of worked up, to hear about these guys attacking Kerry now, it’s just an obscenity.

Now I must say I admire Kerry’s comment that he has never criticized, and will not criticize, anyone’s relation to that war, which was a wrongful war and a mistaken war. Kerry says whatever you did as a young man then — whether you went to Canada to avoid the draft, or joined the National Guard, or went to Vietnam as he did, or was a conscientious objector, or went to prison — whatever you did, he will never criticize anyone’s decision. And I think that is a very creditable position.

The Republicans are trying to turn Jane Fonda into Kerry’s Willie Horton — there’s even a faked photo of the two of them together being circulated on the Internet. The suggestion here is that, like Fonda, Kerry was a traitor after the war.

That’s why this has gotten me so agitated, to hear that word “traitor” or “betrayal” used by these people — who frankly I do not respect. Like Kerry, I won’t condemn someone like Bush for going into the National Guard. But for someone like that to condemn someone like Kerry, who behaved so much better in every respect, is just revolting. It’s just disgusting, and it shows a very bad character, I would say.

I’m sure Kerry felt he was doing his duty as an American, whatever his doubts about the war were before he went. By the way, the fact that he had doubts about the war before he went shows he had his feet on the ground. So did I, and so did a lot of people in the Pentagon. So here’s Kerry going off to war to do his duty, so some other guy doesn’t have to take his place. And then here are these guys, Bush and those around him, who did not expose themselves to danger during Vietnam, though in principle they agreed with the war.

Kerry goes to war and sees it for himself, unlike Bush. And he learned what I did and virtually everyone who went to Vietnam would learn — 3 million Americans went there — that what we were doing, and what we were likely to do, had no prospect of success. And that people were killing and dying for no good enough reason. That’s the minimum we learned, and that’s enough to want it to stop right away. So we all came back disillusioned with the war. And I came back to a Pentagon that was filled with people who were disillusioned with the war.

So then the question is, “What to do about it?” And what Kerry and his fellow antiwar veterans did should be admired by all Americans — they did not merely subside into disillusion and apathy, they did what they could to wake up their fellow Americans to what we had learned in Vietnam. And I respect that.

The vets came back and did what they could, at risk to their own status in society, at the risk of condemnation, which they certainly did get. They obviously spoke out with unusual authority, as people who had demonstrated their patriotism — not only in a conventional way, by going into the military, but like Kerry, with exemplary behavior as soldiers. And then he and the others came back and showed courage again as citizens, facing the condemnation of the Nixon administration and their allies. And for someone like Kerry who had obviously lived his life as a patriot, thinking of himself as patriotic, it’s especially painful to be called unpatriotic and traitorous.

Does it surprise you that this issue still has such resonance for people today?

Well, I am surprised that this White House, staffed by draft dodgers or at least war dodgers, is making this into such an issue. This goes beyond chutzpah, it’s frankly obscene.

It reminds me of John Wayne. I was one of many young men in America recruited into the Marines by John Wayne. I saw him in “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” And later, when I was a Marine and I was on liberty from the 6th Fleet in Rome, I saw him in a restaurant and sent a bottle of wine to his table with my compliments and telling him what a marvelous hero he was to all Marines. And I went over and shook hands with him.

Later I learned that he had escaped military duty in World War II. He let it be known that he had a trick knee, which didn’t prevent him from working in cowboy movies and whatnot — he said he had a football knee or something. That was not true. John Wayne stayed out of the war that Jimmy Stewart and other movie stars flew combat missions in and fought in. He stayed out of it by letting Republic Studios make the plea that he was essential to the war effort as an actor.

So OK, that’s all right, I suppose. It’s our problem if we regard John Wayne as a hero because of his movies. But then, in Vietnam, he had the audacity to call people who resisted the war, and risked jail, “yellow-bellies” and “commie scum” and “traitors” — phrases like that. And that — that — was unforgivable, I thought.

It’s an inexact analogy, but these attacks on Kerry today bring to mind John Wayne and his hypocrisy.

I mean, to call this guy, Kerry, a traitor, of all people! Here is a guy who actually goes over there and serves to the hilt — and his men testify to his heroism and how he saved their lives in a number of cases. And he goes over and he is a war hero. And then he comes home and acts on what he has learned, to tell the truth about what he has learned, to try to save other lives. He did more to save lives at home than he ever had a chance to do when he was in arms in Vietnam.

Compare someone like Kerry to these high government officials from the Vietnam era, these secret doves like McNamara and Clark Clifford and Hubert Humphrey. Not one of them shared their real views, or their warnings, with the American public or Congress. None of them jeopardized their relationship with the president, none of them jeopardized their careers, their security clearances, their ability to come back in future administrations. None of them broke with the policy that they themselves thought was disastrous. None of them took steps to save any lives.

In contrast to that, these veterans like Kerry used their authority — not the authority of high government clearances or Cabinet rank — but the authority of having been shot at and suffered wounds in many cases for what they had been led to believe was in the interest of their country. These people came back and said, “We were misled, we were mistaken in what we did.” They did not defend what they did in Vietnam, and as they told the public, much of what they did in Vietnam was very ugly. They saw crimes and they committed crimes — war crimes. And these veterans, people like Kerry, came back and spoke the truth and did what they could to end the war. Which McNamara did not do — and which none of these high government officials did.

Now McNamara is in a somewhat different category. Because I believe that at least he, unlike the others, was in a position to keep the country from greatly expanding the war — which I believe would’ve cost even more loss of life and still no victory. The right wing says, “He kept us from winning.” I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. So it may be that he did in fact save a lot of lives, even as he was pursuing a policy that cost a lot of lives. I’ll be specific here. In his last year in office, 1967, I believe McNamara did act very creditably as an insider, to keep us from expanding the war into a possible war with China, by going into North Vietnam much more heavily.

But when he left office, the war had seven more years to go. He left in 1968, the war continued until 1975. And there were five more years of American ground combat left. Most of the bombs fell after he left, most of the Americans and Vietnamese died after he left. And he was totally silent. And he has no good excuse for that. He did not save any lives after he left office by telling us the truths about the war that he could have.

The question after any scarring episode in history like Vietnam is, “What did you do in the war, daddy?” That must be applied here. If you did not come to believe that the war was false, a moral catastrophe, then it was not a credit to your wisdom or character or maturity. But if you did realize it, like most Americans, the next test is, “Then what did you do upon realizing that?”

And I will say that certainly the most creditable role for a citizen at that point is to do everything possible to stop it. And the highest standard was set by the people who went to prison for nonviolent draft resistance. And the other highest standard was set by the vets, who came home and put themselves on the line by speaking out and marching against the war. Vets like John Kerry set a standard for the whole country.

I think this is Kerry’s strongest qualification to be a leader of this country.

In January, McNamara spoke out against the war in Iraq for the first time, telling the Toronto Globe and Mail the war is “morally wrong, politically wrong, economically wrong.” But when he was pressed to repeat his criticisms on stage in Berkeley this month, he refused, suggesting that it was improper for a former high government official to publicly attack U.S. policy and that it could cost lives in Iraq. You were in the audience that night — what was your reaction?

Well, clearly we differ. I could not disagree more. To say that someone who had inside knowledge and government experience should not share that with the public, at a time when we’re facing prolongation of a wrongful war, is just plain wrong.

I’ll say this, McNamara is consistent. He refused to act from his inside knowledge and authority and experience to end the Vietnam War, and he’s now refusing for the same reason to end the Iraq war. And he’s consistent — he was wrong then and he’s wrong now.

I don’t know what he actually learned from Vietnam — I genuinely don’t know, he might have learned something. He did clearly learn from the Cuban missile crisis, he did learn the risks of nuclear war can arise even with relatively rational men in power. That’s an incredibly important message he’s trying to convey, and I give him credit for that.

But McNamara has not learned that he could be far more effective as an outside critic of U.S. policy. After he got out of government, he could have been far more effective than he was inside, by speaking out and saving lives. And he could save lives right now, in Iraq. He said in Berkeley that he did not want to risk American lives in Iraq by speaking out about the war. But it’s difficult to figure out how he would be endangering lives by doing that.

It’s not difficult to know exactly what the cost of his silence was during the Vietnam War. His failure to speak out — and mine — during those early years, 1964, ’65, ’66 and in his later years, did not just endanger troops, it cost the lives of 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. And it’s amazing that he hasn’t learned that.

His admonition to the Berkeley audience to apply the lessons of Vietnam and be active and so forth is fine, as words. But it’s pretty hollow because he’s setting an example by refusing to inform that public in a way where they could be effective in their resistance.

I do respect a lot of parts of his career, actually, more than most people. But that is not a behavior pattern of his that I do respect.

Do you think, as you watch the war unfold in Iraq, that Bush learned any important lessons from Vietnam?

Have we learned the lessons? That’s the real question. I think the lesson that the American people should take from Vietnam is that people in Bush’s position, in government leadership, lie all the time. And deceive themselves that what is good for them and their administration is good for the country. That’s the corruption of power, and the question is what are we going to do about it?

This is the context in which Kerry seems to be launching his latest — and very possibly final — push for a big career promotion. The five-term Massachusetts senator, who has chaired the Foreign Relations Committee since 2009, has been highly visible as anti-government protests have swept Egypt in the past two weeks. There was a well-received Op-Ed in the New York Times on Jan. 31, a “Meet the Press” appearance on Sunday and “a lot of headlines in between. Given that no one expects Hillary Clinton to stay on even if there’s a second Obama term, the Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi wrote that Kerry “is running an unofficial campaign to become the next secretary of state.” And, she added, “for once, he looks artful, as well as ambitious.”

Kerry, of course, had hoped to head up the State Department two years ago, when Obama passed him over in favor of Clinton. Instead, he settled for the Foreign Relations gavel, which came free when Joe Biden handed it in to become vice president. It was hardly a bad gig, but it still amounted to a consolation prize. This has been a steady theme in Kerry’s political career.

There was, for instance, his first bid for office, back in 1972. He’d been readying himself for a life in politics since (at least) his prep schools days, and the time seemed right. He’d done his service in Vietnam, then returned and earned a national reputation for his opposition to the war. And if any state seemed suited to an antiwar campaign from a principled, young veteran, it was Massachusetts. Kerry was 29 and on his way to Congress, destined, it seemed, to play an outsize role in American life in the 1970s — and beyond. Except he picked a terrible district to run in. Massachusetts’ 5th District, centered in blue-collar Lowell, was a haven for culturally conservative “white ethnics” (it’s the setting for the new movie “The Fighter“), folks who resented ambitious young war opponents. Even as George McGovern carried Massachusetts, the 5th District snubbed Kerry and chose instead a Republican named Paul Cronin (who would serve just one term, the last time to this day that a Republican has represented the 5th).

Kerry’s dreams of a rapid rise in politics were thwarted. Instead of spending the next decade on the national stage, he went to law school at Boston College, then took a low-profile gig with Middlesex County District Attorney John Droney (who had suffered his own political disaster in 1972, losing by 30 points to U.S. Sen. Ed Brooke). It wasn’t until the year he turned 40, in 1982, that Kerry was finally positioned to take another shot at office, one not nearly as glamorous as Congress: lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. It was supposed to be a doomed mission, but some odd circumstances — ’82 was the year Michael Dukakis, unseated by Ed King in a 1978 primary, won back the Democratic nomination and the governorship — landed him in the winner’s circle on primary night (and from there, the general election was a cruise). A decade earlier, he might have sniffed at the idea of being lieutenant governor, but at least now he was back in the game.

And, it turned out, he picked just the right time to become lieutenant governor. Less than a year later, Paul Tsongas, who’d unseated Brooke in 1978, announced that he’d been diagnosed with lymphoma and would leave the Senate in 1984. The seat was wide open. Kerry jumped at the chance to run. So did several other Democrats. The initial favorite was James Shannon, who had eclipsed Kerry as the state’s designated Democratic up-and-comer when he was elected to the House in 1978 at the age of 26. A favorite of Speaker Tip O’Neill, Shannon won broad establishment support and led in early polling. Somehow, Kerry edged him out in the September primary (and caught another break that same day when Ray Shamie, a conservative activist, upset the liberal Watergate hero Elliot Richardson in the Republican primary). Kerry was elected in November. Suddenly, his 1970s detour was an ancient memory; he had worked his way back to the national stage, and his future was again bright.

But being in the Senate, Kerry soon discovered, didn’t automatically mean standing out on the national stage — or even in Massachusetts. This was partly a function of his lack of seniority. It also didn’t help that his Bay State colleague, Ted Kennedy, was a global political celebrity and a major force in the Senate. Or, for that matter, that Dukakis ran for president in 1988. At best, Kerry was the third most visible Democrat from his home state — fourth, if you throw in O’Neill, who stayed on as House speaker until January 1987.

Nor was Kerry that interested in playing the “Senator Pothole” role in Massachusetts. Foreign policy fascinated him, not ribbon cuttings for transportation projects back home. The stories of Kerry’s indifference to local politicians in Massachusetts — and their indifference toward him — are legendary. In his early years in Washington, Kerry’s bachelor status — he and his first wife divorced in 1988, after a four-year separation — did make news, and not always in a good way. By 1990, with economic anxiety running high in Massachusetts, Kerry found himself facing dangerously low poll numbers and a self-funding multimillionaire GOP opponent, James Rappaport. The race was ugly, but Kerry prevailed. The experience, though, was humbling. He harbored White House ambitions, as everyone knew, but they’d have to wait. There’d be no quick jump from the Senate to a presidential race. (Tsongas, back on the scene following a seemingly successful 1986 bone marrow transplant, ended up being the Massachusetts Democrat who ran for president in 1992.)

He sensed his moment had arrived after his next reelection, in 1996. Opposed by William Weld just two years after Weld had been reelected governor with an astonishing 71 percent of the vote, Kerry had defied initial expectations and survived — by 7 points. The 2000 Democratic nomination would be open; Kerry prepared himself for a national race, building his national profile and making several high-profile breaks with liberal orthodoxy (notably on education). He was ready to run, and he would have … if a single big-name Massachusetts Democrat had been willing to stand in his corner. Instead, one by one, they lined up behind Vice President Al Gore. It was a humiliating blow for Kerry, who soon announced that he’d sit out an ’00 race that he badly wanted to contest. It got worse in the summer of 2000, when Kerry made Gore’s running-mate short list, along with Evan Bayh, John Edwards and Joe Lieberman. Kerry was the logical pick, but Lieberman was Gore’s choice. With reporters camped outside his Beacon Hill home, Kerry put on a good face — something he was getting good at.

Then came 2004, and the near-miss against George W. Bush. The exit polls forecast a Kerry landslide; the actual returns handed Bush a second term. Kerry had missed his dream by 19 electoral votes. He wanted to try again in 2008, and set out in 2005 and 2006 to position himself for the nomination, striking a far more strident tone. The knock was that he’d been unfocused in ’04 and had let Bush walk all over him. Desperately, Kerry tried to prove that he could be a “fighter.” He never got to the starting line. A “botched joke” just before the 2006 midterms gave Democrats an opportunity to bluntly deliver the message to Kerry that they’d been too polite to spell out before then: No way would they nominate him again in ’08.

So he backed out of the ’08 race, watched Obama maneuver his way into contention for the nomination, and then — just two days after Obama suffered a New Hampshire primary loss that seemed crushing at the time — provided an endorsement. Ten months later, President-Elect Obama was in position to return the favor. Kerry wanted to be secretary of state and his qualifications were impeccable. So, of course, the job went to Hillary Clinton. Kerry took it in stride and stressed all of the important work he’d still get to do with the Foreign Relations Committee.

He’s 67 now. There will be no more campaigns for president. The Democrats’ Senate majority, reduced to 53 in the last election, may be slipping away as we speak. A Republican takeover in 2012, which would strip Kerry of his chairmanship, is quite possible. 2012 is also when Clinton figures to leave Foggy Bottom. For Kerry, it may be one final, fateful moment: Will he get the job he truly covets, or spend the rest of his career as a minority party senator, painfully aware of just how close he came to being so much more?

A quick check turned up citations of the senator’s remark by Michelle Malkin, NewsBusters, Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller, and the right-wing blog Legal Insurrection, which apparently started the ruckus.

Are the conservatives that desperate? It occurred to me that if there really is no better target than Kerry for their angry arrows their quiver must be close to empty. Happy thought: Maybe the Democrats have a chance in November, after all.

Alas, I fear not. Kerry was merely the innocent victim of a classic conservative drive-by shooting. It wasn’t Kerry they were aiming at. It was the Democrats’ presumed elitist pretenses. He was merely a convenient target of opportunity.

In Kerry’s defense it should be noted that nothing he said was actually the least bit controversial — if one takes into account the facts, something admittedly that is not terribly popular in American politics. Studies since the 1940s have consistently shown that Americans by and large don’t pay much attention to politics, and when they do it is apt to be because somebody has nicely captured their feelings about the times in a reductionist bumper sticker slogan.

Just how ignorant are Americans? Three facts. Only one out of two know the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia. Only one in five know there are a hundred U.S. senators. Only two in five can name the three branches of government. Please note that in each case the part of the electorate that has been found to be knowledgeable about our history and our government is in the minority.

Poor John Kerry. He has the facts on his side and thinks that matters. Does the man not understand how politics is played these days? How it has been played for going on 40 years, ever since George Wallace denounced pointy-headed intellectuals and Richard Nixon discovered the virtues of the Silent Majority?

Does he not remember being demonized as an effete, wine-swilling, French-speaking, surfer boy-man who hunts in clean clothes and resides in a mansion?

I have some news for Mr. Kerry. Nothing’s changed since 2004. We are the same country we were then, Barack Obama’s election notwithstanding. Even Obama had to sing about hope and change and Yes, we can as if those were more than empty slogans. (His biographer tells us Obama was embarrassed by the latter slogan. Good for him.)

If the senator wants to join the nascent movement to restore civics to the school curricula — a movement I heartily embrace — by all means let him do so by giving a serious address on the subject from the floor of the Senate and then rallying his fellow solons to provide the necessary funding. But he should not be tossing off bons mots in passing about ignorant voters. That plays right into the hands of the Republicans, who are all too ready to rally voters by appealing to faux cultural populist motifs.

John — may I call you John? Voters don’t like being told they are ignorant. Telling them they are in the middle of an election inspires, well, a negative reaction. This comment I found on a conservative blog in response to your statement is representative: “Halp us, Jon Carry, were to stoopid! Pleeze tell us the facks!” Or as the Boston Herald put it in a caption to the story the paper ran, you seem to believe “clueless voters are to blame for Democrats’ uphill fight against Republicans.” Am I getting through, John? This is no way to win votes.

As for Republicans. Please! Just because you can play the populist card to great effect doesn’t mean you should. Let me pretend to be Jon Stewart for a moment. Aside. Camera two … Can’t we agree that it’s cheeky to claim to be on the side of the little guy while favoring tax breaks for the wealthy, as you guys keep doing? Isn’t that a bit rich? You can’t play the race card anymore because racism is now politically incorrect, but it’s OK to play the populist card? Shouldn’t that be politically incorrect, too?

Back to camera one. Folks of both left and right: We can do better, can’t we? Don’t we have to? If only we put as much effort into arming voters with the facts as we do manipulating them, might we not have smarter politics? Don’t smarter voters equal smarter politics? Hey, it’s just a thought. But don’t we want to live in a country with smart voters?

Maybe some of us don’t.

John Kerry — who made headlines for incessantly bugging his peers to pass a climate bill despite the fact that no one wanted too — promises this won’t take as long as health care did, which is probably good, because if it takes as long as health care did, there won’t be much the Senate can do.

Meanwhile:

Sea levels are rising faster than scientists predicted just a few years ago. Himalayan glaciers are melting. In the American West, pine beetles (which struggle to survive the cold) are multiplying and killing trees.

According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008.

On the other hand, it definitely snowed last winter.

Everley led off with his thoughts this morning, and a response from Roberts followed a few hours later (it appears below Everley’s post).

Steve Everley: With the unemployment rate near 10 percent, creating jobs should be the first consideration of our elected leaders, but instead President Obama and his liberal allies in Congress are insisting on enacting a national energy tax that will kill jobs and drive American businesses overseas.

The vehicle for imposing this vast new energy tax system is cap-and-trade, a scheme where the government arbitrarily determines how much carbon each company can emit, chooses which companies get free permits to emit carbon and which companies have to pay for them, and then puts unelected bureaucrats in charge of regulating the whole system.

The result is higher energy costs, which virtually every economist will tell you are necessary for cap-and-trade to be effective – higher prices are necessary to prevent consumers from using what the left considers too much energy. President Obama even bragged that under his ideal cap-and-trade plan, electricity prices would “necessarily skyrocket.”

President Obama has also listed Spain as the model for his energy policy, noting last year that the Spanish government’s investments in green energy “are paying off in good, high-wage jobs – jobs they won’t lose to other countries.”

But a study from economics professor Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Spain shows that his country’s push for “green jobs” has been a disaster for the economy: Calzada found that each green job created not only costs on average 2.2 jobs in the private sector, but also upward of $800,000 each in government subsidies. Two months ago, Spain’s unemployment rate topped 20 percent.

If Spain is the model that President Obama and the left wish to emulate, then America’s unemployment rate will also “necessarily skyrocket.”

Many other studies have shown, including those from the Brookings Institution and the Congressional Budget Office, that higher energy costs lead directly to fewer American jobs. The CBO adds that the shift toward so-called green technologies, President Obama’s biggest selling point for this new cap-and-trade energy tax, would actually reduce economic productivity as each worker in the energy industry would now spend the same amount of time producing less energy.

The European Union sold cap-and-trade to its member countries in 2005 on the basis that it would create jobs and boost their economies. The opposite happened. Since 2005, this policy has cost the EU economy over $7 billion, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office found last year that the EU system did not significantly advance investment in new technologies, which President Obama and his liberal allies in Congress keep pointing to as the source of new jobs that cap-and-trade energy taxes are supposed to deliver.

With that kind of record, what rational policymaker would seek to impose this new energy tax system on his or her own constituents as a way to create net new jobs and net new economic wealth, and not just a massive redistribution of wealth?

Last fall Sen. Kerry tried to sell his cap-and-trade energy tax plan by pointing out that America had effectively reduced its emissions in the past year “because of the downturn in the economy.” In order to get to where we need to be, Kerry concluded, we just need to go “another 14 percent.”

It was an illuminating admission from the Senate’s staunchest defender of the energy tax. Kerry articulated a direct relationship between economic stagnation and cap-and-trade, proof that an energy tax is a strategy that will kill more American jobs and make the recession permanent.

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David Roberts: I confess to being uncertain how to respond to Mr. Everley’s opening salvo. Like his boss Mr. Gingrich, one of the original masters, he seems to be stringing together words and phrases poll-tested to inspire fear. The presence of the term “unelected bureaucrats” does not generally signal good faith and seriousness.

So let’s back up a bit. Why would we want a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions? Because we have a large and pressing problem to solve, namely climate change, a phenomenon that Everley astonishingly fails to even mention. The best science indicates that the developed world needs to reduce its emissions over 80 percent by 2050. That is a truly Herculean task, and I’d be quite curious to hear how Everley proposes to accomplish it without a mandatory cap on carbon pollution — or if he thinks it’s a real problem at all.

By emitting greenhouse gases, industries are imposing costs on the public, but they are not paying those costs. Carbon pollution is a classic economic “externality” that distorts the proper functioning of the market. One way or another, those costs need to be internalized, incorporated into the market price of fossil fuel-intensive goods and services. It’s important to note that such a move would not raise net costs — it would simply move those costs to their rightful owners. It would force the market to tell the truth.

So how to go about it? In the late 1980s, a group of market-inclined environmentalists, recognizing the limits of “command-and-control” air pollution regulations, developed a new model: rather than plant-by-plant mandates, set a declining upper limit on the total pollution emitted across the U.S. economy, issue tradable pollution permits, and allow private capital to flow to the best (read: cheapest) means of meeting the cap. Thus you harness environmental goals to market forces. This essentially conservative idea impressed the administration of George Bush Sr., who signed into law the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, which implemented such a system for acid rain pollutants. It was a resounding success, reducing pollution much more cheaply than expected, with massive social and health benefits. (For a compact history of cap-and-trade, I recommend this article in Smithsonian.)

Market-based pollution limits have been so effective that a bipartisan group of senators led by Sens. Carper. D-Del., and Alexander, R-Tenn., is now pushing a similar trading system for SO2, NOx, and mercury — so-called multipollutant legislation. Leading lights on the right used to feel the same way about using market-based systems to reduce greenhouse gases. For instance, a wise man once said:

“I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.”

That was Newt Gingrich in 2007, before he was angling for a presidential nomination from a party dominated by its Tea Party fringe. Similarly, in 2008 California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina said that a cap-and-trade system would “both create jobs and lower the cost of energy.” Now that she’s seeking votes from the Tea Party, she’s allying with the Senate’s premier flat-earther, James Inhofe, R-Okla.

In short, conservative politicians are turning away from — and grotesquely mischaracterizing — a market-based pollution control system for primarily self-interested electoral reasons. This has made clear dialogue on the subject extraordinarily difficult.

Anyway, I don’t want to bore people, but a couple more quick notes. First, the Spanish study Everley cites has been debunked up one side and down the other, most recently by the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. No one but conservative ideologues takes it seriously anymore. Recent studies of cap-and-trade bills, like the one a couple weeks ago from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, show that they would be net job creators, if modest ones. Other studies, from, for example, the EPA and CBO, show that the bills would reduce the deficit, which you’d think would be attractive to conservatives.

On the costs of a cap-and-trade system, the economic consensus is that it would cost American households about a postage stamp a day — a far, far smaller price than would be imposed by the damages from climate change. For more on that consensus, see this discussion paper (PDF) from journalist Eric Pooley.

To conclude: virtually everyone agrees that the U.S. needs to invest in new clean energy industries and solutions. That’s the easy part. The politically more difficult part is how to pay for those investments. A cap-and-trade system offers a twofer: It discourages carbon pollution by raising its price, and it uses that revenue to fund clean energy solutions. Conservatives want to spend the money, but they don’t want to raise it. It’s fiscally and morally irresponsible.