So has the political response to global warming ever been about mitigation? It doesn't appear so. Whatever you think about science of climate change, one cannot deny that:

There is big money in climate change policy for special interests.

There is big money in climate change policy for climate scientists, relatively speaking.

There is big money in climate change policy for environmental activists groups who need a new raison d'etre.

There is no serious climate change policy yet put forth that would have a perceptible affect on mitigating warming.

Political triangulation around climate change has been primarily about resources transfers to the above groups. Notice how these groups reinforce one another: Environmental groups provide the moralistic veneer, climate scientists provide the "consensus" and special interests provide money to politicians who, in turn, pass climate bills that benefit the above. As I've written elsewhere:

Of course, the mainstream media and all those, like Timmer, who sip from the climate information cascades, want to believe the master narrative. They don’t want to think there are some nefarious forces behind this venal and wasteful web of relationships. Indeed, even if Michael Mann was able through computer models magically to limn our climate future to the last detail, we would still have to look at the Climate Industrial Complex and shudder. So here we go again, offering the lessons of public choice theory. Climate change like most issues in Washington is an object less in what Nobel Laureate James Buchanan calls “politics without romance:”



If the government is empowered to grant monopoly rights or tariff protection to one group, at the expense of the general public or of designated losers, it follows that potential beneficiaries will compete for the prize. And since only one group can be rewarded, the resources invested by other groups—which could have been used to produce valued goods and services—are wasted. Given this basic insight, much of modern politics can be understood as rent-seeking activity. Pork-barrel politics is only the most obvious example. Much of the growth of the bureaucratic or regulatory sector of government can best be explained in terms of the competition between political agents for constituency support through the use of promises of discriminatory transfers of wealth.

Al Gore notwithstanding, it’s Buchanan’s work that won him the Nobel. We should pay attention.

The Climate-Industrial Complex is a perfect term. I wish I could take credit for it. (In Michaels's talk above, he discusses Eisenhower's warning about the technocratic/scientific elite. Prescient, indeed.)