Rush played the audio of Joe Biden replying to an angry green activist in an Ohio rope line berating him for supporting clean coal, which he not only flatly – and, so far as one can tell according to the guy at the top of the ticket, wrongly – denied but also added that “the first guy to introduce a global warming bill was me, 22 years ago.”

Er, well, here he is running for president just last year, talking up clean coal: “If we had clean-coal technology we developed and made the real investment in, we were able to sell it to China, China has all the coal reserves they need, it would free them up from having to buy oil from Iran, and from, and Somalia keeping them tied to their foreign policy…” (tapering off into “win-win situation”-talk). Distilling this and his rope-line comments, it seems his position is anti-clean coal, unless it’s for sale to other people. Not for here, though.

Anyway, he’s right about that bill. And his timeline places it in 1986.

Biden’s website says of this legislation, the Global Climate Protection Act, “A modified form of this pioneering legislation passed in 1987 (P.L. 100-204).” Indeed it was, as a rider on the State Department appropriations bill.

CRS’s summary of the provisions confirms that, indeed, Biden was a very early alarm-bell ringer on warming temperatures, which had after all at this time been underway for nearly ten years . . . and were about ten years away from peaking and, at least for now, turning back to cooling. (What kind of legislation,I wonder, will make the cooling stop?)

However, this may or may not have been the exercise in keen judgment that Biden clearly wants you to believe. This was 1986 – as tense a time in the Cold War as we had seen since the Korean Conflict. The Commies were in their death throes and were starting to realize it. U.S. backed mujahedeen were stepping it up against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the Reykjavík Summit really smarted. Tense.

So with that perspective, note the CRS summary’s closing line as you gauge the priorities and worldview of this candidate for the second-highest office in the land: “Urges the President to accord the problem of climate protection a high priority on the agenda of U.S.-Soviet relations.” Mmm. Yes.

Well, the good news is that Sen. McCain didn’t come to his climate moonbattery until those heady, peace-dividend days of 2000, when that kid following him around in a penguin suit got on his nerves and brought him around. Gosh, I’m upbeat about this election.