U.S. “climate envoy” Todd Stern has just said something very instructive ahead of the Waxman-Markey legislative votes commencing Friday, which will undoubtedly be preceeded by ritual Democratic keening to hurry along and justify this latest hair-on-fire, no-time-to-read-1,000-pages, “must act now!” panic.

According to the Guardian, responding to the (absurdly unrealistic) idea that the U.S. should by 2020 cut its emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels:

“In our judgment [this kind of cut is] not necessary”

Remember: if you grant the alarmists’ assumptions, anything shy of a 50 percent global reduction of emissions couldn’t conceivably under any scenario even flirt with the remotest prospect of detectably if minutely impacting the climate. Oh, and catastrophic man-made climate catastrophe is already upon us!

Yet here’s Obama’s guy saying that a 40 percent reduction by 2020 by a handful of rich countries, representing an ever-decreasing portion of global emissions, “is not necessary.” It wouldn’t do anything, true: it would just be a depression-inducing first step, supposedly toward the larger if even less realistic goal that the economic pain of the first step would cause to be abandoned, anyway. But, it wouldn’t do anything, and even that isn’t necessary. Good for him for admitting it.

Is anyone up on the Hill listening? (And, by the way, if you’re reading this: Have you contacted your representative?)