As I pointed out yesterday in a piece at Human Events, Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer have been arguing that we must pass a global-warming bill now in order to stave off national-security threats down the road.

The New York Times picks up on the national-security push for passing cap-and-trade with a particularly smarmy editorial today. Curiously, while it mentions John Kerry, the editorial makes no mention of Boxer, who is not generally regarded as a hawk. Neither is Kerry, of course, though Democrats like to point to his Vietnam service and chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee as proof of his national-security chops. Instead, the Times cites John Warner, the patrician former senator and Navy secretary whose last legislative cause before retiring was a failed attempt to pass a global-warming bill.

The Times editorial positively drips with Old Gray Lady elitism. The appeal to national security from the mandarins at the Times — folks not known for being overly concerned about the topic — is the best indication that the traditional arguments favoring global-warming regulation are failing with the public. And in a country where laws are crafted democratically (ideally at least), that’s a problem.

At least the Times admits that cap-and-trade will cause energy prices to skyrocket — it is a tax, after all. But what is most striking about the editorial is the patronizing way it blames the public for just not getting it. It’s the public’s fault for not buying the “sound arguments” that demonstrate what they must do is drive smaller cars and pay higher prices for everything.

To paraphrase the very first line of their editorial: One would think that by now most editorial writers advocating the fundamental reorganization of the U.S. economy through extraordinarily higher taxes and oppressive regulations would have figured out that the general public would resist such a radical scenario.