Having perused an advance of the President’s remarks announcing a new policy about climate change, it was with a morose curiosity that I tuned in to C-SPAN 3 to watch the director of the Council on Environmental Quality Jim Connaughton preview same. I hoped to discern some purpose for the exercise, which is not readily apparent from the text when read in a vaccum.

Instead what one sees when reading the speech is — consistent with published reports today and private conversations with relevant folks — what it looks like when someone prepares to roll-out an endorsement of Kyoto-style “cap-and-trade” only to pull that particular specific at the 11th hour. This leaves a speech that could say everything (from the global-warming industry’s perspective) or nothing at all. I fear, however, that the only policy that could match the call to avoid tax increases and job loss with a demand to “carbon-weight new incentives” is a tweak of the tax code to allow for expensing of capital equipment, to pull through more efficient technologies sooner.

Given this, and in context of what we now know, this speech begs the question of what in the world was the point of doing this, particularly since there is no chance of President Bush actually attaining the legislation that he so vaguely outlined, before leaving office? Read the President’s speech and ask yourself, if the purpose going into this wasn’t cap-and-trade, what was it? More curious is, with cap-and-trade having been taken out after the brief but fierce firestorm, what was the purpose of continuing on? Mr. Connaughton was not helpful at clarifying this mystery. But he did offer a passioned defense of the ethanol mandate, amid escalating, global cries of the terrible repercussions arising from tremendous increases in the cost of food, brought about by the growing mandates to put erstwhile food staples in our gas tanks (largely, now, in the name of global warming).

Like the ethanol industry in comments widely reported today, he insisted that this corporate-welfare program is only one small factor in the massive food-price spikes. Hearing this, my colleague Richard Morrison quipped that he heard mention of a leap forward to fuels based on gold flakes and condor eggs.

It’s hard to know when someone’s kidding about this stuff anymore.