More than a few producers of natural gas probably have mixed feelings about President George W. Bush's decision this month not to regulate carbon dioxide emitted from power plants as an air pollutant. Some might be altogether disappointed.
Aggressive CO2 regulation in power generation would help gas compete in an important market at the expense of heavier hydrocarbons.
Gas producers, however, have other interests in the matter. Most important among them is justice in policy-making, especially when it involves the environment.
CO2, after all, isn't the only environmental issue facing producers of natural gas.
Global-warming alarmists want the government to treat CO2 the same as ozone precursors and toxic metals because of what they presume to be the substance's role in climate change.
They assert that a build-up of CO2 associated with industrialization caused an observed increase in average temperature. So they think CO2 should be taxed so heavily that humans reduce their emissions of the substance.
But the position remains subject to much controversy. Last November, the Kyoto Protocol calling for expensive cuts in CO2 emissions by industrial countries hit rough seas when negotiations broke down over implementation.
Hence the attempt to treat CO2 as a dangerous pollutant. The direct approach didn't work.
That's the worst part about the CO2 gambit. It amounted to a deceptive flanking movement in the treacherous politics of climate change.
Furthermore, it was just dumb. CO2 supports plant life and is essential to animal respiration. To regulate it on the same plane as something like mercury makes no sense.
What is more, curbing CO2 could harm human welfare more than whatever warming influence the gas might exert. Growth of the atmosphere's CO2 content should encourage plant growth. It thus should help feed a growing global population.
Because that's not the popular wisdom, however, the notion gets dismissed as fringy. In a world where masses of people still starve, the arrogance is immoral.
These outrages punctuate the question of how CO2 regulation found its way into the deep recesses of Bush's campaign platform to begin with. What matters more is that he purged a faulty notion before it gained political traction.
Environmentalist extremists are screaming, of course. Bush, in their retrospective, violated a campaign "promise"-even though few observers even noticed the CO2 miscue in his campaign material and a mumbled speech line.
The extremists themselves deserve the scolding. Turned back on Kyoto implementation, they tried to sneak a scientific howler into national governance.
This isn't how policy-making should work, including environmental policy-making. For gas producers, integrity of the regulatory system is more important than whatever market boost might have come from treating CO2 like poison.