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Global warming is becoming a new unified field theory for environmentalists, a crisis so urgent and profound that it even justifies leaping the democratic process. Consider the political campaign to prod the Bush Administration to list the polar bear as an endangered species — even though many proponents admit it isn't endangered at all.

It finally dawned on the wizards of Washington this month that high energy prices, the subprime-mortgage meltdown and persistently high taxes — all of which they had a hand in — are taking their toll on Americans' finances and psyches. This realization briefly had President Bush and Congress in a bidding war for Americans' love and confidence. Receiving far less publicity are the words coming from the other side of their mouths.

Plans to force importers to pay the same greenhouse gas emission charges as domestic producers could provoke a trade war of retaliation and litigation, officials and lawyers have warned.

WHAT South Africans have experienced in the past 12 days with load-shedding has already been experienced in a number of other industrialised and developing countries, with many others joining us every week.

The big stories of blackouts have come from Brazil, Cuba, Pakistan, Chile, the US state of California, the Baltic states, Iraq and Uganda, and will include Tajikistan, Rwanda, Zambia and those on the South African grid.

Climate change may be a top issue in the minds of California voters, but so far it's played only a cameo role in this year's presidential race.

The League of Conservation Voters has been tracking the number of questions asked of the presidential candidates on the Sunday news shows and the debates televised by the major networks. Of the more than 2,900 questions asked, only four have mentioned the words "global warming."

In late 2007, the first discussions were held on a new framework to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which set mandatory greenhouse-gas emissions targets for developed countries and expires in 2012.

It was appropriate that, just as our MPs were voting last week to hand over yet more of the power to run this country in the EU treaty, the EU itself should be unveiling easily the most ambitious example yet of how it uses the powers we have already given away. The proposals for "fighting climate change" announced on Wednesday by an array of EU commissioners make Stalin's Five-Year Plans look like a model of practical politics.

Defining complex human behaviors and states, such as obesity or having children, in terms of carbon footprint, however, enables a new structure of good and evil to be imposed on society.

One of the great unnoticed curiosities of the presidential campaign is that even the party that claims devotion to free enterprise is full-out socialist — or, more precisely, fascist — when it comes to energy policy. Listening to the presidential forum the other night, I was struck by how anti-free market all but one of the Republican candidates, Ron Paul, are on this matter.