“Where’s Al Gore when we need him?” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said to loud laughter last week, as he responded to a reporter’s question about the prospects of passing climate-control legislation while Washington, D.C., was digging itself out from its biggest snowstorm in 111 years. With record snowfalls and freezing temperatures gripping the Nation’s Capital, “the prospect of winning support for a climate bill this year [is] even less likely,” concluded the Capitol Hill publication The Hill. Opponents of the measure also known as “cap and trade” took the occasion of the “Snowpocalypse” to denounce both the legislation and its best-known proponent. “It’s going to keep snowing in D.C. until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,’” Sen. Jim DeMint (R.-S.C.) tweeted on Twitter. Even liberal Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D.-N.M.) conceded that the snowstorm paralyzing Washington has made it harder for global-warming advocates to make the case for cap-and-trade. Bingaman told reporters that “People see the world around them and they extrapolate. I think that it’s hard to see how an economy-wide cap-and-trade [proposal] of the type that passed the House could prevail.”
