By James P. Pinkerton
Contributing Editor and columnist American Conservative magazine/FOX News Contributor

On the issue of “global warming,” conservatives are starting to look beyond the loyalty label—and look instead to the economic substance. That’s good news. Let’s just hope that it’s not too late to save America from being crushed by the deadening hand of Green ideology.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president this year, seems to think that he is obligated to endorse Green legislation as part of his bargain with the liberal media establishment (he doesn’t seem to realize that the MSM will drop him for Barack Obama). And so McCain has endorsed the Lieberman-Warner “cap and trade” global warming legislation, now being considered by the US Senate. Of course McCain supports the bill, because it was once known as “Lieberman-McCain,” before McCain dropped his overt support, in favor of more covert support—McCain had to clinch the GOP nomination.

But by any name, the Lieberman-Warner proposal is a $1.2 trillion tax increase, according to the Congressional Budget Office—and the true costs are likely to be much more than that.

But leading conservatives are starting to read the fine print—and starting to react in print. Here’s Charles Krauthammer, writing in the The Washington Post on Friday, making fun of the pseudo-religion of the Greens: Under the headline, “Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment,” Krauthammer explains how environmentalism was a lifeline to leftists dispirited over the collapse of communism: “Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but—even better—in the name of Earth itself.”

Krauthammer goes on to cite a hero to free-market conservatives, a man who lived under communism for most of his life, Czech President Vaclav Klaus: “Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. ‘The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,’ warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, ‘is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.’”

Klaus, by the way, has co-authored an important book entitled, “Blue Planet, Green Shackles,” which everyone ought to read, lest we descend back into a Dark Age of techno-regression.

Next up: conservative columnist George Will, who takes on McCain directly: “Regarding McCain’s ‘central facts,’ the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, which helped establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — co-winner, with Al Gore, of the Nobel Peace Prize — says global temperatures have not risen in a decade. So Congress might be arriving late at the save-the-planet party. Better late than never? No. When government, ever eager to expand its grip on the governed and their wealth, manufactures hysteria as an excuse for doing so, then: better never.”

OK, that’s conservatives, making their voices heard. But what’s really interesting is that now liberals, too, are speaking out. One such is Freeman Dyson, the Princeton physicist, who took to the pages of the trendy-lefty New York Review of Books to make much the same point as Krauthammer — environmentalism is a religion: “There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.”

Dyson went on to take note of an important new book, “A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies,” by Yale economist William Nordhaus, an alumni of the Carter White House. But Nordhaus’ Democratic pedigree notwithstanding, his academic rigor forces him to speak bluntly about the catastrophic cost of the “remedies” to “global warming.”

Here’s Dyson reviewing radical green proposals by Sir Nicholas Stern of the United Kingdom and former Vice President Al Gore: “The main conclusion of the Nordhaus analysis is that the ambitious proposals, “Stern” and “Gore,” are disastrously expensive, the “low-cost backstop” is enormously advantageous if it can be achieved, and the other policies including business-as-usual and Kyoto are only moderately worse than the optimal policy. The practical consequence for global-warming policy is that we should pursue the following objectives in order of priority. (1) Avoid the ambitious proposals. (2) Develop the science and technology for a low-cost backstop. (3) Negotiate an international treaty coming as close as possible to the optimal policy, in case the low-cost backstop fails. (4) Avoid an international treaty making the Kyoto Protocol policy permanent. These objectives are valid for economic reasons, independent of the scientific details of global warming. (emphasis added)

So liberals are starting to wake up, too. Let’s just hope that it’s not too late.