In a Jan. 19 editorial, titled “Kyoto’s Big Con,” the Wall Street Journal declared:

“The U.S. dropped its signature from Kyoto because arbitrary emissions targets are both pointless and economically damaging. No proof exists that lower emissions reduce global warming. The idea that human activity influences climate change one way or another is far from proven, given the overwhelming role nature itself plays in atmospheric changes. And if the warming trend of recent decades continues – by no means a certainty – it might well be a boon to humanity.”

One might be misled into believing the Wall Street Journal’s position on climate change mirrors the opinion of Conservatives and business leaders in the United States.

Fortunately, this kind of tripe has long ago been contradicted by, among others, Jim Woolsey (former head of the CIA), Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), Margaret Thatcher, William F. Buckley, Jr. (neither one exactly a closet liberal), and, more recently, former Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, who has likened the coming impacts of climate change to a “nuclear holocaust.”

It has also been contradicted by such corporations as Alcoa, American Electric Power, Baxter International Inc., Boeing, BP, DuPont, Entergy, General Electric, IBM, Intel, Royal Dutch Shell, Sunoco, Toyota, United Technologies, Weyerhayser and Whirlpool Corporation – to name a few.

No matter. It seems clear that Dow Jones (the parent company of the WSJ) places more faith in the pronouncements of the paper’s editorial board than in the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations in what is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history.

The Journal used to be known affectionately as “the handmaiden of American capitalism.”

Today it is fast becoming one of capitalism’s biggest buffoons.