In his February 24 address to Congress, President Obama asked for "legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution." But don't assume that this administration, in contrast to its predecessor, is overly concerned about the threat to humanity from global warming.

When the president unveiled his budget later that week, it became clear that even if so-called cap-and-trade legislation is passed this year, the administration has no plans to start taxing emissions until 2012. A president who warned of catastrophe should Congress delay implementing his economic agenda seems in no particular rush to cut down on greenhouse emissions. No doubt he has been quietly briefed on just how devastating his cap-and-trade regime would be to a fragile economy.

So it's a hollow victory for climate alarmists. As it happens, besides being an election year, 2012 is also supposed to be the point of no return for action on climate change. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and co-recipient with Al Gore of the Nobel Peace Prize, warned after collecting his prize in Norway that "if there's no action before 2012, that's too late."

Last year Gore himself opined that "we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis." Such warnings have become routine--20 years ago, in 1989, the head of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program, Noel Brown, issued the same dire prediction, claiming that there was

After two decades in which environmentalists have urged immediate government action or else, a unified Democratic government has finally made such action possible--but it is, thankfully, not imminent or assured. The timing of any legislation will be determined by the political climate in Washington, and not the temperature in the Arctic.

Whatever else it accomplishes, cap and trade will be a huge tax on the productive sectors of the economy. The "cap" is a government-imposed limit on total emissions; companies then buy permits from the government to emit pollutants up to the amount of the cap, and can then trade these permits with each other. The process of issuing and pricing the permits will be an invitation to astonishing amounts of lobbying and favor-seeking. Cap and trade, in the words of MIT's Richard Lindzen, will be "a bureaucrat's dream."

According to a recently released study by the George C. Marshall Institute, the cost of cap and trade to the overall economy--depending on the size and scope of the legislation--is anywhere from a 0.3 percent to 3 percent drop in GDP in 2015 below what it would otherwise be. The report, as noted by the National Center for Policy Analysis, estimated that Americans would see their "electricity prices jumping 5-15 percent by 2015, natural gas prices up 12-50 percent by 2015, and gasoline prices up 9-145 percent by 2015." The numbers are staggering, which is why the Obama administration plans to divert some of the permit revenues to its "making work pay" tax credit, reimbursing low-income individuals up to $400 a year and $800 for couples. It won't be enough.