The arrival last week of the enormous — 829 pages! — and laborious U.S. National Climate Assessment, a report put together by 300 American worrywarts, reminds me of a little-noted fact. The American Left has no practical solution for many of the problems that agitate it, and that its neurotics hope will agitate us. Put another way, the Left is given to setting the American people off on noble quests for which there is no solution. A case in point is global warming or climate change.

The global warmists — mostly drawn from the Left — may or may not be right about global warming. As they say in their recent Climate Assessment, “Climate change, once considered an issue for the distant future, has moved firmly into the present.” Well, maybe so, but there is still little we can do to alleviate global warming. America is, mostly for economic reasons, meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol without actually having signed the treaty. In fact, we were the first major industrialized nation to do so, back in 2012. The problem of global warming resides not with us but with other nations. Led by China, the poorer countries of the world are paying no attention to the Kyoto nonsense, and one should not expect them to. Why should a poor country impede its growing standard of living for the grandiose and highly speculative goal of climate control?