We are all global-warming alarmists now. President Bush's speech yesterday outlining the goal of halting the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States by 2025 runs the unusual gauntlet of promising something the private sector will probably deliver on its own — witness the spontaneous rise of "carbon offsets" and green investing — while also kicking the intellectual legs out from under a defensible conservative position on climate change.

To be sure, the president's position is parsimonious by Al Gore's standards. It omits a cap-and-trade scheme; it is much less ambitious than the coming Senate proposal, which targets 2012 for the same emissions goals; it shuns tax increases; it strives to remain technologically feasible on today's terms, unlike many others; and it urges Congress, not bureaucrats, to hash out national policy on the subject.

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But it also guts what remains of the executive branch's conservative possibilities on the subject of global warming. The strongest conservative position on global warming is as follows: Climate change is happening, always has happened and always will; humans contribute to it to some unknown degree; a hysterical U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has leapt far ahead of the science, and, in its politicized discredit, should be ignored; climate policy is to be determined by elected officials, not unaccountable technocrats; it is surely worth society's efforts to fund, study and develop realistic alternatives to fossil fuels in the event that the man-made impact turns out to be significant — this is advisable for security reasons also; the leading liberal proposals are simply too expensive; and, crucially, forcible mandates are harmful. Productive government attention to technical and scientific problems always more readily resembles the efforts of the National Institutes of Health, ARPANET (the Internet precursor) or the Manhattan Project than mere decrees. Technological research and innovation are the best means of harnessing ingenuity to solve mankind's technical, scientific and environmental problems.