In a famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Jonathan Edwards once warned his fellow Americans: "The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher." True, he said, "the floods of God's vengeance have been withheld; but your guilt in the meantime is constantly increasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath; the waters are continually rising and waxing more and more mighty."

Listening to U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer talk is like hearing an updated gospel of the apocalypse: "The clock has ticked down to zero -- after two years of negotiation, the item has come to deliver."

Deliver what?

Well, the kind of global governance that has been the supposedly ridiculous nightmare of stupid populists who for years worried that the United Nations might turn into what Hopenhagen is hoping for. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen pronounced with hope, "The deal that we invite leaders to sign up on will be one that affects all aspects of society, just as the climate change does."

All aspects of society?

"The shepherd cries

The hour of choosing has arrived

Here are your tools"

So proclaims former Vice President Al Gore, inventor of the Internet and poet-prophet of the new age in his book "Our Choice." Into your hands, Al Gore, we commend our wallets.

I do not know whether the planet will warm or not. Watching Copenhagen unfold, I know that I would rather bet on humanity's ingenuity in adapting to climate change than put the power to control "all aspects of society" in the hands of Al Gore, any prince of Denmark or the United Nations. I will trust the creativity of the future -- rather than these experts -- to regulate the lives of future children yet unborn.

Beware of carbon billionaires bearing doom, for they profit from it.

How many times have environmentalists been wrong in the past? How many times have we been told the hour of doom will be upon us? How many children died in Africa because St. Rachel Carson launched a crusade against DDT? And how few of today's fervent environmentalists have ever apologized for the deaths their past mistakes caused? Do they know? Do they care?

Developing countries are suddenly outraged by the leak of the so-called Danish Text -- a draft agreement that would impose carbon constraints on developing countries, indeed permit richer countries to emit twice as much carbon per person in 2050 as the poorer countries. What? Containing global warming doesn't mean just hamstringing the U.S. but limiting African people's prospects? They are right to be outraged, however hypocritically.

The latest news? President Obama has prepared yet another end-run around the American people by supporting the transfer over carbon output regulation (that's every breath you make, literally) to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Drive your children to school? Use a clothes dryer instead of a laundry line? Eat methane-producing beef instead of carbon-friendly fish? Have another baby instead of an abortion? All of these deeply personal choices affect the carbon output of the United States. In one fell swoop the federal government has claimed (in theory) a power unimaginable to our framers and inconsistent with any notion of a free society.

Carbon billionaires will proliferate as businesses learn the way to make money is not to compete on a nonexistent free market but to do cozy deals with politicians, South American style. The left used to warn about the military-industrial complex, now it is seeking to create a corporate-environmentalist complex like nothing America has ever seen.

For, as Jonathan Edwards put it: "The foolish children of men miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and in their confidence in their own strength and wisdom; they trust to nothing but a shadow."