The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already done everything it can to kill the chances of a legally binding agreement emerging from the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Now it can sit back, relax and watch the action from a coffee shop outside the United Nations conference, content that its efforts to derail U.S. climate policy have effectively hamstrung the international negotiations.

As explained clearly in “The Global Climate Change Lobby,” an excellent new report from the Center for Public Integrity, corporate lobbyists and trade associations focus their attention on tampering with domestic legislative efforts, and then stand by and watch as their positions and talking points contaminate international negotiations indirectly.

Business interests (or BINGOs as they’re called in U.N. speak) “can have very little effect at these meetings,” according to Nick Campbell, a European industry lobbyist who has represented the International Chamber of Commerce at U.N. climate talks since the early 1990s when the global effort to fight climate change began with the Rio Earth Summit.

If the Chamber or other lobbying groups send any staff to international summits like the upcoming Copenhagen conference, their goal is to “loiter” in the coffee shops and collect business cards from delegates they can target later on legislative matters back home.

In an embarrassing - and failed - effort to speak the hip language of youth, the Fraser Institute has launched a YouTube video dismissing climate change as a matter of natural variability, saying:

"The climate changes naturally; always has; always will."

Obviously aimed at high school students (sample voiceover: "all because you ride the bus to school every day"), this seems to steal from the tobacco maker’s playbook for selling cigarettes to children.

The latest list of "650 International Scientists (who) Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming" seems to be more of the same: dead guys (Fred Seitz, Marcel Leroux, Reid Bryson ...), paid deniers (Fred Singer, Tim Ball, Sallie Baliunas ...), and a much larger group of weather forecasters and "experts" from unrelated fields, many of whom (eg., Edward Wegman) don't even disagree with the scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change.

The apparent author of this list, Swiftboater Marc Morano, even included the names of Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, an historian and an anthropologist who have made themselves famous by advocating for renewed and more vigorous policy action against the threat of climate change.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed energy legislation that would extract $16 billion in annual subsidies from oil companies while supporting ‘clean’ energy sources like biofuels, wind, solar and geothermal. But the bill, opposed by President Bush, must be merged with Senate measures before it can become law.

When Alan Caruba read the text of James Hoggan's recent speech to the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS), you can almost imagine a little flash of recognition as Caruba concluded: "That Hoggan guy: He's talking about ME!"

As it happens, Mr. Caruba, it's nothing personal: Jim had never heard of you before seeing your snarling response to his CPRS talk. But it's no wonder if you thought you recognized yourself in Jim's condemnation of tawdry public relations practices.