Our friends at Minnesotans for Global Warming have a new theme song for the Republicans in charge of the House in next year’s Congress. With the GOP poised to take control, the cap-and-trade bill looks all but dead, and the EPA enforcement of its endangerment finding may soon lack any funds. M4GW reworks the old Neil Diamond song written for The Monkees, “I’m a Believer,” into something a little more appropriate:

Their previous effort was a hilarious takedown of “Baba O’Reilly” in February, which you should revisit when you get the chance.

Speaking of non-believers, it appears that no one’s really interested in carbon trading in the US any longer.  The Chicago Climate Exchange, in which Al Gore was a major investor, died a strangely quiet death two months ago that the media almost entirely ignored.  Steve Milloy reports on the end of the line for American carbon trading for Pajamas Media:

Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year.

Although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub of the mandatory carbon trading established by a cap-and-trade law, like the Waxman-Markey scheme passed by the House in June 2009. …

The CCX seemed to have a lock on success. Not only was a young Barack Obama a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funded the fledgling CCX, but over the years it attracted such big name climate investors as Goldman Sachs and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the CCX’s highly anticipated looting of taxpayers and consumers — cap-and-trade imploded following its high water mark of the House passage of the Waxman-Markey bill. With ongoing economic recession, Climategate, and the tea party movement, what once seemed like a certainty became anything but.

CCX’s panicked original investors bailed out this spring, unloading the dog and its across-the-pond cousin, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), for $600 million to the New York Stock Exchange-traded Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) — an electronic futures and derivatives platform based in Atlanta and London. (Luckier than the CCX, the ECX continues to exist thanks to the mandatory carbon caps of the Kyoto Protocol.)

The ECX may soon follow the CCX into oblivion, however — the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. No new international treaty is anywhere in sight.

While we don’t know how well Al Gore and Goldman Sachs fared on their investments in the CCX, we do know that there’s no reason to cry for Sandor. He received $98.5 million for his 16.5% stake in CCX when it was sold. Not bad for a failure that somebody else financed.

Incredibly (but not surprisingly), although thousands of news articles have been published about CCX by the lamestream media over the years, a Nexis search conducted a week after CCX’s announcement revealed no news articles published about its demise.

CCX hasn’t disappeared yet, though.  They announced that they would move to the voluntary carbon offset market, in which people pay to balance their carbon footprint with funding for projects intended to enhance environmental health.  It’s basically a system of indulgences in order to skip other forms of penance and guilt, which only harms the fools who feel somehow compelled to get fleeced.