You tell ‘em, Rick, but I don’t think anyone in Democratic Washington, D. C., is going to listen.

Every day seems to coax from the majority party a new imposition on economic prosperity, not to mention common sense. Gov. Perry’s blast at the Environmental Protection Agency for telling us to get ready for carbon dioxide regulation will sail right over the uncomprehending heads of the Obama Democrats who have determined the way forward for America lies in turning us into the new France.

Perry dares the EPA to withdraw its plans to regulate. Good luck. It’s like inviting President Obama to drop his Nobel Prize award in the Atlantic as he wings his way back from Stockholm.

Still, Perry’s point deserves respect. It is a simple point: namely, the climate-control lobby wants to get all the baddies who produce the bad stuff that keeps our homes warm and our automobiles running. The climate-control lobby has a different vision for America: one that sees us tooling around town on bicycles or in electric cars, returning home to throw open the windows and drink in the cooling breezes of late August.

All right, that exaggerates; but not by much. The carbon fuel era is the historical phenomenon on which the climate-control lobby wants to shut the window. Hard. Oh, coal was fine for a while. Crude oil kept the trains running and inspired creation of the interstate highway system. Yet we’re at the end of that now, by the reckoning of the climate-control lobby, which, broadly speaking, wants the whole world to start sizing down its use of carbon so as to Preserve Our Poor Suffering Planet.

If our planet truly were suffering gravely, that might be one thing. But evidence to this effect is spotty, not to say suspicious in tone, much of it. The by-now-well-known Climategate scandal in England – those e-mails from climate scientists trying to shut up or suppress the critics – suggests the lengths to which certain carbon-suppressors are willing to go in the interest of having their way with us. The climate-change lobby has, collectively, possibly the fastest-closed mind in the world: resistant to poor entreaties about human dependence on carbon fuels.

Anyone who doesn’t think Texas depends on carbons fuels is smoking something other than what comes out of an exhaust pipe. Texas produces more than 20 percent of the nation’s oil and one-third of its natural gas. Texas is home to one quarter of the nation’s refining capacity and 60 percent of its chemical manufacturing. Try clamping down on that output without sending one of the country’s truly prosperous states into an economic tailspin,

One thing we don’t know, of course, is what regulations the EPA plans on issuing with a view to making the nation cut back on its carbons and throw its energy fate – literally – to the winds. (Yes, Texas has wind power: lots of it. Just not enough to replace the oil and coal and gas the federal regulators seem eager that we should renounce.)

So we’ll see in due course what the EPA has in mind. That’s not the end of the story, naturally. Energy producers and energy-producing states will go to court — if they didn’t, they’d be nuts – pleading that the EPA has exceeded its authority, or something like that. Texans are particularly indisposed to surrender without a fight.

However, the big battles will take place in Congress. The common-sense lobby will ask our legislators to put the climate-control lobby in its place by specifying which control measures we can live with and which we can’t. That won’t happen immediately. First has to come grassroots revulsion at the governing philosophy for which Americans voted, many of them accidentally, in 2008 – a philosophy of tax and tax, regulate and regulate, hope and hope. Hope right now looks like starting to run down significantly by the mid-term elections in 2010. Putting before the American people in concise terms, some sense of the regulators’ arrogance will help a lot. But it could take a presidential election (can one come soon enough?) to bring into power a cast of characters dedicated to the proposition that America isn’t yet ready for national suicide.

So, tell ‘em, Rick. And keep it up, Mr. President – you and your stud stable of taxers and regulators, because, frankly, the more dark intent Americans recognize in the plans of the taxers and regulators, the greater the coming revulsion should be.

That’s the wonderful thing about democracy – well, one thing anyway. Democracy invites ideas, including crazy ones. It doesn’t guarantee the accomplishment of purposes contrary to the interests that ordinary Americans cherish, such as proper care of their families, such as attention to the necessity of economic growth.