Imagine for a moment you’re applying for an executive position at a prestigious capital firm, and during the course of the interview the assessor asks for your ideas on curtailing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Your internal (if not external) response would probably go something like this: “What does CO₂ have to do with my potential role as an investment manager?” Now imagine being the nominee for the CIA or HUD and being subjected to the same question. That’s exactly what happened during last week’s confirmation hearings.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, Sen. Kamala Harris bizarrely tried to corner Mike Pompeo, nominated to head the CIA, on the issue of man-made global warming. To his credit, Pompeo brilliantly deferred, retorting, “I, frankly, as the director of CIA would prefer today not to get into the details of climate debate and science. It just seems — my role is going to be so different.” He added, “I do know the agency’s role. Its role is to collect foreign intelligence.” Bingo.

HUD nominee Ben Carson faced similar consternation. Sen. Elizabeth Warren used a portion of her time urging Carson to lay out “actions … to adapt to or prevent climate change.” As entertaining and nonsensical as all this is, none of it provided the kind of fireworks we’re bound to witness during EPA nominee Scott Pruitt’s hearing this week. Pruitt, of course, is expected to significantly water down the agency by rescinding onerous regulations.

Unfortunately for Democrats, when it comes to the faux war on CO₂, Pruitt’s job may not be as difficult as they hoped. Cato Institute’s Patrick J. Michaels reports on a new paper, “The Art and Science of Climate Model Tuning,” that undermines the Obama administration’s “finding of endangerment” claim regarding CO₂. Because the EPA interprets GHGs as dangerous, Michaels says “any attempt to undo Obama-era EPA regulations will be bitterly contested in court, perhaps for years.”

The paper, however, provides strong evidence of EPA gerrymandering, which could negate Democrats’ popular legal defense. According to Michaels, it found “that each fiddling of the models … gives a different forecast of how much the earth will warm for doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is called the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). If the ECS can be changed to a wide range of values, depending upon the ‘tuning’ of the model, then it is the modeler and not the underlying physics that decides this number. And who defines an ‘acceptable’ ECS? In these cases, it is the very same people jiggling the models in the first place.”

The Obama EPA gets away with unlawful acts because it fabricates evidence. In fact, the entire Democrat war on greenhouse gases — including off-script “gotcha” questions at confirmation hearings — is nothing but a political farce. The Left is going to be a whole lot more agitated when Republicans put an end to pursuing nonexistent issues.