Whoever eventually wins the US Republican presidential nomination one thing is as sure as eggs: it won’t be a candidate who takes the wrong side on “Climate Change.” (H/T Climate Depot)

Mitt Romney didn’t understand this. He was under the unfortunate impression that it is one of those safe, bi-partisan issues where you can demonstrate how reasonable and electable you are by adopting an accommodating centrist position. And this is why, as Rush has correctly noted, his presidential aspirations are toast.

Jon Huntsman, slightly more canny, has been frantically trying to dissociate himself from his previous position as an ardent supporter of Cap N Trade. “It wasn’t me. The big boys made me do it,” he has been saying. Or words to that effect. But this probably the equivalent of a bourgeois intellectual in 70s Cambodia trying to rough up his hands before Pol Pot’s security police come round: too little, too late.

Best showing so far has been from Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann, both of whom have made an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency one of their first priorities.

Here’s Bachmann:

“Every time liberals get into office they pass an omnibus bill of big spending projects,” Bachmann said. “What we need to do is pass the mother of all repeal bills, but it’s the repeal bill that will get rid of job killing regulations; and I would begin with the EPA because there is no other agency like the EPA, it should really be renamed the ‘Job Killing Organization of America.'”

She is right, of course. And to all those other prospective Republican presidential candidates who have yet to understand why she’s right – among them Texas Governor Rick Perry, I hope – let me explain it using my favourite revolting analogy to do with the suicidal idiocy of misguided centrism: the Dog-Poop Yogurt analogy. (Apologies to readers already familiar with this one: I used it first about David Cameron’s dismal “Conservatives” in a piece for the Spectator). (And again with reference to the noisome Chris Huhne)

OK, so imagine there are two types of people in the world. There are kind like me – and you, I would hope – who like to eat their yogurt plain or with bits of fruit in it. But there is also out there, another kind of person. Lets call them the Greens because that is who I mean. They want to change the world; they want to shake the status quo to its very foundations. They believe that if we carry on as we did before, cleaving to our decadent traditions and selfish, pleasure-seeking lifestyles, then the world will end. And that’s why, as part of the radical, hair-shirt lifestyle shifts we need to adopt if we are to save the planet, they believe the time has come to end our bourgeois, running-dog lackey addiction to unsustainable fruit-flavoured or plain yogurt. What we need to do instead is flavour our yogurt with something more bracing, more radical, more alternative, more organic; something besides which has the virtue of being as cheap and abundant as the wind and the sun: dog poop.

“But hang on”, say all we fruit- and plain-yogurt lovers. “There’s a reason why we eat our yogurt either plain or with fruit. And the reason is, it tastes nice. Whereas if you put dog poop in it, it will taste like ****.”

“Typical,” say the Greens. “We hear this from your side all the time. You’re too selfish to change your ways. You’re addicted to fruit. You want to stick your heads in the sand and ignore all the evidence that fruit and plain yogurt are unsustainable.”

“What evidence?”

“Well for a start look at the supermarkets. Every day they sell tubs and tubs of the stuff, feeding the public’s insatiable greed, encouraging reckless consumption of dairy produce which comes from cows which not only take up precious land which could otherwise be set aside for biofuels but which also produce methane – an even more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Whereas, we have strong evidence to suggest that if yogurt were flavoured with dog poop instead, consumption might fall dramatically, leading people to enjoy much more healthy lifestyles and reduce their addiction to dairy products.”

“Doesn’t sound very enjoyable to me.”

“Well it’s not about your enjoyment. It’s about the children.”

“I don’t think my kids want dog poop yogurt either.”

“Generations unborn then. And the polar bears. And the California Delta Smelt. You’re going to be telling me next you don’t care about the California Delta Smelt.”

“Well now you mention it…”

Which brings us to Mitt Romney. And all those other RINO type quasi-ecotards of his ilk who imagine, somehow, that by positioning themselves in the middle they’re going to achieve the kind of consensus that will keep everyone happy.

“Suppose,” Romney is saying, “We just put a tiny bit of dog poop in the yogurt and mix it up with the fruit and the plain. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

No it wouldn’t. And even if half our political class don’t yet understand why it wouldn’t, an increasing number of the people who vote for them very much can.

The public understand that if there is no remotely convincing, proven link between Anthropogenic CO2 emissions and catastrophic climate change then there is absolutely no point in politicians formulating major, economy-destroying, landscape-blighting, liberty-crushing, tax-raising policy decisions on the basis that there is. Period.

More than that, as I argue in my new book Watermelons – yes, also available on Amazon – environmentalism is not some side issue which politicians can heed or ignore at their leisure: it is, in fact, probably THE most strategically vital political battleground of our age, the Helm’s Deep of Western Civilisation.

Why? Because it has become the liberal-left’s great proxy issue. Under the cloak of ecological righteousness, the liberal-left is seeking to advance its controlling agenda of income redistribution, property theft, taxation, regulation, government by democratically unaccountable activists and bureaucrats, state rationing and economic destruction, only couched in such a way as to make it seem caring and sensible and good. But the green movement represents precisely the kind of Big Government bullying which inspired the Tea Party. Any conservative who cannot understand this does not deserve the Republican nomination: not least because it means he’s not a real conservative.