Only a week after USA Today, in an article summarizing mainstream media opinion, announced that “The debate’s over: Globe is warming,” the Senate voted 60-38 to once again reject measures aimed at controlling energy use.

The margin of defeat was even bigger than a similar vote last year, and was followed by a 49-46 vote against a nonbinding resolution sponsored by Senator Kerry, D-Ma., calling on the United States to negotiate an international treaty on global warming.

The last such treaty, the Kyoto Protocol negotiated by then-Vice President Gore in 1996, was greeted in the Senate by a 95-0 resolution refusing to even bring it up for ratification.

All of which is causing considerable heartburn among environmentalists who have persuaded themselves Mother Earth will soon be toast unless government encourages us to start riding bicycles to work. In their view, the Senate’s benighted attitude on climate change stems from lobbying by the evil oil, gas, and automobile interests, aided by a duplicitous Bush administration that muzzles all efforts to explain the seriousness of the situation to the American people.

But it’s absurd to imply that people haven’t heard about global warming. Indeed, as the USA Today front-page article illustrates, the coverage of global warming has been thoroughly one-sided. Nowhere in the article did we hear the voices of the scientists who are skeptical that manmade global warming is taking place, or who think that a rise of a few degrees in temperature is best dealt with by adapting to the change rather than trying to re-engineer industrial society.

Indeed, as an ABC News/Washington Post poll recently found, 59% of Americans are “mostly” or “completely” convinced that “global warming or the greenhouse effect is actually happening.” That’s not surprising, considering that they have heard little to the contrary for nearly two decades.

Fortunately, however, Americans are also blessed with an abundance of common sense. By an equally large margin, the respondents expressed the belief that global warming is “a long-term problem that requires more study before government action is taken.” They know full well that the weatherman, armed with incredibly powerful computers, has difficulty predicting tomorrow’s rain. Why should anybody be confident that computer models can predict the temperature a century from now?

There is an even more basic reason for skepticism. Americans understand that government isn’t very terrific at solving such complex problems, even when they turn out to be real. After all, a fair chunk of the population can still remember the last time government got itself deeply involved in trying to ration energy. The result was stagflation and the hugely wasteful gas lines of the 1970s.

And make no mistake about it, energy rationing – as well as huge subsidies to the big corporations who make nuclear plants or wind turbines – is precisely where the environmental hysteria over global warming was leading.

The latest bill rejected by the Senate, sponsored by Senators McCain, R-Ar., and Lieberman, D-Conn., would have mandated caps on carbon dioxide and a market-oriented system for trading them. Those who needed more energy could theoretically buy credits from those who could make do with less. But at the end of the day, government would still have to establish the overall cap on energy use.

And that amounts to rationing, which wasn’t even popular during World War II, when there was widespread fraud and abuse despite one of the most patriotic moments in American history.

Even environmentalists confess that Kyoto or McLieberman would have been a small first step in clamping a huge indirect tax on the American and the world economy. Great Britain, which like other European countries has committed itself to meeting Mr. Gore’s Kyoto targets, now finds itself falling short – leading to calls for even stricter rationing. Thus does the camel follow the camel’s nose under the tent’s edge.

The collapse of the latest global warming boomlet should be seen as far more than another bump in the political road. It represented the profound unease of the American public at turning so much economic and social power over to Washington. At the least, those who persist in believing global warming is such a serious threat have some serious rethinking to do.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.