When Al Gore, John Kerry and the New York Times gang up on someone, you know a political hit is on. That’s what happened last week to World Bank President David Malpass, for the sin of not turning the international lending institution into an arm of Democratic Party policy on climate change. //

The Journal points out that bringing third-world countries into the first world…

…requires energy, which today is still most efficiently and affordably provided by fossil fuels. Yet Mr. Kerry recently cautioned African leaders against investing in long-term natural gas production, as if they have an alternative if they want to develop.

This is an indulgence in a place like California, which is affluent enough to pay twice what its neighboring states do for energy. //

…it amounts to condemning countries in Africa and much of the developing world to more decades of poverty. //

Kerry may even be consigning poor countries to needless hunger from rising prices and perhaps a global shortage of natural gas for fertilizer. Climate monomania is easier to preach with a sea-side view from a bluff in Martha’s Vineyard than it is from a village with unreliable electricity in the Congo.

As the world is painfully learning, the technology doesn’t exist for a rapid transition to a world without fossil fuels. //

Lectures from Mr. Kerry are hard to take when he travels around the world by carbon-spewing private jet or government aircraft. As for Mr. Gore, he has been predicting climate doom for decades even as he invests in green energy backed by copious government subsidies. And what do they have to show for their decades of climate advocacy? They hold conferences and set unrealistic emissions targets. But the U.S. emissions reductions in recent decades are almost entirely the result of the expansion of natural gas production that the climate lobby wants to shut down.