Climate legislation: Dead on arrival?

Cap and trade is back, said John M. Broder in The New York Times. A “long delayed and much amended” Senate plan to address global warming and U.S. energy needs was introduced in the Senate last week by Democrat John Kerry and independent Joe Lieberman. The proposal is less aggressive than a House bill passed in 2009, but it nevertheless proposes sweeping changes in energy policy, targeting a 17 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. The plan would establish a system of tradable pollution credits and other incentives for industry to meet those targets while speeding construction of nuclear power plants, funding research into “clean coal,” and pumping billions into renewable technologies such as solar and wind power. The only thing missing from the 987-page proposal, said Bryan Walsh in Time.com, is a Republican sponsor. A “major player” in drafting the bill, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham abruptly abandoned it late last month. GOP support is now “nowhere to be seen.”

Don’t blame “Republican intransigence” again, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Democrats from coal-producing and coal-consuming states in the Midwest, whose industries will be sacrificed on the altar of environmentalism, are “the real opposition.” Yet Kerry and Lieberman’s bill has won support from a “who’s who of corporate America,” said Stephen Spruiell in National Review Online. Why? Simple: The bill provides companies with “a basket of goodies”—giving away more than 70 percent of the tradable pollution permits. The public, alas, isn’t welcome on the gravy train. Ratepayers would pay higher energy bills while taxpayers funded politically correct, economically dubious adventures in alternative energy.

The alternative is ignoring climate change altogether, said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. Unfortunately, this bill’s prospects for passage appear “genuinely dire.” Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham negotiated for months to get a bill acceptable to business, environmentalists, and some Republicans. Without Graham, “Kerry and Lieberman are left with all the problems of a compromised bill, but none of the votes the compromise was supposed to secure.” Meanwhile, President Obama appears loath to spend any dwindling political capital on “advancing the cause” of alternative energy. So while the globe warms, Washington seems poised to do … nothing.

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