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...Or maybe they were both bad news
May. 27th, 2009 11:48 pm"Haste makes waste."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."
- John Godfrey Saxe
Yesterday, I referred to the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act's bright prospects for relatively swift passage through the U.S. House as good news. This evening from 6 to 8 PM, I sat at a table on a concourse of the local mall and tried to talk passersby into supporting this 932-page bill, with no more than a sound-byte-level analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. Then I came home and discovered an article on Grist that argues persuasively that "The [central] cap-and-trade portion [of the ACES Act] is worse than doing nothing." ( The gory details )
So as far as I can see, there are three possible reactions to this:
- Benjamin Franklin
"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."
- John Godfrey Saxe
Yesterday, I referred to the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act's bright prospects for relatively swift passage through the U.S. House as good news. This evening from 6 to 8 PM, I sat at a table on a concourse of the local mall and tried to talk passersby into supporting this 932-page bill, with no more than a sound-byte-level analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. Then I came home and discovered an article on Grist that argues persuasively that "The [central] cap-and-trade portion [of the ACES Act] is worse than doing nothing." ( The gory details )
So as far as I can see, there are three possible reactions to this:
- Does the whole environmental movement need to abandon this bill, wait another year or three for one that gets these issues right, and let the EPA's proposed regulation of greenhouse gases fill the gap? (Or is there too much political downside in rejecting a bill with as many amazingly good provisions as this one has? Maybe the politicians will write us all off as being impossible to please.)
- Would it actually be a good idea to try to pass the ACES Act without its central cap-and-trade mechanism? (Or would that look ridiculous to the rest of the world, since we all know that a descending cap on greenhouse emissions is what needs to happen to save the global climate?)
- Or is this author full of crap, bashing a system that can be made to work with a few good amendments, and is the best we're ever going to get, given the interests of those in power? (Or does that just mean we need a full-scale revolution, as Dr. Glen Barry advocates?)
