"Good news and bad news" on the climate bill

AlterNet: "Good News, There's a Climate Bill -- Bad News, It Stinks"

First, the good news: One of the most comprehensive pieces of energy and climate legislation ever drafted by members of the U.S. Congress has finally seen the light of day. After lots of haggling among fellow moderate and conservative Democrats, Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) released their "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009."

Now the bad news: Their bill stinks. I'll spare you the many odiferous details and just highlight three particularly bad aspects: 1) It won't protect the poor from price-hikes as the price of carbon is slowly internalized into our energy bills, but will protect polluting industries by allowing them free pollution permits; 2) It opens the door to fraud and shell games instead of real climate action by setting up a huge carbon derivatives market; 3) It makes a mockery of our common understanding of "renewable energy," favoring dirty smokestacks over truly clean, renewable energy.

Obama and Waxman like it, though:

After the vote on the legislation, President Barack Obama said: "We are now one step closer to delivering on the promise of a new clean energy economy that will make America less dependent on foreign oil, crack down on polluters, and create millions of new jobs all across America."

Henry Waxman, the panel's Democratic chairman, said the bill represents "decisive and historic action".

So does the Environmental Defense Fund:

As President Obama said, and we agree, the chairman’s mark reflects an “historic agreement” that sets the stage for Congress to cap greenhouse gas pollution, begin to break our dependence on foreign oil, and create millions of new jobs. Companies across America are ready to build the clean energy technologies we need to grow the economy and protect the climate; a cap will unleash the private-sector investment they need get going. The short-term targets in the bill help ensure that investments are made quickly, and they increase our chances of minimizing climate impacts by kick-starting the transition to low-carbon energy sources. Protecting consumers from volatile energy prices during that transition is essential. We believe the American Clean Energy and Security Act’s provisions to ensure that end-use energy consumers receive a significant amount of the value of emissions permits under the cap is an effective and efficient way to keep electricity rates low. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, a well-designed cap that returns value to consumers can be achieved for as little as $98 per household per year – about a dime a day per person.

Reminds me of the old saw about a mob of bureaucrats busily hacking their way through the jungle. One of them climbed a tall tree, saw a cliff ahead, and hollered down to warn them. To which they all replied: "Shut up, we're making progress."

UPDATE: Environmental Capital:

Plenty of folks are chuffed there’s some political momentum behind a U.S. bill tackling greenhouse-gas emissions. Plenty of folks are horrified—for entirely opposite reasons. Even with all the compromises, conservatives are still aghast at the costs of what they call a giant “energy tax.” Thanks to all the compromises, some environmentalists are aghast at what they see as a toothless bill. You could drive yourself insane plowing through the nearly 1,000 pages and try to work out how all the overlapping policies, regulators, giveaways, exemptions, and mandates actually affect U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions over the next four decades. Actually, folks at the Breakthrough Institute did that and came away horrified by how little the bill will really do.

and

Do the compromises that allowed Waxman-Markey to make it out of committee, and survive a vote in the full House, make it that much harder to get the rest of the world in line?

Short answer: No. The rest of the world is either way ahead of us (however you want to define that) or is playing us for fools.

By the way, here's a link to the thousand-page bill if you have time to speed read it. 

And please, for God's sake (amen), don't print it out.

UPDATE: Grist has a pretty cool "Gore vs. Hansen" post, but between these two it's more like Left vs. Leftier.