If Darren Sakmuelsohn is correct in his NY Times Greenwire post, our Senators are now talking about a Climate Plan B that would still implement some sort of cap-and-trade... but only for power plants... everyone else being free to emit all they want.
"A power plant-only cap and trade could be doable on the Hill," Mark Helmke, a senior aide to Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), said today.
Senate Democratic and Republican staffers are studying a package that combines a mandatory limit on power plant emissions with separate programs outside of the cap-and-trade program aimed at cutting greenhouse gases from other sectors of the economy. "It'd be done with efficiency standards for buildings and stronger CAFE [corporate average fuel economy] standards for transport," Helmke said.
OK, it is just an idea being floated for public reaction... but it is a horrible idea. If all our legislator's did was pass the "doable" then I could do the job as well as Barbara Boxer and a hell of a lot better that DiFi. We elect them to apply their brain mass to figuring out solutions to problems, not solutions to electoral calculus.
In fact, I wonder what Boxer is really doing to end the embarrassment of our current climate non-policy. It looks like she has punted the ball over to firm of Kerry, Graham and (shudder) Lieberman. Oh how I wish we had a Green positioned to take on Boxer next year. If you surmise that her opponent would be Carly Fiorina, then it would be a race in which an ecology savvy Green can make a good case. If Nuclear Chuck DeVore pulls enough right wing-nuts to the polls to take the primary, then Boxer is the environmental choice and Greens would be less attractive as an alternative.
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