Every environmentally-knowledgeable person I’ve talked to the last few months has come to the same conclusion: the ACES bill (aka Waxman-Markey) is not going to do anything for the environment, at least for a couple of decades. This has put us all in a quandary. Do we say that its better than nothing and support it, or come out against it, understanding that it will be harder to get the process started later.
In their effort to add something for everybody in Waxman-Markey, its gotten so huge that I fear that there’s now something for everyone to hate in it.
Andrew Revkin’s Friday Times Dot Earth piece, Study: Cool Spells Normal in Warming World talks about how climate change is communicated and understood.
He starts by noting an upcoming academic publication that reinforces the point that an upward temperature trend may still have decade or two long periods without warming or even moderate cooling. This, of course, is important for both sides of the argument: we need to be careful reading too much into short term trends (of course that argument applies in both directions, which could have deserved some mention).
The Core Tension of Cap and Trade from Roger Pielke, Jr. on Prometheus blog:
“This quote from an anonymous White House official in The Washington Post sums up the core tension of cap and trade.
No cap and trade bill can at once send a meaningful price signal while at the same time not have an adverse impact on energy prices (in short or long terms). The following description of cap and trade in the Washington Post story also reflects this core tension: