Obama admits cap and trade is dead

This week the President admitted what D.C. insiders have been saying for months about the Democratic plan to control greenhouse gas emissions.

ACES, The American Clean Energy and Security Bill passed by the House last fall, which is intended to control emissions by a cap-and-trade mechanism, is politically dead.

At a town hall meeting in Nashua, NH, Obama said:

The House passed an energy bill, and people complained about, well,
there's this cap and trade thing, and you just mentioned, you know,
let's do the fun stuff before we do the hard stuff," Obama told former
New Hampshire Rep. Dick Swett.

Obama went on to point out that cap and trade is a market-based approach to controlling greenhouse gas emissions, but obviously that fact failed to sway conservative Democrats, far less Republicans.

But is it possible that the failure of cap and trade is not a disaster, but a second chance to pass a better bill? Jonathan Zasloff, of Legal Planet, argues so, saying this will compel Dems to give up on the super-majority, and simply pass a carbon tax as part of a reconciliation deal between the two houses. 

A budget reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered: according to
the Budget Act of 1974, the Senate is limited to 20 hours of debate on
it.  It does not get rid of the filibuster because you cannot put
everything in a reconciliation bill: only those items whose
relationship with the budget is more than “merely incidental” qualify.

But one thing is clear: tax bills virtually always qualify, because by definition, they are centrally concerned with the budget.

Neither Waxman-Markey nor Kerry-Boxer would qualify.  But a refundable carbon tax, such as has been proposed by the Carbon Tax Center, clearly would. 

Hmmm. Well, if you listen to our leading climate scientists, cap-and-trade was a bad idea from the start. James Hansen, in his blunt new book Storms of My Grandchildren, argues at length in his book about it:

I almost forgot that I had agreed to provide a proof that the [cap-and-trade] approach pursued by governments today cannot conceivably yield their promise of an 80 percent emission reduction by 2050. It is an easy proof. An 80 percent reduction in 2050 is just what occurs if coal emissions are phased out between 2010 and 2030. This is based on the moderate oil and gas reserves estimated by the IPCC — implying also that we cannot go after the last drops of oil. First ask if the governments are building any new coal plants. The answer: "Lots of them." Then ask how they will persuade the major oil-producing nations to leave their oil in the ground. The answer: "Duh." Proof complete.

Hansen for years has been arguing against new coal plants, and the science argument, backed by the decades-old Clean Air Act and a threat of some sort of carbon tax, has been surprisingly effective at preventing the construction of new coal plants in this country.

Still, the death of the hopes of the best and brightest for legislation on this issue cannot be considered good news. Maybe it's not all bad, but…as Toles points out, it's not exactly a milestone.