You don't see any other road forward? How about what candidate Obama and Obama until sometime in the spring of 2009 was putting forward: 100% auction, return 80-85% of the revenue to the American people, invest the remainder in green jobs/renewables/international assistance? And don't say this isn't politically possible. It was clearly a political winner with the American people. The problem is that Obama allowed the fossil fuel and industrial agriculture interests to run the show when it came to legislation in the House instead of going to the American people to again lay out his plan and enlist their participation to counter those corporate interests.

History shows that there's only one thing that beats money power: organized and visible people power.

Ted Glick

So again: I'm an innovation optimist, IF the right incentives are in place.  But what incentives exactly is this bill establishing?  How will it drive a clean energy technology revolution?  I'm all for faith.  But this just strikes me as silly.

Rejected response to Joe Romm's blog:

This is profoundly discouraging. Obama says we can look back "five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now" and at that time consider an "even more ambitious program"; and "you have to have meaningful targets so that by 2020, by 2050 we are actually seeing reductions in carbon emissions". Climate science is telling us we don't have 5-10-15 years to begin that "more ambitious program"; and we need to be well beyond the stage of "seeing reductions" in 2050. Obama is trying to put W-M in a positive light, but "you can't put lipstick on a pig".

He asserts that "it's going to be very similar to the Clean Air Act of '91 or how we approached acid rain, where all the nay-sayers are proven wrong". Obama has become a puppet of the cap-and-trade dogmatists, whose notion of "success" is "achieving an unsustainable and wholly inadequate cap as cheaply as possible". Considering what the acid rain program accomplished, and what it could have accomplished with existing technology (see here and here), I think any impartial observer would conclude that its cap-and-trade regulatory model is insufficient to the task of global climate stabilization. (Look at the history of the EPA's attempts to institute its "more ambitious program": the Clean Air Interstate Rule. Is that the kind of regulatory model we want to establish for global climate stabilization?)

What I find particularly discouraging is the stultifying lack of imagination in our legislative process. For example, on the subject of import tariffs, why not consider import subsidies on low-GHG goods? Tariffs and subsidies can be used in combination to preserve revenue neutrality. If we're considering output-based allocation for our trade-sensitive industries, why not apply the same principle to imports?