Betting Blind on ACES:

Yesterday I had an NRO column on the just-passed House climate bill. Here's the intro:

Last Friday, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a massive climate-change bill that few, if any, members of Congress had actually read. The legislation would impose the first-ever limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and impose a raft of other regulatory measures, while simultaneously ensuring that key constituencies are protected from climate policy's pinch. The bill is one step closer to becoming law, and yet most of our elected representatives could not tell you much of what it contains.

It is relatively certain that few, if any, members of Congress had read the bill before voting on it. Why? For one thing, House leaders dropped 300 pages of amendments 3am Friday morning and a complete copy of the bill language incorporating the amendments was still unavailable during the debate; not even the House clerk had one.

Meanwhile, Clive Crook understands how ridiculous the Waxman-Markey bill is, while Paul Krugman has a conniption over "treason against the planet" even though he supported the bill and it passed. Roger Pielke Jr. wonders whether the bill's sponsors really understand offsets, and Gregg Easterbrook observes how cleaner coal facilities are being blocked while we wait for "FutureGen" coal facilities that may never appear. On a sunnier front, the NYT reports on promising efforts to make ethanol from algae that can be used as a fuel or feedstock for plastics.

What's in Waxman-Markey?

So what ended up in the Waxman-Markey climate bill? Kevin Williamson and Stephen Spruiell look under the hood of this climate policy vehicle. The cap-and-trade legislation sparked a special-interest feeding frenzy — and this is precisely what we should have expected. As I've argued before, a cap-and-trade regime for greenhouse gases is more vulnerable to rent-seeking than a tax-based alternative. There's no way to prove that a carbon tax bill would have been less pork-laden than Waxman-Markey, but it could not have been any worse.