Crunch time on Waxman-Markey

It's crunch time: the Dems in the House have scheduled a vote for Friday on the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which would, among other things, create a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions.

Getting something through the Senate will be the real challenge, but the House has been no piece of cake. Waxman and Markey have had to make a lot of concessions on the bill to get these 'moderate' Dems on board, and it's quite frustrating to watch. Almost all of the bigger enviro groups are totally on board, but there are plenty of enviros who are criticizing it from the left, saying "um, this is not good enough, this would probably not save the world, actually" which is a fair point.

I think Yglesias makes some good points about the politics and the big picture scenarios:

There’s simply nobody else in Congress whose record of progressive legislative accomplishments can hold a candle to Waxman’s. When you draw intersecting curves of “what needs to be done” and “what can realistically be done,” Waxman has time and again put himself at the intersection, and I think it involves a fair amount of hubris to think that you know better than him what the best feasible legislative outcome is.

That said, there’s really no getting around the fact that the best feasible legislative outcome isn’t good enough according to the climate science. What we’re left with is essentially the hope for an iterative process—a flawed bill that makes progress helps spur a productive meeting in Copenhagen helps spur some kind of bilateral deal with China which helps create the conditions for further domestic legislation. I think this is the best idea anyone has, but it’s a pretty dicey proposition. Bottom line is that to get a better bill you need a situation wherein a non-trivial number of Republicans are willing to contemplate emissions reductions. Faced with uniform Republican support for untrammeled pollution, the only viable legislative path involves buying off every Democrat.