Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) has taken over as chair of the Senate Agriculture committee from Tom Harkin (D-IA).  The NY Times (via Climate Wire) reports, “the new chairwoman said she does not expect her panel to hold a markup on any contributions to the climate bill.”

Nonetheless, since Obama is on a seeming down swing, the media herd have been stampeding to write the obituary for the clean air, clean water, clean energy jobs bill. Hence the excitement over any potential bad news, as in the Politico’s “Lincoln casts doubts on climate bill” or Newsweek‘s, “Musical Chairs in the Senate Present Worries for Enviros“:

…. it will be in her political interest to hold up climate-change legislation until after the election. Environmentalists hoping the Senate will strengthen the House’s Waxman-Markey bill should start readjusting their expectations.

The latter comes from the too aptly named blog of Newsweek‘s political reporters blog, “The Gaggle,” which they define as “a flock of reporters pecking at a politician.”

Note to Newsweek:

1. Why must you insist on framing this issue of paramount importance to all Americans, all humans in fact, as something only enviros care about?
2. I don’t think any enviros were hoping the Senate will strengthen the bill significantly (certain not ones likely to read The Gaggle).
3. Small point, but it looks like you got the entire story wrong.

The NYT via CW has a much more detailed and savvier analysis of Lincoln’s stance, which I’ll excerpt, since she is a major swing vote:

Read more

While Nicholas Stern, the world’s top climate economist, recently endorsed 350 ppm as “a very sensible long-term target,” he laid out two blunt messages about our current do-nothing strategy in a talk to students in Beijing’s People’s University:

Stern warned that if the world continued to emit around the same levels of greenhouse gases every year, there was a 50 percent chance temperatures would rise more than five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) within 100 years.

Stern knows the scientific literature (see “M.I.T. doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C” and Hadley Center warns of “catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path“).

A rise of “five degrees Celsius has not been seen on this planet for 30 million years — we as humans have been here for only 200,000 years,” he said.

“This type of temperature change involves radical dislocation, it involves re-writing where people can live, it would involve the movement of hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people.”

“This would result in extended, serious global conflict.”

It would result in Hell and High Water.

The second message was aimed at China, and equally blunt.  As Treehugger put it:

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