This is a very good column:
There is much in the House cap-and-trade energy bill that just passed that I absolutely hate. It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic that we couldn’t do better. It is appalling that so much had to be given away to polluters. It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it.
Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.
One thing I will say is that I think it’s absolutely vital that Senators start out by writing a new, much better bill than the one that passed the House rather than using the House bill as a starting point. The reason is that I think that for any given climate bill, there are a lot of Senators from coal areas who will insist on weakening the bill to make it more coal-friendly. The Senators in question aren’t going to care that coal state House members already did this. They need to do it personally so they can claim credit. So you need to go back to a cleaner bill, then basically let the coal state Democrats do what Rick Boucher (D-WV) already did all over again. That way they can say that they changed the bill, and saved Appalachia from the depredations of the environmentalists, which sounds a lot better than just giving Boucher the credit.
And, yes, that’s stupid. But I’m quite confident that’s how congress works.
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