The following analysis from EarthTrack
Just last week, the Economist magazine noted in an editorial that:
However you measure the full cost of a gallon of gas, pollution and all, Americans are nowhere close to paying it. Indeed, their whole energy industry—from subsidies for corn ethanol to limited liability for nuclear power—is a slick of preferences and restrictions, without peer. The tinkering that will follow this spill will merely further complicate it.
As if on cue, out comes "The American Power Act." For some reason, idle hands in Congress always find particular comfort in working on energy bills, and an early summary of the latest of a long line of government energy initiatives has just been released. A short summary of that summary can be accessed here. The American Power Act will dole out all sorts of goodies, with some huge potential gains to coal and nuclear power. EarthTrack
And this from free-public-transit advocate Charles Komanoff [commenting on StreetsBlog]
It's both bizarre and disheartening that Transportation for America would endorse the miserable Kerry-Lieberman bill ... a bill so lacking in genuine mechanisms to significantly reduce CO2, and so larded with giveaways to every inch of Big Energy: oil, coal, utilities, nukes. (For particulars, see Earth Track's excellent and easy-to-digest analysis.)
I guess it shows the capacity of desperate constituencies to be easily seduced by a few crumbs, and to cast a blind eye to the enormous adverse consequences elsewhere.
The fix is in, of course, and it's asking too much for otherwise worthy outfits like TfA to pry themselves loose from the Kerry-Lieberman monstrosity. Please, though, let's desist from calling it a climate bill? It's not. It's an energy bill (and a terrible one), plain and simple.
