Better to wait till we get a real Democrat or near enough (Obama) into the White House and a decent cloturevote majority in the Senate.

Lets try again next year. Do it right.

I know it won’t be 60, I know not every Dem is so hot, but it will help to have someone in the WH who will at least auction 100% of the permits.

I did not proofread: I meant to say

“Once they voted DOWN the Clinton/Sanders “no giveaways to industry” (100% auctions of permits only) it would be a huge expensive deal, so its not that terrible that it failed for this year.”

Miles, no: never give up. We can keep working to pass other pieces of the 12 Socolow/Pacal wedges these next 7 months.

Because 400 billion is a lot of money.

Come ‘09, you will then see a replay of what’s described above–everybody with a home-state industrial interest (read: everybody) digging in to make sure his or her ox is not Gored.

So put aside your disappointments of the moment. It is going to be a very long, unpleasant haul, especially with NO sunspots since the first of the year lasting more than 24 hours, NO net warming measured by satellite or surface stations over the past decade, the ARGO ocean buoys reporting cooler sea temperatures, NASA reporting the Pacific Decadal Oscillation having shifted into its cold phase, which might well last 30 years, Arctic sea ice recovering at a record pace, Antarctic sea ice coverage at an all-time high…I could go on and on but you get the idea.

Don’t you?

There will be another ice age at some point and last I knew an advancing ice sheet is a little more problematic than an ocean forecast to rise a few centimeters.

So I could see where colder is not necessarily better, and of course in reality warmer is not necessarily bad or good - it just is. And the faster everyone remembers this, the better off we all would be. 30 or 40 years ago, all the hype was global cooling, now warming, are we in for another bunch of hysteria on cooling in another few decades? I would suggest that all the alarmists relax and quit acting the part of chicken little. Weather varies, over huge periods of time. To think that any of us, whether skeptics or believer, has enough real temperature data to make a convincing argument to warrant any massive intrusive program to combat either warming or cooling, is the epitome of hubris.

When those in cities talk about driving less, they seem to somehow forget that there is NO mass transit out in the country. You know, the farming areas where your food is grown? Where corn, wheat, fruit, vegetables, soybeans, sugarcane, sunflowers, cows, pigs, chickens, eggs, etc. are grown/raised. So, stop punishing all those trying to earn a living, those trying to get by, those trying just to hold on to the little house they bought outside the city because they could not afford $200,000 for a small fixer-upper in a city.

The Hollywood types & media ‘personalities’ do not give a damn about the ordinary people in this country. Ditto for the politicians. They feel no compunction about telling others how to live as they jet across the country to show their faces, usually for a hefty fee or award & wasting far more in resources PLUS creating huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. They live in their ‘do as I say, not as I do because I am a celebrity/personality/role-model and you are nobody so you don’t count’ world.

Guess what, ordinary people are fed up. Ordinary people are working much harder than the celebrity/personality/role-model types to conserve energy & resources. We are tired of empty politics & short-sighted ’solutions’ that fail to correct anything & generally worsen every situation.

The absolute, bottom-line reality is that ordinary people can no longer afford the world proposed by the elitists who think they are in charge. While elitists may look down their collective noses at the ‘ordinary people’, elitists are scrambling to make certain their money is off-shore & they use every tax loophole. All the while patting themselves on their collective back they are educating the rest of us. They have other homes in exotic locales in which they can rest & discuss how to make all of us ‘ordinary’ people — who of course don’t know what we are doing or should be doing — do things the way we are told by them & believe what they tell us.

Enough is enough. The political knee-jerk reactions have to stop. The pandering to one-sided views has to stop. REAL discussions populated by ordinary people have to be heard. All sides need to be heard with the same amount of consideration. Decisions need to be made after hearing all of the evidence. Just as justice is supposed to be blind, the solutions need to be based on all evidence being heard & weighed. It cannot be accomplished by who has the biggest lobby. Ordinary people do not have a lobby. That is why we are ordinary.

Only then can REAL solutions be found for REAL problems.

Unfortunately for the elites leading the charge, those of us in the U.S. that make this country function are not quite the bitter, gun-toting, bible clinging fools you believe us to be. This bill in this form will never see the light of passage. The more shocking result will be you will see us lead the worl in reducing our emissions, it is just not that we will cut our own throats to do it.

For the eleites to propose a bill that woudl take money (arbitrarily) form our pockets and send it to China, India and the like to shut down minimally producing dirty pseudo-shops for paymenst that they use to build 1 coal fired plant a week in planning for the arrival of the exodus of jobs from the U.S. (based on passage of this bill). Well, if you believe that, you all are the bitter fools.