Alright, April Fool's Day over, as I can't figure out how to handle the House's 600-page cap and trade bill in sarcastic code. The full text is here. Human beings, given our puny brains and inability to recall previous subsections referred to be their numerical identifier, will probably prefer the summary document. The bill -- which is the joint work of Henry Waxman and Ed Markey -- calls for a 20 percent cut in carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, a 42 percent reduction by 2030, and an 80 percent cut by 2050. The crucial question of how the allowances are apportioned and how the revenues are distributed has been left open for negotiation. The only concrete signal on this is that 15 percent of the permits will be given to energy intensive industries to help them manage the transition. That's a nod to political realities, but worrying insofar as it's the only concrete policy the authors have proposed. Reports are that Waxman and Markey mean to begin hearings on the bill during the week of April 20, push it through subcommittee markup around April 27th, and bring it to the full committee on May 11th. The hope appears to be that the Senate and the House will reconcile their finished bills in the fall. Instant reaction has been cautiously favorable. Joe Romm gives the bill a B+. Brad Plumer seems more skeptical, noting that if the proposed two billion in carbon offsets -- a policy most experts are skeptical about -- "were all used, the cap's emissions targets could be met for 20 years without anyone needing to reduce their fossil-fuel use." Dave Roberts comes out on the other end. "If this thing gets passed it will be an epochal change in U.S. policy," he says. All these folks say that the bill is a good start. What concerns me is that it's not clear how it gets better. Waxman and Markey probably represent the leftmost edge of the possible. They're aggressively liberal, terrifically informed legislators who get the moral urgency of climate change and possess the intellectual firepower to grasp the necessary scale of the response. If this is as far as they felt able to go on an opening bid, it's hard to see the legislative pathway that strengthens, rather than weakens, the legislation.
