In recent years, the amount of ice replaced in the winter has not been sufficient to offset summer ice losses. The result is more open water in summer, which then absorbs more heat, warming the ocean and further melting the ice. Between 2004 and 2008, multi-year ice cover shrank 595,000 square miles—nearly the size of Alaska’s land area.

• It guts the Clean Air Act, removing EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.
• It sets meager targets — 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year’s level — and sabotages even these by permitting fictitious “offsets,” by which other nations are paid to preserve forests – while logging and food production will simply move elsewhere to meet market demand.
• Its cap-and-trade system, reports former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Robert Shapiro, “has no provisions to prevent insider trading by utilities and energy companies or a financial meltdown from speculators trading frantically in the permits and their derivatives.”
• It fails to set predictable prices for carbon, without which, Shapiro notes, “businesses and households won’t be able to calculate whether developing and using less carbon-intensive energy and technologies makes economic sense,” thus ensuring that millions of carbon-critical decisions fall short.

Needless to say, Joe “#1 W-M Cheerleader” Romm, he ain’t cottonning to the Hansen critique.

Groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have science if not politics on their side when they decry Waxman-Markey as an industry diluted half-measure with soft gums that falls far short of what is necessary to avoid cataclysmic climate change later this century.

“The giveaways and preferences in the bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions,” said Greenpeace in a statement the day before the House vote. “To support such a bill is to abandon the real leadership that is called for at this pivotal moment in history. We simply no longer have the time for legislation this weak.”

This view is shared by leading climate scientists like James Hansen and his peers around the world at leading research centers such as the UK’s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, which urge more significant and immediate cuts than the finance-sector friendly cap-and-trade system can deliver.

And, this was just Zaitchik’s intro to the real Dark Side of Climate Change. The author interviewed the Father of the Gaia Theory, James Lovelock, who opines that “It’s Already Too Late,” “Cap and Trade Is a Scam,” and “Few Will Survive.”

I’ve been writing about climate change for two decades, and now, at long last, my country’s leaders have at least done something. Something halting and lame and catastrophically inadequate yes, but something that at least acknowledges the reality that we live on a planet with an atmosphere.

Whoa! Those rad Congress critters…

Without Waxman-Markey, we have the Mass. v. EPA Supreme Court decision and the CAA (Clean Air Act). Many, take Georgetown Law’s Lisa Heinzerling for example, have laid out how an Administration that wants to could use the EPA and the CAA to use good old fashioned command and control regulation to immediately address GHG pollution.

But W-M guts the Clean Air Act.

And CP commentator Jeremy Johnson chimes in that the EPA is removed of the ability of mandating CO2 emissions as a public health hazard. The W-M bill transfers that power solely to Congress… “It’s W-M or EPA not both.”

So, the question put to Climate Progress:

Wouldn’t it be better for the climate of our planet to pass the other titles, skip the global warming title, leave the CAA in place and let EPA start cranking down on climate polluters. If the Administration is truly serious about emission reductions, industry will beg Congress for specific climate legislation.

I think Tim R. has a valid argument against Romm’s all or nothing attribution to H.R. 2454. “W-M failing doesn’t leave us with nothing.” Indeed, asserts CP readers, Passing W-M blunts a very strong tool — the CAA.