Living the American Green

Ethanol production

It’s tricky to get a handle on.  Many forward looking environmentalist types have decided that it’s a past fad; that essentially Corn Ethanol production was a dead end given it’s land and water use, and the amount of energy that goes into it.  People who were very excited about the potential of corn as alternative fuel in the 90’s can’t BELIEVE that people haven’t moved past it in the 2000’s.   More nuance: we might not have DQ’ed things like production of Ethanol fuel from Algae, so over-all reaction against it seems like a bad idea.

However, like everything else, there is a huge lobby for Corn Ethanol, (which has some valid points!) and many Midwestern Democrats are completely unwilling to hear about anything that might touch the status quo of cash for that cause.  It doesn’t matter if it’s good green policy (and evidence suggests that it is not) — it matters if it is good pork.

It’s a mess, to be sure… but a mess worth sinking the Waxman-Markey environmental bill over?

Yup.

Once again, Congress is the place that great ideas go to die.  Look, I realize that the Cap and Trade program is going to be hard on some folks.  But this quibbling, this exempting and counter exempting, this hijacking of the debate over things that are not central to the discussion — this is why the tax code is millions of lines long.  This is why you need a PHD in stupid to begin to track the reasoning that suggests that a bill designed to get this country on track to start combating global climate change issues is getting nickled and dimed into irrelevance by stupid riders and past gripes.

Peterson and the 26 Democrats on his committee say they will vote against climate change legislation passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week unless it better addresses several concerns raised by farmers, including reversing the EPA decision.

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Absurdity — Thy name is Texas Rep. Joe Barton.  This dude is the RANKING Republican member on the  energy committee.  While he is the official point person on the Environment for the Republicans in the house, he calls the science of global climate change “pretty weak stuff”.   But here we are on the Waxman bill, and even the Republican Party top brass realizes this thing shouldn’t come down to a war on the Science of the thing.  They realize that they are loosing that fight, and think they have traction by painting the Carbon Cap and Trade as a huge tax on the… someone.  Probably the small business owners: they are usually trotted out when the specter of a tax is brought up.

Except, Joe Barton might not have gotten the memo.  Yep, his plan is to keep claiming that there isn’t any science behind global warming science, and play neato tricks like making Waxman read the entire bill.  Really?  You wonder why people think politics are boring: for some reason their is a rule that you can make people read the entire bill on the floor of the senate or congress while everyone waits around.  And then, Barton plans on crashing the party by adding 300+ ad ons to the bill.

I’m all for the rule that lets a minority party put up some sort of defense (and I wish the Dems had done some stuff like this when they were rocking through the Bush years), but there should be a rule that says that one individual can’t hijack the entire proceedings.  I know I might be over reading this thing, as Barton might be given more power in this article then he actually has.  But man, I’m frustrated that some goofball from Texas is holding up what should be the most important legislation of my lifetime.

*(Db = Douchebag)