"The strange death of this year's cap-and-trade movement"

Cap and Burn - WSJ.com

For months, Democrats and the environmental lobby promoted last week's Senate global-warming debate as a political watershed. It was going to be the historic turning point in U.S. climate change policy. In the event, their bill collapsed in a little more than three days.

Democrats failed to secure a majority, much less the 60 Senators necessary, for a procedural vote on Friday morning that would have allowed the real work of amending the bill to begin. By that point, Majority Leader Harry Reid had already made it plain that he wanted the bill off the floor as quickly as possible – despite calling climate change "the most critical issue of our time." But not critical enough, apparently, even to let his Members vote on the merits, much less amendments.

The strange death of this year's cap-and-trade movement was so unexpected that some are already predicting a shift in the politics of global warming. That's premature. Still, the postmortem holds lessons for the next time this issue emerges.
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Even Barack Obama and John McCain backed away from a bill they claim to favor. Mr. McCain said he opposed it because it didn't do enough for nuclear power, while Mr. Obama blamed the failure on Republicans. But the word on Capitol Hill is that both Presidential candidates urged Mr. Reid to yank the bill, lest they get trapped into voting for higher energy prices.