Australia: Climate [swindle] plan so close and yet so far | smh.com.au

Trying to play both sides on an emissions trading scheme, the Federal Government again looks like coming up empty-handed, at least before the Copenhagen summit, reports Marian Wilkinson.
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Labor insiders, meanwhile, told the Herald they believed there was little prospect of an ambitious deal at Copenhagen, rendering the target a dead duck.

By week's end Wong's hopes of a Senate win were rapidly evaporating and Australia's national climate change policy again appeared on the brink of collapse. Despite scientific warnings that Australia should support a strong 2020 target and aim for an ambitious global climate deal in Copenhagen, politicians, business and the environment movement remain deeply divided on how to achieve this.

The divisions were on stark display on Thursday morning when Wong addressed the 10th annual national emissions trading summit. Insisting she would get the new climate deal through the Senate, Wong hit out at Turnbull again, calling on him to challenge climate sceptics among Coalition MPs and "rise to the challenge" of passing the legislation.

Do Carbon Offsets Cause Emissions to Rise? - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com

But whether offsets work in practice is a heated debate. Environmentalists have harshly criticized many offset programs for failing to deliver genuine carbon reductions, and for making claims about reductions that are difficult to verify.

Mr. Wara said those lessons should be reflected in any cap-and-trade program in the United States, so that polluters could only use offsets of the highest quality. Mr. Wara warned that “if the offsets are bogus, we will have lots of monitoring, lots of trading, but no change in the growth of atmospheric concentrations of” greenhouse gases.

Waxman-Markey [swindle] deal-making update: 14% cut by 2020, about half the allowances given away at first, phased out to full auction in 10 to 15 years

While the final details remain to be worked out, Waxman acknowledged that he is comfortable with distributing credits for free as a way to help industries transition into a low-carbon economy and during the period when an international climate agreement takes shape. “We’re not using allocations just because people would like some revenue,” Waxman said. “We’re doing it for very legitimate purposes within the integrity of the bill.”

Guest Blogger: Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) » The Foundry

Special interest groups around the country are scheming to sue the EPA to prosecute hospitals, farms, nursing homes, commercial buildings and any other small emitter of greenhouse gasses. These regulations are a dangerous loose cannon in the wrong hands.