Too late for Obama to turn it around? | Camille Paglia | Salon

Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform.
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Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

Oddly Enough, the Developing World Wants Reliable Power - Greg Pollowitz - Planet Gore on National Review Online

The inconvenient truth is that people all over the world want to live like Americans, and no Western rhetoric — however hopeychangey — will persuade them to embrace energy poverty.

Refining away affordable fuel - Washington Times

You've heard of cap-and-trade. Now meet the low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) -- its younger, quieter but just-as-harmful kissing cousin. Cooked up in a California political laboratory over the past decade and being advanced on Capitol Hill by powerful members of both chambers, LCFS has as its goal to force refiners to start producing fuels with a lower-intensity carbon profile. Same price, same power, just with less carbon dioxide coming out of the tailpipe.

Who can be against that?

The laws of science, for starters.

Bill may be on ice by Copenhagen - Lisa Lerer - POLITICO.com

Chances that a bill will pass Congress before the Dec. 7-18 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen slimmed over the August recess. And already, experts say, U.N. officials have been lowering expectations for the talks, which are aimed at strengthening and continuing the landmark climate change accords approved in 1997 in Kyoto.

“Copenhagen has to be viewed as a very important step. Would it be overoptimistic to say that it would be the final one? Of course,” U.N. Development Chief Helen Clark told the Financial Times last week. “If there’s no deal as such, it won’t be a failure. I think the conference will be positive, but it won’t dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t.’”

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told the 150 governments at the World Climate Conference last week that time was running out for a new climate deal.

“We need rapid progress,” he said. “Our foot is stuck on the accelerator, and we are heading towards an abyss.”

Democratic aides say the full Senate will not turn its attention to the climate bill until the contentious health care debate is resolved — a process that some believe will take until the end of the year.