Senate Climate Bill Delay Raises Doubt on Chance for U.S. Law - Bloomberg.com

“We’re going to try to do that sometime in the spring,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said of climate-change legislation in remarks to reporters yesterday. He didn’t cite a reason for the delay.
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“I don’t think anyone’s excited about doing another really, really, big thing that’s really, really hard that makes everybody mad,” McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, told reporters yesterday. “Climate fits that category.”
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“The Senate is far from the 60 votes needed to move a climate-change bill and that is unlikely to change as long as the economy continues to underperform,” said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at Washington-based Brookings Institution in an e-mail yesterday. “If Obama succeeds in getting a health- reform bill and financial regulation, I think his energies in 2010 will be focused on jobs and the economy.”

Big Hollywood » Blog Archive » If NBC Really Wanted to Save the Planet They’d Go Out of Business

Apparently television watching contributes to 10% of the entire American electrical requirement. Holy Moly. Ten percent is more than the entire Cap and Trade Bill expects to cut over the next hundred years.

Which leads me to my proposal. If people in Hollywood REALLY wanted to go green, they should just quit making TV shows, and get a real job. All of them. Writers, Directors, and Producers as well. (It wouldn’t be an issue for tech people, they’re quite familiar with work already.) Without television programming, TV would become completely unwatchable.

Talk of Plan B -- a Power Plant-Only Climate Bill -- Emerges in Senate - NYTimes.com

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is taking the lead with Lieberman and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in writing the broader climate legislation, said in an interview today that he is not planning to write a bill that goes after only power plants. That, he said, would not be a political winner, anyway.

"The problem is you lose countless numbers of entities," Kerry said. "It becomes far more expensive, and they don't get the help you get the other way. You get no transitional cost help that way, so it becomes more expensive. And in fact, you lose three-quarters of the support for the legislation."  [So if you've got 44 Senate votes now, you could get 11 total votes for the Plan B version?]

Cold putting pressure on power supply -- Shanghai Daily

The city's power supplier was scrambling yesterday to avert shortages, as five sets of generators broke down amid the cold weather.

Shanghai Electric Power Co rushed to fix three of the five malfunctioned generators overnight on Tuesday to meet a spike in consumption brought by the sudden chilly weather.  [Why don't they just try heating the city with wind and solar power?]