Toles on cap and trade « [Has alarmist Joe Romm lost his optimism about the cap and trade swindle?]

Of course, cap and trade is just a means. Perhaps something will rise Phoenix-like from its ashes that can achieve the same end and get 60 votes in the Senate. If not, then indeed, America will be abandoning the global race for 20 million clean energy jobs by 2030

Negative Energy | Mother Jones

A key bloc of Democrats has a climate Plan B: Ditch cap and trade for an energy bill filled with industry giveaways.

With the Senate cap-and-trade bill on ice for the foreseeable future, a key bloc of Democrats is agitating for a Climate Plan B: an existing energy policy bill they say would put the US on the path to a clean energy future. Make that a road to nowhere. The bill in question lacks any kind of cap on carbon, and contains so many concessions to the oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries that one environmental group has dubbed it a "flashback to Bush energy policy."

For months, a gaggle of centrist Democrats has tried to convince the party's leaders that they should abandon their push for a cap-and-trade scheme and instead settle for passing the energy measure that was approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last June. When Republican Scott Brown seized Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat in an upset victory, these Plan B proponents saw their chance. Since then, they've been vigorously arguing that capping carbon is a huge political risk that Democrats can't afford to take in an election year. "They're using uncertainty over the Obama agenda as a whole to reinvigorate their push," said Joe Mendelson, director of global warming policy at the National Wildlife Federation.
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Talk of a climate about-face intensified as news outlets reported last week that senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman—who are working to assemble a cross-party coalition to support climate legislation in the Senate—are planning to scrap a cap on carbon altogether.