Climate Bill's Dress Rehearsal. Commentary by Steve Mufson, WashingtonPost.com, June 5, 2008. "Here is one of my questions about the future of climate legislation, assuming that supporters... fail now and try again next year... Will climate legislation circa 2009 meet the same fate as the failed Clinton-backed health care legislation circa 1993? Both... have good intentions... address problems that won't go away... [and] are immensely complicated. Both try to include something for almost everyone... [Lieberman-Warner-Boxer] tries to cover almost all the political bases. It proposes big tax cuts to help the poor pay for higher energy prices that would come out of the legislation. It allocates far fewer emission permits than Europe does in its system, but the allocations are still substantial... Rather than force states to join a federal system, the bill provides... [huge incentives]... to entice [them] into joining the national system. Paul Bledsoe... [of] the National Commission on Energy Policy, says 'if you have an economy-wide cap-and-trade system with some basic cost containment provision and incentives for developing country action, you have a fairly broad constituency for that approach. It's when you have to get to the next level of detail that you alienate people...'"
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