cap-and-trade

My colleague Mike Lillis speculates that the retiring Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) could become a major advocate for the coal industry and a strong opponent of climate legislation. It’s a good theory, although I have to say that my initial reaction to the news of his retirement was, well, kind of the opposite: that free [...]

Democrats face tough task of winning over moderates in an election year.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) made a quick stop in Copenhagen today to deliver the message to international climate negotiators that he’s been telling the American public for months: there’s “zero” chance that the Senate will pass comprehensive climate legislation.
Inhofe’s drive-by press conference — he spent just two hours in Denmark — was intended to undercut [...]

Jonathan Martin and Manu Raju’s fun story about the surprisingly oppositional role Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has played this year includes what has to be a cheeky quote from Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
I don’t know whether he’s angry about his loss or whether he’s preparing himself for the next presidential run.
The odds of McCain — [...]

One of the perks of political rock star-dom is that you get to write pretty much whatever you want and the nation’s leading newspapers will publish it. Take Sarah Palin: Judging from The Washington Post’s op-ed page, she’s now one of the country’s top experts on climate change. In July, The Post devoted valuable ink [...]

At the Heritage Foundation today, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) claimed that there were only 25 “aye” votes in the Senate for the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill. The “Climategate” scandal, over e-mails obtained from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit that skeptics claim to show scientists forging global warming data, had not had an effect [...]

If you did a free association test on political insiders and said “Robert Byrd,” 90 percent of them would probably respond immediately with “coal.” The Democratic senator from West Virginia has undergone some major transformations over his record-setting career — most notably from KKK member to semi-reliable liberal — but the one constant has been [...]

Nine Democratic senators sent a letter to President Obama this morning laying out ten conditions that will allow them to support domestic and international climate deals. The senators, who all hail from manufacturing of fossil fuel-dependent states, are mostly moderates, and their votes will be crucial to passing a climate bill next year.
But their demands [...]

As national climate legislation slowly simmers on the back burner of the Senate and expectations are lowered for the international climate conference in Copenhagen, environmentalists can take solace in the efforts of California, which this afternoon issued the country’s first broad-based cap-and-trade blueprint to reduce greenhouse emissions.
The Los Angeles Times reports:

Reid Wilson has the first look at a resolution being pushed by Republican National Committee member Jim Bopp, author of the infamous “socialist” resolution, that would aim to prevent future NY-23 disasters by requiring that candidates agree to at least seven of 10 issue promises in order to receive financial support from the RNC. After [...]