Pathetic

So now there's finally a big push to find out what candidates think about ways to address global warming and energy in general. The League of Conservation Voters (www.lcv.org) has released a scorecard with a few of their policy points.

Unsurprisingly, Clinton and Obama, the Democratic warriors for our suffering corporate elite, are the weakest (ok, so that is under the proviso that we exclude former Senator Gravel from the list as he is virtually incoherent on the matter). MoveOn has sponsored an odd town hall-type thing where the candidates can discuss their policies, the transcript of which can be found here.

To me, on this issue, Obama is the biggest loser of the candidates. The cap system of which he speaks has been used from the 70s to deal with trading air pollutants within EPA-established regions in the US. Clearly, this system has been a complete and total failure, otherwise, we'd have much cleaner air and all metropolitan areas tracked by the EPA would be in Attainment. They're not. And when you realize how much of the pollution hasn't been moved around within metro areas - but over borders to China and Mexico (because it's easier to move your plants there than it is to figure out how to buy pollution credits), where they REALLY know how to belch filth into the sky - the global impact of the entire policy of which he bases his emissions shell game has been nearly cataclysmic. Not coincidentally, many plants have closed up in the US in order to move overseas. Some of them HAVE sold their pollution credits to other companies - which is a financial windfall/bonus - helping to subsidize the exportation of US jobs.

Wow, we gotta get us more of THAT, right?!

Does anyone actually believe that China will give a crap about caps? Are they gonna dump billions of dollars into that program? Will third world countries even be able to try to buy into it? Do you?!?! Bottom line, no one will globalize the control of their smokestacks - period.

Obama's concept doesn't only sound weak and feel impractical, it's the environmental equivalent of proposing in 2007 a new "trickle-down" economic policy. Been there, done that, f-d up everything! I don't know if it's stupid, misleading, the apex of borderline psychotic optimism, or some combination thereof.

I've been cold toward Clinton, mainly because she's as phony as Joan Rivers' cheeks (all 4 of them). She's in it to win it, as they say, and that's it. But Obama's energy and environmental policy - probably the two momentous issues of our age - are simply a recipe for total and complete disaster. The best he can hope to achieve is a few years of begging for everyone to buy into the plan and then after realizing that it's not going to work, give up and adopt a plan that actually might have a prayer of working.

Worse, I doubt he came up with this stupid plan on his own. I say this because I wouldn't know much at all about the topic of pollution credits if I had not been elected locally to help scuttle a plan to build another fossil-fuel burning power plant in a region that exports a massive amount of the power that its plant generate. Unless he's been personally involved in issues like that in Illinois, he can't have known how the system works. He asked someone to make it for him. And given how comfortably he trots this foolhardy idea to the public, he clearly has total faith... in fools.

Sound like anyone else we know in DC?