When you have Harry Reid moving onto the Jobs bill and Liberal Senators whose vote you'll need to complete cloture, including Rockefeller and Byrd completely against it, and Barbara Boxer (!) who's not exactly a moderate, spearheading the bill, then you know it's in trouble. Then you have Webb and Alexander discussing Nuclear replace the entire carbon regulation of the bill along with Graham, Kerry and Lieberman developing a substitute that may not be enough, then you know your support is dead.
Climate Change Bill protested by Liberals
Of course, I'm not even counting that 2010 is around the corner and with so many other priorities, including DADT, Immigration Reform, ENDA, Financial Re-Regulation in need of being accomplished, there's just no way this is going to get accomplished in time, Copenhagen or no Copenhagen. I'm highlighting that article above because I think it's particularly galling especially at this juncture.
In essence, 14 democratic senators (including Franken and Feingold and Rockefeller) are suggesting that the entire structure of carbon regulation shouldn't apply to coal companies. THAT IS INSANE. That is the entire point of Climate Change legislation. If these Senators can't see past their constitutiences and focus on the entire world then they would know that this is a problem. But who am I talking about? This is the US Senate after all. This is why pending some major breakthrough on the foreign scale (IE if Obama convinces China and/or India to go with a reduction in carbon emissions), this bill is dead and that is the saddest part of all.
In particular, the senators oppose the way that carbon credits are allocated in the House and the proposed Senate bill, arguing that it unfairly harms states who rely on coal for their energy needs. Their concern is that the House bill and the Senate bill that advanced last week would make higher-emitting utilities—those that burn coal—pay more under cap and trade. Under the House and Senate proposals, the formula by which local electricity distributors recieve free credits is based 50 percent on their total energy sales and 50 percent on their total emissions. The coal state senators want the allocations to be based 100 percent on emissions—meaning that utilities that emit more would get more free credits.
Of course, this would work against the entire logic of the proposed scheme, which is to offer utilities financial incentives to switch to lower-carbon fuel sources. And the existing bills already contain a number of measures to help out coal-burning utilities, such as free allocations for deploying carbon-capture-and-storage technology. Plus, as Nat Keohane, an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, points out, the bills also contain "other tools" to compensate consumers whose energy costs will rise when their local utilities start paying for their emissions. These tools include a rebate for low-income consumers and, later in the program, a dividend program that would provide rebates to all energy consumers.