Iain Murray at National Review Online wrote an interesting piece about the Lieberman-Warner energy bill.

The collapse last week of the Lieberman-Warner bill, the enviro-Left’s attempt to bribe Senators to impose energy rationing on the nation, shows that we are now left with only two energy-policy choices: We can adopt fudging issues as a policy, which will achieve nothing, hurt many, and satisfy no one; or we can pursue a free-market policy that will anger green activists and alarmists but actually do some good. Chances are that fudge is on the menu.

How did we get here? To answer that question, a look at the recently failed policy proposal is instructive. The Boxer Amendment — all 490 pages of it — to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act sought to reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by instituting a “cap-and-trade” regime to make energy use more expensive. Leaving aside the folly of proposing this at a time when Americans are hurting from steeply rising energy prices, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) and her well-funded environmental-movement allies realized that they could not sell this scheme without massive bribery.

The Act would have raised about $7 trillion in new government revenues and funded over $4 trillion in new government programs (yes, that’s trillion, with a “t”). Some of that money would have paid for the support of special interests that might be hurt most by the Act. Other portions of it would go toward new handouts to the rapidly growing environmental-industrial complex of rent-seeking “green” businesses and their consultants from the advocacy movement.

However, even with those provisions, Sen. Boxer and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) could not find 50, never mind 60, votes to compel an up-and-down vote on Lieberman-Warner. Of the 48 votes they managed to scrape together, several senators said after the vote that, while they supported voting on the bill, they would not have voted for it as it stood because it directly harmed their constituents. This shows that there is little political will for any policy with a large price tag on it for consumers. This is likely to hold true even if Democrats increase their majorities on Congress in this year’s elections.

So what are we left with? If there is an appetite to “do something” about global warming, what could get through Congress? There appear to be two options.

Read the rest here.

In the EU, the answer may soon be health warnings, as explained by this article from Leigh Phillips at EUobserver:

Europe’s media giants have attacked proposals to slap environmental cigarette-packaging-style ‘health warnings’ on car advertising in newspapers and magazine.

The European Publishers’ Council, which represents major publishers and broadcasters across the continent, have warned that such advertising regulations, if adopted, threaten the freedom of the press.

“A state-imposed mandate on car advertising would pose a major threat to free competition and journalism,” said EPC chairperson Francisco Pinto Balsemao in a statement. Read the rest of this entry »