Fatalistic Friday: World watches as House votes on clean energy, climate bill

"Why do we allow the US to act like a failed state on climate change?": "It would be laughable anywhere else. But, so everyone says, the Waxman-Markey bill which is likely to be passed in Congress today or tomorrow, is the best we can expect – from America.
The cuts it proposes are much lower than those being pursued in the UK or in most other developed nations," says George Monbiot. Why? "You have only to read the comments that follow this article to find out. Thanks to the lobbying work of the coal and oil companies, and the vast army of thinktanks, PR consultants and astroturfers they have sponsored, thanks too to the domination of the airwaves by loony right shock jocks, the debate over issues like this has become so mad that any progress at all is little short of a miracle." (The Guardian)

Barack Obama urges Congress to back climate change Bill: "The Bill would require utilities, by 2020, to get 15 per cent of their electricity from renewable resources — solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass — and show annual energy savings of 5 per cent from efficiency measures. The EU plan calls for getting 20 per cent of all electricity from renewable resources by 2020." (The Times Online)

Political paralysis as clock ticks on climate change: ...President Obama faces fierce domestic opposition to all measures, however modest, that aim to rein in Americans’ high-energy lifestyles. Legislation known as the Waxman-Markey Bill is now before Congress. It’s so watered down that if it were a medicine, it might well be classified as homeopathic. And yet, after eight years of Bush era anti-science, the very fact that a climate Bill is even on the table is cause for celebration. It would be inconceivable for the world’s largest polluter to arrive in Copenhagen without having its own national policy on climate change in place." (The Irish Times)

EU: we want US climate bill to succeed: "The Europe Union wants a U.S. climate change bill to succeed so the United States can move swiftly to curb greenhouse gas emissions, EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Friday..."We want the U.S. to go as far and as fast as they can on climate change," Barroso said. "We want Waxman-Markey to succeed. ... Rarely, perhaps, has U.S. domestic legislation been so carefully monitored internationally." (Associated Press)

China welcomes U.S. climate bill, says more needed: "China's top climate change official on Friday welcomed a U.S. climate change bill but said Washington needed to take stronger action to ensure success at year-end talks to settle a global framework on warming. Xie Zhenhua, a deputy chief of the National Development and Reform Commission who steers climate change policy, said the bill was a positive break with the stance taken by the Administration of former President George W. Bush. But he said the legislation still did not meet international expectations for U.S. action, or ensure a strong deal could be reached at U.N.-led talks in Copenhagen in December. "We think that we should give a positive evaluation to this bill...But in the area of tackling climate change, especially on the issue of cutting emissions, if they could take some more positive, effective measures it would give a bigger impetus to the year-end talks," he added. (Reuters)

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Image: The Earth on August 2, 2005, from NASA's Messenger spacecraft.