If Stephen Spruiell & Kevin Williamson at National Review Online are right, then even lefty supporters of global warming legislation ought to be feeling pretty hoodwinked by the Waxman-Markey Clean Energy Act.  In A Garden of Piggish Delights, they chronicle 50 ways in which the legislation satisfies their description of it (my emphasis):

Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.

Highlights:

5. . . . [T]the bill also allows for the creation of “offsets” — the medieval-style indulgences of the carbon-footprint world. In fact, nearly all of Waxman-Markey’s carbon-reduction targets can be met with offsets alone through 2050, meaning decades before any actual reduction of greenhouse gases is required. That means huge new expenses for small businesses and consumers in return for basically zero environmental improvement.

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14. Naturally, Big Labor gets its piece of the pie, too. Projects receiving grants and financing under Waxman-Markey provisions will be required to implement Davis-Bacon union-wage rules, making it hard for non-union firms to compete — and ensuring that these “investments” pay out inflated union wages. And it’s not just the big research-and-development contracts, since Waxman-Markey forces union-wage rules all the way down to the plumbing-repair and light-bulb-changing level.

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50. Waxman-Markey dumps money into questionable “partnerships” and grants to study “emerging careers” in “renewable energy, energy efficiency, and climate change mitigation.” The first career to emerge, of course, will be managing grants to study emerging careers.

H/T: Pundette.

The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

Can he do anything about the summer evenings where I live? The days are perfect — I don’t want them to change at all.  But the evenings are a little chilly for my taste. Might as well go for perfection, with so many brilliant minds working on the project:

Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea.

The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.

But lest you think they’re being hasty (emphasis mine):

But Holdren noted that shooting particles into the air—making an artificial volcano as one Nobel laureate has suggested—could have grave side effects and would not completely solve all the problems from soaring greenhouse gas emissions. So such actions could not be taken lightly, he said.

No shit?

Still, “we might get desperate enough to want to use it,” he added.

Today at Ace’s, Kat-Mo makes the case that Barack Obama seems virtually certain to cause great economic hardship through his plans to cause energy costs to skyrocket. It’s a long-ish post, but here’s the philosophical (as opposed to economic) part:

The problem in this country is that there are too many who have a mythological view of American history. Some where, some how, people have romanticized the “sacrifices” of the depression era along with the great crime wave that accompanied it. Subsistence living on the government dole with long soup lines and 30% unemployment has turned into a national triumph when, in fact, it was a terrible tragedy. When, in fact, our great grandparents and grand parents worked extremely hard to leave that era behind and create a better life for their descendants.

People are willing to vote Obama in because he says the word “sacrifice” within soaring rhetoric, further adding to its “romance” as if accepting a government manufactured crisis “for the greater good” is the thing “we’ve been waiting for” and will somehow purify the American soul. Someone should remind our erstwhile citizenry that there was a great number of our recent ancestors in the depression era who put sawdust in their bread as a partial substitute for flour because they simply could not afford to buy the flour they needed to make real bread. One could ask exactly how “purifying” was that experience and who wants to repeat it.

I don’t think I’m guilty of that romanticization. What I hold in esteem about that era is not that it gave people the opportunity to exhibit great character. I hold in esteem those people who learned great lessons from it. I agree with Kat-Mo that a repeat would be a tragedy.

Even someone hoping for a depression because they think it would be good for the country in the long run, however, are on a better moral footing than Obama, who wants to impose this in the name of fighting climate change:

In fact, the middle class appears strangely willing to sell their votes for about a $500 tax decrease when there is every indication that he is planning to increase the cost of living by ten fold that return and allow Bush’s tax cuts to expire, effectively making that “tax credit” nil. It is political slight of hand and it is most egregious because our media and our representatives in government are willing to perpetrate this great scam for some inexplicable reason. “Global warming” is not a good enough reason to impoverish an entire nation. Ask the Europeans who are busy trying to nullify or extend any part of the Kyoto Treaty that has stagnated their industries and added to their increasing unemployment.

“A car that emits no pollution . . . only clean water vapor.”

So, I’m wondering . . . why are water vapor emissions harmless?  Doesn’t man-created water vapor alter the natural balance of the atmosphere like any other man-created emission?  Might this create an artificial rise in humidity, changes in the dew point, an increase in precipitation, or increases in water levels, all of which might affect the continuing viability of critical plant life and other ecosystems?  Couldn’t these changes have disastrous effects for mankind?  Could we be in for a disastrous case of Global Drenching?

Remember, it’s never too early for hysteria.  Write your representatives in Congress and the Senate and demand that they stop global drenching now!  Measures we can take include a windfall profits tax on Big Vapor, development of total-body anti-perspirants to reduce perspiration evaporation from the ever-growing population, enclosure of large bodies of water to prevent evaporation into the atmosphere, and the development of protocols for you to develop your own personal moisture neutrality, including moisture absorption farms where you can buy vapor credits.  The world depends on you.