offsets

Whew! The crush of news about climate over the past few days was breathtaking:

First, late Friday night, details finally rolled out about what exactly the Kerry-Boxer climate-change bill in the Senate says. Journos were scrambling around 'til all hours trying to figure it out, and even today the smoke is still clearing.

David Roberts at Grist had an incisive if bleary-eyed look at why the common wisdom -- that Kerry-Boxer is more ambitious than the House's Waxman-Markey -- is wrong.

On Saturday -- even as the journos were still slaving over the details of Kerry-Boxer -- worldwide demonstrations called attention to the need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to a pre-industrial level of 350 parts CO2 per million parts of atmosphere.

The folks at Bill McKibben's 350.org apparently did a fair job turning out demonstrators around the globe, according to The New York Times' coverage. Marketplace had a worthwhile curtain-raiser.

Today folks in D.C. are still scurrying around trying to find out what this Kerry-Boxer thing says. It starting to sound like both the House and Senate bills allow lots of offsets for industries to get out of the greenhouse gas caps   -- offsets that may not, in fact, do anything to reduce global warming (so-called "anyways" offsets for stuff that was going on already.)

Lobbyists for industry are saying the analysis coming from the government is questionable. For example, Frank Maisano of the Bracewell & Giuliani firm charged in his weekly note advancing D.C. goings-on:

 There are a few flaws in EPA's analysis. Besides using insufficient models and old data, there are overlapping mandates and caps that will increase cost and diminish the effectiveness of the trading system. . .