Obama Dumps Cap-And-Trade

President Obama has dumped his cap-and-trade plan for reducing greenhouse gases.

"Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way," Obama said at a news conference Wednesday, a day after Democrats lost control of the House. "I'm going to be looking for other means to address this problem."

Legislation putting a limit on heat-trapping greenhouse gases and then allowing companies to buy and sell pollution permits under that ceiling narrowly passed the House in 2009 as a centerpiece of Obama's domestic agenda, but it stalled in the Senate.

While he is surely right that there is more than one way of skinning this cat, I wouldn't be surprised if this part of his environmental agenda is as dead as a doornail considering Tuesday's election results.

While I'm on the subject, I found this over at Boing Boing. It's a video by science journalist Peter Hadfield laying waste to some climate change myths. There are more at his YouTube channel.



The funny part for me is that he dismantles the myth that global warming has stopped by tracing the claim back to this article by geologist Robert Carter and showing what Carter got wrong. At the end of the video Hadfield urges people to evaluate the evidence and trace claims to their source.

I was reminded of UW philosophy professor Lester Hunt who fell hook, line, and sinker for Carter's claim which was repeated by David Whitehouse and inspired the post "Has Global Warming Stopped?" linked to above. He repeated the myth again here. Hunt's skepticism apparently ends when a view he endorses begins.