We're gonna be sorry

When I first heard Thursday that Senate Democrats were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil, I remembered something that Joe Romm, the climateprogress.org blogger, once said: The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

Alas, so are the rest of us.

I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one GOP senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Barack Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the chamber of commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill.

The truth is, the public, confused and stressed by the last two years, never got mobilized to press for this legislation. We will regret it.

We've basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature's operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign - even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so.

Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is what we're doing.

Since I don't have anything else to say, I will just fill out this column with a few news stories and e-mails.

•Just as the U.S. Senate was abandoning plans for a U.S. cap-and-trade system, this article ran in The China Daily: "BEIJING - The country is set to begin domestic carbon trading programs during its 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) to help it meet its 2020 carbon intensity target ..."

•A day before the climate bill went down, Lew Hay, the CEO of NextEra Energy, which owns Florida Power & Light, one of the nation's biggest utilities, e-mailed to say that if the Senate would set a price on carbon and requirements for renewal energy, utilities like his would have the price certainty they need to make the big next-generation investments, including nuclear. "If we invest an additional $3 billion a year or so on clean energy, that's roughly 50,000 jobs over the next five years," said Hay. (Say goodbye to that.)

•Making our country more energy efficient is not some green feel-good thing. Retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who was Gen. David Petraeus' senior logistician in Iraq, e-mailed to say that "over 1,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hauling fuel to air-condition tents and buildings. If our military would simply insulate their structures, it would save billions of dollars and, more importantly, save lives of truck drivers and escorts. ... And will take lots of big fuel trucks (aka Taliban Targets) off the road, expediting the end of the conflict."

•The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted:

"Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible 'conspiracy theory': The fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their PR skills, while wondering, as always: "Have they no grandchildren?"