And now for some good news- ever since the Copenhagen conference I’ve been looking for some good news about the climate legislation to come out of the U.S., and this is the first positive lead I’ve come across.

The U.S. Envoy says that he hopes the U.S. Senate will pass a climate change/ global warming focused bill during the first half of the year. Good news, to be sure.

The timing, though, leaves a little to be desired. It will be in place for the coming summit in Mexico City, but shows that the U.S. Congress is in no hurry to work with the rest of the world, and certainly does not really take seriously the calls from some nations the seriousness of the situation we are dealing with.

"I'm quite optimistic there will be action,” said Jonathan Pershing, U.S. Deputy special climate change envoy.

He continues that he doesn’t think the Senate will not pass legislation, a bit of a double-negative saying the same thing. So, we have that going for us.

There are three senators working on the bill, trying in earnest to make it bi-partisan- John Kerry (D), Joe Lieberman (I), and Lindsey Graham (R). The bill is rumored to include incentives for nuclear energy and offshore drilling,- more than the one that got passed in the House. Again, like I said yesterday, nuclear energy is not clean or renewable or sustainable, and is certainly not green, whatever we take green to mean. It does lower emissions, but beyond that, well, there is that toxic leftovers idea to deal with.

The big U.S. Congress opposition comes from coal states and the view that emissions caps or a cap & trade solution would hurt the market by raising energy costs. Um, yes, it will- that’s the point.
The point here, Senators, is to raise fossil fuel energy costs in order to incentivize entrepreneurs to create and energy companies to buy new, greener solutions for creating energy. It is not to preserve the fossil fuel industry- can you get that through your heads?

We are not trying to hold onto the old model! The U.S. is in serious danger of falling behind if we keep bending to the coal and other fossil fuel industries and lobbyists- let’s be honest here. It is painful and will require us to begin starting to do things differently. If you are not in favor of that you should be voted out of Congress. Period.  

All countries in the world are supposed to come up with concepts, strategies and designs for how to combat climate change. Combat isn’t even the right word- we don’t need to come up with ways to stop it right now- we need to come up with ways to ourselves make it not worse. How do we start creating energy without destroying the Earth and dirtying the air? That is the question.

Not how to preserve dirty industries, not how to keep the status quo with minor tweaks, not how to keep doing what we are doing with a green tint.

How do we create a new energy system. ?

That is the question.

Photo Credit: ozgurmulazimoglu (via Flickr under CCL)