Cap-and-FAIL Roundup

A lot of smart people were less than thrilled following yesterday's slow and brutal bludgeoning of anything resembling good energy policy. Here are a few choice reactions:

• Andrew Revkin (NYTimes Dot Earth blog): "Obama has failed to challenge fossilized foes of meaningful action on energy and climate change, from Senator James Inhofe to the many conservative columnists - along with some liberals - who've distorted the American discourse on climate into an either-or debate over beliefs little different than that on abortion or gun rights."
• Jesse Jenkins and Devon Swezey (Huffington Post): "Cap and trade has repeatedly failed because it doesn't address the main barrier to the widespread deployment of clean energy technologies: the technology-based price gap between new clean energy and mature fossil fuels."
• Kate Sheppard (Mother Jones): "Obviously, there's no carbon cap, that much we already knew. But there's also no other major energy efficiency standards, and, perhaps most importantly, no renewable electricity standard - not even the weak one included in the energy bill last year.
• Michael Noble (Fresh Energy blog): "The President must do more than talk about energy. He needs to force action in the Senate by convening the kind of public conversation only the President can drive."
• David Roberts (Grist): "Big Coal is in trouble. Sooner or later, the industry will realize that the funding it can get from cap-and-trade, to support carbon capture and sequestration, is the only path to survival... By 2012, certainly by 2015 when many of the [EPA CO2 regulations] kick in, the industry will be forced to acknowledge this basic truth."
• Joe Klein (TIME): "Next year, the Environmental Protection Agency will begin regulating the hell out of CO2. The business community won't like that, nor will many Republicans."