@atrembath: Starting to wonder if the #climate bill is in limbo within a dream within a dream... #Inception.
It was a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes a kind of vague, existential sense. Look at the many levels of climate/energy bills we've had in the past year (ignoring, for convenience's sake, the attempts made prior to them). We've gone from ACES to CLEAR to ACELA to KGL to K[G]L to APA, all which are some amalgam or response or "stone soup" of each other. Some have carbon pricing, some do not; some increase subsidies for fossil fuels, some eliminate them; some are politically feasible and at least decent policy constructions, others are not. At this point, it would be a circuitous and functionally pointless operation to trace back the current legislation to its counterparts in previous bills, drafts of bills, etc.
As in the film "Inception," the levels of climate/energy bills have pushed us deep into a strange, surreally litigious version of reality, and the hope is that whatever we construct in Congress so deep within the depths of the legislative process will make some kind of difference in the real world. This is especially true for cap-and-trade, the very definition of a "green dream," or carbon offsets, whose desired and planned effects - drafted deep in the layers of my shaky metaphor - will likely come up against bureaucratic and corporate nightmares in reality. Or, if the legislation has become so entangled in the deep layers of Congress that it becomes stuck in limbo, unable to free itself from a prison of its own making.
After seeing "Inception" last night, I told my friend that my own personal hell might be if my memory of the movie were erased and I was given all the pages of drafts of the script - out of order and unnumbered - and told to assemble them correctly. Ditto that for the climate legislation.
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