Something, anything is better than nothing; so compromise, dilution, are the order of the day until form erases substance and corporations and other wealthy contributors are satisfied that business as usual will continue. 

That seems to be the mantra and method of operation of this Democratic administration and a Democratic majority in Congress.

However, during the criminal Bush regime, when the GOP was the majority in Congress, the reality was Republicans were able to accomplish everything...especially creating disastrous bills and policies re-inforcing government of, by, and for the wealthy few the hell with the rest of the people.

The current Waxman-Markey climate change bill is an example of the Democrats' lack of fortitude and selling out government of, by, and for the people and the common good to the demands, bribes and control of the rich few and corporations.

This bill would also create a vast, complicated carbon derivatives market that, given the deliberate weakness of this administration's financial regulations proposals including ignoring strong derivative and other speculation and manipulation regulation, could cause another disastrous financial and economic meltdown in this country.

By the way, Lawrence Summers, a member of Obama's weaselly, Wall Street protecting economic team, along with his mentor, a Repug in Dem clothing, Robert Rubin, (and destructive Alan Greenspan) succeeded in blocking regulation of derivative markets and Obama's nominee to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, was also instrumental in blocking derivative regulations and made beaucoup bucks in that unregulated market.

While, the bad and ugly of this bill outweigh any good, most environmental groups back the bill as a foot in the door. 

But these groups may be deluding themselves about it being a first step to change.  Their foot in the door is actually opening the door to an vast, ruinous economic depression caused by carbon derivative speculation and manipulation by the same perpetrators of the current debacle and this nominal first step may be the only step...an environmental double cross by an energy industry controlled Congress.

From Stacy Morford at Common Dreams: "The House climate bill took another hit this week as Rep. Henry Waxman made further concessions, this time to farm-state Democrats, to ensure the bill's safe passage on Friday. Even weakened, though, the bill continued to draw support from most of the big environmental organizations.

"Except for Friends of the Earth. The organization is going it alone with an ad campaign and request to its members to demand better legislation from Congress. FOE President Brent Blackwelder is publicly urging Congress to either substantially strengthen the bill or vote no.

'Corporate polluters including Shell and Duke Energy helped write this bill, and the result is that we're left with legislation that fails to come anywhere close to solving the climate crisis,' Blackwelder wrote.

'Worse, the bill eliminates preexisting EPA authority to address global warming-that means it's actually a step backward.

'This exercise in politics as usual is a wholly unacceptable response to one of the greatest challenges of our time, and it endangers the welfare of current and future generations. ... If the ‘political reality' at present cannot accommodate stronger legislation, their first task must be to expand what is politically possible-not to pass a counterproductive bill.'

"That position hasn't been easy hasn't been easy to take. Some of the largest environmental groups, including NRDC and EDF, were involved with Shell and Duke in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a consortium that wrote the industry-environment compromise that the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill is based on. Groups that have questioned the legislation have been pressured to back off."

As Stacy Astyk writes at Energy Bulletin: "What interests me about Waxman-Markey is the degree to which its accomplishments are very much in keeping with the kind of accomplishments we seem to be able to make at the national level. The bill is woefully inadequate - among other truly disastrous acts, it removes the newly won power of the EPA to regulate CO2 emissions - this alone is sufficient to undermine the bill. The targets are extremely low, the actual science mostly ignored in dealing with climate targets, the coal issue is not dealt with, carbon capture and storage, which doesn’t work and has no merit receives a ton of money, and corporations are unduly enriched and pandered to. And yet, for environmentalists, aware that we are truly teetering at the point of no return, there is a desire to hope, to appreciate the first step, to reassure ourselves that it will be strengthened later, as people adapt. (Underline added.)

"But what are the odds? The last three decades of US policy has been one of pandering to industry and consistently, across party lines, undermining and weakening inconvenient legislations, whether ecological or economic, that corporate interests claimed hurt them. If we had some certainty that Democrats, who mostly at least deal with the science of anthropogenic global warming, if inaccurately in many cases, were likely to stay in power, we’d still have no real certainty here - Clinton’s commitment to regulation wasn’t any better than many of his Republican predecessors."

Let's look at just two provisions in this bill.

The good, the bad and the ugly on the cap-and-trade provision and offsets from Josh Harkinson at Mother Jones:

Cap and Trade
The Good
Ambitiously caps emissions at 68 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 by creating a market in tradable emissions permits
The Bad
By 2020, the cap will have cut emissions by only 4 percent
The Ugly
Only 15 percent of the tradable emissions permits will be auctioned off by the government; the bill hands out another 50 percent of the permits to the fossil fuel industry for free.

Offsets
The Good
Emission reduction projects funded through carbon offsets must be verifiable, permanent, and “additional,” meaning that the projects would not have occurred on their own.
The Bad
If US polluters use all of the offsets allowed under the bill—equivalent to 2 billion tons of CO2 per year—they won’t have to start cutting their own emissions until around 2025.
The Ugly
Despite similar regulation of offsets under the Kyoto Protocol, a 2008 analysis from Stanford found that between one-third and two-thirds of the projects did nothing to counteract carbon emissions.  

For the rest of a brief look at the good, the bad and the ugly in this climate change bill check here.

And that isn't all.

From a commentary in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"Cap-and-trade programs have often failed. For example, a Los Angeles cap-and-trade program designed to reduce ground-level ozone ended up issuing permits for more pollution than was actually being emitted. It took more than five years for the "cap" to be ratcheted below pollution levels, whereupon the price of permits skyrocketed and utilities threatened rolling blackouts. Cap-and-trade had produced little besides delay.

"In Europe, cap-and-trade has failed to deliver on climate change. It yielded windfall profits for utilities, but few reductions in emissions or investments in clean technology.

"While U.S. officials vowed to learn from Europe's mistakes, the bill sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) and Edward Markey (D., Mass.) has many of the same flaws and adds massive "offsets" that blow away the "cap" in "cap-and-trade." Offsets allow polluters to, for example, pay to preserve an acre of forest so they can continue burning coal above the cap. The concept's problems are legion and well-documented.

"The Waxman-Markey approach would not only guarantee a decades-long failure in the United States; it would also undermine U.S. credibility in international negotiations on climate change.

"Those who favor Waxman-Markey as a political best-case scenario lack faith in the American people. We believe the American people can understand and support a more effective and fair approach.

"Many observers across the political spectrum agree that carbon fees or taxes, with rebates to consumers, would be a more enforceable and effective alternative. While cap-and-trade-and-offsets will enrich special interests and delay the transition away from fossil fuels, carbon fees with monthly rebates could be the centerpiece of an affordable, equitable, rapid transition to a clean-energy future."

If you think that the current economic catastrophe is terrible, cap and trade could cause another economic meltdown.

Rachel Morris writes at Mother Jones: "You've heard of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. Are carbon default swaps and subprime offsets next? If the Waxman-Markey climate bill is signed into law, it will generate, almost as an afterthought, a new market for carbon derivatives. That market will be vast, complicated, and dauntingly difficult to monitor. And if Washington doesn't get the rules right, it will be vulnerable to speculation and manipulation by the very same players who brought us the financial meltdown.

"Cap and trade would create what Commodity Futures Trading commissioner Bart Chilton anticipates as a $2 trillion market, "the biggest of any [commodities] derivatives product in the next five years." That derivatives market will be based on two main instruments. First, there are the carbon allowance permits that form the nuts and bolts of any cap-and-trade scheme. Under cap and trade, the government would issue permits that allow companies to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. Companies that emit too much can buy allowances from companies that produce less than their limit. Then there are carbon offsets, which allow companies to emit greenhouse gases in excess of a federally mandated cap if they invest in a project that cuts emissions somewhere else—usually in developing countries. Polluters can pay Brazilian villagers to not cut down trees, for instance, or Filipino farmers to trap methane in pig manure. 

"In addition to trading the allowances and offsets themselves, participants in carbon markets can also deal in their derivatives—such as futures contracts to deliver a certain number of allowances at an agreed price and time. These instruments will be traded not only by polluters that need to buy credits to comply with environmental regulations, but also by financial services firms. In fact, a study (PDF) by Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions anticipates that if the United States passes a cap-and-trade law, the derivatives trade will probably exceed the market for the allowances themselves. 'We are on the verge of creating a new trillion-dollar market in financial assets that will be securitized, derivatized, and speculated by Wall Street like the mortgage-backed securities market,' says Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and a cofounder of the US Climate Task Force.

"Already, the industry has achieved its main objective: The Waxman-Markey bill would create a big, convoluted market for carbon derivatives...

"Among environmental groups, there is, understandably, less focus on the finer points of financial regulation. 'The derivatives side is not something that a person who comes to the table worried about carbon emissions has on their agenda,' says Michael Greenberger, a derivatives expert at the University of Maryland who has also served in the CFTC and the Justice Department. 'Those people—and they're fighting a good battle—opened the door.' "