The flawed and weak Senate bill, like most of the Senate's pathetic legislative efforts, deserved to be buried.

Time to go back to the drawing boards on a climate change bill, and this time to heed the following warnings.

I wrote this in FYII recently: "Greed and cowardice killed action on climate change; however, "if anything is deserving of blame, it is the cap and trade strategy itself."

Now EPA employees are raising their voices about the flawed climate bills in Congress.

From the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:

"The major bills before Congress to regulate greenhouse gases to combat global climate change suffer from “multiple unfixable flaws” that undermine their effectiveness, according to a detailed congressional disclosure by two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees, posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). These agency experts’ unofficial protest is also testing new agency guidelines on employee free speech rights following EPA’s order last fall that the two employees remove a YouTube video they had produced on the frailties of cap-and-trade.

"The two EPA employees, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, are enforcement attorneys speaking as private citizens. They contend that the integrity failings of greenhouse gas offsets, the lynchpin for major climate bills before Congress, ensure that such legislation will be an ineffective – and deceptive – waste of funds. Specifically, they argue that:

• The complexity and subjectivity of offsets renders them impossible to certify, regulate or enforce;
• There is no reliable way to distinguish offset projects which will occur because of the offset incentive from those which would have happened anyway;
• In some cases, such as in the context of forestry projects, the offsets will fail to appreciably mitigate demand and the polluting activity (such as logging) will simply shift elsewhere; and
• The offsets will create perverse incentives to keep polluting activities legal so they can keep being sold as offsets.

"Williams and Zabel assert that these offsets, in essence, are a new “creative financial instrument” which carries the same deceptive potential to bankrupt markets as did the creative instruments peddled on Wall Street. The two ask for a congressional probe into the reliability of any offset program before enactment."

In June, 2009, Rachel Morris wrote at Mother Jones about the potential for cap and trade, carbon derivatives to cause another market meltdown.

"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."

"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......"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.

"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."

"Even a well-designed regulatory system may not be able to prevent gamblers from contorting prices and discouraging the investments in green energy that are the entire purpose of cap and trade. After all, one lesson to be drawn from the economic crisis is that complexity is like catnip to the unscrupulous, and the carbon regime that would be created by cap and trade is nothing if not complex.

"Perhaps the biggest uncertainty hinges on how offset derivatives—such as a contract to buy offset credits at a future date for a determined price—will be monitored. This too would be left to the White House task force to figure out. It will be a tough task because the quality of offset projects is notoriously difficult to verify. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) has described them as 'fraught with opportunity for game playing, which will be fully exploited, I'm sure.' "

The economic disaster of the last few years proved that the greedy Wall Street and financial industry's casino players will find a way to cheat and commit fraud to increase wealth for the rich few, relying on their corporatist government marionettes for trillions of taxpayers and borrowed monies for a bailout from the financial meltdown they cause knowing they won't be held accountable for their crimes.