So, EPA chief Lisa Jackson testified yesterday to kick off four days of hysteria that will culiminate, naturally, with the Goracle on Friday (I’d leave the snow tires on until Saturday just to be safe).

She was forced to admit that she hadn’t read the bill she was testifying about.

Later, she somehow managed to claim that the same bill would be vastly better than the disastrous “endangerment” rulemaking she had just threatened us all with, obviously to blackmail the weak-kneed into just suing for carbon peace (or at least, what they think will be peace).

Having read much of the bill that she hasn’t, I can attest that the above assessment confirms her prior answer.

You can’t read Waxman-Markey and conclude it’s somehow an acceptably managed chaos compared to “endangerment” regulation; all a regulated party would accomplish by agreeing to legislation instead would be to relieve both the administration and Team Reid-Pelosi them of the political burden that’s kept them from legislating, that prompted the mad scramble last year to get Bush to take ownership of this mess, and that would set off round after round of infighting and threats.

It is worthwhile to bear in mind as this circus proceeds that the parade of horribles Waxman-Markey put in their bill — and all that they refused to put in it, like preemption of ESA and NEPA, of states doing anything other than cap-and-trade, of numerous other CAA provisions kicking in . . . a breathtaking list of threats that would persist unmolested after passage of this vehicle for supposedly providing regulatory “certainty” — make the thing completely unfixable.

This leaves industry better off taking its chances:

  1. in court litigating the EPA rule, which is entirely grounded in unverifiable computer models and non-peer reviewed documents like IPCC AR4 (grounded in the same models, textbook arbitrariness); and
  2. with the likelihood that both the admininstration and congressional Democrats will continue “blinking” in their intra-family spat, one that we have no business getting in the middle of since they’re fighting over which of them should get the chair for taking the axe to us.

We’ve seen two major overreaches by the Democrats — the budget’s cap-and-trade revenue stunt, and now this bill. The administration has painted itself into a corner with the “endangerment” threat: “We’ll do something really disastrous to the economy unless you agree to do it first!” Now, either acting means they both lose — mutually assured political destruction, which is why they are desperately seeking to have their bacon saved.

I fail to see the threat. Let’s hope the targeted industries and congressional Republicans continue to see things similarly.