It seems that Democrats have broken down into two distinct camps when it comes to the Obama Energy Tax legislation being debated in Congress — now put off until September.

There’s the Tom Friedman camp that says, basically, this bill is a giant stinker, but we have to do something!

And then there’s the James Hansen camp that says, this bill is a giant stinker, and it’s worse than doing nothing at all. This quote from Hansen about sums it up:

This requires nothing less than an energy revolution based on efficiency and carbon-free energy sources. Alas, we won’t get there with the Waxman-Markey bill, a monstrous absurdity hatched in Washington after energetic insemination by special interests.
For all its “green” aura, Waxman-Markey locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like “cap-and-trade” scheme. […]
The fact is that the climate course set by Waxman-Markey is a disaster course. Their bill is an astoundingly inefficient way to get a tiny reduction of emissions. It’s less than worthless, because it will delay by at least a decade starting on a path that is fundamentally sound from the standpoints of both economics and climate preservation.