Kevin Vranes has a useful summary:

That this package could not pass easily, with the contentious issues worked out before markup, is certainly a sign that meaningful climate mitigation legislation is going to be bloody and a long time in coming. It also illustrates some of the messy compromises that will come with climate legislation, some of which may actually increase carbon emissions. Sure, CO2 could be captured at the coal-to-synfuel plant, thus preventing the extra CO2 that coal synfuel production emits from hitting the atmosphere and leaving a zero-sum between burning synfuel or gasoline. But with a liquefied coal mandate sitting alongside a biofuels mandate who actually thinks that in the end a requirement for capturing CO2 at the coal synfuels production site is going to happen? With all the people who want to make it and want to use it (i.e. the military), the economic pressures on not driving up the price by requiring carbon CSS [Carbon Sequestration and Storage] are already clear.

This is a useful example of why the supposed alliance of global warming alarmists and energy independence advocates will always break down at the legislative stage. While both might want to reduce reliance on foreign oil, the solutions are going to be very different. As the energy independence advocates do not care about emissions, their solutions might be completely unacceptable to the alarmists. And vice versa. As always, the pesky detail about the cry “Do something!” is what exactly that something is.