Alarmist author Bill McKibben writes in today’s Washington Post: “Forty years in, we’re losing.”

Forty years in, we’re losing.
This weekend, when speakers at Earth Day gatherings across the country hearken back to the first celebration in 1970, they’ll recall great victories: above all, cleaner air and cleaner water for Americans.
But for 20 years now, global warming has been the most important environmental issue — arguably the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And there we can boast an unblemished bipartisan record of accomplishing absolutely nothing.
To mark Earth Day this year, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) were supposed to introduce their long-awaited rewrite of the House’s climate legislation. Now that’s been delayed for at least a few days, which is probably just as well, since as Graham points out, it’s no longer really an environmental bill.
“I’m all for protecting the planet, but this is about energy independence,” Graham said last week. The bill’s emission reductions are weakened by offsets and loopholes — and to win support for even those concessions, it offers the fossil-fuel industries a glittering collection of door prizes. President Obama himself has already offered the first of these bent-knee offerings: a return to the full-on offshore drilling that was one of the targets of the first Earth Day. Now a new generation will have a chance to experience its own Santa Barbara oil spill, with its iconic oil-soaked birds.
Worse, the bill may specifically remove the strongest tool the environmentalists won in the wake of Earth Day 1: the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to use the Clean Air Act to bring the fossil fuel industries to heel. Enforcement may be preempted under the new law. Even the right of states to pioneer new legislation, such as California’s landmark global warming bill, apparently could disappear with the new legislation

The rest here.