Deciding right now

"The incoming administration is deciding right now how ambitious they can be on climate and energy policy."

That's the first line in a mass Email sent out by Repower America (a good organization that you should sign up as a supporter of if you're in the U.S.). That's pretty much what I'd expected. Somewhere in the background some transition team plus Congressional staff is putting together what may become policy for the next few years. It's probably going to be cap-and-trade, since that's what Obama has said. That's highly preferable to nothing, but it's not really an infrastructure-replacement plan (like Repower America's). The acid rain program has cap-and-trade, and they have for their latest year of data 40% more pollution permits than they have pollution. In other words, the program is currently doing nothing -- people put better scrubbers on their electric power plants because of Clean Air Act requirements, easily reduced their pollution to below what the cap requires, and the neoliberal trading scheme is just sitting there, giving people a nice glow of faith in the market or something.

I'll be posting more on eGRID soon. Going through a database is a lot like work.