It’s been a busy political tricks week where climate change was, in theory, a main topic in the US Congress. Unfortunately nasty Republican partisan politics emerged the winner during this lamest of lame duck session.

As oil topped $137 a barrel and $4 at the pump President George Bush began his farewell EU trip today with an exhortation that if they were to allow his oil buddies to drill in the Alaskan National Wilderness Reserve (never called that, instead goes by the code name ANWAR) and along the Continental Shelf where there is a huge environmental and fishing risk.

House Republicans realise they are in big trouble for this coming fall and so they are behaving like spoiled children threatening to take the game ball and go home if they don’t get their way. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky used a little known rule to force the reading of an entire 500 page amendment to a climate change bill to “punish Senate Democrats” for not swiftly approving GOP backed judicial nominations.

You read that correctly.

Democrats either blinked when they realised they could not stop a Senate Republican filibuster so folks could go home for the weekend or have a longer range view in mind. Democratic leaders fell 12 votes short of the 60 needed so Majority Leader Harry Reid must decide whether to bin the bill and postpone climate change to next year with a new Congress and new president. It certainly is another arrow in the quiver with which to bludgeon Republicans this fall.

Republicans blocked efforts to bring the global warming bill to a final vote after a bitter debate over the economic cost and Republican claims it would push gasoline prices even higher.

The proposed bill wanted to cap carbon dioxide from power plants and factories with a target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 71 percent by mid-century. Republicans said it amounted to a big tax increase and would lead to higher energy prices.

McConnell argued the bill’s “cap and trade” approach to cutting carbon dioxide emissions would unleash “the largest restructuring of the American economy since the New Deal.”

One GOP senator after the other argued that people would be paying more for gasoline, words meant to hit home to motorists angry over having to pay $60 to $100 to fill their gas tanks.
“There is no increase in gas prices,” Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. insisted.

The measure would require power plants, refineries and factories to reduce their carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 19 percent by 2020 and by 71 percent by 2050. Along with capping emissions, it would allow companies to buy pollution allowances to meet the cap and ease the transition from fossil fuel.

The legislation was in trouble from the start. Republicans are hoping that it, like so many other issues, will just go away.