George Voinovich.

There's an important story in yesterday's edition of E&E (as always, $ub. req'd) about two alternatives to Lieberman-Warner that have recently been floated in the Senate. One comes from Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and the other -- not so much a bill as a "set of principles" -- from a coalition of the nation's biggest and dirtiest coal companies. Together they serve as an excellent primer on the conservative movement's latest approach to climate change.

What do they want?

1. No mandatory caps or a safety valve. Voinovich's bill ditches cap-and-trade entirely, at least for a three-year evaluation period. He and the coal companies would both institute a "safety valve," which would prevent the price of carbon from exceeding a specific threshold. (Policy-wise, that's about as bad as no cap at all.)
2. Incentives. When conservatives don't like incentives, they call them "pork." When they don't like the recipients of the incentives, they call them "welfare." On global warming, though, fossil interests see an historical chance to attach themselves more securely to the public teat, so "incentives" it is. Voinovich's bill is called the "Incentives-Based Alternative Climate Policy Act," and it amounts to a laundry list of handouts and tax breaks for individual industries and technologies (think nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration). This is "green conservatism" of the Gingrich variety: all carrots, no sticks.
3. Preemption of state efforts. Many state governments are not as sclerotic, polarized, and compromised as the feds. They present the real danger to Republicans' corporate sponsors. Remember states as "laboratories of democracy"? That's a notion conservative federalists love when they aren't in power. In power, they need control consolidated at the federal level, so fossil interests can do more targeted lobbying. If passed this would, at a stroke, eliminate the majority of good climate policy that's been passed in the U.S., in deference to much weaker policy.
4. Inaction pending Chinese and Indian policies. Conservatives claim that carbon caps in the U.S. will drive jobs and capital to developing countries unless those countries also implement caps. The practical effect of this would be to deprive us of our one truly powerful means of persuading China and India to act.

What's wrong with it?