Obama's pledge - a future with more renewable energy sources and less pollution - is not the Waxman-Markey Bill. Known as the U.S. House cap-and-trade bill, this is a botched 1,000-page effort to form energy policy by using a mitigating process to drive a square peg in a round hole. President Obama's administration promised us that science, engineering, a level playing field and transparency would be the basis of transformation of our energy policy and potential independence from foreign oil imports.
The Waxman-Markey Bill is a backroom deal made by the coal and utilities industries to give one energy source - coal - a free 20-year pass from carbon abatement. All cleaner energy sources will be capped and taxed. This will give natural gas a price disadvantage before the horse is out of the barn. We obviously are dealing our carbon chits before the bill is even law.
Obama's long term path is to move this country from carbon-based fuels to more renewable means of creating energy in all sectors of our economy - transportation, industrial, electrical generation, and home usage. However, the Waxman-Markey Bill, written by lawyers without science, is not the way, nor the process. Scientists and engineers would require us to examine our energy sources, model what best is used in which energy sector and put a plan in place that moves us through an energy transformation.
Only then would the lawyers be brought in to write the law. Cap and trade is a most effective mechanism to move us from poisoning ourselves from greenhouse gases. However, misusing this mechanism by applying it to every fuel except coal - the dirtiest polluter - is as radically wrong as outsourcing our energy policy to a Congress run by lawyers and lobbyists. Tell your congressman and President Obama that we want our government to develop energy policy the right way, through unbiased science.
George L. Richardson, Durango
