When people bring up new climate change legislation today they aren't seeking to reinvent the Clean Air Act or implement the Kyoto Protocol.  Rather, the goal is to block responses to climate change. A case in point is a bill that passed the House of Representatives on a voice vote yesterday, H.R. 2594, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011. As its name implies, H.R. 2594 is not about a climate change fix. Instead it is all about getting in the way of a fix. Its operative provision provides:  "The Secretary of Transportation shall prohibit an operator o...

Notwithstanding the bad press garnered recently by some clean technology business models that relied on government largesse (most notably the failure of Solyndra LLC and its accompanying half-billion dollar government guarantee), government funding of "green" is not going away.  Last Thursday, ECOtality announced the award of a five year $26.4 million contract with the Department of Energy to continue to test and evaluate advanced vehicles.   As stated by ECOtality, "The primary goal of the Advanced Vehicle Testing and Evaluation project is to provide key data for technolo...