House punches holes in greenhouse bill

Last week, when the House of Representatives passed landmark legislation designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it was a strong and overdue first step toward doing something about global warming. The bill includes a provision to cap carbon dioxide emissions and allow industrial and energy companies to trade credits for the right to pollute.

Here's the problem, though: In an effort to leverage market forces to clean up the environment, the bill writers deleted a provision that would have eventually allowed the credits to be bought and sold, with the revenues financing a tax cut for the middle class.

When a similar cap-and-trade mechanism was proposed by then-Sen. John Warner a few years ago, how much the credits would cost industry was a similar sticking point. When Congress decided last week to give away the credits, though, it undermined the market mechanism for reducing CO2 emissions, not to mention the bill itself.

Such all-or-nothing lawmaking was also on display when the House killed an innovative proposal by Rep. Randy Forbes that would have used huge prizes to encourage the best ideas to move America away from foreign oil.

The proposal - modeled on the Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb that ended World War II - would award prizes ranging from $250 million for the first solar plant capable of generating 300 megawatts of cheap power to $10 billion for a functioning fusion reactor.

"It sends a shot across the bow of every country in the world that we're not going to surrender and we're going to compete," the Chesapeake lawmaker said during the debate.

"It invigorates a whole generation of Americans to go into math and science and be a part of an energy solution for years to come."

We endorsed Forbes' measure a year ago, when it first received attention in Washington.

Last week, Republicans offered it as a substitute for the larger energy bill, which was primarily designed to reduce greenhouse gases rather than encourage innovation. As a wholesale replacement for that bill, Forbes' measure would have been inadequate.

But as a means of sparking a meaningful push in the private sector toward new technologies, Forbes' measure has no equal in Washington's cautious imagination. Unfortunately, the legislation was caught in the partisan rancor that seems to rule Capitol Hill.

"This amounts to a grant program and competition with prizes for good ideas," said Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the sponsors of the energy bill. "... Why didn't they give out prizes for the last eight years?"

That question, which both belittles Forbes' prior good-faith efforts and somehow seeks to blame his bill's failure on the previous occupant of the White House, typifies the state of debate in Congress.

It's a place where the quality of an idea doesn't matter as much as the politics of its author, a sickening litmus test that guarantees results that fall well short of what's best for the nation.