current climate change bill "worse than nothing"

Very disturbing news out of the House (via dKos):

President Obama says the greenhouse-gas emissions cutting Waxman-Markey bill before Congress will "spark a clean energy transformation." But a new analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency casts doubt on that claim. According to page 27 of the analysis, published Tuesday, the legislation, sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, and Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, would actually result in slightly less new renewable energy generation capacity by the year 2020 than if the U.S. continued on a business-as-usual path with no emissions caps.

When President Obama won, I predicted that he'd be lukewarm on progressive health care and foreign policy, but that he'd be at least excellent on climate change and renewable energy. The appointment of Nobel Physicist Dr. Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy seemed to confirm my optimism on this particular issue. But with the White House notably absent in pushing for climate change legislation that would actually stop climate change, is it possible that even on this path, both hope and change are at risk of falling short?

Legislation that takes us backwards in developing renewable energy over the next 10 years is not good legislation. Legislation that subsidizing the coal industry is not good legislation. We were promised that climate change legislation would be based on science, not politics. The politics were supposed to take care of themselves on the Biggest Issue Facing The Planet. But instead, we get politics, industry give-aways, and a lot of pretty words.

The bill also won’t sufficiently drive up the price of dirty fossil fuels to encourage a big switch to renewables, the analysis says. (Here’s how that sounds in untranslated EPA-speak: “Allowances prices are not high enough to drive a significant amount of additional low or zero-carbon energy . . . in the shorter term.”)

This isn’t quite consistent with White House talking points. On Tuesday, President Obama told reporters that the legislation before the House of Representatives “will create a set of incentives that will spur the development of new sources of energy, including wind, solar, and geothermal power,” incentives that “will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy.”

Green advocates are split on this bill, known as Waxman-Markey: Greenpeace is against it, and the Sierra Club takes the something is better than nothing approach. In this case, however, something may actually be worse than nothing.