"The one approach I will not accept," said Barack Obama in June of Congress's faltering efforts to fight global warming, "is inaction." Instead, the president instructed America's lawmakers to "seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels". Yet the energy bill unveiled by the Democratic majority in the Senate on July 27th does nothing of the sort. Harry Reid, the majority leader, having earlier abandoned as hopeless an effort to limit America's emissions of greenhouse gases through a "cap-and-trade" scheme, is proposing nothing more substantial than subsidies for home insulation and trucks that run on natural gas. (The bill also removes the $75m cap on oil firms' liability for damage from offshore spills, in response to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.)
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