Liberal Talk Radio

After a whole lot of wrangling between Nancy Pelosi, John Dingell, and others, the House has passed an energy bill. It sounds good to me, but I’ll defer to Dave Roberts at Grist, who follows these things much more closely and gives it a qualified thumbs-up.

There are some really annoying pieces to the bill, such as a provision that allows automakers to continue to produce gas-guzzlers as long as they run on [river-polluting, prairie-destroying] Iowa corn. But on the plus side that provision is set to go away by 2020. Of course, 2020 is a presidential election year — so will it really go away, once all those ethanol plants are up and running and GM has re-tooled its lines to produce nothing but E85 Chey Tahoes?

Still, navigating a monster bill like this through congress is no easy task, and we’ve come a long way from Dick Cheney’s infamous energy task force of a few years back. The trend lines are all in the right direction.