August update (and no meeting this week)

Hey everyone: Sorry for the long silence since my last email, but things are moving rather slowly on the climate front because of health care and the Congressional recess coming up soon &etc. So:

1) Let's not meet this week, but let's pencil in our next meeting downtown on Th Sept 3 from 12-1pm. Agenda TBD, but one obvious centerpiece is how to move forward through the molasses. If anybody has thoughts they'd like to email out to the group please send them my way and I'll forward them along.

2) I'm hearing a lot about the Waxman-Markey bill getting pushed even further down the road, e.g., an email from Environmental Defense Fund says "the hoped-for September debate on climate will have to wait until at least October – and perhaps November or even December" and Joseph Romm of ClimateProgress says the Senate vote won't be "until at least November" and "I’d say it’s at least 50-50 the vote isn’t until December or January". (Recall that the international negotiations in Copenhagen are the first two weeks of December.) If the Washington State legislature is thinking of taking up WCI again in their next session, the timing will be tricky, e.g., because the environmental community will be putting together their top priorities in the fall. Depending on how the cards fall there may well be an opening for our proposal. (Yes it may seem that I'm grasping at straws, but so be it :)

3) Just a heads-up that I'm working on an op-ed or blog piece about my own thoughts on Waxman-Markey. If anybody objects because that would interfere with the neutrality of the CarbonWA group, please email me to let me know. On the other side of the spectrum, if any of you want to share your own opinions about Waxman-Markey with me and/or the rest of the group, that would be interesting too, so send them my way. (Please be clear about whether your thoughts are for public consumption &etc.)