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The U.S. will agree to carbon cuts during the upcoming Copenhagen summit, but will they be enough? Concern is growing over the amount of carbon that the U.S. will agree to limit in the coming years. This concern is not a one-way battle; US law makers appear weary over too high of expectations in carbon reductions while Europe and other key climate change combaters seem skeptical of the US’s non-committal stance to be an equal partner in the fight against global warming. It is widely agreed that climate change is a global issue which transcends national boundaries and dismisses domestic political debacles regardless of their seemingly weighty importance on a sustained economy. Nevertheless, limits are in the foreseeable future for the US, albeit likely lower than the limits proposed in Europe.   Just how carbon reduction targets will affect business-as-usual is somewhat unclear, but, at least in the short-run, energy efficiency provides a mechanism to improve the bottom-line while reducing the environm ...

The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act of 2009, or Waxman-Markey, an economy-wide reassessment of energy and climate policy, passed the House in June 2009. A Senate version co-sponsored by Barbara Boxer (D–CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) was finally released in late September after months of planning, but in recent weeks, little traction has been made in moving the process forward. And the Kerry-Boxer bill lacks a cap-and-trade system, one of the hallmarks of the ACES Act and an important piece of the climate change puzzle for President Obama. Any legislation that does make it out of Senate committee is likely to face a much tougher road to passage in the Senate than ACES had in the House, and further delays are certainly not out of the question. The earliest that the Senate might pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation, if at all, is early 2010. Discussion often centers on how new legislation changes things, whether for the better or the worse. People ask questions such as, “What if Congress ...