What was the first rule of Fight Club?  Don’t talk about it. What was the first rule of Climate Change legislation?  Don’t call it that.  Call it “energy legislation”.

This is what Sen. Harry Reid plans to do, except now, at this point, that’s all it will be.  It is not nearly enough to fight climate change.

Our hopes for a climate change bill in 2010 are gone.  The situation was the same last year, and it’s incredible that we are saying the same thing this year, considering the mine disasters and the massive oil spill off our coast.  It’s a situation that is nearly beyond belief.

There are a lot of reasons why this happened.  According to Senator Bernie Sanders, who appears every Friday on the Thom Hartmann radio show, in large part the blame lies with the lack of will to get it done in the Congress.  From DemocracyNow last Friday, the blame lies with President Obama, who did not fight for a climate bill, and broke another campaign promise:  that climate and energy would be addressed with common sense and science.  Didn’t happen.  Instead, politics controlled how the various climate and energy bills were dealt with from start to finish.  After the Shirley Sherrod debacle, I think I know why — this White House reacts less to science and more to the”gotcha” right-wing media.  If you have a government who reacts more to the media than the people,  you won’t get things done that need to be done.  The media is nearly brain-dead on climate change.  They choose to create time-wasting debates and other crises to mislead the public and prolong problems, instead of doing journalism.

As Senate Dems Give Up on Climate Bill, What Does the Future Hold for US Climate and Energy Policy?

Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! interviewed environmental leaders and writers last Friday in her attempts to find out what the BEG (Big Environmental Groups) are going to do now that climate change legislation is dead in the U.S.  Here is part of the interview.  You can read and listen to the entire segment here. Read on for how Climate Change is like Fight Club.

AMY GOODMAN: Kate Sheppard, let’s begin with you. You’ve been writing in Mother Jones magazine about energy legislation. What do you make of this—well, of this energy bill that has little or no teeth?

KATE SHEPPARD: It has almost absolutely no teeth. This is basically the least ambitious plan they could come up with. It not only—it has very valuable things for oil spill response; it’s probably going to focus on reforming some important regulatory agencies and raising the liability cap so that BP pays what it owes in the Gulf. But going beyond that, it doesn’t really do much of anything. Ideally, this is going to be a bill that addressed carbon pollution, is going to be a bill that actually started phasing in clean energy, but it doesn’t do [...]