Quote of the Day, June 1st, 2009

Importantly [the Waxman-Markey ACES climate bill] falls a long way short of Obama's election promises on most scores: the [renewable electricity standard], CO2 emission reductions and allocations. The expected price of carbon will therefore in all likelihood be too low (USD13-17) to really drive the change that's needed, resulting in no clean energy fund versus the USD150bn fund that we would have expected to have been raised from 100% auctioning of permits. This in our opinion makes the clean energy mandates ever more important. This is an area which, despite some progress, remains weaker than initial expectations. ...

[M]ore importantly, if the best that the US can bring to the negotiating table ahead of the talks on a new post-Kyoto emissions treaty, is a 3% cut in emissions versus 1990 baseline, then this may not be enough to tickle out an agreement from China and India [at the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, December 2009.]

-Global investment firm HSBC on the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (via WSJ.com's Environmental Capital blog). We note that HSBC's conclusions about the Waxman-Markey climate bill strongly echo Breakthrough's own (see links in quote above).

See Breakthrough's original analysis of the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill here.