Cap and trade mercy killing?

After weeks in the legislative mire, the Waxman-Markey carbon cap-and-trade plan got jolted back to life by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Today, President Obama spoke of a “clean energy transformation” as he brushed by the subject in between Iran and health care, and spoke almost optimistically about the prospects of a bill widely believed to either be dead or only able to pass in such a compromised form that it would achieve little of what the global warmists want.

The erratic course that legislation establishing transferable global warming fees has taken shows how hard it is to get a coalition together for a future problem that many people think is overstated.

While her admirers say that the reason the speaker kicked the bill out of committee for a sudden vote by the full House is because she believes she can get the job done, it’s at least as likely that Pelosi knows she can’t.

Leaving the bill in the hands of skeptical and regionally motivated committee chairmen and subject to special interest lobbying, Pelosi was losing control of the bill. Worse than having the Waxman-Markey bill defeated would be having it pass in some form that is really more of a subsidy to carbon emitters than a crackdown.

Lobbyists were helping to create a Frankenstein bill that might have eventually passed but been an obstacle to the kind of hard-line approach that Pelosi and others would like.

By bringing the bill out for a vote this week, it will almost certainly fail in the House. If, by some miracle it does get out of the House, the Senate would smite any bill that amounts to a tax or hurts manufacturing states.

Especially if they were able to drag the bill into 2010, opponents could even force a painful election-year vote that could damage some vulnerable Democrats.

To understand why the bill will likely fail, look at the chart Colin Clarke at the Atlantic put together on who will pay the most for cap and trade — the burden falls squarely on middle class voters just as folks are beginning to feel deepening doubts about the long-term economic impact of the big changes sought by the new Democratic mega majority.

Rather than being a sign of new life, Pelosi’s decision to push the cap and trade bill out of committee may be something of an assisted suicide.