The House’s climate bill is a masterpiece of obfuscation. Buried somewhere in the 1,200 pages of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (also known as Waxman-Markey, after its sponsors) is a sensible cap-and-trade plan to curb emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). But it is so weighed down with giveaways, loopholes and needless complexity that many environmentalists hesitate to support it.

The bill calls for the government to issue a fixed number of permits to emit CO2 each year, which firms must buy before releasing the stuff into the atmosphere. The permits will be tradable, and their number will gradually decline. The goal is to use them to reduce America’s CO2 emissions by 17 per cent (from the level in 2005) by 2020 and by 83 per cent by 2050.

The outline is fine, but the details are not. Mr Obama wanted the permits to be auctioned, which would raise large sums (which were meant to help finance health-care reform) and allocate the permits to the firms that value them most. Instead, the House decided to give away 85 per cent of them free to politically-favoured entities.

Some say this was necessary — the bill only passed by a whisker, 219 votes to 212, and would probably have failed without the giveaways. The mid-term elections, after all, are only 16 months away. A poll for The Economist by YouGov (see chart) found that 62 per cent of Americans want carbon curbs, but only 30 per cent would pay even $175 a year for them, and only 7 per cent would pay $770. Republicans snarl that Democrats want to tax Americans every time they flip a light switch. Free permits for electric utilities will help keep electricity prices low. But it will also undermine the object of the bill. If power is cheap, people will use more of it, and emit more carbon.

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