Climate bill shaped by compromise

That strategy yielded a narrow victory in the House on Friday. The question was, did Obama, Waxman and other supporters give away so much in the process that the benefits to the environment ended up being slim to none -- especially since the bill now goes to the even less sympathetic Senate? "There's a point at which you've got to ask yourself, what are we doing here? What's the point?" said Elaine Kamarck of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who was a Clinton administration official and advisor to then-Vice President Gore. So far, most of the major environmental groups are sticking with Obama. Most groups calculated that, in sum, the bill was worth moving, said Emily Figdor, the federal global warming policy director for Environment America. "We think there's a lot of problems in the bill," she said, but "we need to take that first step. We're so long overdue."...Environmentalists watched the deals go down with varying cases of nerves. Greenpeace labeled the final bill "a victory for coal industry lobbyists, oil industry lobbyists, agriculture industry lobbyists, steel and cement industry lobbyists." An Environmental Protection Agency analysis this month suggested the bill would barely make a dent in the nation's oil imports, even though Obama repeatedly promised it would. A study by the environmentalist Union of Concerned Scientists said the renewable electricity standard, watered down by compromise, might spur less wind and solar use than no standard at all...LATimes