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Here's a timely headline, from today's ClimateWire (subscription required), what with the House and Senate voting to block EPA's backdoor attempt at imposing the cap-and-trade legislation rejected by Senate Democrats last year:

Tea party, wonky White House messaging sunk cap and trade -- Van Jones

Yeah. Excuses are like certain body parts...quite often they don't really work. Though he did get the first part right. But let us trundle once more into those wonky weeds, reminding us what helped get those tea partiers going:

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it - whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers."

BOR-ING! How about some straight talk we can all understand?

"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.

That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches. [NB: YES! It's criminal we haven't done that yet!]

The only thing I've said with respect to coal, I haven't been some coal booster. What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as a ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can.

It's just that it will bankrupt them."

Oddly, that latter part in particular wasn't viewed by everyone as a legitimate use of the state.

I suppose Jones's excuse beats the oh-so-common strains of I just tried to do too much. It confused people. But not by much. Maybe it was that bouncing around from 'catastrophic man-made global warming!', to 'jobs!', to 'energy of the future'. None of which do very well upon scrutiny, either. When the reason for doing something is constantly changing -- and even then with none of the reasons being credible -- you know there's probably not a good reason for doing it.

Now that a strong majority of both houses of Congress are about to vote to block EPA's effort (though the Senate Dems will split among three ruses offering nothing more than political cover allowing them to say they voted to block the power grab, without actually doing so in the end), what's the next excuse for the agenda's unpopularity? Not enough Van Jones?