Mike Tidwell's Climate Chronicles

President Barack Obama may have made history last November, but he seems deaf to history's loudest call right now.

The president clearly believes that health care reform, above all else, will define his early presidency. But even if Mr. Obama scores total success on health care, few future Americans will care or remember as long as the Earth's ailing atmosphere goes untreated.

Climate change, it turns out, is the ultimate public health issue. And yet the House of Representatives passed a mere Band-Aid of a bill last month on global warming.

Why so weak? Because Mr. Obama, with his 63 percent approval rating, was surprisingly AWOL for most the climate debate, essentially telling House leaders to hurry up and pass something - anything - so we can get on to the real issue of health care.

But cheap prescription drugs won't do much good if our cities have filthy drinking water in coming years due to global warming. A "public option" on heath insurance? I'm all for it - but it will mean little if killer heat waves and mega-droughts parch the nation while Florida becomes a chain of malarial islands.

Utility companies and their coal-state apologists in Congress are wrecking America’s last, best chance to solve global warming.

By insisting on free pollution permits, utilities are creating a climate bill that is complicated, unfair and destined to fail in future years. It’s now up to New York Congressman Charles Rangel (see video) and the House Ways and Means Committee to fix the problem.

The much-discussed Waxman-Markey bill on global warming now proposes to give 35 percent of all carbon pollution permits to utilities for free. Another 45 percent will go free-of-charge to other carbon-intensive industries, but utilities are least deserving by far.

Last year, America’s 48 largest utilities earned profits of $28 billion. And last month, in a study requested by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the EPA determined that allowing utilities to pollute for free under a global warming bill would drive up the overall cost of the program and would hurt poor people the most.

But this is about more than social justice and corporate welfare. Free permits weaken the most important tool within the Waxman-Markey bill: the carbon cap.