So it passed and we’re simulaneously relieved and happy and disappointed and appalled. We’ve got more than nothing and less than enough. We got a dollar instead of the 20 we need to pay the bail.

I think Joseph Romm has it just about right.

While the bill’s targets may seem dramatic, they are in fact less than what the science tells us is required to avoid catastrophic warming. The 2020 target in particular is far too weak and quite easy and cheap for the country to meet with efficiency, conservation, renewables and fuel-switching from coal to natural gas. The definitive analysis of ACES by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the cost to the average American household in 2020 of ACES would be about a postage stamp a day — despite repeated claims of conservatives using dubious industry-funded research that this bill would devastate the economy.

The GOP arguments against the bill, which included calling global warming a hoax, were so lame that one Democrat, Lloyd Doggett of Texas, who had announced his intention to vote against the bill because it was too weak, switched to supporting the bill after “listening to the flat earth society and the climate deniers, and some of the most inane arguments I have heard against refusing to act on this vital national security challenge.”

It is worth noting that the original Clean Air Act — first passed in 1963 — also didn’t do enough and was subsequently strengthened many times. Similarly, the 1987 Montréal protocol would not have stopped concentrations of ozone depleting substances from rising and would not have saved the ozone layer. But it began a process and established a framework that, like the CAA, could be strengthened over time as the science warranted. The painful reality of climate change is going to become increasingly obvious in the coming years, and strengthening is inevitable.

The bill’s targets are also less than what the Europeans would like to commit to and what developing countries have been demanding of us. Still, the bill is likely to be strong enough — if the Senate also passes it — to bring about a successful international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Equally important, the bill should be strong enough to reach a bilateral deal with China — ideally before Copenhagen (and even more ideally, before the Senate vote).

Politically, the vote Friday is a stunning achievement, a rare alignment of the stars. This is the first climate bill either house of Congress has passed. This country hasn’t enacted a major economy-wide clean air bill since the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. And that bill was focused on direct, obvious, short-term health threats to Americans, quite unlike global warming. Also that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when the entire Republican establishment wasn’t dead set against any government led effort to reduce pollution.

We’re in the lifeboat we all know about, drifting further from safety. All we can do at the moment is get a thin string tossed to land and secured to a big tree. It’s no where near strong enough to pull us in and if the current or wind picks up in just a few hours the string will snap and we’ll be lost. It is strong enough to pull a slightly larger line aboard, and with that a slightly larger one until finally the hawser that will keep us from falling off the edge of the word is in our hands. The question is: can we keep hauling faster than calamity overtakes us?

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