While I know the /. community hates anything that will make their power hungry habits more expensive, but quite frankly this sort of bill is great news for us. The United States has done a horrible job at implementing sane growth policies. We've out sprawled, out consumed, while neglecting design lessons learned during times when energy was more expensive. During the middle ages, cities were dense because energy was expensive. Development took place along natural trade routes, such as water ways, because it was too expensive energy wise to move things over land. Society developed in conjunction with energy that could largely be sustained, and when it didn't and over farmed, deforested, and depleted their water supply society collapsed.
For the past 100 years or so, we've been living high on the hog from new sources of energy we learned to exploit, with very little view to the long term consequences. Since we have the ability to anticipate problems, it falls to those social institutions best suited to direct the course of our society's development to prevent its eventual collapse. By paying a higher price now, we can defer the collapse of our civilization by several centuries. For those of us with kids, ardent transhumanists, or just a little more altruistic than selfish, this is a desirable goal.
Does this mean that society will have to change? Yes, but society has been changing faster and faster as technology advances. So rather than burning ancient marine life, we'll charge our hyper-sexy full electric cars with waste heat from the sun. Booo hooo. Will suburban shopping malls disappear? One can only hope!
The society of our future looks much more like the society of the 18th century, only with clean water, medicine, computers, plenty of food, and increasingly high levels of affluence globally. Most of us will return to living in small towns and villages, and the mega-cities will grow upwards (like Edinburgh did) not outwards. Most of us will live in walking distance of everything we need, including parks, wildlife, and recreation areas.
Also with having to make everything energy efficient, changes in technology mean huge work for all of us engineers. Huge money making opportunites will arise when the Feds start taxing waste. Construction will boom, durable goods spending will flourish, and any geek with half a brain will figure out how to "green" some old clunky tech and make a buck.
So quit your bitching... our green future is bright and profitable. Maybe with the higher energy costs, our server farms won't require air-conditioning to operate, and could just be shoved in a closet. Higher commuting costs mean telecommuting becomes even more attractive. As someone who has telecommuted for the past 6 years, let me tell you that's a very good thing.