Before president-elect Obama's cabinet is named -- even before we know who the next Senators from Minnesota or Georgia will be -- jockeying for position on 2009 climate legislation is well underway on Capitol Hill.   Detailed intellectual cases and functioning coalitions are getting built now, not just for the idea that we need robust climate legislation fast - that's already widely accepted and anticipated in Washington - but for which specific mechanisms will deliver the biggest, fastest impact on carbon emissions and the economy. 

Significantly, these discussions aren't all taking place behind closed doors, but in full public view, for example at a public Hill briefing December 9 with carbon tax supporters like NASA scientist James Hansen, economists Gilbert Metcalf and Robert Shapiro, Canadian public affairs expert James Hoggan, and Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn., 1st district), who has just been elected chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and who introduced an early piece of carbon tax legislation into the House.  The public can attend, along with Congressional members and staff -- details here.

If introducing a new tax on carbon seems like a quixotic political battle in a time of historic economic and fiscal crisis, then you're out of touch.  The economic crisis has in fact given it a big boost, and in this crisis-ridden political environment, the carbon tax is an increasingly formidable competitor to cap-and-trade schemes.

The latter work by creating trillions of dollars' worth of complex, tradeable instruments, and public faith in market gurus to make such trading efficient, or in government agencies to regulate them, is at an all-time low. 

Critics point out lots of places to hide in the cumbersome trading scheme, witness 800-pages of special interest potlatches in the DOA Warner Lieberman bill, whereas a carbon tax is as inexorable as...taxes. 

Crisis-driven volatility in oil prices has proven what advocates of gasoline taxes and energy taxes have said all along:  price spikes may come and go, but if we don't somehow tax wasteful use of carbon fuels, the highs will just put windfalls in the pockets of oil producers and do nothing for American interests, either for energy independence or for getting control of our emissions.   A carbon tax would put an effective floor under the price of gas, help smooth volatility, cut into the windfall profits of producers during price spikes, and as prices fall off the highs, keep oil consumers from going, as president-elect Obama recently said, from shock back into trance.

Perhaps most appealing of all amid the economic crisis is the fact that a carbon tax could be kept revenue-neutral.  That would allow us to pay as we go to curb emissions; and wouldn't entail any huge government outlays or bureaucracies to get addicted to the revenue.  Along with the increase in energy prices, carbon tax revenues would be big, but the money would be given right back to taxpayers, whether in the form of direct payments like Alaskans get for oil production, or in the form of a progressive tax cuts like cutting or eliminating payroll taxes, as progressives like Al Gore and even conservatives like T. Boone Pickens have proposed. 

Payroll taxes are the biggest, most regressive taxes 80% of Americans pay, and a big drag on employment since they artificially raise hiring costs.  Cutting them would both put money back into the pockets of middle-class and working-class families, and take the self-imposed brakes off job creation. 

If you're President-elect Obama and you've promised to create 2.5 million jobs by 2011, and to lower taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year, while finding the means for a meaningful economic stimulus and major reductions in carbon emissions, that has got to sound good. 

If you're a concerned citizen who has been waiting for years for the political static to clear, and some real, productive grappling with meaningful climate legislation to begin, this is your moment.  You can weigh in, sign petitions, write letters to Congress, attend that Hill briefing, and generally be part of substantive, small-d democratic debate about serious climate legislation at the Price Carbon Campaign. 

Dan Rosenblum is an expert on regulatory law and policy with extensive experience as both a regulator and as an advocate. He co-founded the Carbon Tax Center and is also a Senior Attorney at the Pace Energy and Climate Center. He has over fifteen years of experience as an energy and environmental attorney advocating for increased energy efficiency and renewable energy to reduce the environmental footprint of the energy industry. He also has over sixteen years of energy and telecommunications regulatory experience, as a member of the Illinois Commerce Commission, senior staff at the New York Public Service Commission, and attorney for the City of New York, State of New York and low-income consumers in Chicago.

It's a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it's through, and it will fail in the end.

The reason is before our eyes. This bloated megacorporation is being run by idiots.

For years, as it became evident to everyone that oil prices were going to soar because demand has been exceeding both production and supply and will continue to do so, it has been obvious that to succeed, a car company had to offer well-made cars that could demonstrate high gas mileage. GM, perhaps more than any other company, ignored that reality and has been paying the price, watching its share of the car market wither.

Now the company, worth about what Starbucks used to be worth, its stock now down to where it was in the depths of the Great Depression, has bet the farm on a new car, the Volt, which it promises will, two years from now, be able to go all of 40 miles purely on electric power. It will have a motor too, and not a small one, but rather one the size of what you get in a typical conventional Honda Civic-1.4 ltr. That motor wouldn't drive the car; rather it would keep charging the Volt's huge lithium-ion battery so the car could keep going for a few hundred miles.

Wow.

The management wizards at GM obviously don't do much driving. If they did, and found themselves in typical commuter traffic, they'd see that maybe 90% of the cars, or more, have only one person in them. Occasionally, they'd see a passenger. On a typical 45-minute trip from the burbs into Philadelphia at rush hour, I can count the number of cars I see with three or more people in them on my fingers.

So why is GM making the Volt as a full-sized four or five-passenger car? That's not where the market for an electric car is. What is needed is a two-seater little car.

Because GM is trying to make an electric family car, they've made something so big that, if they are lucky, they'll be able to get it to 40 miles on electric drive only, but at a cost in excess of $40,000 and perhaps much higher, which will put it out of almost everyone's reach. The car is destined to be a bust.

And yet, because President-elect Obama will want to win Michigan next election, and because Congressional Democrats don't want to be seen as ignoring the fate of GM's workers, GM will be bailed out and the Volt will be funded right through to its introduction and subsequent disaster in the market.

I'm not opposed to the idea of government support of industry, but that support has to involve government input or even control over decision-making.

Maybe GM wouldn't make much profit on a little electric commuter car, but a little two-seater electric commuter car would have a huge impact on reducing the output of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, particularly if efforts were made to increase solar and wind-generated electricity. A small electric commuter car would also massively reduce the amount of oil the US imports, making a major contribution to reducing the nation's trade deficit. Those are results that justify a bailout.

Making an overpriced electric family car is not.

At this point, since the Democrats in Congress and the White House are congenitally incapable of imagining a state-owned or partially state-owned enterprise, it would be better to just let GM go under, and maybe Ford too, if it comes to that (another stupid company). The pieces could be sold off, and allowed to sink and swim on their own. Maybe one of those smaller, more entrepreneurial fragments would see the wisdom of developing what the public really needs.

The truth is that the entrepreneurs over at Tesla, a star-up in California, have already made that car-a high-performance two-seater commuter car that can go 200 miles on a charge and that doesn't need an auxiliary engine. Their problem is that small size and too little capital have forced them to pimp it up into a high-priced luxury show-off item for rich people costing $100,000. If they were to team up with a GM spin-off-say Saturn-they could make a stripped-down version of that baby and crank out 100,000 of them to start at a price ordinary people could afford.

Meanwhile, regarding those poor autoworkers, they have a legitimate complaint. While Republicans like to blame the auto industry's problems on them, saying they have demanded too much pay, and too much in healthcare benefits, it's not their fault that GM and Ford executives have been stupid and greedy and short-sighted (besides, the high wages and benefits that the United Auto Workers won over decades of bitter struggle helped to set standards that raised the wages of all workers across the nation). But let's do the math. There are about 125,000 unionized hourly workers at the two companies. For a lousy $8.7 billion, every one of those people could receive a $70,000 buyout from Congress. Double that if you want to give them two years to adjust and find new work at an electric car plant or something else. That would cost $17 billion, or less than half of what the doomed bailout of GM is going to end up costing.

Optimism is fueled by expectation that decisions will be guided by reason and evidence, not ideology. The danger is that special interests will dilute and torque government policies, causing the climate to pass tipping points, with grave consequences for all life on the planet.

The President-elect himself needs to be well-informed about the climate problem and its relation to energy needs and economic policies. He cannot rely on political systems to bring him solutions - the political systems provide too many opportunities for special interests.

Here is a message I think should be delivered to Barack Obama. This is a first draft. Criticisms would be much appreciated.

Climate threat. The world's temperature has increased about 1°F over the past few decades, about 2°F over land areas. Further warming is "in the pipeline" due to gases already in the air and the inevitable additional fossil fuel emissions.

Effects already evident include:

1. Mountain glaciers are receding worldwide and will be gone within 50 years if CO2 emissions continue to increase. This threatens the fresh water supply for billions of people, as rivers arising in the Himalayas, Andes and Rocky Mountains will begin to run dry in the summer and fall.

2. Coral reefs, home to a quarter of biological species in the ocean, could be destroyed by rising temperature and ocean acidification due to increasing CO2.

3. Dry subtropics are expanding poleward with warming, affecting the southern United States, the Mediterranean region, and Australia, with increasing drought and fires.

4. Arctic sea ice will disappear entirely in the summer, if CO2 continues to increase, with devastating effects on wildlife and indigenous people.

5. Intensity of hydrologic extremes, heavy rains, storms and floods on the one hand, and droughts and fires on the other, are increasing. Some people say we must learn to live with these effects, because it is an almost god-given fact that we must burn all fossil fuels. But now we understand, from the history of the Earth, that there would be two monstrous consequences of releasing the CO2 from all of the oil, gas and coal, consequences of an enormity that cannot be accepted. One effect would be extermination of a large fraction of the species on the planet. The other is initiation of ice sheet disintegration and sea level rise, out of humanity's control,eventually eliminating coastal cities and historical sites, creating havoc, hundreds of millions of refugees, and impoverishing nations.

Recent evidence reveals a situation more urgent than had been expected, even by those who were most attuned.

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Titles such as Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization fill faculty bookshelves. It has also provided fodder for literature and films, most recently Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. There is a grim, irresistible appeal to this tale of central American oblivion. Recent events have injected a jarring note into Mayan studies: a sense of anxiety, even foreboding. Serious people are asking a question that at first sounds ridiculous. What if the fate of the Maya is to be our fate? What if climate change and the global financial crisis are harbingers of a system that is destined to warp, buckle and collapse?

No one is suggesting that vines will start crawling up the concrete canyons of Wall Street, or that howler monkeys will chase pin-striped bankers through Manhattan. Mayan kings who screwed up were ritually tortured and sacrificed with the aid of stingray spines to pierce the penis; an emphatic application of moral hazard. In our era, the only thing slashed is a bonus. There are, however, striking parallels between the Maya fall and our era's convulsions. "We think we are different," says Jared Diamond, the American evolutionary biologist. "In fact . . . all of those powerful societies of the past thought that they too were unique, right up to the moment of their collapse."

Complex and organised it may have been but Mayan society resembled a frog who stays in slowly boiling water. The environmental trouble built up over centuries and was partly concealed by short-term fluctuations in rainfall patterns and harvest yields. But when the tipping point came, events moved quickly. "Their success was built on very thin ice. Kings were supposed to keep order and avoid chaos through rituals and sacrifice," says David Webster, author of The Fall of the Ancient Maya. "When manifestly they couldn't do it people lost confidence and the whole system of kingship fell apart."

Which brings us to modern parallels. Webster, watching the season's first snowflakes through the window of his office at Pennsylvania State University, has been waiting for the question. Pinned to his wall is an old clipping about the fall of Enron Corporation in 2001. "That was the first tremor," he muses. "You know, human beings are always surprised when things collapse just when they seem most successful. We look around and we think we're fat, we're clever, we're comfortable and we don't think we're on the edge of something nasty. Hubris? No: ignorance."

NASA climatologist James Hansen has continued, in recent years, to offer the most useful projections of climate change, and the most outspoken interpretation of their meaning. Last December, in a paper delivered at the American Geophysical Union, he said that carbon concentrations in the atmosphere (currently 387 parts per million) were already above the safe line for preventing the possibility of the rapid rise of sea levels, shifts in monsoons, and other civilization-shaking disasters. We needed, he said, to take emergency action to push that number back below 350 parts per million. The only way to achieve that result, he added, was to close all coal-fired power plants in the next few decades, a truly monumental challenge.

This summer's rapid melt of Arctic ice has served only to underline the magnitude of Hansen's challenge, and indeed new data released in late September showed that carbon emissions have grown even faster than the most dire predictions of the IPCC. (The new numbers, ironically, came during the worst week so far of the Wall Street crisis, and the financial meltdown served to blot out any discussion of the meltdown meltdown.)

If the Chinese continue building coal-fired power plants for another decade while we wait for America to construct a shiny green city on the hill, the carbon load from those Chinese plants will force us toward many of the dangerous tipping points that Hansen and other scientists have identified in recent years. In that world, the rising seas will be lapping at the bottom of the hill, and the city up on top will be spending most of its dwindling capital dealing with the damage.

The world's governments are now nearing a real deadline: December 2009, when a negotiation session in Copenhagen is supposed to produce a new climate treaty, the successor to the Kyoto protocols And there's no good reason to think that the planet needs America alone to be in the lead position-the Europeans and the Japanese have already done far more, with technology and with policy, to limit global warming, and if you visit China you know that the hotels are already full of foreign consultants and advisers on global warming.

There is, therefore, no escaping the need for politics, for a robust international agreement that, among other things, commits America to sharing the burden for helping China and India develop without burning their piles of coal; building wind farms in Mongolia is even more crucial than in Minnesota. The controlling metaphor here is not the Manhattan Project or the Apollo moonshot; it is a Marshall Plan for carbons by which the global north makes up some of the difference between cheap coal and more expensive renewable energy for the global south-another possibility that has probably grown less likely as our financial strains have increased. But if the conventional wisdom doesn't line up behind such a plan soon, before the Copenhagen talks, then the chance will pass. Consider the words of a scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, who last year accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC, which he heads: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

Full essay available here