Carbon tax vs Waxman "cap and trade" - James Hansen profile

On this morning's "Face the State" program, Jay Kohn interviewed Molnar, Kendal Van Dyke (D-Billings legislator) + the manager of Yellowstone Valley Co-op on the pending 'Cap and Trade' legislation. (I looked, but couldn't find any links on the Billings or KRTV websites).
Needless to say, none of them even mentioned the viable alternative - a straight carbon tax starting low, but quickly increasing to $100/ton or more. This could be a simple, one-page bill (they had a copy of the Waxman bill and the last-minute - midnight amendments or "mark-ups", and discussed how it was all lobbyist-written, and wouldn't do much at all to affect global warming, but would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and drive even more of our industry off-shore), would be simple to apply and enforce, and would provide maximum economic efficiency and all the incentives to quickly move to a carbon-free economy. Like Single Payer Healthcare, it's not even "on the table."

Brad Molnar, as usual, seemed to understand the issues better than the others, and even though he is a Republican, he was the only one of the PSC who wanted to reverse the sell-off of Montana Power's assets. (Ken Toole, of course, was one of the founders of the Buy Back the Dams initiative, but it got little support from the Democrats and none from the Republicans, who were actually responsible for selling off Montana Power's assets under the rhetoric of "deregulation.") The "denial and blame" tactics of the two major parties continues to sabotage any real progress in energy legislation (as well as health care, the war, etc.). Both sides are half-right and half-wrong, but they always seem to run for office on the right half, and then legislate and govern according to the wrong half, blaming the other party for "making them do it."

In any case, if you missed it, here's a link to the great profile of James Hansen in the New Yorker. He (late in the article) sketches out the real carbon-tax, phasing out fossil fuel strategy we must follow if we are to avoid a global catastrophe.
Time is getting short.

Now is the time to join the Green Party, if you can't get your present party to do even the simplest, most obvious, efficient polices like Single Payer Healthcare and a universal carbon tax. These are the real "free market solutions."

Paul Stephens, CasCoGreens

www.mtgreens.org

Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker profile of James Hansen
June 29, 2009

http://thingsbreak.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/hansennewyorker.pdf

It’s here, and well worth reading. Hardly the zealot the denialists make him out to be, which should surprise exactly no one familiar with his work or public speech.

For me the two key takeaways are Hansen’s unwavering resolution to point out that bills like Waxman-Markey (ACES) are insufficient to the task at hand and perhaps calamitously so, and Kolbert’s point that while politicians seem to willfully misunderstand climate science, Hansen seems to willfully misunderstand politics. I think they’re both correct, and that provides a sobering counterpoint to the jubilation of ACES’s passage in the House.