The US is so hugely important to the world economy that the new Democrat-led Congress would be wise to spend 6-12 months just on public hearings to educate themselves about the current state of the science of both climate change and the likely consequences of proposed policy option to fight it. The subject matter is complex and I suspect many legislators are still ill-equipped to cast a vote. The process should include inviting those states and cities that are ahead of the curve to give testimony.

There is still a lot of convincing left to do before the US electorate will accept the inevitable downsides to their standard of living: switching to smaller vehicles, postponing vacations to pay for home insulation, cutting down on meat consumption to free up land for biofuel production etc. Serious climate change mitigation costs serious money, so it's more important to get the policy right than to get it right away.

However, industry should be given incentives to get cracking even in the absence of a national policy. One option would be to give those corporations taking substantive measures pro-actively more influence over how the legislation is drafted, including emissions credits for these earlybirds.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112401361.html

Unfortunately, campaign contributions tend to trump all other considerations in the US Congress, so to will be difficult to herd the cats in this way. Ms. Pelosi has her work cut out for her.

Imagine a Carbon Tax funding industrial scale algae to bury, in a world scale. A dream but the Carbon Tax should be here and used agressively.

Regardless of what Bingaman thinks about the window, he should get cracking now and put a global warming bill on the table. A bill should be introduced and debated. If the Republicans filibuster it, it will be clear who is obstructing this critical action. If Bush vetoes it, it will be also be clear who are the obstructionists.

Barring a comphrehensive bill, we need to start by banning coal fired plants unless they will be sequestering co2.

Pizmo -

I guess Sen. Inhofe is still in his turkey-induced annual tryptophane stupor. Ironically, moderate Republicans - a small but resilient bunch mostly out West - will look to get back in the game / keep the Presidency in GOP hands in 2008 and, may choose to co-opt the Dems on climate change. This could happen if even their supporters conclude the bloody and expensive wild goose chase in Iraq was really mostly about the oil, after all. If so, even a veto from #43 might be overriden.

Perhaps some students at a university know what this climate change stuff is all about.

But your average American. Heck.. even your average journalist still has no idea.

What we need now is direct dialog... Repetative, Republican style (beat it into your heads) dialog & and warnings about climate change.

And about the instability of depending on oil.

If the Democrats knew about technology themselves... they would:

0. Make it clear that the most patriotic thing to do at this point is to drive an electric vehicle. It may also be the best thing to do to help our children and grandchildren survive in a stable world.

Establish a V2G protocol. Create implementations.

1. Use government funds to get GE and perhaps Energizer or whoever to build LiIon battery factories in the US. Build them for massive scale. Talking a WW2 level of effort here.

2. Incentivize the purchase of these battery packs for use in vehicles. 20 million cars are purchased annually in the US. All must be electric.

3. Once these factories are in place & the money is ready to go... Pull out of Iraq. There will be chaos. Price of oil will go up. But we'll be ready with electric cars.

4. continue with buildout of wind farms. deep offshore wind farms. pump serious $$$ into solar cell research. & advanced battery research.

Gotta start moving.

The way we'll be doing it from now on will be to charge up overnight.

If you plan is premised on that, the plan's not going to work.

Good suggestions Matt. But we still must get to EVs via a transition technology and that today is hybrid. If we are pumping up with biodiesel and ethanol/butanol - at least we are burning renewable energy with reduced GHG.

The transition across hybrid to EV will take a while - there is infrastructure to consider since millions of EVs recharging in 30 minutes will severely strain the grid.

GHG awareness is greater than ever before. Once the entrepreneurs show us there is $$ in clean energy - a lot of big boys will climb aboard. Watch the algae CO2 scrubbing technologies to lead the way.

Since we are talking about politicians and batteries - The Lithium battery was invented and developed at Sandia National Labs, using taxpayer money.

Just before Duracell was sold to the Japanese for untold $B. Sandia was told to sell the rights to the Lithium battry to Duracell for $1. (Energizer is also owned by the Japanese)

All this happened on Rayguns watch.

Ever wonder why they invited him to Japan right after he left office and gave him $3M for speaking fee.

(At a time when he couldn't remember his first name)

Lucas:

Duracell is owned by Gillette, which is now part of Procter & Gamble (NYSE symbol PG); Energizer Holdings is based in St. Louis, MO (NYSE symbol ENR).

The most important manufacturers of rechargeable batteries now are the Japanese (Sanyo, Panasonic, and Sony), but the new technology for lithium came out of MIT (A123), Reno, NV (Altair Nano), and others.

The point is we're not dependent on Japan, or anybody else, for lithium batteries for our future BEVs and HEVs.

CS1992:

Reducing population does not necessarily translates into a NET reduction in energy consumption and pollution emissions. Americans and Canadians over consume at 2+ times the average European and Japanese, 5 times the average Chinese and 17 times the average Indian and by almost 5 times the world average.

Active energy conservation may be a better solution. Americans and Canadians could easily reduce their per capita energy consumption by 50+% together with associated GHG and fine particles (PM) emission.

It is often just a matter of making the proper choices. More efficient HVAC, home appliances, lights, residences, offices, factories, cars, trucks, trains, power plants etc., don't cost that much more but could consume 50% to 60% less while polluting much less.

Twice the actual USA + Canada population could consume half the energy and pollute half as much as we do now and have a very high standard of living.

Every time I see a two legged pork barrel eating a 3000+ calories meal it makes me sick. Many people eat like three. No wonder we over consume energy by about 5 times the world average.

The politicians are still running scared from the false choice Bush used for rejecting the Kyoto protocol. Namely, significantly reducing our CO2 emissions will hurt our economy. Politicians would do well to make the opposite point that solving the global warming problem would benefit us far more than it would cost us.

I recently helped convert a Toyota Prius to a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). Driving around afterwards in PHEV mode convinced me we have found a way to significantly reduce our addiction to oil. Range is not a problem for PHEV's since they have greater range than conventional gasoline or diesel vehicles. Our PHEV can be charged quickly (240 volt), charged overnight (120 volt outlet), or not charged at all if you don't mind paying more for fuel.

As the senior energy services engineer for an electric utility, and as someone who has looked at this issue carefully, plugging in electric vehicles will not overwhelm our electrical distribution system. Time-of-use rates can encourage off-peak charging at night. PHEV's may even be able to reduce our system peaks if they are equipped with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities to feed power back to the grid during peak periods. Coming up with the additional energy is not a problem either since installing 350 ft2 of solar PV on your roof would generate as much energy as a PHEV consumes in a year. The solar/PHEV combination helps level out the loads on our power grid by filling in the low valleys at night during charging and the solar reduces the peaks during the day when the car is out and about on the road.

The Prius we converted has an AC and DC-to-DC charger on board. Each night the charger is used to charge an extra battery pack installed in the back of the Prius. In PHEV mode, the charger takes energy from the battery pack to keep the Prius's standard NMH battery pack fully charged. With the all-electric mode enabled on the Prius, it will drive without the gasoline engine coming on for as long as the extra battery pack holds out (10 to 40 miles). Once the extra battery pack runs low, the gasoline engine kicks in and the car runs like a regular hybrid. The all-electric mode can handle most of your daily commuting needs, and your gasoline usage is reduced dramatically.

James,

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience. This is what I think GreenCar is for, to bring facts to the table and come to some valid conclusions about what makes a GreenCar.

Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the UN Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, June 1992:

“We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse”.

“sustainable development... can be implemented by deliberate quest of poverty… reduced resource consumption… and set levels of mortality control”.

Aaron Wildavsky, professor of political science at Berkeley:

"Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist's dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population's eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”

Nothing really new under the sun.