How does Obama spokesman Jason Grumet reconcile his call for pulling together and feeling a shared burden in regards to tackling climate change with support for acap and trade system? He correctly mentions that the last time America had a unified approach and shared pain was WWII, but seems to ignore the fact that in order to conserve resources essential to the war effort, FDR did not put in place a cap and trade system. He allotted each individual quotas for such items as gasoline, flour and sugar.

Cap and trade would allow the wealthy class to continue living like Al Gore, with no sacrifices necessary. Individual quotas, especially nontradable ones, affect everyone equally. If we want to succeed in preventing the worst of climate change, we do need to dramatically reduce our carbon footprints and that is unlikely to happen if we don't work together.

These fascist-inspired cap and trade schemes divide us by wealth; individual quotas would put us all in this together. We could start with gasoline/diesel (which would make improved CAFE standards moot), move on to grid power (okay, the wealthy can get a break by buying P.V.panels) and then tackle the beast of consumables (which has the added benefit of reducing imports from coal-intensive China).

Has Thirty-five years of nearly nonstop fascist leaders caused us to completely forget what a human-based, as opposed to corporate-based, society would even look like? For the sake of a future for life on this planet, I sure hope not.

  Individual quotas resemble cap and trade, its just that the trading goes on in the black market. Better to make it legal, and well facilitated. Perhaps the only other difference is that cap and trade allocats to businesses, not individuals. Kinda hard to allocate industrial resources to individuals. What would I do with my quota of say sulfur -trade it to a chemical company for fertilizer?

  Of course taxes are better -and would generate government revenues which could be distribted to the people. But that is a political nonstarter.

I still think the two Democratic candidates are very similar. I don't hear what I would like to hear from them. That would be:

An immediate ban on all new coal plants.

A plan to elimiante coal plants over a period of time, preferably as quickly as possible. Since this is going to encounter extreme reistance from the coal lobby, and coal state congresspersons, we will need a realistic way to convince them to go along. That probably means spending lots of cash to buy them out. Throw cash at coal produceers to get them into some other business. Throw money to coal states to get them to realign their economies to some other industry.

Huge incentives are neeeded for solar and wind and other alternatives. We need to look at the German solar program and setup something similar here.

The reality of the situation is that we will still need nuclear power. We need to solve the waste issue, and it is solvable. We can learn some lessons from France. They reproccess used fuel into new fuel, while we just treat it as waste. Their method means must less waste, and less need to mine fresh uranium too.

A huge push is needed to get electric cars on the road. Ethanol and biodiesel can help some, but  are not really effective fixes overall. Higher taxes on oil, investment in electric and battery research are needed. Also incentives for both makers and buyers of BEVs and PHEVs.

Setting a goal for emissions in 2050 is not very helpful. That's like setting out on a drive from NY to LA, without determining the route first. You need to have intermediate goals, or you're not going to get there. You need to know whether you're going to go through Chicago, or St. Louis or what. We need emissions goals for 2012, 202, 2030, 2040, and 2050.

We won't have the money to do any of this unless we end the Iraq war, ASAP.

Obama's rep on the panel, Jason Grumet, says taxing carbon at $150. a ton would be "prohibitive". Prohibitive of what? Of waste and inefficiency? What he really means is that it would prohibit the operation of coal powered plants...exactly what we need to do! Fast!  But Obama is a devout (but uninformed) coal lover, as witness his reference to "clean coal". Maybe he thinks coal doesnt emit CO2? I wouldnt be surprised.  He needs new advisers if he doesnt want to keep making a fool of himself.Getting unhooked from fossil fuels fast means pricing them high enough to reduce demand and let renewable energy replace them in a level playing field. Taxing carbon is putting the REAL price on carbon, not the low price that has allowed us to get addicted to fossil fuels.
As for nukes, we not only don't need them if we unleash renewables by ending fossil fuel subsidies and implement serious efficiency measures and regulations across the board, but we wont GET THEM because they are too expensive, take too long to bring on line in any meaningful time period, divert money away from efficiency and renewables, and because efficiency can reduce our end uses of electricity quickly and more cheaply , thus replacing BOTH coal and nukes. As Amory Lovins once said, nuclear power is a future energy source whose time is past.

Barack needs a complete energy education makeover.  Lester Brown, go to it!

But please, no carbon tax or C and T.  More boondoggle fuel farm funding, oil warring, and hedge fund scamming will be the only results.

Divert subsidies instead.  Dis-incentivize carbon energy monopolies and directly subsidize homeoners, farmers, and small business with 10 cent per kwh subsidy for renewables and conservation.  Checks for solar panel, geo heat exchange, farm biogas, wind farm, and plugin hybrid owner/investors.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

It's simply not true that the only trading is black market. The trading is the same. The difference is who gets the initial allotments. In the auction scheme it's those with money. And guess what? Here we go again on round two of rule by the rich.
As for sulfur? Yeah I want whoever wants to use my sulfur allotment to buy it from me. Each year.

How about 10 cents per kwh saved, by not reproducing?  A nice check each year you keep from breeding.  Around 200 bucks per year most likely.  That would really help starving people in exploited nations like Brazil.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

I liked BlackBirdHighway's suggestions, except for the part about nukes. I wonder if Obama is capable of changing his take on "clean coal"? I sure couldn't make myself vote for Clinton, even though she may be slightly better on this critical issue.
On the suggestion above by Dr X: No. You CANNOT pay people not to reproduce, thus making parenthood of the next generation a privilege of wealth, without huge social justice complications. Better to deal with the need to reduce population the only fair way: give every woman the right to one child. Doesn't matter who you are, you can give birth once. If you're male, you have to persuade a woman to choose you as the father (and some would father more than one). Anyway, this certainly won't happen until problems are very much worse than now, and it's much more likely to happen via the usual Horsemen (famine, War, pestilence)than through policy choices.