I don't know how our climate will fair, we cut down so many deciduous trees even if they just take the Co2 and make oxygen in the summer, they will be missed. When we all are taken out of the valley's and put up on high plateau's due to Mountain Top Removal we will be subjected to the prairie fires and the same type of brush fires they have in the hills aroung Malibu. Probably a lot of emotional problems to deal with, having being valley dwellers for so long and now having to live on flat land. That could place a burden on the mental health care providers down here. Economy, we have none now even though we are the second largest coal producer, the coal corporations are out of state owned and most of the money goes there. It takes very few workers to strip coal as opposed to drift shaft or shaft mining it. We get very little benefit into the community now so we won't miss the money. Of course they use to be able to supplement their diet with wild game, valley fills will dry that food source up. Joking of course but seriously a large portion of the population down here now lives on some sort of government subsistence. As long as the federal government can afford to subsidize the poverty down here I don't feel they will be much of a change in our economic environment.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

You can lament all you want, but we've got to fix things. You know we're in a climate warming phase, and second that all these man-made emissions are accelerating it?  

OK, we need two things. First, a long-range plan to reduce man-made CO2 inputs, with all the attendant greenhouses gases.  Second, we need to help some people with some rather serious problems happening already.  

And you know, we might start working on the second part because all kinds of new bugs are going to start growing the more it warms up. I'm serious, stuff like as tiger mosquitoes and dengue fever are headed up north. So we have to plan for stuff like that.

From my disco days:  "do it, just do it man."

Onward through the fog

Climate Change should be a massive "National Security" and "Wall Street" concern.

GreyFlcn,  I spent many unproductive hours trying to frame the AGW message that will catch Wall Street's attention.  Its a many-trillion dollar gambling parlor and operates globally-now at the speed of light.  But, we know "Wall Street" is our euphemism for "capitalism".  

Having reached the end point with my Wall Street focus, along comes the great international credit crunch and panic.  And, wow.  Wall Street saddled up and became the search and rescue team on steroids.  Maybe it is too late to stave off serious and long-term economic recession in the US and non-commodity export nations but there is a lesson here.  Wall Street will act in its collective self-interest and the better we understand whom those self-interest are, the more likely we can affect their behavior.

The many billions of shares traded every hour around the globe are not the work of day-traders sitting at the kitchen table.  Pension and mutual funds are the major betters and day traders hang out t the $2 window.  

Putting an increasingly higher price on carbon and making bettors understand the risk of betting on carbon-overweight stocks will eventually have a desired effect because share earnings will diminish as production costs increase faster than consumer income.

Imagine midwestern electric customers having to absorb a 10 cent/kilowatt-hour charge--bringing those customers into line with prices paid by New England customers (supplied mainly by gas/oil/hydro and nuke sources).  The Midwesterns would revolt and either the US economy would collapse or non-carbon electric power sources would come streaming into that market region.  Capital for the new low/no-carbon generating equipment would be derived either by borrowing at likely high ROR rates or by shareholder equity.

It is hard for me to imagine "Global Wall Street" operating in any other way.

John L. McCormick

A carbon tax would mainly affect basic industry, manufacturing, and agriculture. Sure, that's a large chunk of the different markets (NYMEX, DOW, S&P, CiBOT) but not all of it. See, one can bet long and short on intangible indexes, and indexes of indexes.

Which is precisely how we got got into the current fix, along with a shrinking dollar and a housing bubble. My conclusion is that a carbon tax wouldn't change things very much, other than to pass through costs to the ultimate consumer. Wall Street is not there to absorb any of those costs, but simply to bet by placing a short or long position on anything.

But if consumers react, watch out because over a third of the US economy is simply driven by consumers. In other words, Wall Street had little societal benefit to anybody besides some very rich traders themselves.  

Many economists thing we're already in a recession and their numbers prove it. With tightening budgets, less money is available for nice Climate Change programs. Those opposing forces, shrinking liquidity and expanding need for Climate Change action, is a tough topic to predict.

But if calamities happen, the people consumers pay for it if they can see it. Incidents like Bhopal really get people. An example of "Bhopal" incidents would be the remarkable growth in wildfires out west. As we run out of money to fight the fires, more people are building in sensitive fire zones! Obviously, climate change will have an impact there, since we can't afford to keep [literally] burning our money in a senseless way.

Discussion of disasters linked to Climate Change are pouring in every day. The only exception, as I have noted before, is that there is no clear proof that hurricanes are getting worse. Amazing though, with less hurricane risk over the last two years Wall Street has jacked up coastal insurance by approximately a factor of two.  

Let's face it, Wall Street is in la-la land and is no longer relevant to consumers except when it bites them in the butt.
-sam

Onward through the fog

I'm looking forward to the "how to do it" piece because most of the various suggested solutions I've seen to date will, inordinately, hurt the poor, in every nation, even ours. And as I see it, only the very rich (and maybe not even) will escape being hurt, severely, financially in the years to come. But right now, today, there are plenty of people just in Maine who are suffering due to high heating and energy costs and layoffs and cut-backs, unfortunately from businesses that tend to pay more. The service industry may be taking over the job market, but the jobs pay half or less than what many of those laid-off workers made. Since most people live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a month or two leeway, what's happening is painful. What people don't seem to understand is how poor you have to be before any government help kicks in. You can't just get food stamps or fuel assistance, you have to be in dire poverty. In other words, if you make much over $1500/mo, forget it. And who can live on that?

And we need to be more compassionate. When I read some of the "solutions" and attitudes in some Grist posts toward the so-called general populace, especially when referring to people in the US, I admit I cringe at times. For instance, there's a certain arrogance when one talks about rising food prices due to high energy costs, corn for fuel, whatever the reason, and then saying something like, "Well, it might help the obesity epidemic". As if fat people were the problem and making it harder for them to buy food was a good thing. Those attitudes are not endearing.

Fact is, we're all going to have to get used to paying more for things we had come to rely on being cheap. Like food and gas and heating oil. This is the way it is now. Fact also is, if we're going to be good and compassionate people we're going to have to figure out a way that these rising costs don't unfairly hit poor people, in other countries and in our own. And we need to wake up right now and realize that they already are, that people are freezing and going hungry and losing their homes or apartments and eating less nutritious food and not all of these are those we would have labeled "poor" even two or three years ago.(And they're not all fat either.) Times are changing very quickly and we need to deal with the reality of it now.

Climate change(environmental issue) in fact is a economic problem,
[If people's needs for ecological value can't be converted into practical profits, then it is unthinkable that every participant should exert himself to gain ecological profits.]